Month: August 2018
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The Week Observed, August 31, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. If you want less displacement, build more housing. A common refrain at planning commission meetings around the country is that cities ought to block new housing as a way of insulating neighborhoods from change and displacement. The irony of this position is that making it harder to build…
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Does increased housing supply improve affordability?
Why a recent Fed study tells us very little about supply and affordability The takeaway: A recent Federal Reserve study which seems to show that building more housing won’t improve affordability has little relevance to supply-constrained cities; among other things, it unrealistically assumes that any increase in housing supply will be exactly offset by an…
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Do rich neighbors make low income people unhappy?
Lower income households are happier in higher income neighborhoods How does your neighbor’s income affect your happiness? Do you feel worse off if you have less income than most of your neighbors? The “Keeping up with the Joneses” theory of happiness would suggest that if people live in a neighborhood with people who have more…
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If you want less displacement, build more housing
The more you limit housing, the more you increase displacement In city after city, we see the same refrain: a neighborhood is starting to attract new residents and new investment, current residents are starting to worry about gentrification. They show up at city council meetings or planning meetings to voice objection to new development. Just…
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The Week Observed, August 24, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Philadelphia’s urban policy harmonic convergence. The proposal to build a multi-billion dollar expansion of University City adjacent to Drexel University and Philadelphia’s Center City brings a host of urban issues to the fore all in one small location. The city is making a big bet on knowledge-based economic…
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IoT: The Irrelevance of Thingies
People and social interaction, not technology, is the key to the future of cities Smart city afficianado’s are agog at the prospects that the Internet of Things will create vast new markets for technology that will disrupt and displace cities. Color us skeptical; our experience with technology so far–and its been rapid and sweeping–is that…
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Philadelphia’s urban policy harmonic convergence
Philly’s University City: The urban challenge in a nutshell The knowledge economy . . . tax breaks . . . NIMBYism . . . gentrification . . . Amazon’s HQ2 . . . high speed rail . . . university economic development? All this in one location. Many conversations about the nation’s urban challenges address…
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The Week Observed, August 17, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. We disagree with the Washington Post on housing economics. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post published an article claiming that rents were going down for higher income renters but increasing for lower income renters. That didn’t square with our reading of the data, so we took a closer…
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Whither small towns? Wither small towns?
Rural and small town America faces some tough odds In an article entitled: “How to save the Troubled American Heartland,” Bloomberg’s very smart Noah Smith shares his thoughts on how to revive the smaller towns of rural. For the most part, he’s in agreement with the ideas expressed by James and Deborah Fallows in their…
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Is St. Louis Gentrifying?
Gentrification Debates Without Gentrification? By Todd Swanstrom Editor’s note: We’re pleased to offer a guest commentary from Todd Swanstrom. Todd is the Des Lee Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. He is also co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/drepl3.html). Recent research has provided evidence for…
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We disagree with the Washington Post about housing economics
Contrary to what you think you may have read in last week’s Washington Post, rental housing markets at all levels still conform to the laws of supply and demand Monday’s Washington Post ran a provocative headline: “In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich–but rise for the poor.” Citing data from one of the nation’s…
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The Week Observed, August 10, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Jason Segedy on gentrification. This week we feature a guest column from Akron planning director Jason Segedy. You can’t build new housing in any existing neighborhood, it seems, without some invoking the specter of gentrification. Writing from the perspective of an economically lagging rust-belt city, Segedy makes the…
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Going the wrong way: NYC’s new ride-hailing cap
Capping or taxing ride-hailing services isn’t going to solve NYC’s congestion problem New York’s City Council is moving ahead with a package of measures designed to cap the number of ride-hailed vehicles, like Uber and Lyft, as a way of addressing the city’s growing congestion problem. This is both a mistake and a blown opportunity. …
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More evidence of declining rents in Portland
Zillows data shows Portland rents have dropped 3.5 percent in the past year A couple of weeks ago, we published the latest data from ApartmentList.com on the decline in rents in the Portland metropolitan area. Their benchmark series for one bedroom apartments showed a year-over-year decline of 3 percent in Portland. While we have a…
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Don’t decry new urban housing as “gentrification”
Whenever a distressed neighborhood gets new market rate housing, someone’s bound to cry “Gentrification”. Here’s why that’s wrong. This is a guest post from Jason Segedy, Director of Akron’s Planning Department. This is an excerpt of a two-part essay written by Segedy and published in The American Conservative. Jason writes about a range of urban…
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The Week Observed, August 3, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Your summertime must read: Alan Mallach’s Divided City. We have a review of this newly released book, which we think every urbanist ought to read. Although written primarily from the perspective of lagging Rust Belt cities, Mallach’s book has a lot to say to urbanists through the nation.…