Month: September 2018
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The Week Observed, September 28, 2018
What City Observatory did this week Peaks, Valleys and Donuts: Visualizing cities in cross-section. The University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has produced a powerful on-line tool for visualizing the spatial patterns of income, poverty, educational attainment and population growth and diversity across the metropolitan area. Their…
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Peaks, valleys, and donuts: Visualizing cities in cross-section
Too often, the descriptions of urban form are reduced to excessively simple binary classifications (city v. suburb), or rely on data grouped by counties, which are maddeningly disparate units. County-level population data is bad at telling us much of anything about cities and housing preferences. Counties just contain too many multitudes – of built environments,…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 5: Exclusive suburbs
Part 5. Are the nation’s richest suburbs really its most economically inclusive cities? A statistical methodology that repeatedly flags high income suburbs as “inclusive” probably isn’t actually measuring inclusiveness. (Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report that attempts to measure and rank the inclusiveness of U.S.…
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The Week Observed, September 21, 2018
What City Observatory did this week This week, we published five posts taking a critical look at how a recent Urban Institute report, Measuring Inclusiveness, illustrates the problems and pitfalls of defining and measuring “inclusion.” 1. Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 1: Parallax distortions in applying equality concepts to small geographies. It seems like…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 4: Metropolitan context
Part 4. Are racially and economically homogeneous cities and suburbs in a segregated metro “inclusive?” Looking only at disparities within cities misses the often far larger disparities across cities within in single metropolitan area. (Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report measuring and ranking city-level inclusiveness. Please…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 3: Annexing growth
Part 3. Do annexations and mergers constitute economic growth? Not adjusting city job growth estimates for changes in city boundaries produces misleading estimates, especially when used for comparing and ranking cities. (Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a part of a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report measuring and ranking city-level inclusiveness.…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 2: The limits of city limits
Part 2. Are city boundaries the right way to measure inclusion? Municipal boundaries produce a myopic and distorted view of inclusion; the boundaries themselves were often drawn to create exclusion (Editor’s note: This is the second in a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report that attempts to measure and rank the inclusiveness of…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part I
Inclusiveness is a worthy policy goal, but in practice turns out to be devilishly hard to measure. A recent report from the Urban Institute shows some of the pitfalls: looking just within city boundaries ignores metropolitan context and gives a distorted picture of which places are inclusive. (Editor’s note: Over the next several days, City Observatory…
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The Week Observed, September 14, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of localism. A number of urban luminaries, including Bruce Katz and Richard Florida have been urging that we pin our hopes for social and policy change on local governments. At City Observatory-enamored as we are of cities-we’ve been skeptical of that argument. This week, some of…
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Does new construction lead to displacement?
A careful study of evictions in San Francisco says “No.” There’s a widespread belief among some neighborhood activists that building new housing triggers displacement. We-and most economists are highly skeptical of that argument at the metropolitan level, but its at least theoretically possible that there could be some neighborhood effects, for example, that building a…
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The limits of localism
Overselling localism is becoming an excuse to shed and shred federal responsibility Our friend, and director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Amy Liu, weighs in with a timely commentary on the limits of localism. As regular readers of City Observatory will know, we’ve been concerned that the soaring rhetoric of those enamored of…
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The Week Observed, September 7, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. An affogato theory of transportation. The combination of gelato and espresso is a special treat, and it also neatly captures two of our favorite parables about how transportation really works. The ice cream part focuses on Ben & Jerry’s annual free cone day, which regularly produces lines around…
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An affogato theory of transportation
Coffee and ice cream and jam (or traffic jams) Just once, we are going to sugar-coat our commentary. At City Observatory, we know that a lot of what we present is highly technical, especially when it comes to understanding the complex and dynamic problems of transportation. But when it comes to transportation policy, two of…
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Quantifying Jane Jacobs
Our storefront index shows where there’s a density of destinations to enable walkability As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along the margins of public spaces…
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Let’s stop with the absurd surveys masquerading as serious research
No: Eighty percent of today’s 8 to 23 year-olds won’t be buying houses in the next five years At City Observatory, we get a regular stream of press releases and media advisories about the results of surveys and other market research, purporting to tell us the preferences of the American people. Some of what we…