Month: January 2019
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It’s Groundhog’s Day yet again, Oregon: How’s your climate change strategy working?
Another year later, and we’re still stuck with the same hypocrisy on climate change If it seems like you’ve read this post before at City Observatory, you’re not wrong. For the past couple of years, every Groundhog’s Day, we’ve stuck our heads up and looked around to see whether anything has changed when it comes…
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More driving, more dying: Dangerous by Design, 2019
More driving and our car-oriented transportation system killed 50,000 pedestrians in the past decade Each year, Smart Growth America produces its annual report Dangerous by Design looking at pedestrian deaths and injuries. Once again, this is grim reading, but the report, as always, is a vital public service that brings home just how serious this…
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A third-way for approaching affordable housing
Here’s a provocative proposal for getting more affordable housing, especially in rapidly changing, opportunity neighborhoods In part I of this series we laid out a key challenge to housing affordability described by Washington developer Rob Stewart based on his experience working in development in the Washington DC area. Today we turn to a possible proposal,…
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A third way for more affordable housing? Part I. The problem
How can affordable housing help minimize, rather than perpetuate, income segregation? At City Observatory, we’ve long focused on the challenge of concentrated poverty, starting with our first report Lost in Place, in 2014. American metropolitan areas have become more segregated by income, and the results of concentrated poverty have been devastating for families that live…
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The Week Observed, January 25, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Remembering Dr. King. We were reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech about the pronounced tendency in public policy to prescribe socialism for the rich and rugged, free market capitalism for the poor. Much has changed in the half century since that remark, but sadly, it’s still the…
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The outlook for the Portland housing market
Coping with the nation’s shortage of cities is a key factor in the Portland housing market in 2019 On January 9, I was invited to talk to the annual housing outlook seminar convened by HFO Oregon. A video of my remarks is available on YouTube. My presentation addressed a number of themes that will be…
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Measuring the Civic Commons
A New DIY toolkit helps neighborhoods and cities measure the state of their civic commons At City Observatory, we’re all about metrics, and especially keen on metrics that help us better understand the function of cities. We’ve mapped everything from the location and changing status of the nation’s neighborhoods of concentrated poverty to identifying the…
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Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor
It’s a long road to redressing inequality A half-century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the stilted rhetoric used use to talk about public spending to promote the social good: Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and…
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The Week Observed, January 18, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Scooters are a success in Portland, but there’s an insidious double standard. A new report from Portland’s Bureau of Transportation details the success of the city’s 120-day long experiment allowing about 2,000 scooters from Bird, Lime and Skip to be operated on city streets. The report judges the…
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Scooter Lessons: Success, but a stark double standard
Data shows Portland’s scooter experiment worked. Maybe it’s time to critically appraise the failed 110 year experiment with cars. Starting in July, Portland, Oregon began allowing fleets of e-scooters, as an experiment, to see how they would work. Portland’s Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) just released its 36-page report on the city’s 120-day trial of allowing…
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Why Carmaggedon never comes (Seattle edition)
Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand Seattle has finally closed its aging Alaskan Way viaduct, a six-lane double-decker freeway that since the 1940s has been a concrete scar separating Seattle’s downtown from Elliott Bay. In a few weeks, much of this capacity will be replaced by a…
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No deal: Why a CRC revival is going nowhere
Reviving the Columbia River Crossing will never happen: the two sides have incompatible aims There are continued rumblings in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area about reviving the abandoned plan to spend $3 billion or more on a grand Columbia River Crossing to replace the existing 6-lane Interstate 5 freeway bridge with a 12-lane structure and a…
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The Week Observed, January 11, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. You’re going to need a bigger boat. We’re excited that Minneapolis has pushed forward with the legalization of duplexes and triplexes in formerly single-family only zones, and that others (including Oregon) appear to be following suit. It’s a major achievement to recast “missing middle” housing as one way…
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Ten things more inequitable than road pricing
Don’t decry congestion pricing as inequitable until after you fix, or at least acknowledge, these ten other things that are even more inequitable about the way we pay for transportation. There’s a growing interest in using congestion pricing to help tackle traffic issues in major cities. Putting a price on peak hour road capacity is…
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You’re going to need a bigger boat
Eliminating exclusively single-family zones won’t provide enough density: Recognizing the limits of “missing middle” as a solution to urban affordability At City Observatory, we’re excited as anyone that there seems to be a growing groundswell of support around the nation for eliminating exclusively single-family zoning. Minneapolis has garnered national headlines by legalizing duplexes and triplexes…
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The Week Observed, February 15, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Widening freeways doesn’t reduce crashes or crash related delay. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of Interstate 5 near downtown Portland. They’ve already conceded that the project will do nothing to reduce the recurring daily delay that…
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The Week Observed, January 4, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Displacement by decline. Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy offers a guest post on our misplaced obsession with gentrification. He argues that pundits and urban policy people are fighting the wrong battle. Too much time is spent on the challenges of urban success, and not enough time is spent…
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Is Oregon’s road tax limit a paper tiger?
The Oregon Constitution exempts refunds and debt repayment from the limits on how revenue from taxing cars and fuel is spent Note: What follows is a hypothesis and a question. What’s presented here is not a legal opinion, nor does it purport to be one. This commentary raises the question–which deserves a thorough examination in…
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Displacement by decline
An obsession with gentrification obscures the urban problem: concentrated poverty Editor’s Note: We’re again pleased to offer a guest commentary from Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy, who has some keen insights on cities, poverty and neighborhood change. Like City Observatory, Segedy puts great stock in the longer argument made in Alan Mallach’s book “The Divided City.”…