Month: April 2018
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The Week Observed, April 27, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Gerontopoly: Is homeownership a sure route to building wealth? It has been in the US, but increasingly, its only working for older generations. Homeowners 55 and older now hold most of all of equity in owner-occupied homes in the US. Younger adults have only about half as much…
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Dow of Cities: Big data on the urban price premium
Zillow’s data tracking prices of tens of millions of US homes adds further confirmation to the Dow of Cities For some time, we’ve been talking about the Dow of Cities: the notion that the price premium that urban homes command over suburban ones is a market indicator of the growing preference of Americans for city…
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The Mortgage Interest Deduction: Smaller, but even more unfair
Tax changes cut the Mortgage Interest Deduction sharply–but not for the rich The 1.2 percent of households with incomes over $500,000 get 20 times as much tax relief from the mortgage interest deduction as the half of all households with incomes under $50,000. Every year, the federal government spends about $250 billion on subsidized housing–not…
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Gerontopoly: Homeownership, wealth, and age
Is the “dream” of homeownership really just a massive, intergenerational wealth transfer? Recently, that’s just how it has worked out. The takeaways: Homeownership is a gerontopoly. Most housing wealth is held by older Americans. Inequality in the US is increasingly intergenerational. The old get richer and the young get poorer. Most of the growth in…
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City as theme park
There’s no critique more cutting than saying that development is turning an urban neighborhood into a theme park. The irony of course, is that cities like Dubrovnik and Venice represent a profoundly obsolete, pre-industrial technology. They were built without machines, without computers, designed for walking and and most animal powered travel. They provide a…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to drop more than a billion dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. It isn’t so much Earth Day as a…
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Video: Portland’s Housing Market
Earlier this month, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright was interviewed for HFO TV. The interview focused on recent developments in Portland’s housing market, and explored the reasons behind the growth in rents in the middle part of this decade and the likely effects of housing policies, including the city’s inclusionary zoning requirements. The full interview is 27…
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Housing reparations for Northeast Portland
Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished? One of the carefully crafted talking points in the sales pitch for the $450 million proposed Rose Quarter I-5 freeway widening project in Northeast Portland is the idea that it is somehow going to…
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The Week Observed, April 13, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Dow of Cities. The most predictable feature of any media business report is a recitation of the daily movements of major stock indices, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow is meant to use changes in prices to concisely convey the market’s sentiments about the outlook…
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A critical look at suburban triumphalism
The “body count” view of suburban population misses the value people attach to cities Lately, we’ve seen a barrage of comments suggesting that the era of the city is over, and that Americans, including young adults, are ready to decamp to the suburbs. We think this new wave of suburban triumphalism is missing some key…
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The Ben & Jerry’s crash course in transportation economics
They’ll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads Today’s that day, folks. Ben and Jerry are giving away free ice cream to everyone who comes by their stores. Whether you’re hankering for Cherry Garcia or Chunky monkey, you can now get it for absolutely…
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The Dow of Cities
The Dow Jones Industrial may be down, but the Dow of Cities is rising The daily business news is obsessed with the price of stocks. Widely reported indicators like the Dow Jones Industrial average gauge the overall health of the US economy by how much, on any given day (or hour, or minute) investors are…
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Housing: A shortage of cities
City Observatory’s Joe Cortright is one of the panelists at Chapman University’s April 5 conference “Will California Ever Figure Out How to House Itself“. Here’s a summary of his remarks. The housing crisis in California, as in many other states, manifests itself as a shortage and high price of housing, but is in fact symptomatic…
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The Week Observed, April 20, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Housing reparations for Northeast Portland. The Oregon Department of Transportation is selling its plan to spend half a billion dollars widening a stretch of freeway in Portland by claiming it will help knit together the communities divided when the freeway was built in the 1960s, including the city’s…
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The Week Observed, April 6, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Cappuccino Congestion Index. Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. To illustrate how misleading these fictitious numbers are, we’ve used the same methodology and actual data to compute the value of time lost…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions We’re continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It’s annoying to queue up for anything, but traffic congestion has spawned a cottage industry of ginning up reports that transform our annoyance with waiting in lines…