Month: December 2017
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Our seven most popular posts of 2017
Affordable housing and sensible transportation were our most-read features #7 – Urban myth busting: How building more high income housing helps affordability. One of the predictable lamentations about the housing market is that developers are always building new structures for middle and upper income households, and nothing for the poor. That observation fuels an argument…
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The Week Observed, December 22, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Should cities be worried about “Peak Millennial?” Time magazine highlighted data from three cities where the count of millennials has declined in the past year, according to the American Community Survey. To some, it seems to be a harbinger that the young are growing disenchanted with city living.…
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How the g-word poisons public discourse on making cities better
We’re pleased to publish this guest post from Akron’s Jason Segedy. It originally appeared on his blog Notes from the Underground. Drawing on his practical experience in a rust-belt city, he offers a compelling new insight on the casual way that “gentrification” is invoked in serious discussions about the future of our cities. By Jason…
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Diverging diamond blues
A key design element of the supposedly pedestrian friendly Rose Quarter freeway cover is a pedestrian hostile diverging diamond interchange One of the main selling points of the plan to spend nearly half a billion dollars widening the Interstate freeway near downtown Portland is the claim that the improvements will somehow make this area safer…
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Are the young leaving cities?
The so-called “peak millennial” conjecture. Is it right? What does it mean? Should I care? Time has published an article, based largely on the research of UCLA demographer Dowell Myers, proclaiming that US cities are hitting “peak millennial.” We’ve been critical of the peak millennial claims in the past. The gist of Myers argument is…
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The Week Observed, December 15, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Is inequality over? There was some good news from the labor market this month. According to an analysis by Jed Kolko, low wage workers saw their earnings increase slightly faster than all other workers over the past year. That’s a welcome change from the trend of growing wage…
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The great freeway cover-up
Concrete covers are just a thinly-veiled gimmick for selling wider freeways As you’ve read at City Observatory, and elsewhere (CityLab, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week), Portland is in the midst of a great freeway war. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to widen a mile-long stretch of Interstate 5 opposite downtown Portland from 4 lanes…
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The Talent Dividend: Updated
Educational attainment explains two-thirds of the variation in economic success among metropolitan areas. Each additional percentage point increase in the four-year college attainment rate increases metro per capita income by $1,250 For a long time, we’ve been exponents of what we call “The Talent Dividend,” the idea that raising a metro area’s educational attainment is…
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The Week Observed, December 8, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The death of Flint Street. In Portland, a $450 million dollar freeway widening project is being sold as a way to “re-connect” a community that was divided by freeway construction half a century ago. But there’s a problem with that claim. Part of the project is eliminating one…
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Is inequality over?
After a long, slow recovery, wages are finally rising for the lowest-paid workers, but we’re no where close to rectifying our inequality problem; in fact, it’s going to get worse. The very smart Jed Kolko, who now writes for labor market website Indeed, offers some keen insights from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data.…
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A constant state of change: turnover in business establishments
Churn means that lots of businesses, even large ones, aren’t around forever Many of our discussions of the economy are based on simple, and often largely static mental models of the economy. In a good year, a local economy might add 2 or 3 percent to its job total, and the total number of businesses…
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The death of Flint Street
A proposed freeway widening project will tear out one of Portland’s most used bike routes At City Observatory, were putting a local Portland-area proposed freeway widening project under a microscope, in part because we think it reveals some deep-seated biases in the way transportation planning takes place, not just in Portland, but in many cities.…
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The Week Observed, December 1, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Uber and Lyft: A dynamic duo(poly)? The continued growth of the ride-hailing industry has been something we’ve followed closely. New data show that in most major markets across the country, Lyft has been gaining market share at the expense of industry leader Uber. This rivalrous duopoly has important…