Month: October 2017
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Back at the ranch
What the ranch house teaches us about house prices and filtering. Back in the heyday of the post-war housing boom, back when the baby boomers were babies, America was building ranch houses–millions of them. In its prime, the ranch house was the embodiment of the middle-class dream, and newly built suburbs across the nation were…
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Winners and losers from rent control
A new study of San Francisco’s rent control shows it raises rents for some Rent control is a perennially contentious issue. Many housing activists see it as a logical and direct way to make housing more affordable. Economists are almost unanimous that it makes things worse by promoting disinvestment and decreasing supply. Particularly in the…
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Autonomous Vehicles: Does federal preemption shut down the laboratories of democracy?
There are a lot of details to be worked out to integrate autonomous vehicles into cities. Federal preemption could foreclose the opportunity of states and cities to help figure out the best ways forward. It’s a touchstone of federalism that states and localities are the “laboratories of democracy”: pilot testing new concepts before they’re rolled…
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The Week Observed, October 27, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Signs of the times. For most of the past few years, Portland–like other flourishing metro economies–has seen significant increases in apartment rents, as demand for urban living has outstripped local supply. There’s evidence that situation is changing–in the form of a bumper crop of “For Rent” signs in…
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Signs of the times
“For Rent” signs are popping up all over Portland, signaling an easing of the housing crunch and foretelling falling rents A year ago, in the height of the political season in deep blue Portland (in a county which voted 76 percent for Hillary Clinton) only one thing was rarer than Donald Trump lawn signs: For…
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The hamster wheel school of transportation policy
Going faster doesn’t mean your city gets anywhere more quickly, and it doesn’t make you happier One of the key metrics guiding transportation policy is speed: how quickly can you get from point A to point B. But is going faster a good guide to how we ought to build better places? When it comes…
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The Week Observed, October 20, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are 3. This week marks City Observatory’s third birthday. It’s been an exciting time to be engaged with cities. We take a few minutes to review what we’ve done over the past year, and set some goals for what we want to achieve in the next…
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Why is “affordable” housing so expensive to build?
The high price of affordable housing It’s a problem that isn’t going away: the so-called “affordable” housing we’re building in many cities–by which we mean publicly subsidized housing that’s dedicated to low and moderate income households–is so expensive to build that we’ll never be able to build enough of it to make a dent in…
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Now we are three!
Three years ago–on October 15th, 2014–we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. Since then, we’ve weighed in daily on a whole series of issues set in and around urban spaces. So today, we’re taking a few moments to celebrate our birthday, reflect back on the past year, and plot a…
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The Week Observed, October 13, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The constancy of change in neighborhood populations. The canonical story of gentrification focuses on the fact that many of the people living in a neighborhood today are not the same ones who lived there a decade ago. The implication is that, absent gentrification, neighborhood populations change slowly, if…
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The myth of naturally occurring affordable housing
Block that metaphor! There’s nothing “natural” about “naturally occurring affordable housing.” There’s a new term that’s gaining currency in some housing policy circles: “naturally occurring affordable housing.” It even has a catchy acronym: “NOAH.” There’s a recent report from Co-Star (the real estate advisory firm), issued in collaboration with the Urban Land Institute and the…
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The constancy of change in neighborhood populations
Neighborhoods are always changing; half of all renters move every two years. There’s a subtle perceptual bias that underlies many of the stories about gentrification and neighborhood change. The canonical journalistic account of gentrification focuses on the observable fact that different people now live in a neighborhood than used to live there at some previous…
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The Week Observed, October 6, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Subarus and Suburbans: Flat fee unfairness. Proposals to implement some form of road pricing, which would charge cars based on which roads they use, when, and how far they drive, have raised concerns that pricing may be unfair to low income households. But unexamined in such criticisms is…
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Metro economies pulling away nationally
Unemployment rates are down in cities, especially for those with less education One of the trends we’ve been following at City Observatory has been the increasing shift of the driving forces of the nation’s economy to large metro areas, and within these areas to cities. The industries that are flourishing in today’s economy are ones…
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Transportation equity, part 2: the Subaru and the Suburban
Flat per vehicle registration fees charge lower rates to wealthier households with more road damaging vehicles The prospect of shifting from using a combination of vehicle registration fees, fuel taxes and general revenues to pay for roads, to a system of road pricing, which would charge vehicle users only for the amount of time they…