June 2017

Prices Matter: Parking and Ride Hailing

Pricing parking drives demand for ride hailing services Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have been highly reluctant to share data about their services with cities. In California, the state Public Utilities Commission has pre-empted municipal access to ride-hail data (and isn’t sharing it with anyone). As Bruce Schaller’s recent study of New York (one

Prices Matter: Parking and Ride Hailing Read More »

Urban myth busting: Congestion, idling, and carbon emissions

Increasing road capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will backfire Time for another episode of City Observatory’s Urban Myth Busters, which itself is an homage to the long-running Discovery Channel series “Mythbusters” that featured co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman using something called “science” to test whether commonly believed tropes were really true. In each episode, they would

Urban myth busting: Congestion, idling, and carbon emissions Read More »

You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs

The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location At City Observatory, we’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons to believe that a single, fixed percentage of income standard does a poor job of reflecting whether housing is priced

You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs Read More »

More evidence of the growth of concentrated poverty

Since 2000, the number of people living in extremely poor neighborhoods has doubled; neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are still disproportionately in the densest urban places. Last week, the Joint Center on Housing Studies released its annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. While most of the report focuses on new housing construction, and the slow

More evidence of the growth of concentrated poverty Read More »