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 […]
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
Winners and losers from rent control Read More »
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
Autonomous Vehicles: Does federal preemption shut down the laboratories of democracy? Read More »
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
The Week Observed, October 27, 2017 Read More »
“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
Signs of the times Read More »
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
The hamster wheel school of transportation policy Read More »
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
The Week Observed, October 20, 2017 Read More »
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
Why is “affordable” housing so expensive to build? Read More »
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
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
The Week Observed, October 13, 2017 Read More »
