Month: March 2018
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The Week Observed, March 30, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Gentrification and integration in DC schools and neighborhoods. A recent study looks at changes in school enrollment in the most gentrified neighborhoods in Washington DC over the past 15 years. Historically, DC schools have been hyper-segregated, but that’s started to change; the number of white children enrolled in…
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Gentrification isn’t ending. We must rise to meet that challenge.
We’re pleased to publish another contribution from City Observatory friend and colleague Alex Baca. Alex has written about cities while living in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Cleveland, OH, and earlier this year authored a three-part review of Derek Hyra’s Cappuccino City. She’s back this month with more thoughts on how we talk about, think…
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How segregation limits opportunity
The more segregated an metro area is, the worse the economic prospects of the poor and people of color Our City Observatory report, Lost in Place, closely tracks the growth of concentrated poverty in the nation’s cities; this is particularly important because of the widespread evidence of the permanent damage high-poverty neighborhoods do to children…
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Gentrification & integration in DC
Gentrification is producing more diverse schools and growing enrollment In Washington DC, gentrification is producing higher levels of integration and increasing the total number of kids–black and white–attending schools in changing neighborhoods. DC’s gentrifying neighborhoods have both more white residents, more total residents, and more kids attending local schools. These facts discredit the folk wisdom…
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Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods Maps
This page contains maps showing the nation’s most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, and those with the highest levels of income mixing. for City Observatory’s Diverse, Inclusive Neighborhood report. These web-based maps that let you zoom in to a particular metropolitan area, and observe racial/ethnic and income patterns, and inspect data for individual census tracts.…
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The Week Observed, March 23, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland’s teachable moment: time for a little housing economics 101. There’s a big debate going on in Portland right now about whether using discretionary land use approvals to block some market rate housing will worsen the city’s affordability problems. Long-time readers of City Observatory will know our position:…
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An Open Letter on Housing Affordability to Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish
Our planning processes and land use decisions have a huge impact on housing affordability. Editor’s Note: Today we’re publishing an open letter from Ethan Seltzer to Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish. Portland is the midst of a serious debate about the economics of housing , and how blocking proposed market rate housing is likely to…
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Parking meters and opportunity costs
What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere? Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient…
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Portland’s brouhaha over housing market economics 101
Understanding how housing markets really work is essential to crafting solutions to our affordability problems Regular followers of City Observatory will know two things about us: We’re keenly focused on the problem of housing affordability, and we like to treat Portland, Oregon (our local backyard) as a kind of laboratory for better understanding urban issues.…
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The Week Observed, March 16, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland doesn’t really want to make housing affordable. Portland’s City Council has officially declared a housing crisis, and has passed strong renter protection measured and an ill-advised (and most mostly counter-productive) inclusionary housing ordinance. But despite its statements to the contrary, it showed that it really isn’t all…
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Cloaking a weak argument in big—but phony—numbers
Journalists: Stop repeating phony congestion cost estimates. They’re just weak arguments disguised with big numbers. This month The Economist has an excellent special report exploring the prospects for autonomous vehicles. They seem to be coming faster than many people anticipated, and they pose some big challenges and opportunities for cities. This otherwise very useful contribution to…
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Dallas: Diverse mobility, complete neighborhoods & placemaking
Carol Coletta’s Remarks to Downtown Dallas, Inc. (Our friend and colleague Carol Coletta delivered the keynote address to the annual meeting of Downtown Dallas, Inc. on March 5. While her remarks are focused on Dallas, we think the themes presented (promoting diverse forms of mobility in cities, building complete neighborhoods, and encouraging placemaking) are of…
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Portland doesn’t really want to make housing affordable
Actions speak louder than words; blocking new housing will drive up rents Nominally, at least, the Portland City Council is all about housing affordability. They’ve declared a housing emergency. In the last general election, City voters approved a $258 million bond issue to build more affordable housing. The Council has made permanent a city ordinance…
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The Week Observed, March 9, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The correlation between bad diets and vote for President. A new research paper has distilled mounds of data on consumer shopping behavior gleaned from supermarket scanners, and combined it with nutritional information to estimate how healthy or unhealthy average dietary patterns are in different parts of the country.…
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City Women
Jane Jacobs was just one of the first of many It’s International Women’s Day, and today, we’d like to acknowledge just a few of the really sharp women urbanists we rely on, every day, at City Observatory, to understand and make sense of the world. We read their research, study their commentaries, and follow them…
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The technological fix for our pedestrian problem
What the obsession with technological fixes says about how we fail to prioritize people in cities In the best traditions of engineering, clever minds are working on new technologies that can prevent or reduce the carnage on our nation’s roadways. A couple of years ago, we note that Google had patented a technology to coat self-driving cars…
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Barack Obama on Gentrification
. . . we want more economic activity in this community, because that’s what creates opportunity and with more economic opportunity it does mean that there’s going to be more demand for all kinds of amenities in the community. So you can’t have one without the other. You can’t say we want more jobs, more…
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Junk food America elected its president
The states with the worst diets voted disproportionately for Donald Trump A powerful new study from uses big data to shine a powerful light on our eating habits. Using data from grocery store scanner records, Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, and Jean-Pierre Dube (researchers from the New York University, Stanford and the University of Chicago, respectively)…
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Road pricing for all vehicles, not just ride-hailed ones
The problem isn’t the ride-hailed vehicles, it’s the under-priced street It really looks like we’re on the cusp of a major change in transportation finance. Cities around the country are actively studying real time road pricing. And no where is the conversation more advanced than in New York, where Governor Cuomo has endorsed the FixNYC…