Month: July 2017
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How luxury housing becomes affordable
Build expensive new “luxury” apartments, and wait a few decades One of the most common refrains the the affordable housing discussion is “developers are targeting the high end of the market” and new apartments are just unaffordable. Although we–and others–have pointed out that building more high end housing keeps those with high incomes from moving…
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The Week Observed, July 28, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Housing policy lessons from Vienna, Part II. In the second of his two guest commentaries, Mike Eliason takes a close look at land use laws and development processes in Vienna–a city generally recognized for its success in making affordable housing widely available to its citizens. A key difference…
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The Week Observed, July 21, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How green is my free parking structure? Not very. The National Renewable Energy Lab does cutting edge research on wind, solar and renewable energy. One area where their thinking isn’t cutting edge: their new parking garage. Not only did the federal lab build an 1,800 space garage for…
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In a New York minute
Why are travel speeds in Manhattan dropping? There’s a kind of ominous tidbit in New York City’s most recent mobility report. Travel on streets in Manhattan is getting slower. Here’s the data, computed from the report, showing the average travel speed on streets south of 60th Street in Manhattan: The difference between 9.35 miles per…
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Housing Policy Lessons from Vienna, Part II
Allowing multi-family housing in all residential zones, and aggressively promoting private bidding lowers housing costs We’re pleased to welcome a guest commentary from Mike Eliason of Seattle. Mike is a passivhaus designer with Patano Studio who is interested in baugruppen, mass timber, ultra low energy buildings, and social housing. Vienna is often mentioned as a…
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Housing policy lessons from Vienna: Part I
Is Stadt Wien the model for US urban housing policy? We’re pleased to welcome a guest commentary from Mike Eliason of Seattle. Mike is a passivhaus designer with Patano Studio who is interested in baugruppen, mass timber, ultra low energy buildings, and social housing. Vienna is often mentioned as a model for how American cities…
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How green is my free parking structure? Not very.
Why does the National Renewable Energy Lab give its employees free parking? The researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab are hard at work on a lot of cool ideas for reducing pollution and promoting greater energy efficiency. They’re figuring out ways to improve photovoltaics and increase the efficiency of wind energy generation, and are…
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When it comes to transit use, it’s all about destination density
At City Observatory, we’ve written quite a bit about the phenomenon of city center job growth. We did a whole CityReport about the phenomenon, showing that since the Great Recession, urban cores have been outperforming the rest of their metropolitan areas on employment, reversing earlier trends. And just this week, we covered new job numbers…
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The Week Observed, July 14, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Climate change: the two-cent solution. The City of Chicago charges its residents a fee of 7 cents for each disposable grocery bag. The fee provides revenue and more importantly, creates an incentive for consumers to use their own recyclable bags. The small fee is working; plastic bag use…
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Reality check: Poverty rates are much lower in suburbs
Despite what you may have heard, poverty rates in suburbs are on average half what they are in urban centers There’s a growing chorus about the so-called suburbanization of poverty. A couple of years ago, Alan Ehrenhalt’s Great Inversion argued that the wealthy and well-educated are moving to cities and the poor are being displaced…
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What’s the biggest threat facing cities?
Politico’s survey of experts leaves out the most important challenges, in our humble opinion. A couple of weeks back, Politco, the wonky-insider beltway news source queried a dozen of the nation’s urban thought leaders about the biggest crises facing cities in the years ahead. “What’s the greatest risk that cities face? Mayors, Governors, scholars, think…
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Climate Change: A 2-cent solution
Let’s put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon For almost six months, Chicago has been charging shoppers a 7 cent fee for using disposable plastic grocery bags. Rather than banning the bags outright, the city settled on the fee as a way to preserve consumer choice and yet encourage…
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The Week Observed, July 7, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why median rents are an incomplete and often misleading indicator of housing affordability. Our colleague Daniel Hertz shows how the median rent statistics that are often cited to demonstrate whether a neighborhood or city has a housing affordability problem can be a misleading guide. Medians tell us little…
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Market timing and racial wealth disparities
How buying high and selling low makes housing a bad investment for many disadvantaged groups One of the enduring features of American inequality is the wide disparity in homeownership rates between white Americans and Latinos and African-Americans. And because homeownership has — or at least was, historically — a principal means by which families built…
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For low-income households, median home prices aren’t always what count
Affordable housing is an issue rife with statistics: median rents, median housing costs, percentage of people who are “housing cost burdened,” and so on. Previously, we’ve written about some of the issues with many of these statistics, including the untrustworthiness of most “median rent” reports and which rent statistics are more trustworthy. But another issue—which…