Month: July 2020
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The Week Observed, July 31 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The abject failure of Portland’s Climate Action Plan. Last month, Portland issued the final report on its 2015 Climate Action Plan. It emphasizes that the city took action on three-quarters of the items on the plan’s checklist, but glosses over the most important measure of results: the fact…
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Portland awards itself a participation trophy for climate
Portland is utterly failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, but not to worry, its ticking lots of boxes in its bureaucratic check-list. The city walks away from its 2015 Climate Action Plan after an increase in greenhouse gases, but promises to do better (and more equitably) in the future. Portland’s greenhouse gas emissions…
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A world of fewer cars and less driving
Auto industry consultants KPMG see fewer cars and less driving in our future That may be bad for the car business, but good for the environment and cities One clear implication: hold off building new road capacity There’s little question that the pandemic has altered the way we live in the present, the big unresolved…
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The Week Observed, July 24 2020
What City Observatory did this week The exodus that never happened. You’ve probably seen stories bouncing around the media for the past few months claiming that fears that density makes people more susceptible to the pandemic are prompting people to leave cities in droves. While and enterprising reporter can always find an anecdote to build…
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The Exodus that never happened
The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities. The latest data show an increase in interest in dense urban locations. At City Observatory, we’ve regularly challenged two widely repeated myths about the Corona Virus. The first is that urban density is a cause of…
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The Week Observed, July 17, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Dominos falling on Portland’s Rose Quarter freeway widening project. In the space of just a few hours two weeks ago, local political support for an $800 million freeway widening project collapsed, after local African-American groups pulled out of the project’s steering committee. We trace the rapid-fire chronology of local…
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Dominos falling on Rose Quarter freeway widening
Last week, over the space of about 24 hours, the prospects for Portland’s proposed the Rose Quarter freeway widening dimmed almost to extinction. Leaders of Portland’s African-American community have concluded that the Oregon DOT had no intention of altering the project in response to community concerns, and when they withdrew, a host of local leaders…
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The Week Observed, July 10, 2020
What City Observatory did this week CityBeat: NPR urban flight story. The pack animals of the media have settled on a single, oft-repeated narrative about cities and Covid-19; that fear of the virus will lead people to move to the suburbs. The latest iteration of this trope is an NPR story, focused on a couple…
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CityBeat: NPR’s suburban flight story
Yet another entry in the trumped-up pandemic-fueled suburban flight narrative Anecdotes aside, there’s no data that people are fleeing cities to avoid the Coronavirus The data show young, well-educated adults moving to urban centers everywhere, and no decline in interest in urban markets during the pandemic As we’ve chronicled at City Observatory, there’s a welter…