Month: February 2020
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The Week Observed, February 28, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. The inequity built into Metro’s proposed homeless strategy. Portland’s Metro is rushing forward with a plan asking voters to approve $250 million per year in income taxes to fight homelessness and promote affordability in Metro Portland. It’s pitched as redressing the inequities of the past: homelessness disproportionately affects communities…
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Why Atlanta’s anti-gentrification moratorium will backfire
Blocking new development will only accelerate demand for existing homes The moratorium makes flipping houses even more lucrative Atlanta’s making a major investment in Westside Park at Bellwood Quarry, not far from the Beltline that has triggered a wave of redevelopment around the city. It’s going to be a gem. When completed, Westside Park will…
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Gentrification: the case of the missing counter-factual
Why are there so few studies charting displacement and cultural decline in non-gentrifying neighborhoods? The implicit assumption in most gentrification research is that if a neighborhood doesn’t change, that it stays the same, but almost no one looks at that question Displacement by decline is much more common, and more harmful than displacement due to…
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Equity and Homelessness
What’s equitable about spending six times as much per homeless person in the suburbs as in the city? The “equity” standard that’s guiding the division of revenue for Metro’s housing initiative is based on politics, not need. Portland’s regional government Metro is rapidly moving ahead with a proposed $250 million per year program to fight…
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The Week Observed, February 21, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Local flavor: Which cities have the most independent restaurants. Local eateries are one of the most visibly distinctive elements of any city. As Jane Jacobs said, the most important asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place. Independent restaurants are a great indicator…
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Climate failure and denial at the Oregon Department of Transportation
Oregon is utterly failing to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions Instead of being down 10 percent by 2020, transportation greenhouse gas emissions are up more than 20 percent Oregon will miss its 2020 GHG goal by 6.5 million tons per year ODOT’s so-called “strategy” is really technocratic climate denial In 2007, Oregon boldly adopted the…
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Understanding Walkable Density
A new way of measuring urban density that explicitly considers walkability by DW Rowlands Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to offer this guest commentary by DW Rowlands. DW Rowlands is a human geography grad student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her current research focuses on characterizing neighborhoods based on their amenability to public transit and…
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Mapping Walkable Density
Walkable density mapped for the nation’s largest metropolitan areas by DW Rowlands Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to offer this guest commentary by DW Rowlands. DW Rowlands is a human geography grad student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her current research focuses on characterizing neighborhoods based on their amenability to public transit and on the…
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How driving ruins local flavor
Car-dependent metros have fewer independent restaurants Chain restaurants and cars go together Yesterday, we used data compiled by Yelp on chain and independent restaurants to compute the market share of chains in the nation’s largest metro areas. Overall, about a quarter of all restaurants are part of a chain, but that fraction varies widely across…
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Local flavor: Cities with the most independent restaurants
Which US cities have the most independent restaurants? One of the chief advantages of cities is the range of consumption choices they afford to their residents. In general, larger cities offer more choices than smaller ones. One of the things that makes a city special and distinctive is its food and culture. Too much of…
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Climate crisis: Cities are the solution
A new report shows how cities are central to any strategy to fight climate change Cities have the “3 C’s: Clean, compact, connected National government policies need to support cities Let’s describe a low carbon future in positive, aspirational terms Will the future be brighter or darker than today? That’s a central question in the…
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Lying about safety to sell freeway widening
ODOT’s lies about safety at the Rose Quarter are so blatant they can be seen 400 miles away. Freeway widening isn’t about deaths or injuries, but “motorist inconvenience” according to this safety expert, making this $800 million project an egregious waste of funds Traffic safety is a real issue, and by any objective measure, Oregon…
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The Week Observed, February 7, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Talent drives economic development. We know the single most important factor determining metropolitan economic success: It’s determined by the education level of your population. The latest data on educational attainment and per capita incomes show that two-thirds of the variation in income levels among large metro areas is explained…
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Memo to the Oregon Transportation Commission: Don’t Dodge
Climate change? Not our job. We’re just following orders. The Oregon Transportation Commission is on the firing line for its plans to build a $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project in Northeast Portland. There’s been a tremendous outpouring of community opposition to the project: more than 90 percent of the 2,000 comments on…
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Bags, bottles and cans: Pricing works
Oregon’s new mandatory bag fee harnesses market forces to promote environmental objectives Now do it for greenhouse gases On January 1, a new law went into effect in Oregon, which mostly bans single use plastic grocery bags, and requires grocery stores to charge a 5 cent fee for every paper bag they provide to customers.…
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Jealous billionaires: The story behind Amazon’s HQ2
Cash prizes for bad corporate citizenship: When we incentivize anti-social behavior by big corporations, we get more of it Bloomberg Business has a behind-the-scenes post-mortem of the Great Amazon HQ2 sweepstakes, “Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk.” In the Fall of 2017, Amazon announced a high stakes competition for cities across…
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Talent: The key to metro economic success
Educational attainment explains two-thirds of the variation in economic success among metropolitan areas. Each additional percentage point increase in the four-year college attainment rate increases metro per capita income by $1,500 We’re increasingly living in a globalized, knowledge based economy. In that world, the single most important factor determining a region’s economic success is the…