Month: January 2018
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An idea whose time has passed: The VMT Fee
Obsolete before its even tried: A simple mileage fee is a bad way to pay for roads It’s being touted as a replacement for the gas tax, but the VMT fee is a flawed way to pay for roads. We should adopt a pricing system that reflects impacts on the environment, wear and tear on…
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The Week Observed, January 26, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Two thing’s everyone’s missed about Amazon’s HQ2. The urbanist Internet has been all abuzz reading the tea leaves from Amazon’s decision to winnow the list of contenders for its ballyhooed HQ2 to 20 cities. Some cities who didn’t make the list are licking their wounds, while others…
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More evidence of rent declines in Portland
Growing supply is producing growing vacancies and easing rents There’s been a lot of skepticism expressed as to whether supply and demand are actually at work in the housing market. We’ve been strong believers that the economic perspective is fundamentally sound: rent hikes over the past few years have been the product of demand outstripping…
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Two things everyone’s missed about Amazon’s HQ2 decision
What kind of company is Amazon, and how many locations does it want? We’re now into round 2 of the great Amazon HQ2 extravaganza, and as with the initial announcement much digital ink has been spilled to analyze the meaning of the winnowing of the list to a mere 20 cities. The Brookings Institution’s Jenny…
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The Week Observed, January 19, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. We’re losing the battle for Vision Zero. One of the compelling aspects of the Vision Zero road safety campaign is its bold, measurable objective: we want to completely eliminate traffic deaths. That vision gives us a clear metric, but unfortunately, the data show that we’re losing ground. While…
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Are integrated neighborhoods stable?
More American neighborhoods are becoming integrated–and are staying that way It’s rare that some obscure terminology from sociology becomes a part of our everyday vernacular, but “tipping point” is one of those terms. Famously, Thomas Schelling used the tipping point metaphor to explain the dynamics of residential segregation in the United States. His thesis was…
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2017 Year-in-review: More driving, more dying
We’re driving more, and more of us are dying on the roads. Four days before Christmas, on a Wednesday morning just after dawn, Elizabeth Meyers was crossing Sandy Boulevard in Portland, near 78th Avenue, just about a block from her neighborhood library. She was struck and killed, becoming Portland’s 50th traffic fatality of 2017. Vision…
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The Week Observed, January 12, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. How great cities enable you to live longer. We take a close look at some findings from the Equality of Opportunity Project on the connections between community characteristics and life expectancy. It turns out that among people in the lowest income quartile, some of the strongest correlations with…
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Your college degree pays off more if you live in a city
The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city It’s a well-understood fact that education is a critical determinant of earnings. On average, the more education you’ve attained, the higher your level of earnings. This holds both for individuals, and as we’ve shown for metropolitan areas. But the payoffs to…
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How great cities enable you to live longer
Low income people live longer in dense, well-educated, immigrant-friendly cities Some of the most provocative social science research in the past decade has come from the Equality of Opportunity Project, led by Stanford economist Raj Chetty. The project’s major work looks at the factors contributing to intergenerational economic mobility–the extent to which different communities actually…
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The Week Observed, January 5, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities continue to attract the young and restless. We’ve seen some push-back in the last few months, arguing that city population growth is no longer outpacing suburbs, and that the movement back to cities is threatened by “peak-millennials.” That led us to take a close look at the…
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Nothing about pedestrian safety that more technology won’t fix
In auto-land, pedestrians are just one more patented gimmick away from being safe The dominant approach to automobile safety has, for many years, been the quintessential technical fix. Some combination of new technologies (anti-lock brakes, collapsible steering columns, crush zones, multiple air bags, etc) will make cars safer and safer (well, at least for their…
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Cities continue to attract smart young adults
The young and restless are continuing to move to the nation’s large cities One trend that highlights the growing demand for city living is the increasing tendency of well-educated young adults to live in the close-in urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. At City Observatory, we’ve been tracking this data closely for more…