Month: May 2019
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The Week Observed, May 31, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Who bikes? Discussions of investing in bike infrastructure are often fraught with arguments about who benefits, with oft-expressed fears that bike lanes chiefly benefit a spandex-wearing elite. How does cycling correspond to income. There’s a misleading claim floating around the twitterverse that the single largest group of bike…
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The constancy of change in neighborhood populations
Neighborhoods are always changing; half of all renters move every two years. There’s a subtle perceptual bias that underlies many of the stories about gentrification and neighborhood change. The canonical journalistic account of gentrification focuses on the observable fact that different people now live in a neighborhood than used to live there at some previous…
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Who bikes?
Workers in low income households rely more on bikes for commuting, but the data show people of all income levels cycle to work There’s a lot of hand-wringing and harrumphing about the demographics of cycling. Some worry that bike lanes cater to higher income, spandex clad commuters, and are yet another signal of gentrification. In…
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The Week Observed, May 24, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Exit, hope and loyalty: What’s behind neighborhood change? America’s neighborhoods are always changing, and it’s often a question of whether change is driven more by hope or despair. We offer a slight tweak to Albert Hirschman’s trinity of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” to explore the choices and decision-calculus confronting…
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Exit, Hope and Loyalty: The fate of neighborhoods
How neighborhood stability hinges on expectations: If people don’t believe things are going to get better, many will leave One of the most perplexing urban problems is neighborhood decline. Once healthy, middle-class or working class-places seem to gradually (and then abruptly) fall from grace. As we documented in our report Lost in Place, the number…
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The Week Observed, May 17, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Will upzoning help housing affordability? Housing supply denialism–claims that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to housing markets–have a ready audience in the NIMBY community. The latest study to make the rounds comes from Andres Rodriguez-Pose and Michael Storper, with an added boost from CityLab’s Richard…
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Will upzoning ease housing affordability problems?
More housing supply denialism–debunked It appears that we have been a bit premature in calling the housing supply debate over. Last week’s urbanist Internet was all a flutter with the latest claim of an academic study purporting to show that allowing more density in cities wouldn’t do anything to ameliorate the housing affordability problem. The…
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The Young and Restless in Black and White
A sharp divide by race in urban residence for young adults Well-educated young whites are increasingly living in central cities, while well-educated young African-Americans are shifting increasingly to the suburbs For some time, we’ve been tracking the location decisions of a group we call the “young and restless”–25 to 34 year olds with a four-year…
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Inclusionary Zoning’s Wile E. Coyote moment
You won’t know that your inclusionary zoning program is wrecking the housing market until it’s too late to fix. How lags and game theory monkey wrench inclusionary zoning. One of the toughest problems in economics and economic forecasting is dealing with markets and decisions that involve considerable lags. There’s often a lag, or length of…
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The Week Observed, May 10, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of design thinking. Really good design can frequently improve the utility and performance of everyday objects, and there’s little question that the attentiveness to software design and user experience has made smart phones indispensable adjuncts to our lifestyle. But while design thinking can improve many things,…
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Why road pricing is inherently equitable: Faster buses
Road pricing is inherently fairer to the poor because it speeds up buses As economists, we’re keen on the idea of road pricing. The reason we have congestion and delay is because we charge a price for peak hour road use (zero), that doesn’t come close to covering the costs of providing roadway capacity and…
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The limits of design thinking
The most difficult design challenge is asking the right question Not long ago, a feature article at the New York Times described how the design wizards at IDEO are helping stodgy old Ford Motor Company re-imagine how transportation might work in the future. IDEO conceptualized the design task by sending groups of its employees to…
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The Week Observed, May 3, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The idea of cities and the city of ideas. What cities do is bring people together, and the heightened interaction among people invariably generates friction, but also new ideas. City Observatory’s Joe Cortright delivered the annual Harold Vatter Memorial Lecture on Economics at Portland State University on May…
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City of ideas, and the idea of cities
Cities have always been about bringing people together and creating new ideas Editor’s Note: City Observatory Director Joe Cortright will be giving the Harold Vatter Memorial Lecture in Economics at Portland State University on Thursday, May 2. His theme will be “Cities in the Knowledge Economy.” As a prelude to that lecture, we’re offering this…