January 2019

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 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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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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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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