Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences I pity you, dear reader.  You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around  the Summe... →

Portland's $30 Million Container Shipping Folly Cargo cults are a well-documented sociological phenomenon:  Cargo cults were religious movements that emerged among indigenous people in Melanesia during the early to mid-... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has proposed a $1.9 billion freeway widening project for Portland's Rose Quarter.  The agency proposes to cover a portion of the freeway in what it calls "restorative justice... →

The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Project is two years behind schedule IBR's Draft SEIS was supposed to be complete in December 2022—It now won't be done before December 2024. This two-year delay means the environ... →

Once again, Portland loses container service:  the economic effects will be minimal. Economic development has long been obsessed with "cargo cult" thinking:  the idea that economic prosperity is caused by ports and hi... →

The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project will save the average commuter just 30 seconds in daily commute time IBR officially determined that "leaking" the project EIS would result in "negative public react... →

The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you'll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement IBR officially determined that "leaking" the project EIS would result in "n... →

There's a yawning chasm of neighborhood level economic distress across US metro areas.  While about 1 in 6 US neighborhoods is classed as distressed, some metro areas have large concentrations of distress, while others ha... →

Wouldn't it be nice if we could create valuable new urban land by decking over freeways? Turns out, its massively uneconomical, and doesn't eliminate many of the most negative effects of urban freeways Its massively ... →

How ODOT is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to freeway cost overruns. The 2017 Legislature authorized zero funding for the I-205 Bridge project In 2024, ODOT now falsely claims that the I-205 projec... →

There are good reasons to be dubious of claims that trucks are being over-charged for the use of Oregon roads. The imbalance between cars and trucks seems to stem largely from the Oregon Department of Transportation''s ... →

An imagined decline in trip-making is the result of bad data analysis USDOT counted fewer trips in 2022, because it used a different, and less reliable survey method USDOT's social media created a false perception th... →

A central message of the highway building sales pitch is that traffic is ever-growing and ever worsening, and that we have no choice but to throw more money at expanded capacity. The Oregon Department of Transportation ... →

Metro's Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) claims it will meet state and regional climate objectives by slashing vehicle travel more than 30 percent per person between now and 2045. Meanwhile, its transportation plan ac... →

The proposed re-design of the I-5 Rose Quarter Project now includes two deadly hairpin freeway off-ramps. Just last week, Brandon Coleman was killed at a similar hairpin highway ramp in downtown Portland  The Oregon... →

Earlier, we branded Portland Metro's proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed the region was reducing greenhouse gases, and falsely claimed its transportation investments were ... →

Oregon's Department of Transportation (ODOT) says it doesn't have enough money to maintain roads, fix potholes or even plow snow. This is a Big Lie: Mega-projects and their cost-overruns, not maintenance, are the cause ... →

A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn't meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness The Interstate Bridge Project is a value-destroying proposition:  it costs more to build than it provides in economic benefits Fede... →

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaims the primacy of drivers "We are a nation of drivers" Those who don't own cars, or can't, or choose not to drive, are second class citizens The transportation culture war is f... →

New York lost more than 100,000 homes due to the combination of smaller, more affordable apartments into larger, more luxurious homes When rich people can't buy new luxury housing, they buy up, and combine small apartme... →

Secret ODOT plans obtained by City Observatory show ODOT is planning a ten-lane freeway through the Rose Quarter Though the agency claims its "just adding one auxiliary lane" in each direction, the I-5 Rose Quarter proj... →

Portland Metro's Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) does nothing to prioritize projects and expenditures that reduce greenhouse gases Metro falsely asserts that because its overall plan will be on a path to reduce GHGs ... →

Metro's Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse ga... →

The cost of the $1.9 billion Rose Quarter freeway is driven by its excessive width ODOT is proposing to more than double the width of the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway through the Albina neighborhood ODOT could easily str... →

For years, we've been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland.  The past few months show this project is in serious trouble.  Here's a su... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged business enterprises One-tenth of one percent of I-205 contracts went to Black construction firms ODO... →

The members of ODOT's "Historic Albina Advisory Board" (HAAB) are hopping mad.  As related by Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland, they feel board betrayed by a decision to postpone construction of the $1.6 billion I-5 Rose Qu... →

On June 28, 2023, City Observatory's Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Transportation Commission about the agency's dire financial situation. Background:  The Oregon Department of Transportation is pushing a multi-... →

Oregon freeway fighters chalk up a key victory—but the fight continues On June 26, the Oregon Department of Transportation finally bowed to reality that it simply lacks the funds to pay for a seven-mile long widening ... →

There's plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrink... →

ODOT isn't giving buses the shoulder, it's giving transit the finger. IBR is planning a transitway for the new $7.5 billion interstate bridge that can't be used by buses. It's sketching in a "bus on shoulder" option ... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) can't tell the truth about the width of proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project ODOT is more than doubling the width of the bridge from its existing 77 ... →

The HB 2098 "-2" amendments  are perhaps the most fiscally irresponsible legislation ever to be considered by the Oregon Legislature.  They constitute an open-ended promise by the Oregon Legislature to pay however much m... →

IBR officials are planning to sabotage the analysis of a moveable span options as part of the Interstate Bridge Project The Coast Guard has said a replacement for the existing I-5 bridges would need a 178 foot navigatio... →

ODOT grabs a billion dollars that could be used for bikes, pedestrians and transit, and allocates it to pay highway bills. Oregon highways are out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the cost of ... →

Editor's Note:  For the past two year's the Federal Highway Administration has been investigating a civil rights complaint brought against the proposed I-45 freeway expansion project in Houston.  This week, FHWA and TxDO... →

The "bridge replacement" part of the Interstate Bridge Replacement only costs $500 million, according to new project documents So why is the overall project budget $7.5 billion? Short answer:  This is really a massi... →

Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel Induced travel is a well established scientific fact:  any increase in roadway capacity in a metropolitan area is likely to produce a proportional increa... →

Here are our 16 top reasons Oregon and Washington need to re-think the proposed Interstate Bridge Replacement Project.  The bloated size of the project and its $7.5 billion cost, and the availability of better alternative... →

The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer graphic renderings showing possible designs for a new I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland.  But what they show is a project in real troubl... →

For four years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing a revival of the failed multi-billion dollar I-5 Columbia River Crossing.  Their key sales pitch is that the size and design of the project c... →

Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge.  Eighty percent of daily commuters, and two-thirds of all traffic on the bridge are Washington residents.  On average, these commut... →

Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the cost of the I-5 Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) had ballooned 54 percent, to as much as $7.5 billion. To... →

Sigh. Here we are again, another year, and yet another uninformative, and actively misleading congestion cost report from Inrix. More myth and misdirection from highly numerate charlatans. Burying the lede:  Traffic... →

Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the state DOTs ay it will cost even more We estimate project costs are likely to increase 20 percent or ... →

The price of the I-5 "bridge replacement" project just increased by more than 50 percent, from $4.8 billion to $7.5 billion ODOT and WSDOT are blaming "higher inflation" for IBR cost overruns As we've noted, the Oreg... →

After more than three years of public debate, ODOT still won't tell anyone how wide a freeway they're planning to build at the Rose Quarter ODOT's plans appear to provide for a 160-foot wide roadway, wide enough to acco... →

ODOT's Supplemental Environmental Analysis shows it has no plans for doing anything on its vaunted freeway covers It left the description of cover's post-construction use as "XXX facilities" in the final, official Suppl... →

A newly revealed ODOT report shows the redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project will: creates a dangerous hairpin turn on the I-5 Southbound off-ramp increase crashes 13 percent violate the agency's own highw... →

The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from a Interstate 5 Is ODOT's supposed "safety" project really creating a new "Deadman's Curve" at the Moda Center? Bike riders wi... →

The science of induced travel is well proven, but state DOTs are in utter denial Widening freeways not only fails to reduce congestion, it inevitably results in more vehicle travel and more pollution The Oregon Depar... →

The real expense of the $5 billion I-5 bridge replacement project isn't actually building a new bridge over the Columbia River:  It's widening miles of freeway and rebuilding every intersection north and south of the rive... →

ODOT claims that its policy is "fix-it first" maintaining the highway system. But it is spending vastly less on maintenance and restoration than is needed to keep roads and bridges from deteriorating It blames the Le... →

Ignoring the Coast Guard dooms the I-5 Bridge Project to yet another failure The Oregon and Washington DOTs have again designed a I-5 bridge that's too low for navigation In their rush to recycle the failed plans for... →

The Coast Guard has told Oregon and Washington that a new I-5 bridge must have a 178-foot vertical clearance for river navigation--vastly higher than the 116-foot clearance the state's have proposed A fixed span with th... →

Nearly every major project undertaken by the Oregon Department of Transportation has ended up costing at least double its initial estimate As ODOT proposes a multi-billion dollar series of highway expansions, its estima... →

Ignore the false claims that the Oregon and Washington highway departments are making about the number of lanes on their proposed I-5 project:  its footprint will be 164 feet—easily enough for a 10- or 12-lane roadway. ... →

In the next month or two, regional leaders in Portland are going to be asked to approve the "modified locally preferred alternative" for the I-5 Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project, an intentionally misnamed, $5 billion, 5 mi... →

Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge:  Why won't anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses tri... →

Sprawl and tax evasion are the real forces fueling the demand for wider freeways Highway widening advocates offer up a  a kind of manifest destiny storyline: population and traffic are ever-increasing, and unless we ac... →

California is the first in the nation to establish a Universal Basic Income . . . for cars One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head-on is the idea of a "Universal Basic Inco... →

Portland and Oregon leaders shouldn't commit to a $5 billion project without an investment grade analysis (IGA) of toll revenues Not preparing an IGA exposes the state to huge financial risk: It will have to make up tol... →

Green cities will be less hurt by higher gas prices; Sprawling cities are much more vulnerable to gas price hikes. In sprawling metros like Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Nashville and Oklahoma City, higher gas prices will c... →

Reporters:  read this before you write a "cost of congestion" story. Congestion cost studies are a classic example of pseudo-science:  Big data and bad assumptions produce meaningless results Using this absurd meth... →

A new study calculates that twenty percent of all time "lost" in travel is due to traffic lights Finally, proof for the Lachner Theorem:  Traffic signals are a major cause of traffic delay Another classic example o... →

Widening freeways is no way to promote equity.  The proposed $5 billion widening of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver is purportedly being undertaken with "an equity lens," but widening Portland's I-5 freeway serves high... →

The Oregon and Washington transportation departments are using a biased, unscientific survey to market their $5 billion I-5 freeway widening project. The survey over-represents daily bridge users by a factor of 10 compa... →

Oregon and Washington highway builders have re-branded the failed Columbia River Crossing as a "bridge replacement" project:  It's not. Less than 30 percent of the cost of the nearly $5 billion project is actually for ... →

Adah Crandall is a sophomore at Grant High School. She is the co-lead of Portland Youth Climate Strike and an organizer with Sunrise PDX's Youth Vs ODOT campaign, a biweekly series of rallies fighting for the decarboniza... →

If you aren't talking about our two-caste transportation system, you're not really addressing equity. Portland's regional government is looking forward at trends in the transportation system and their implications for e... →

Metro, Portland's regional government, says it has a plan to reduce transportation greenhouse gases But in the 8 years since adopting the plan, the agency hasn't bothered to look at data on GHGs—which have increased 2... →

Oregon's highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge ODOT has two different standards for forecasting:  When it forecasts revenue, it says it will ignore a... →

The plan to spend $5 billion widening the I-5 Bridge Over the Columbia River would produce 100,000 additional metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, according to the induced travel calculator Metro's 2020 transporta... →

Louisville charges a cheap $1 to $2 toll for people driving across the Ohio River on I-65.   After doubling the size of the I-65 bridges from six lanes to 12, tolls slashed traffic by half, from about 130,000 cars per... →

Louisville's I-65 bridges:  A huge under-used roadway and hundreds of millions in debt for their kids—who will also have to cope with a climate crisis. Their financial plan kicked the can down the road, saddling futu... →

Portland's Metro regional government would be committing planning malpractice and enabling lasting fiscal and environmental damage if it goes along with state highway department freeway widening plans The proposed $5 ... →

The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are advancing their $5 billion freeway widening plan based on outdated 15-year-old traffic projections. No new projections have been prepared since the 2007 estimates... →

10 reasons not to believe phony DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution We know that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and that our car dependent transportation syst... →

Portland's $60 million a year clean energy fund needs climate accountability Any grant writer can spin a yarn that creates the illusion that a given project will have some sort of climate benefits, but if you're actuall... →

Stanford claims its campus will be 100 percent solar powered . . . provided you ignore cars. A flashy news release caught our eye this week.  Stanford University is reporting that its campus will be 100 percent powered... →

Yesterday, we explored the differences in car insurance premiums in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Today, we will take a look at homeowners insurance rates. Unlike car insurance, homeowners insurance is not... →

Everyone loves to compare the affordability of different cities, and most of the attention gets focused on differences in housing prices and rents. Clearly, these are a major component of living costs, and they vary su... →

Four lamentations about a bad infrastructure bill From the standpoint of the climate crisis, the infrastructure bill that passed the Senate is, at a minimum, a tremendous blown opportunity.  Transportation, especially ... →

Electric vehicles will help, but we need to do much more to reduce driving Editor's Note:  City Observatory is pleased to offer this guest commentary by Matthew Lewis.  Matthew is Director of Communications for Califor... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation is in complete denial about climate change Oregon DOT has drafted a so-called "Climate Action Plan" that is merely perfunctory and performative busywork. The devastation of cli... →

In Miami, e-scooters pay four to 50 times as much to use the public roads as cars If we want to encourage greener, safer travel, we should align the prices we charge with our values Florida is home to some of the... →

The $800 million project transitions from "nothing has been decided" to "nothing can be changed" There's a kind of calculated phase-shift in the way transportation department's talk about major projects.  For a long, l... →

Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood survived the 1921 race massacre, only to be ultimately destroyed by a more unrelenting foe: Interstate highways Black Tulsans quickly rebuilt Greenwood in the 1920s, and it flourished for ... →

Single-family zoning, a policy that bans apartments, is widespread in Los Angeles County. The median city bans apartments on 80% of its land for housing. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning have higher medi... →

Single-family zoning, a policy that bans apartments, is widespread in Los Angeles County. The median city bans apartments on 80% of its land for housing. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning have higher whit... →

If OregonDOT is serious about "restorative justice" it should mitigate  highway damage by building housing Around the country, states are subsidizing affordable housing to mitigate the damage done by highway projects ... →

The intentionally misleading re-brand of the failed Columbia River Crossing conceals the key fact that it is a 12-lane wide, 5 mile long freeway that just happens to cross a river, not a "bridge replacement." It's vastl... →

Drawings don't constitute restorative justice ODOT shows fancy drawings about what might be built, but isn't talking about actually paying to build anything Just building the housing shown in its diagrams would requi... →

In 2021, US residential values increased by $6.9 trillion, almost entirely due to price appreciation Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2021 were... →

In 2020, US residential values increased by $2.2 trillion Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2020 were more than three times larger than the tota... →

ODOT has claimed a "peer review panel" vindicated its air pollution analysis Now the panel says they didn't look into the accuracy of ODOT's travel forecast Travel forecasts are critical, because they determine air a... →

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.  Upton Sinclair It's even harder to get a trucking industry lobbyist or a highway department booster to un... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation is launching a series of boondoggle freeways, with no idea of their ultimate cost, and issuing bonds that will obligate the public to pay for expensive and un-needed highways. Fut... →

Oregon legislation goes whole hog on highways HB 3065 would launch a whole new round of freeway boondoggles, and plunge the state into debt to pay for them The classic Robert Moses scam:  Drive stakes, sell bonds ... →

For years, the Oregon Department of Transportation has concealed its plans to build a ten lane freeway through Portland's Rose Quarter We're calling on the state to do a full environmental impact statement that assesses... →

Since Covid started, rents are down in some cities, but up in most "Superstar" cities have experienced the most notable declines; the demographics of renters in these cities are different than elsewhere. Rent decline... →

ODOT's proposed I-5 Rose Quarter project would turn a school yard into a freeway The widened I-5 freeway will make already unhealthy air even worse Pollution from high volume roads has been shown to lower student ac... →

For years, ODOT has been planning to build a 10 lane freeway at the Rose Quarter, not the 6 lanes it has advertised. Three previously undisclosed files show ODOT is planning for a 160 foot wide roadway at Broadway-Weidl... →

Portland's inclusionary zoning requirement is a slow-motion train-wreck; apartment permits are down by sixty percent in the City of Portland, while apartment permitting has more than doubled in the rest of the region In... →

Portland's inclusionary zoning requirement is a slow-motion train-wreck; apartment completions are down by two-thirds, and the development pipeline is drying up This will lead to slower housing supply growth and increas... →

Studies from around the world have validated the existence of induced demand:  each improvement to freeway capacity in urban areas generates more traffic. The best available science worldwide—in Europe, Japan and Nor... →

Buried in an Oregon Department of Transportation presentation earlier this month is an acknowledgement that the I-5 bridge replacement "contribution" from Oregon will be as much as $1 billion—up from a maximum of $850 mi... →

An equitable carbon fee and dividend should be set to a price level necessary to achieve GHG reduction goals; kicker payment should be set so 70% of people receive a net income after paying carbon tax or at least break eve... →

Interstate 5 "Meat Axe" slashed through the Albina Neighborhood in 1962 This was the second of three acts by ODOT that destroyed housing and isolated Albina Building the I-5 freeway led to the demolition of housing ... →

I-5 wasn't the first highway that carved up Portland's historically black Albina Neighborhood. Seventy years ago, ODOT spent the equivalent of more than $80 million in today's dollars to cut the Albina neighborhood off ... →

Freeways slash population in cities, and prompt growth in suburbs Within city centers, the closer your neighborhood was to the freeway, the more its population declined. In suburbs, the closer your neighborhood was t... →

There's relatively little migration in the wake of Covid-19 Most Covid-related migration is temporary, involves moving in with friends or relatives, and not leaving a metro area It's not professionals fleeing cities:... →

Albina then and now Basically, Albina was wiped out by Interstate Ave 99E (ODOT)   1951 Memorial Coliseum (City) 1958 I-5 1962 Emmanuel Hospital (PDC)  1970s Blanchard Center (PPS)  1980 Convention Center 1990... →

Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas There's a strong correlation between metropolitan segregation and black-white housing wealth dispari... →

Home prices are soaring, rents are falling The disparate impact of the recession on high income and low income households in driving the housing market in two directions at once. Job losses have been concentrated amo... →

Widening I-5 at the  Rose Quarter in Portland will produce an addition 17.4 to 34.8 million miles of vehicle travel and 7.8 to 15.5 thousand tons of greenhouse gases per year. These estimates come from a customized cal... →

More than a year ago, Oregon Governor Kate Brown directed ODOT to "include a full review of  congestion pricing" before deciding whether or not to do a full environmental impact statement for the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter... →

Hartford Connecticut considers a pioneering move to make parking pay its way A higher parking tax works much like a "lite" version of land value taxation (LVT) Surface parking lots are highly subsidized polluters ... →

by Garlynn Woodsong Editor's note:City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by Garlynn Woodsong. Garlynn is the Managing Director of the planning consultancy Woodsong Associates, and has more than 20 years ... →

By all means, Portland should adopt its proposed healthy climate fee, a $25 ton carbon tax But make sure it applies to the biggest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases in the region The healthy climate fee... →

A new study from Germany shows that added housing supply lowers rents across the board A 1 percent increase in housing is associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent decrease in rents Housing policy debates are tortured by ... →

Here's an insight from tolling:  A substantial portion of the people driving on our roadways are only there because we're subsidizing the cost of their trip. When we charge a toll to use a road, suddenly many of those ... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) desperately wants to build a mega-freeway through NE Portland, and is planning to double the freeway from 4 lanes to 8 or 10 lanes.  But it has hidden its true objective, by ... →

You can't be a climate mayor—and your city can't be a climate city — if you're widening freeways Phoenix says it's going to reduce greenhouse gases 90 percent by 2050, but the city's transportation greenhouse gases ... →

Portland voters resoundingly defeated a proposed multi-billion dollar payroll tax to pay for transportation projects The two areas slated for the biggest benefits voted against the measure:  The Southwest Corridor and ... →

A proposed Portland area ferry makes no economic or transportation sense. Why the Frog Ferry is a slow boat to nowhere A ferry between Vancouver and Portland would take 20 minutes longer than existing bus service ... →

Advocates for a $5 billion transportation bond that Portland area voters will be deciding in November are making a specious argument about it being an equity measure. Its largest single project, a multi-billion dollar l... →

The Great Disconnect By Jason Segedy City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Akron's Jason Segedy.  It originally appeared on his blog.   As this decade draws to a close, the story... →

The average price of a monthly parking permit in cities is $2.25, compared to $70.00 for a transit pass. Everything you need to know about equity and privilege in urban transportation is reflected in how much we charge ... →

Again:  It's anecdotes, not data that are fueling claims of an urban exodus due to Covid-19 The virus is now  deadlier in the nation's rural areas than it is in cities, undercutting the basis for the urban flight theo... →

Another anecdote-fueled, data-starved article repeats the "suburban flight" meme, this time for Portland. Actual market data show the central city's market remains strong Janet Eastman, writing in the Portland, Orego... →

We're much less segregated during the day, and when we're away from home Commercial and public spaces are important venues for interaction with people from other racial/ethnic groups Patterns of experienced segregati... →

Editor's Note: City Observatory is pleased to present this guest commentary from GB Arrington, longtime veteran of Portland's transit and land use planning systems, explaining why he's against a proposed $5 billion transpo... →

Houston's "Energy Corridor" gets a pedestrian makeover, but just one thing seems to be missing. Bollards and better landscaping can't offset the increased danger from wider, faster slip lanes. Most "pedestrian" infra... →

Big money "pedestrian" projects are often remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic. One of the biggest lies in transportation planning is calling something "multi-modal."  When someb... →

Big data and new technology make bold promises about solving urban problems, but not only fall well short of solutions, but actually can end up making things worse. Why we're skeptical of the "smart city" movement. Y... →

Metro's proposed $5 billion transportation measure makes no sense for the region, for transportation, for our economy, for our kids and for our planet. Portland's regional government, Metro, will be asking voters in Nov... →

The latest Census data show that Black/White segregation is decreasing in large metro areas. Racial segregation still prevails in most American cities, but varies widely across the nation. Portland is one of America'... →

Racial segregation still prevails in most American cities, but varies widely across the nation. Portland is the nation's least segregated large city. The murder of George Floyd by police has reignited national intere... →

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 ... →

The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities. US Post Office data show that the supposed urban exodus was just a trickle, and Americans moved even less in ... →

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 regularl... →

Restorative Justice & A Viable Neighborhood What destroyed the Albina community?  What will it take to restore it? It wasn't just the freeway, it was the onslaught of cars, that transformed Albina into a bleak a... →

Portland's climate emergency efforts are tarnished by an inability to plainly speak the facts about climate change But the tragic fact is that the city is utterly failing to meet even its own previous goals, and more al... →

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 ... →

ODOT proudly spends road funds on mitigating the impact of its highways:  if you're an invertebrate. The highway department mitigates noise pollution, rebuilds jails, and even compensates neighborhoods But if we rep... →

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 ... →

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... →

A so-called "peer review" panel was kept in the dark about critiques of the highway department's flawed projections This is a thinly veiled attempt These are the products of a hand-picked, spoon-fed group, asked by ODOT... →

Some advice on economic policy for states looking to rebound from the pandemic City Observatory's Joe Cortright has served as Chair of the Oregon Governor's Council of Economic Advisers under three Governors.  The Coun... →

Once again, there's a naive and unsubstantiated association between urbanism and the pandemic Portland and Multnomah County have some of the lowest rates of Covid-19 cases of any large metro area The big drivers of Cov... →

Using county-level data, it depends on who's classification system you use Counties may not be the right basis for diagnosing the contributors to Covid. One of the oft-repeated claims in the pandemic is the notion th... →

Today's misleading and incomplete take on cities:    There isn't any evidence that people are fleeing cities for the suburbs; plus it wouldn't help them avoid the virus if they did. We've addressed the claim that t... →

Invoking concerns about equity to block providing more street space for people is destructive  A cautionary tale from Chicago, with some keen insight from Greg Shill. Let's begin by stipulating one thing:  Ther... →

The highway department's claims it doesn't have enough for maintenance are a long-running con You've all seen the classic street con three-card monte. All you have to do to double your money is follow one of three cards... →

Shape of the urban/suburban divide:  Views differ There's a lot of debate about the relative merits and performance of cities and suburbs. You'll read that the migration to cities has come to a halt, that suburbs are g... →

The incidence of reported Covid-19 cases, and their daily growth is higher in the metros of NE corridor than the rest of the country. The Northeast Corridor has all four of the cities with the highest rate of newly repo... →

Originally published April 12; Revised and Corrected April 14 The Covid-19 pandemic is hitting two regions in the US much harder than others:  The NE Corridor and the Great Lakes Metro areas in these regions have th... →

Seattle and San Jose had the first outbreaks of Covid-19 but now have the slowest rates of growth of any large US metro area Their progress seems closely related to the fact that they've cut back on travel more than nea... →

How well are "stay at home" and "shelter in place" policies working in different metro areas? "Big data" from smartphones gives us a picture of how we're dialing back on travel in response to "stay-at-home" orders to co... →

What maps and charts can--and can't--tell us about the spread of the pandemic National dashboards now have county data We need to shift our focus to changes in rates of growth at smaller geographies South Korea ... →

The Coronavirus pandemic is already worse in several American states than anywhere in China outside Hubei Province The pandemic is all about geography, and we need to do more to pinpoint hotspots and contagion The ve... →

Adding more freeway capacity at the Rose Quarter will thousands of tons to the region's greenhouse gas emissions If you say you believe in science, and you take climate change seriously, you can't support spending $800... →

A new report from the DC Policy Center shows the inner-workings of the shadow rental market that is a key to housing affordability Too often, our debates about housing policy are shaped by inaccurate pictures of how the... →

We know what's responsible for declining bus ridership:  Cheap gas And now, its about to get worse, thanks to $30 a barrel oil Prices matter. Last Friday's New York Times has a nice data-driven article by the pap... →

Gasoline prices will drop 50 cents per gallon in the next week or so, and cheap gas will fuel more bad results: more air pollution, more greenhouse gases and more road deaths Now is the perfect time to put a carbon tax ... →

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 ... →

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 U... →

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 a... →

Happy Earth Day, Everyone! If we care about equity, we need to make rapid progress on climate change Equity needs to be defined by substantive outcomes, not vacuous rhetoric and elaborate process. Ultimately equit... →

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 $80... →

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 Portlan... →

Denver's new bag fee is another object lesson on how to use economics to achieve environmental objectives.  Now do it for greenhouse gases Starting this month, you'll have to pay 10 cents for each disposable paper o... →

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 groce... →

The Oregon Department of Transportation has a decades long-tradition of ignoring Portland Public Schools when it comes to freeway projects So here's our story so far.  The Oregon Department of Transportation, ODOT, is ... →

A tech-centered vision of the future of the Pacific Northwest envisions creating a series of new urban centers 40 to 100 miles away from the region’s current largest cities—Seattle, Vancouver and Portland. The answ... →

If we're going to have a lot more missing middle housing; we're also going to have a lot more landlords Accessory dwellings, duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes are suited to "mom-and-pop" landlords, but tough tenants ri... →

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 f... →

Pretending that climate change can be solved by widening roads to keep cars from idling in traffic is dishonest and reprehensible, yet that's exactly what Portland's regional government is doing. A new poll in Portland ... →

Political rationalizations and exceptionalism will always be used to justify giveaway policies With the possible exception of Greg LeRoy (who tracks state and local incentives for Good Jobs Now) and Amazon's site locati... →

A new study shows a tantalizing connection between more walkable places and intergenerational economic mobility City Observatory readers will be familiar with the findings of Raj Chetty and his colleagues in the Equalit... →

We have urban traffic congestion because we heavily subsidize people driving in cities. Reducing subsidies and lowering road capacity reduces traffic and congestion. Why are we building highway capacity for users wh... →

What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? A recent story about Singapore caught our eye:  In Singapore, you can't even buy a car without a government issued "certificate"—and the number o... →

Many states subject housing approval to environmental reporting requirements; what if we extended this same principle to car registrations. Back in the early days of the environmental movement--the late sixties and earl... →

Too much economic development policy is based on a naive analogy to portfolio theory Cities looking to strengthen their economies should concentrate on building upon and  extending current specializations One of the... →

There's scarcely any evidence that proximity to jobs matters for escaping poverty. One of the most popular and persistent theories of urban poverty is that the poor are poor because they don't live particularly close to... →

Carbon emissions from transportation in Portland increased 6 percent last year In the one are where city policy can make the most difference, greenhouse gas emissions are increasing Portland has long prided itself in... →

West Coast political leaders talk a good greenhouse gas game, but actions speak louder Throughout Ecotopia, carbon emissions are rising due to more driving, yet the region's leaders are throwing even more money at subsi... →

Beto O'Rourke brings a strong urbanist, inclusive message to the presidential campaign The 2020 Democratic presidential race has been remarkable for addressing both climate change and housing policy issues that have long ... →

We're killing more people because more people are ignoring traffic signals We've charted the ominous increase in road deaths in the past several years, and now there's a new bit of evidence of just how bad the problem h... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why diversification is a simplistic, often flawed economic strategy. When it comes to personal investment everyone understands (or certainly should understand) the concept of portfol... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. What super-commuters really mean.  Media coverage of super-commuters--people who travel more than 90 minutes each way to and from work--is invariably sympathetic, treating these fol... →

What City Observatory did in 2019 We spent a lot of time this year addressing Portland's proposed half-billion dollar Rose Quarter freeway widening project. You may have thought Portland put its freeway fights behind it i... →

What City Observatory this week 1. 2019:  The Year Observed.  We take a look back at 2019 and review some of the most important City Observatory commentaries, interesting stories and valued research.  Our most read pos... →

What City Observatory did this week 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 ca... →

What City Observatory did this week The pernicious myth of "Naturally Occurring" Affordable Housing.  One of the most dangerous and misleading concepts in housing reared its ugly head in the form a a new publication from... →

What City Observatory this week Robert Moses strikes again:  One of the most infamous decisions of "The Power Broker" was to build the overpasses on the Long Island Expressway too low to allow city buses to use the roadw... →

What City Observatory this week Why does it take four years and $200 million for consultants to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing?  The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admit... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards. The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive.  The report i... →

What City Observatory this week Institutionalized housing discrimination. A recent study of housing discrimination in Detroit came to a seemingly surprising conclusion:  Fair housing complaints were less likely to be fil... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Why Portland's Rose Quarter Freeway widening will increase greenhouse gas emissions.  The Oregon Department of Transportation hashas falsely claimed its $800 million freeway widening pr... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Calculating induced travel. Widening freeways to reduce traffic congestion in dense urban areas inevitably fails because of the scientifically demonstrated problem of induced demand; som... →

What City Observatory this week 1.  How housing segregation reduces Black wealth.  Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas.  There's a st... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Covid migration:  Disproportionately young, economically stressed and people of color.  Data shows the moves prompted by Covid-19 are more reflective of economic distress for the vulne... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Revealed: Oregon Department of Transportation's secret plans for a ten-lane I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter.  For years, ODOT has been claiming that its $800 million freeway widening pr... →

What City Observatory this week 1. How the Oregon Department of Transportation destroyed a Portland neighborhood, Part 2:  The Moses Meat Axe.  We continue our historical look at the role that freeway construction (and ... →

What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina:  Part 3 the Phantom Freeway.  Even a freeway that never got built played a key role in demolishing part of Portland's Albina neighborhood.  In parts 1 and 2... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Taking Tubman:  The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to widen the Interstate 5 freeway in Portland into the backyard of Harriet Tubman Middle School.  The $800 million w... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Restorative justice without funding is a sham.  Portland's Albina neighborhood was decimated by the construction of three Oregon Department of Transportation highway projects in the 195... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Fighting climate change is inherently equitable. While there's a growing recognition of the existential threat posed by climate change, it's becoming increasingly frequent to pit equity ... →

What City Observatory this week 1. It's not a bridge replacement, it's a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide freeway that just happens to cross a river.  The Oregon and Washington highway departments are trying to revive the faile... →

What City Observatory this week Don't be fooled again.  The Oregon and Washington state highway departments are up to their old tricks in trying to push a multi-billion dollar highway building boondoggle in the POrtland ... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Needed:  A bolder, better building back. In response to an invitation from its authors, we take a look at a  "grand bargain" proposed by Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger for breaki... →

What City Observatory did this week An open letter to Secretary Pete Buttigieg on his visit to Oregon.  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg came to Oregon this week to look at some local transportation innovations. ... →

What City Observatory did this week Oregon Department of Transportation's Climate Fig-Leaf.  Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Oregon, and the state's Department of Transportation is—yet again... →

What City Observatory did this week The cost of Oregon DOT's Rose Quarter project has nearly tripled to $1.25 billion.  Just four years ago, the Oregon Department of transportation sold its mile-and-a-half long I-5 freew... →

What City Observatory did this week Talkin' 'bout my gentrification.  Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification.  If we're concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrifi... →

What City Observatory did this week The Cappuccino Congestion Index.  Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. ... →

What City Observatory did this week A universal basic income . . . for cars.  One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head on is the idea of a "Universal Basic Income"--a payment... →

What City Observatory did this week How sprawl and tax evasion are driving demands for wider freeways.  The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are proposing to spend roughly $5 billion to widen a 5 mile ... →

What City Observatory did this week The folly of the frog ferry.  One bane of transportation policy discussions is the tendency to believe that miracle technical fixes—self-driving cars, personal aircraft, the Segway, ... →

What City Observatory did this week Ten questions that deserve answers before making a multi-billion dollar decision. The Portland metro area is being asked by the Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation to gi... →

What City Observatory did this week Just Say "No" to freeway widening zealots.  George Santayana meet David Bragdon:  Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat the failures of the past.  A year ago, we pu... →

What City Observatory did this week Another exploding whale:  The cost of the I-205 bridge project doubles in four years. Famously in the 1960s, the Oregon State Highway Department tried to dispose of the carcass of a wh... →

What City Observatory did this week Oregon DOT's "reign of error"—chronic cost overruns on highway projects.  The Oregon Department of Transportation is moving forward with a multi-billion dollar freeway expansion plan... →

What City Observatory did this week There's nothing green about free parking, no matter how many solar panels you put on the garage.  The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory brags about its sus... →

What City Observatory did this week The economics of fruit, time, and place.  It's berry time in Portland, and that got us thinking about how special local products are in defining quality of life.  Recently, Paul Krugm... →

Must read The most gas guzzling states. The sting of higher gas prices depends on where you live, not so much because of the variation in prices, but because in some states, you just have drive a lot more.  The website Q... →

What City Observatory did this week A Bridge too low.  The Oregon DOT is fundamentally misrepresenting the process and legal standards for setting the height of a proposed new multi-billion dollar I-5 bridge across the C... →

What City Observatory did this week Failing to learn from the failure of the Columbia River Crossing.  Last week, Portland's Metro Council voted 6-1 to wave on the Oregon Department of Transportation's plan for a multi-b... →

What City Observatory did this week Fix it Last.  The Oregon Department of Transportation claims that it has a "Fix-it" first policy--prioritizing spending funds to preserve existing roads and bridges.  But their actual... →

What City Observatory did this week The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve?  The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from Interstate 5.  This  supposed ... →

What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges.  The Oregon and Washington highway departments are blundering ahead with a $5 billion plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver, and are making many of the same m... →

What City Observatory did this week Groundhog's Day for Climate.  So you think you're not Bill Murray in the classic "Groundhog's Day?"  Oregonians, ask yourself:  are we anywhere closer to seriously addressi... →

What City Observatory did this week Driving stakes, selling bonds, overdosing on debt.  The Oregon Department of Transportation is following a well trodden path to push the state toward a massive highway expans... →

What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion?  For the past several years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing for construction of somet... →

What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge cost $7.5 billion?  For almost two decades the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been saying they want to replace the I-5 bridges over t... →

What City Observatory did this week Oregon's transportation finance in crisis:  Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee.  On March 16, City Observatory's Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature's b... →

What City Observatory did this week What are they hiding?  Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge:  Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like?  The Oregon ... →

What City Observatory did this week IBR's plan to sabotage the "moveable span" alternative.  The proposed $7.5 billion Portland area freeway widening project is supposedly looking at a moveable span option to avoid i... →

What City Observatory did this week The case against the Interstate Bridge Project.  We offer 16 reasons why Oregon and Washington lawmakers should question the current plans for the proposed $7.5 billion I-5 freeway... →

What City Observatory did this week Scratch one flat top!  That was the famous cry of US Naval aviators, when, early in World War II they chalked up their first victory, sinking the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho.  Por... →

What City Observatory did this week This is what victory looks like.  Freeway fighting is hard, drawn-out work.  StateDOTs and their allies have vast funding for public relations campaigns to sell giant projects; citize... →

What City Observatory did this week What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing?  Getting a building permit for a new house is difficult, expensive, and in some places, simply impossible.  In c... →

Must Read Portland:  Four Floors and Corner Stores--Upzoning for urban development and housing affordability.  A coalition of community, enviornmental and social justice groups is advocating for a YIMBY strategy for mor... →

What City Observatory did this week Britain's Caste system of transportation.  In a cynical ploy to revive the Conservative Party's flagging electoral hopes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has engaged in some blatant pro-mot... →

Must Read The high, high cost of "affordable housing."  The Voice of San Diego takes a look at the pricetag of several affordable housing projects in California and finds they're pushing and breaking through the million-... →

What City Observatory Did This Week Beware of phony claims that highway projects are "On-time and Under-Budget." For highway departments, the key to being on-time and under-budget is Orwellian double-speak. Oregon ... →

What City Observatory Did This Week Unique Local Experiences: The Hidden Value in Urban Economies. An often-overlooked aspect of urban economics: the value of unique, local, and seasonal experiences. We take as an example... →

What City Observatory Did This Week Inventing a "commitment" to megaproject cost-overruns.  Oregon's Department of Transportation is is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to unapproved freeway s and massi... →

What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation's (ODOT) Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project is facing significant delays of up to 18 months. The culprit? Flawed traffic model... →

What City Observatory Did This Week We grade the city clean energy scorecard.  A new scorecard tires to measure how cities are promoting energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases—a laudable goal. But the scorecar... →

What City Observatory Did This Week A costly cargo cult in Portland:  A proposal to spend $30 million per year subsidizing the revival of container shipping operations at the Port of Portland is misguided effort based on... →

What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation can and should mitigate the negative impacts of its highway construction projects, including social and economic impacts.  ODOT's massive $1.9 b... →

What City Observatory Did This Week Another Oregon Department of Transportation exploding whale.*  The cost of one of OregonDOT's megaprojects, the expansion of the I-205 Abernethy Bridge over the Willamette River south ... →

What City Observatory Did This Week Earth Day: Oregon is spending billions to widen freeways in a move that will only worsen the increase in greenhouse gases from transportation.  Transportation is the leading source of ... →

What City Observatory Did This Week A teachable moment: Free Ice Cream Day.  Traffic was lined up around the block last Tuesday at your local Ben and Jerry's, for the same reason roadways are clogged most weekday afterno... →

What City Observatory did this week Thirty seconds over Portland:  Spending $7.5 billion on a freeway widening project will save the typical affected commuter about 30 seconds a day, according to the Interstate Bridge Re... →

What City Observatory did this week What the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project doesn't want you to know.  The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release ... →

What City Observatory did this week The high cost of covering freeways.  The latest fashion in highway urbanism is "capping" freeways.  In theory, highway builders claim that capping freeways will repair past damage and... →

What City Observatory did this week Abandoning road pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation, traffic reduction and climate plans.  This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek terminated Oregon's Regional Mobility Pricing ... →

What City Observatory did this week A yawning chasm in neighborhood distress among metro areas. Almost every metropolitan area has some neighborhoods that face serious economic distress, but the patterns of distress vary ... →

What City Observatory Did this Week Is it time to address the problem of "Missing Massive" housing?  This past week marked the latest convening of YIMBYTown, this year, held in Austin, Texas.  One of the perennial topic... →

Must Read The freeway cap mirage.  Don't like freeways?  Let's just cover up the problem.  It's increasingly popular to try to repair the damage done to urban neighborhoods by "capping" freeways:  building a cover so ... →

What City Observatory did this week Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study.  Some of the most important policy decisions are buried deep in seemingly technocratic documents.  Case-in-point:  Oregon's... →

Must Read How CalTrans cheated on its environmental reporting.  Some months back, former Deputy Director of CalTrans,Jeanie Ward-Waller blew the whistle on the agency's effort to evade environmental laws and illegally us... →

What City Observatory did this week A $9 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project?  Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the Oregon and W... →

What City Observatory did this week Bad data.  What appears, at first glance, to be a big decline in trip-making is really an object lesson in failing to read the footnotes.  Every five years or so, the US Department of... →

What City Observatory did this week Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle.  A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness.  The Interstate Bridge... →

What City Observatory did this week Tolling i-5 will produce massive traffic diversion.  The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers... →

What City Observatory did this week Secret plans show ODOT is planning a 10-lane freeway in the Rose Quarter.  City Observatory has obtained previously un-released plans showing that the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter pro... →

What City Observatory did this week 5 million miles wide of the mark.Portland's regional government Metro, has proposed a regional transportation plan (RTP) that purports to achieve state and regional policies to reduce g... →

What City Observatory did this week Snow-Job:  Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) threatens to slash snow-plowing and other safety maintenance unless it is given more money, while spending billions on a handful o... →

What City Observatory did this week Killer off-ramps.  The Oregon Department of Transportation's $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter widening has been repeatedly (and falsely) portrayed as a "safety" project, but the latest re... →

What City Observatory did this week More climate fraud in Portland Metro's proposed regional transportation plan.  We branded Metro's proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed... →

What City Observatory did this week What apartment consolidation in New York tells us about housing markets and gentrification.  A new study shows that over the past several decades, New York City lost more than 100,000 ... →

What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter:  Death throes of a bungled boondoggle.  For years, we've been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near do... →

What City Observatory did this week Metro's Climate-Denial Regional Transportation Plan.  Portland's regional governtment, Metro, has published a draft Regional Transportation Plan, outlining priorities for transportatio... →

What City Observatory did this week Climate fraud in the Portland Metro RTP.  Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of gr... →

Must Read Some Texas-sized greenwashing for highway widening in Austin.  TXDOT is aiming to spend close to $5 billion to widen I-35 through downtown Austin, and to sweeten the deal, they're producing project renderings s... →

What City Observatory did this week Eating local:  Why independent, local restaurants are a key indicator of city vitality.  Jane Jacobs noted decades ago that“The greatest asset a city can have is something that is d... →

What City Observatory did this week Myth-busting:  Idling and greenhouse gas emissions.  Highway boosters are fond of claiming that they can help fight climate change by widening highways so that cars don't have to spen... →

What City Observatory did this week Few highway construction dollars for Black-owned firms in Oregon.  The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged bu... →

What City Observatory did this week We have an in-depth series of reports on the Oregon Department of Transportation's imploding I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. The cost of the I-5 Rose Quarter project has n... →

What City Observatory did this week Yet another exploding whale:  One of the Internet's most popular videos shows employees of the Oregon Department of Transportation blowing up a dead whale carcass stranded on an Ocean ... →

What City Observatory did this week We took the week off to celebrate the Summer Solstice and gorge on Hood strawberries! We'll be back next week. Must Read The amazing non-appearance of Carmageddon.  Echoing th... →

What City Observatory did this week Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly.  A tanker truck caught fire and the ensuing blaze caused a section of I-95 in Philadelphia to collapse.  This key roadway may be out of commissio... →

What City Observatory did this week Guest contributor Miriam Pinski observes that getting the prices right could produce dramatic improvements in how US transportation systems perform.  New York is on the verge of implem... →

What City Observatory did this week What computer renderings really show about the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project:  It's in trouble. The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer gra... →

What City Observatory did this week Pricing is a better, cheaper fix for congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter.  The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to squander $1.45 billion to widen about a mile and a hal... →

What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter tolls:  Available, but not foreseeable?  There's a glaring--and illegal--contradiction in the planning for the Oregon Department of Transportation's $1.45 billion Rose Qu... →

What City Observatory did this week There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project. Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in fundin... →

What City Observatory did this week Why can't Oregon DOT tell the truth?  Oregon legislators asked the state transportation department a simple question:  How wide is the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacem... →

What City Observatory did this week Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state? Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily c... →

What City Observatory did this week Testifying on the Oregon Transportation Finance.  City Observatory director Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature on HB 2098, a bill being proposed to fund bloated free... →

What City Observatory did this week More induced travel denial.  Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel. We offer our rebuttal to a reason column posted at Planetizen, attempting to minimize... →

What City Observatory did this week IBR admits its bridge is too steep.  After 15 years of telling the region that the only feasible alternative for crossing the Columbia River was a pair of side-by-side double-decker br... →

What City Observatory did this week Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15.  Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-w... →

What City Observatory did this week CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project.  Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the co... →

What City Observatory did this week Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor.  We're reminded this year of Dr. Martin Luther King's observation that our cities, and the public p... →

What City Observatory did this week A reporter's guide to congestion cost studies.  For more than a decade, we and others have been taking a close, hard and critical look at congestion cost reports genera... →

What City Observatory did this week The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening.  This week marked the end of public comment on the Supplemental Environmental Assessment for the Oregon Department of Tr... →

Editor's Note:  Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project Between now and January 4, 2023, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project.  ... →

Editor's Note:  Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project In the next month, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project.  If you're inte... →

What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges: If you're going to spend several billion dollars, you might want to get some independent expert advice.  Oregon and Washington are on the verge of committing 5 billion d... →

What City Observatory did this week A toll policy primer for Oregon.  The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to finance billions in future road expansions with tolling.  While we're enamored of road pricin... →

What City Observatory did this week Using phony safety claims to sell a billion dollar freeway widening.  This past week, Sarah Pliner, a promising young Portland chef was killed when she and her bike were crushed by a t... →

What City Observatory did this week Two of the three candidates for Oregon Governor are Climate Deniers. Oregon will elect a new Governor next month, and two of the three candidates for the job insist on repeating the dis... →

What City Observatory did this week Building a bridge too low--again.  In their effort to try to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing (a $5 billion freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver) the Oregon... →

What City Observatory did this week Our apologies to City Observatory readers for our website outage on 19-22 May.  More meaningless congestion pseudo science.  A new study from the University of Maryland claims that... →

What City Observatory did this week Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon. Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon's historical Columbia River Gorge Highway.  Instead of widening t... →

What City Observatory did this week Who's most vulnerable to high gas prices? Rising gas prices are a pain, but they hurt most if you live in a sprawling metro where you have to drive long distances to work, sho... →

Must read The problem with the "reckless driver" narrative.  Strong Towns Chuck Marohn eloquently points out the deflection and denial inherent in the emerging "reckless driver" explanation for increasing car crashes and... →

What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst:  Woke-washing the survey data.  Highway builders are eager to cloak their road expansion projects in the rhetoric of equity and have become adep... →

What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst?  Woke-washing is all the rage among those pushing highway projects these days, and there's no better example that Portland's I-5 "bridge replacem... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Metro's failing climate strategy. Portland Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure. Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses a... →

What City Observatory did this week What does equity mean when we have a caste-based transportation system? Transportation and planning debates around the country increasingly ponder how we rectify long-standin... →

What City Observatory did this week Metro's "Don't look up" climate strategy.  In the new film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who find that the nation's leaders simply refuse to take s... →

What City Observatory did this week Why Portland shouldn't be moving elementary and middle schools to widen freeways.  We're pleased to publish a guest commentary from Adah Crandall, a high school sophomore and... →

What City Observatory did this week Climate and our Groundhog Day Doom Loop.  It's Groundhog  Day—again—and we're stuck in exactly the same place when it comes to climate policy.  Scientists are regularly... →

What City Observatory did this week The "replacement" bridge con.  It's telling that perhaps the largest single consulting expense for Oregon and Washington transportation departments' efforts to revive the fai... →

What City Observatory did this week Oregon's highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge.  ODOT has two different standards for forecasting:  When it... →

What City Observatory did this week The financial fallout from Louisville's I-65 boondoggle.  As we showed earlier, Kentucky and Indiana both wasted a billion dollars on doubling the capacity of I-65 across the... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. ODOT's real climate strategy:  Pollution as usual.  Oregon's highway builders are keeping two sets of books, one claiming that it cares about climate issues, the other shows that i... →

What City Observatory did this week How Portland powered Oregon's economic success. After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon's income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery:  I... →

What City Observatory did this week Why we shouldn't be whining about higher gas prices. Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for... →

What City Observatory did this week Has this city discovered how to solve traffic congestion?  Why aren't they telling everyone else how this works?  A miracle in Louisville. [caption id="attachment_12554" al... →

What City Observatory did this week The Opposite of Planning:  Why Portland's Metro government needs to turn down the highway department request for more money to plan future freeway widenings.  On paper, and to admirer... →

What City Observatory did this week America's least and most segregated metro areas:  Evidence from Census 2020.  Racial segregation remains a chronic problem in US metropolitan areas.  Data from Census 2020 provides a... →

What City Observatory did this week Ten reasons you can't trust DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution.  Highway departments are fond of ginning up traffic projections and air quality analyses claiming... →

What City Observatory did this week Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence.  The Oregon Department of Transportation has been trying to sell its $1.25 billion freeway widening project as a ... →

What City Observatory did this week Portland's Clean Energy Fund needs accountability.  Portland voters approved a ballot measure creating a $60 million annual fund to invest in community-based clean energy projects, par... →

What City Observatory did this week Is the campus 100 percent clean energy?  (Only if you don't count the cars and parking lots).  Stanford University announced that its near to realizing a goal to move all of its campu... →

What City Observatory did this week Cost of Living and Auto Insurance. We often compare the affordability of different cities with a clear focus on housing prices and rents. This week at City Observatory we are interest... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Tackling climate change will require electric cars, and a lot less driving.  We're pleased to publish a guest commentary from CalYimby's Matthew Lewis looking at the challenge of ad... →

What City Observatory did this week America's berry best cities.  It's the height of the summer fruit season and berries are ripening across the country.  Nothing beats a fresh local berry in season. We've ranked the na... →

What City Observatory did this week Selling Oregon into highway bondage.  Oregon is moving ahead with plans to issue hundreds of millions—and ultimately billions of dollars of debt to widen Portland-area freeways.  An... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Miami's double standard for charging road users.  The City of Miami is hoping to make their streets a safer place for bikes and scooters by building protected lanes along three mile... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The Texas Transportation Institute is back, and it's still wrong about traffic congestion.  Every year or so, a group of researchers at Texas A&M University produce report purpo... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cars kill city neighborhoods.  Across the nation, America's cities have been remade to accomodate the automobile.  Freeways have been widened through city neighborhoods, demolishin... →

What City Observatory this week 1.  Race and economic polarization.  In the past several decades, racial segregation in the US has attenuated, but economic segregation has increased.  This is nowhere more apparent than... →

What City Observatory this week What ultimately destroyed Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood:  Highways.  This past week marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre.  In 1921, a racist mob attacked and destroyed the B... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Why highway departments can and should build housing to mitigate road damage.  For decades, American cities have been scarred and neighborhoods destroyed by highway construction project... →

What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina.  Urban freeways have been lethal to neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods of color, in cities throughout the nation.  While the construction of Interstate ... →

What City Observatory this week 1. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission.  For more than two years, City Observatory and others have been shining a bright light on the Oregon Department of Transportation... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The failure of Vision Zero.  Like many regions, the Portland metropolitan area has embraced the idea of Vision Zero; a strategy of planning to take concrete steps over time to reduce th... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The fundamental global law of traffic congestion.  For years, urbanists have stressed the concept of induced demand, based on the nearly universal observation that widening urban roadwa... →

What City Observatory this week 1. 2021 is when we have to get real about tackling climate change.  We've boiled our analysis of the climate challenge down to four key points: Pledges alone won't accomplish anything... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The thickness of the blue line. Robert Putnam popularized the notion of social capital in his book "Bowling Alone," which he illustrated with a number of indicators of social interconnec... →

What City Observatory this week Exploding whales and cost overruns. For years, the Oregon Department of Transportation has been pushing a mile-and-a-half long freeway widening project at Portland's Rose Quarter, telling t... →

What City Observatory this week 1.  Counting Covid- Cases in US Metro Areas.  We've been updating our metro area tabulations of the number of reported Covid-19 cases on a daily basis. You can find our latest tabulations... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Regional Patterns of Covid-19 Incidence.  The pandemic has struck every corner of the nation, but has clearly hit some areas harder than others. We've focused on those metro areas, like... →

What City Observatory this week 1. What the Covid-19 Shutdown teaches us about freeways. Everyone knows that speeds are up on urban roadways around the nation because of the stay-at-home orders to fight the pandemic. But ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 rates are spiking in five cities. Stay-at-home policies and social distancing have dramatically slowed the spread of the pandemic in the US, but as many state's begin re-op... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Youth Movement: Our latest CityReport. America's urban revival is being powered by the widespread and accelerating movement of well-educated young adults to the densest, most central... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why free parking is one of the most inequitable aspect of our transportation system. There's a lot of well-founded anger over the inequitable aspects of transportation:  the burdens... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon never comes, Portland edition. It's a favored myth that any reduction in road capacity will automatically trigger gridlock, and highway engineers regularly inveigh agains... →

What City Observatory did this week Let's fight congestion with a PR campaign.  For decades, when pressed to do something to improve road safety, city and state transportation officials have responded with . . . marketin... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 is now worst in rural areas and red states. Early on in the pandemic, it seemed like everyone attributed the spread of the Coronavirus to big cities and density. It turns ou... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Want lower rents?  Build more housing!  A new study from Germany provides more evidence that the fundamentals of economics are alive and well in the housing market. The study looks... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The only reason many people drive is because we pay them to. There's an important insight from recent applications of tolling to urban highways. When asked to pay even a modest amoun... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Achieving equitable transportation: Reallocate road space and price car travel. New York has recorded a kind of "Miracle on 14th Street." By largely banning through car traffic, its ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Seven reasons you should be optimistic about cities in a post-pandemic world. There's widespread pessimism about the future of cities. With the pandemic-induced advent of work-at-hom... →

What City Observatory did this week Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Gridlock Tuesday?  The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced "Zoom Thanksgiving" we'll look to see how the pandemic affects the traditional "... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are six. We marked City Observatory's sixth birthday this week, and took a few moments to reflect back on the journey, and to thank all those who helped us on our way, and to ... →

What City Observatory did this week Equity and Metro's $5 billion transportation bond. This week, Portland residents are voting on a proposed $5 billion payroll tax/bond measure to fund a range of transportation projects.... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Lived segregation in US cities. Our standard measure of urban segregation, whether people reside in different neighborhoods, doesn't really capture the way people from different raci... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Manufacturing consent for highway widening. In the early days of freeway battles, state highway departments were power blind and tone-deaf, and citizen activists often triumphed in... →

What City Observatory did this week Why most pedestrian infrastructure is really car infrastructure. One of the most misleading terms you'll hear in transportation is "multi-modal" which in practice means a highway for ca... →

What City Observatory did this week The case against Metro's $5 billion transportation bond. Portland's regional government, Metro, is asking voters to approve a $5 billion package of transportation improvements, to be fu... →

What City Observatory did this week America's most and least segregated cities. Residential racial segregation is a fundamental and persistent aspect of system racism in the United States. Segregation cuts of disfavored g... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Is it random, or is it Zumper? Are rents going up or down in your city?  Listicles showing which places have the biggest jumps (or declines) in rents are a perennial media favorite,... →

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-q... →

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 pand... →

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... →

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 mo... →

What City Observatory did this week When NIMBYs win, everyone loses. Two land use cases from different sides of the country are in the news this week. In both cases, local opponents of new housing development have succeed... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 and Cities:  An uneven pandemic. We've been following the progress of the Covid-19 virus in the nation's metropolitan areas for the past three months, and with the benefit ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. LA Covid correlates with overcrowding and poverty, not density. City Observatory is pleased to publish a guest analysis and commentary from Abundant Housing LA's Anthony Dedousis.�... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Postcards from the Edges:  Looking at the relationship between density and the pandemic. There's a widely circulating meme associating urban density with the spread of the Covid-19 viru... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  City Beat:  We push back on a New York Times story claiming that people are decamping New York City on account of pandemic fears. You can always find an anecdote about someone lea... →

What City Observatory this week Our updated analysis of the prevalence of Covid-19 in US metro areas.  It continues to be the case that the pandemic is most severe in the Northeast Corridor.  The New York Metro area is ... →

What City Observatory this week 1. What cities are showing us about the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic.  In an important sense, each large US metro area is a separate test case of the path of the Covid-19 virus. By... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Cheap gas means more pollution and more road deaths. Russia and Saudi Arabia have engineered a big decline in oil prices in the past few weeks, and as a result, US gas prices are now exp... →

What City Observatory this week 1. The Geography of Covid-19.  A week ago, we issued a call to get much more granular with our statistical analysis of the pandemic's spread.  In just the past few days, a number of new l... →

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 homele... →

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... →

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 l... →

What City Observatory this week 1. A massive regional transportation spending plan that does nothing for climate change.  Portland's leaders are in the process of crafting a $3 billion plus regional transportation packag... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Oregon DOT repeats its idle lie about emissions. It's every highway builder's go-to response to climate change:  we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we could just keep cars from... →

What City Observatory this week 1. Portland's progress (or lack thereof) on climate. Portland likes to present itself as a climate leader, but the latest data on transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions shows that ... →

What City Observatory did the past couple of weeks 1. Using seismic scare stories to sell freeways. The Pacific Northwest is living on the edge; sometime (possibly tomorrow, possible several hundred years from now) we'll ... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. No Deposit, No Return: Another lie to try and sell the $3 billion Columbia River Crossing. The state's of Oregon and Washington spent nearly $200 million planning the failed Columbia... →

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Copenhagen's cycling success hinges on tax policy and pricing, not just bike lanes.  The New York Times offers up yet another postcard view of cycling in Copenhagen, where riding ... →

What City Observatory did this week A two cent solution to climate change?  Around the world, plastic bags are an environmental scourge, both in the form a litter (a nuisance) and as a threat to wildlife. In response, ma... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Tim Bartik explains business incentives. States and cities spend about $50 billion a year on tax breaks and other incentives to try to influence business location decisions.  The na... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Our 5th Anniversary.  October 17 marked 5 years since we started publishing our research and commentary at City Observatory. We reflect back on five years of work, and thank all tho... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Transportation for America won't be fooled again..  After years of getting rolled by the freeway lobby, it appears that T4America has finally said "Enough."  Transit and active tra... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. We debunk the Wall Street Journal's claim of an exodus of young adults from cities.  Last week, the Wall Street Journal trumpeted an "exodus" of 25 to 39 year old adults from cities... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. 20 Reasons to ignore the Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report. It's back. After a four-year hiatus Texas A&M University's transportation institute trotted out... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. Beto O'Rourke brings a strong inclusive urbanist message to the Presidential contest.  While its been great to see housing affordability and climate change grow in prominence on the... →

The Transportation Research Board, nominally an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is engaged in technocratic climate arson with its call for further highway expansion and more car travel. The planet is in immin... →

The Transportation Research Board, nominally an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is engaged in technocratic climate arson with its call for further highway expansion and more car travel. The planet is in immin... →

After a four year hiatus, the Texas Transportation Institute has once again generated its misleading Urban Mobility Report--and its still wrong. The UMR has been comprehensively debunked--it has never been peer-reviewed... →

Are home prices appreciating more or less in black neighborhoods? Is that a good thing? Today, in part 2 of our analysis of the home price gap between majority black and predominantly white neighborhoods we look at the ... →

How food carts illustrate the importance of dynamic change in cities. There's a tension in the city between the permanent (or seemingly permanent) and the fleeting, between the immutability of the built environment and ... →

The new Philadelphia Fed study of gentrification is the best evidence yet that gentrification creates opportunity and promotes integration To many "gentrification" is intrinsically negative. When wealthier, whiter peopl... →

Home buying is a risky bet: There's a 30% chance your house will be worth less in five years It's a widely agreed that promoting homeownership is a key means to help American households build wealth.  But as we and oth... →

US drivers are killing 50 percent more pedestrians, European drivers are killing a third fewer If anything else--a disease, terrorists, gun-wielding crazies--killed as many Americans as cars do, we'd regard it as a nati... →

http://furmancenter.org/research/publication/has-falling-crime-invited-gentrification →

Lingering racism holds down property values in majority black neighborhoods For most American households, their home is their largest financial asset; how valuable that asset is, and whether it appreciates has a profoun... →

Frontier Group and USPIRG's annual report on highway boondoggles calls out the Oregon DOT's wasteful, ineffective I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project as a national level boondoggle. Portland is famous for making t... →

Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences   I pity you, dear reader.  You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around ... →

Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences Friday night on Twitter, Paul Krugman waxed poetic about fruit and economic theory.  Krugman is back from Europe, and thirsting for summe... →

The case for using tax increment financing for affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods The problem with gentrification is that rising property values may make it expensive or impossible for lower and moderate in... →

Subsidizing electric vehicle purchases is an expensive way to reduce carbon emissions, and mostly subsidizes rich households who would have bought electric vehicles anyhow There's a new study from the National Bureau of... →

New research shows new apartments drive down rents in their immediate neighborhood, disproving the myth of "induced demand" for housing If you're a housing supply skeptic, there's one pet theory that you've been able to... →

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... →

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 ... →

Good decisions result only if state officials are transparent and honest City Observatory has been closely following the proposal to spend $500 million widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter in Portland. In the pr... →

Gentrification:  Here's your all-purpose list, from artists to zoning, of who and what's to blame We first published this list in 2019, but the search for scapegoats has expanded, and now includes little libraries and ... →

Gentrification:  Here's your all-purpose list, from artists to zoning, of who and what's to blame When bad things happen, we look around for someone to blame.  And when it comes to gentrification, which is loosely def... →

Portland is weighing whether to spend as much as $1.45 billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter near downtown. We've dug deeply into this idea at City Observatory, and we've publi... →

Portland is weighing whether to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter near downtown. We've dug deeply into this idea at City Observatory, and we've published 25 co... →

We have always been at war with Eastasia. Concealing and lying about key facts regarding the proposed Rose Quarter Freeway widening process is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and a betrayal of publi... →

Oregon DOT's own consultants say congestion pricing would be a better way to fix congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter than spending $800 million. Pricing would improve traffic flow and add capacity equal to another full l... →

Congestion pricing is a quicker, more effective and greener way to reduce congestion at the Rose Quarter than spending $500 million on freeway widening. Failing to advance pricing as an alternative in the environmental ... →

Expanding freeway capacity on I-5 hasn’t reduced crashes in Woodburn, but did triple in cost Today, we’re pleased to offer a guest commentary from Naomi Fast. Naomi currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon. Previously, ... →

Highway planners use a deeply flawed "lemming" model of traffic that rationalizes highway widenings The traffic projections made as part of the Environmental Assessment for the $500 million Rose Quarter I-5 widening pro... →

The proposed I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project creates a bike- and pedestrian-hostile environment The Oregon Department of Transportation has crafted distorted images that exaggerate pedestrian use by a factor o... →

There's no evidence that widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter will reduce crashes. ODOT used a model that doesn't work for freeways with ramp-meters When ODOT widened I-5 lanes and shoulders near Victory Boul... →

ODOT is really building an 8-lane mega-freeway at the Rose Quarter You can tell from the tortured rhetoric about "auxiliary" lanes that the Oregon Department of Transportation is falling all over itself to make the free... →

ODOT's own traffic data shows that daily traffic (ADT) has been declining for 25 years, by -0.55 percent per year The ODOT modeling inexplicably predicts that traffic will suddenly start growing through 2045, growing by... →

State DOT officials have crafted an Supplemental Environmental Assessment that conceals more than it reveals The Rose Quarter traffic report contains no data on "average daily traffic" the most common measure of vehicle... →

`State DOT officials have crafted an Environmental Assessment that conceals more than it reveals In theory, the National Environmental Policy Act is all about disclosing facts. But in practice, that isn't always how it ... →

The fundamental injustice of pollution from urban freeways Item:  In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. ... →

What pretends to be an environmental assessment is actually a thinly-veiled marketing brochure In theory, an environmental impact statement is supposed to be a disclosure document. The idea behind the National Environme... →

ODOT hid its plans to build a $3 billion Columbia River Crossing in the Rose Quarter Freeway Widening Environmental Assessment The carefully crafted marketing campaign for the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project i... →

Why Portland's freeway fight is so important to the future of cities everywhere The plan to widen the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway in Portland, at a cost of $500 million, is a tragic error for one city, and an object lesson... →

We can calculate how much added freeway lanes will induce additional car travel The takeaway:  the I-5 freeway widening project in Portland lead to 10 to 17 million more miles of vehicle travel annually, which will in ... →

There's a huge demographic divide between those who use freeways and neighbors who bear their costs When it comes time to evaluate the equity of freeway widening investments, it's important to understand that there are ... →

Streetsblogger extraordinaire Angie Schmidt is not happy with Uber and Lyft. They're not really the ones to blame. Are Uber and Lyft to blame for growing urban transportation problems? Streetsblog's Angie Schmit makes a... →

Widening  I-5 in Portland apparently made traffic congestion worse Oregon's Department of Transportation (ODOT) is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to add two lanes to Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter in Portl... →

Spending half a billion dollars to widen a mile of I-5 will have exactly zero effect on daily congestion. The biggest transportation project moving forward in downtown Portland isn't something related to transit, or cyc... →

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 injuri... →

One thing economists agree about: pricing carbon is essential to saving the planet; but if you don't believe economists, you ought to believe Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Economists are famous for disagreeing with one ano... →

Low house prices signify problems, not affordability There's a presumption that low housing prices are a sign of affordability, and a related belief that if housing prices rise, that its "a bad thing" because it must me... →

Gradually, more people and elected leaders are admitting that more housing density is needed if we're to tackle housing affordability, and provide equitable opportunities to live in great cities and neighborhoods. But l... →

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 t... →

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 bill... →

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 us... →

Tax free shopping in Oregon saves the typical Southwest Washington household $1,000 per year Cross border shopping accounts for 10-20 percent of all trips across the I-5 and I-205 bridges Tax avoidance means we're  ... →

Harnessing the value of public assets to support the civic commons It's widely recognized that public assets, like parks, libraries and community centers, generate important and tangible benefits for their neighborhoods... →

We can't have empathy for those we can't encounter due to the way our cities are built Editor's Note: Last month, our friend Carol Coletta spoke to the Kinder Institute in Houston about the critical role that place play... →

Adjusted for inflation, US home prices are still lower than in 2006 For most US households, the home they own is their biggest financial asset. After the housing bust of 2007, when collectively about $7 trillion in home... →

America's economy is increasingly driven by the concentration of talent in cities The Economic Innovation Group (aka EIG, a DC-based think tank) has been compiling some interesting data on the relative economic performa... →

Part of the disparity in intergenerational economic mobility may stem from a willingness to leave home Raj Chetty, Nate Hendren and their colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project have crafted a rich picture of ... →

Whether at the neighborhood or metropolitan level, more job growth doesn't seem to improve economic mobility There's a seemingly un-questioned (and unquestionable) truth among economic development practitioners that mor... →

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 ... →

The Opportunity Atlas: Stunning neighborhood maps of economic opportunity Some of the most important research findings of the past decade have come from the work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Oppor... →

A careful study of evictions in San Francisco says "No." There's a widespread belief among some neighborhood activists that building new housing triggers displacement. We-and most economists are highly skeptical of that... →

Part 4. Are racially and economically homogeneous cities and suburbs in a segregated metro "inclusive?" Looking only at disparities within cities misses the often far larger disparities across cities within in single m... →

Part 3.  Do annexations and mergers constitute economic growth? Not adjusting city job growth estimates for changes in city boundaries produces misleading estimates, especially when used for comparing and ranking cities.... →

Part 2. Are city boundaries the right way to measure inclusion? Municipal boundaries produce a myopic and distorted view of inclusion; the boundaries themselves were often drawn to create exclusion (Editor's note: Th... →

The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive.  The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying som... →

Inclusiveness is a worthy policy goal, but in practice turns out to be devilishly hard to measure. A recent report from the Urban Institute shows some of the pitfalls: looking just within city boundaries ignores metropoli... →

Why a recent Fed study tells us very little about supply and affordability The takeaway: A recent Federal Reserve study which seems to show that building more housing won't improve affordability has little rel... →

Gentrification Debates Without Gentrification? By Todd Swanstrom Editor's note: We're pleased to offer a guest commentary from Todd Swanstrom. Todd is the Des Lee Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Pol... →

Rural and small town America faces some tough odds In an article entitled: "How to save the Troubled American Heartland," Bloomberg's very smart Noah Smith shares his thoughts on how to revive the smaller towns of rural... →

A few knowledge workers decamp to rural America as they age, but cities are the key It's an oft-told tale: talented professionals grow weary of the stress and high cost of city-living, and decamp with their spouses, chi... →

Zillows data shows Portland rents have dropped 3.5 percent in the past year A couple of weeks ago, we published the latest data from ApartmentList.com on the decline in rents in the Portland metropolitan area.  Their b... →

Contrary to what you think you may have read in last week's Washington Post, rental housing markets at all levels still conform to the laws of supply and demand Monday's Washington Post ran a provocative headline: "In e... →

More supply is driving down rents in the Rose City According to Apartment List.com, rents for one bedroom apartments in Portland have declined 3 percent in the past year. It's a solid vindication of the standard predict... →

Philly's University City: The urban challenge in a nutshell The knowledge economy . . . tax breaks . . . NIMBYism . . . gentrification . . . Amazon's HQ2 . . . high speed rail . . . university economic development?  Al... →

How we embrace socialism for car storage in the public right of way Florida Senator Marco Rubio has denounced President Biden's $3.5 trillion spending program as un-American socialism.  Rubio claims: In the end, Ameri... →

How we embrace socialism for car storage in the public right of way Comrades, rejoice:  In the face of the counter-revolutionary neo-liberal onslaught, there's at least one arena where the people's inalienable rights r... →

People and social interaction, not technology, is the key to the future of cities Smart city afficianado's are agog at the prospects that the Internet of Things will create vast new markets for technology that will disr... →

Prime working age adults are increasingly clustering in the center of the nation's largest metro area City Observatory has long been following the movement of people and jobs back to cities.  Our inaugural study on the... →

How slow growth and industrial decline perpetuate racial segregation As regular readers of City Observatory know, we think that the continuing racial and economic segregation of the nation's metropolitan areas is at the... →

Eds and Meds . . .  and Capitol Domes? I recently participated as a part of an expert panel reviewed Sacramento’s economic development strategy. You can learn more about the city’s “Project Prosper” here.  It ... →

Being cheaper may not be an advantage at all in a dynamic, knowledge based economy It's axiomatic in the world of local economic development that the sure-fire way to stimulate growth is to make it as cheap and easy as ... →

Distrust and empowering everyone to equally be a NIMBY is a recipe for perpetual housing problems The recent defeat of SB 827--California State Senator Scott Wiener's bill that would have legalized apartment constructio... →

There's no critique more cutting than saying that development is turning an urban neighborhood into a theme park.   The irony of course, is that cities like Dubrovnik and Venice represent a profoundly obsolete, ... →

The "body count" view of suburban population misses the value people attach to cities Lately, we've seen a barrage of comments suggesting that the era of the city is over, and that Americans, including young adults, are... →

This page contains maps showing the nation's most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, and those with the highest levels of income mixing. for City Observatory's Diverse, Inclusive Neighborhood report.  These we... →

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 an... →

The key to being on-time and under-budget:  Orwellian double-speak Oregon DOT projects are always on-time and under budget--because the agency simply disappears its original schedules and budgets. Delayed, half-fini... →

Actions speak louder than words; blocking new housing will drive up rents Nominally, at least, the Portland City Council is all about housing affordability.  They've declared a housing emergency. In the last general el... →

Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished? One of the carefully crafted talking points in the sales pitch for the $... →

. . . we want more economic activity in this community, because that’s what creates opportunity and with more economic opportunity it does mean that there’s going to be more demand for all kinds of amenities in the com... →

Journalists: Stop repeating phony congestion cost estimates. They're just weak arguments disguised with big numbers. This month The Economist has an excellent special report exploring the prospects for autonomous vehic... →

The states with the worst diets voted disproportionately for Donald Trump A powerful new study from  uses big data to shine a powerful light on our eating habits. Using data from grocery store scanner records, Hunt All... →

The problem isn't the ride-hailed vehicles, it's the under-priced street It really looks like we're on the cusp of a major change in transportation finance. Cities around the country are actively studying real time road... →

Gentrification is producing more diverse schools and growing enrollment In Washington DC, gentrification is producing higher levels of integration and increasing the total number of kids–black and white–attending sc... →

Ride-hailing is growing: We distill a new report into 5 key factors that explain its growth A good reporter is always supposed to ask five questions: "who, what, when, where and why?" A new report on ride-hailing provid... →

Politics and the President's wheeler-dealer background suggest the infrastructure plan is a mirage If there's been one shred of hope for bi-partisan progress in this politically polarized time, its been the idea that so... →

Overselling localism is becoming an excuse to shed and shred federal responsibility Our friend, and director of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, Amy Liu, weighs in with a timely commentary on the... →

We like cities, but localism can only flourish with a competent, generous, fair federal government  As our name City Observatory suggests, we're keen on cities. We believe they're the right frame for tackling many of o... →

City Observatory has long challenged the popular narrative about the nature and effects of gentrification. This is the second installment of a three-part commentary by our friend and colleague Alex Baca. You can read parts... →

City Observatory has long challenged the popular narrative about the nature and effects of gentrification. Today, we are pleased to offer the final installment of a three-part commentary by our friend and colleague Alex Ba... →

A picture of metropolitan growth: Sprawl then, stagnation now. We're in awe of Issi Romem's prodigious data skills.  Romem is the economist and big data guru BuildZoom, the web-based marketplace for construction profes... →

We're driving more, and more of us are dying on the roads. Four days before Christmas, on a Wednesday morning just after dawn, Elizabeth Meyers was crossing Sandy Boulevard in Portland, near 78th Avenue, just about a bl... →

Let's require that highways really be accessible to those who can't drive:  State highway departments should provide bus service on state roads for the disabled The Americans with Disabilities Act was landmark legislat... →

The young and restless are continuing to move to the nation's large cities One trend that highlights the growing demand for city living is the increasing tendency of well-educated young adults to live in the close-in ur... →

A key design element of the supposedly pedestrian friendly Rose Quarter freeway cover is a pedestrian hostile diverging diamond interchange One of the main selling points of the plan to spend nearly half a billion dolla... →

We're pleased to publish this guest post from Akron's Jason Segedy.  It originally appeared on his blog Notes from the Underground. Drawing on his practical experience in a rust-belt city, he offers a compelling new insig... →

After a long, slow recovery, wages are finally rising for the lowest-paid workers, but we're no where close to rectifying our inequality problem; in fact, it's going to get worse. The very smart Jed Kolko, who now write... →

Concrete covers are just a thinly-veiled gimmick for selling wider freeways As you've read at City Observatory, and elsewhere (CityLab, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week), Portland is in the midst of a great freeway war... →

A proposed freeway widening project will tear out one of Portland's most used bike routes At City Observatory, were putting a local Portland-area proposed freeway widening project under a microscope, in part because we ... →

Congestion pricing is a win-win strategy and the only way to truly reduce traffic congestion The urban transportation problem is a hardy perennial: no matter how many lanes we add to urban freeways, traffic congestion i... →

What to make of the high credit scores of new renters in some markets: alarm bell or success signal? RentCafe–one arm of Yardi Matrix, a real estate data and services firm–has a very interesting new data series on t... →

Will two firms produce enough effective competition to benefit consumers? The use ride-hailing services continues to grow in the US, and while there are a range competitors in some markets, like New York, in most places... →

Building more market rate housing sets off a chain reaction supply increase that reaches low income neighborhoods Households moving into new market rate units move out of other, lower cost housing, making it available t... →

Slowly, the rhetorical battle is being won, as affordable housing advocates acknowledge more supply matters There's been a war of words about what kind of housing policies are needed to address the nation's affordabilit... →

We review Yelp's new index for rating local economies:  It's a good start For a long time, the only comprehensive and reliable means we've had of tracking and comparing economic activity across state and regional econo... →

A new study of San Francisco's rent control shows it raises rents for some Rent control is a perennially contentious issue. Many housing activists see it as a logical and direct way to make housing more affordable. Econ... →

"For Rent" signs are popping up all over Portland, signaling an easing of the housing crunch and foretelling falling rents A year ago, in the height of the political season in deep blue Portland (in a county which voted... →

Unemployment rates are down in cities, especially for those with less education One of the trends we've been following at City Observatory has been the increasing shift of the driving forces of the nation's economy to l... →

Developers stampeded to get grandfathered before new requirements took hold, will the pipeline run dry? In December, Portland's City Council adopted one of the nation's most sweeping inclusionary zoning requirements.  ... →

Flat per vehicle registration fees charge lower rates to wealthier households with more road damaging vehicles The prospect of shifting from using a combination of vehicle registration fees, fuel taxes and general reven... →

Peak hour car commuters have incomes almost double those who travel by transit, bike and foot The Oregon Legislature has directed the state's department of transportation to come up with a value pricing system for inter... →

The wealth of black families lags far behind whites, and housing markets play a key role There's a great article from The New York Times' Emily Badger about a new study that shows just how much Americans (especially wh... →

Average household income in cities is increasing twice as fast as in their suburbs Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates of national income based on the annual Current Population Survey. The... →

How can a city be named the first "LEED Platinum" city and be building freeways in its suburbs? Submitted for your approval: Two recent news items from our nation's capital.  In the first, Washington DC proudly announc... →

Coffee and ice cream and jam (or traffic jams) Just once, we are going to sugar-coat our commentary. [caption id="attachment_5029" align="aligncenter" width="700"] Affogato (1912Pike.com)[/caption] At City Observa... →

Rising inequality in the US isn't new; Declining inequality globally is. Scratch just beneath the surface of many daily problems, and you'll find income inequality is a contributing factor, if not the chief culprit.  W... →

Portland is thinking about widening freeways; other cities show that doesn't work Once upon a time, Portland held itself out as a national example of how to build cities that didn't revolve (so much) around the private ... →

Uber's lifting the veil--just a little--to provide data on urban transportation performance Uber's new Movement tool provides valuable new source of data about travel times in urban environments. We've gotten an early l... →

Allowing multi-family housing in all residential zones, and aggressively promoting private bidding lowers housing costs We’re pleased to welcome a guest commentary from Mike Eliason of Seattle. Mike is a passivhaus de... →

Let's put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon Earlier this week, Yale economist William Nordhaus was announced as this year's co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (along with Paul Romer,... →

Let's put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon It works for plastic bags; let's use the same idea for carbon Consider the plastic bag:  It's a highly visible environmental problem, one that w... →

Let's put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon For almost six months, Chicago has been charging shoppers a 7 cent fee for using disposable plastic grocery bags. Rather than banning the bags outri... →

About 2 percent of all car commuters travel 90 minutes to work, same as a decade ago. We've always been clear about our views on mega commuters, those traveling an hour and a half or more to work daily. As we said last ... →

Pricing parking drives demand for ride hailing services Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have been highly reluctant to share data about their services with cities. In California, the state Public Utilities Comm... →

Why traffic engineers really aren't interested in reducing traffic congestion We now know with a certainty that investments in additional highway capacity in dense urban environments simply trigger additional travel, wh... →

If it weren't for cultural appropriation, would America have any culture at all? In Portland, two women opened a food cart business--Kook's Burritos--selling burritos based on ones that they'd seen and tasted during a ... →

The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city It's a well-understood fact that education is a critical determinant of earnings. On average, the more education you've attained, the higher your le... →

The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city A recent Wall Street Journal article painted the nation's rural areas as its new inner cities, with high rates of poverty, limited economic opportun... →

Reducing segregation does seem to result in much more social interaction, as intermarriage patterns demonstrate Change doesn't happen fast, but it happens more frequently and more quickly when we have integrated communi... →

Reducing segregation does seem to result in much more social interaction, as intermarriage patterns demonstrate Yesterday, we took a close and critical look at Derek Hyra's claim that mixed-income, mixed-race communitie... →

Integrated neighborhoods produce more mixing, but don't automatically generate universal social interaction. What should we make of that? Our recent report, America's Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods identifies ... →

Gentrifying neighborhoods produce more mixing, but don't automatically generate universal social interaction. What should we make of that? In one idealized view of the world, economically integrated neighborhoods would ... →

Trump's infrastructure package would let states pursue road pricing A trillion dollars for infrastructure. That's been the headline talking point for months about the Trump Administration's policy agenda, but the detail... →

What the ranch house teaches us about house prices and filtering. Back in the heyday of the post-war housing boom, back when the baby boomers were babies, America was building ranch houses–millions of them. In its pri... →

Why we're very skeptical about urban farming. At City Observatory, we don't tend to have a lot of content about agriculture. Farming is not an urban activity. But every so often, we read techno-optimistic stories about ... →

Here's a thought:  Let's fight traffic congestion using the same techniques DOT's use to promote safety. Let's have  costumed superheroes weigh in against congestion, and spend billions on safety, instead of the other... →

It's no longer fashionable to get an unrealistically flattering portrait painted, but you can get an economist to do it with numbers. You've no doubt heard the term "hagiography" an unduly flattering biography or other ... →

Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland's transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down.  State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals t... →

If you're serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. The Oregon Department of Transportation is hell-bent on widening freeways and destroying the planet ... →

If you're serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to drop more than a bil... →

Four decades after the city earned national recognition for tearing out a downtown freeway, it gets ready to build more April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon's Legislature is on the verge of considering a tran... →

Volunteering is one of the hallmarks of community; here are the cities with the highest rates of volunteerism The decline of the civic commons, the extent to which American's engage with one another in the public realm,... →

"Traded sector" businesses that employ well-educated workers mark a prosperous region At City Observatory, we regularly stress the importance of education and skills to regional economic success. Statistically, we can e... →

Housing doesn't "occur naturally" Using zoning to preserve older, smaller homes doesn't protect affordability There's no such thing as "Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing"--older, smaller homes become affordable ... →

Block that metaphor! There's nothing "natural" about "naturally occurring affordable housing." There's a new term that's gaining currency in some housing policy circles: "naturally occurring affordable housing."  It ev... →

More evidence that supply and demand are at work in housing markets In early 2016, Portland experienced some of the highest levels of rent inflation of any market in the US.  According to Zillow's rental price estimate... →

You can't leave out births and deaths when you examine population trends The release of the latest census population estimates has produced a number of quick takes that say that cities are declining. The latest is Derek... →

Migration, especially by young adults, is increasing racial and ethnic diversity in US counties As we related last week, a new report from the Urban Institute quantifies the stark economic costs of racial and income seg... →

They'll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads Your highway department is broke, and thinks it needs much bigger roads because it gives its produce away for free e... →

They'll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads You can learn everything you need to know about transportation economics today, just by helping yourself to a free i... →

What one day of free ice cream teaches us about traffic congestion Today's that day, folks. Ben and Jerry are giving away free ice cream to everyone who comes by their stores. Whether you're hankering for Cherry Garcia ... →

They'll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads Today's that day, folks. Ben and Jerry are giving away free ice cream to everyone who comes by their stores. Whether... →

Once again, Carmaggedon doesn't materialize; Shutting down half of the I-5 Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River for a week barely caused a ripple in traffic It's a teachable moment if we pay attention:  traffic ad... →

Once again, Carmaggedon doesn't materialize; this time when Seattle started asking motorists to pay a portion of the cost of their new highway tunnel Initial returns suggest that tolling reduced congestion by reducing t... →

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 concret... →

Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand It had all the trappings of a great disaster film:  A spectacular blaze last week destroyed a  several hundred foot-long sectio... →

A new report from the Urban Institute shows the stark costs of economic and racial segregation Long-form white paper policy research reports are our stock in trade at City Observatory. We see dozens of them every month,... →

13 propositions about autonomous vehicles and urban transportation It looks more and more like autonomous vehicles will be a part of our urban transportation future. There's a lot of speculation about whether their effe... →

New York Times columnist Russ Douthat got a lot of attention a few days ago for his Johnathan Swiftian column–"Break up the liberal city"–suggesting that we could solve the problems of lagging economic growth in rural ... →

Going faster doesn't mean your city gets anywhere more quickly, and it doesn't make you happier One of the key metrics guiding transportation policy is speed:  how quickly can you get from point A to point B. But is go... →

Speed doesn't seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems.  If there's one big complaint people seem to have about the transportation system its that they can't get from place... →

Speed doesn't seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems.  Yesterday, we presented some new estimates of the average speed of travel in different metropolitan areas developed... →

Alan Ehrenhalt is alarmed. In his tony suburb of Clarendon, Virginia, several nice restaurants have closed. It seems like an ominous trend. Writing at Governing, he's warning of "The Limits of Cafe' Urbanism." Cafe Urbanis... →

As has been well chronicled in the media, it's been a tough month for Uber. The company's CEO, Travis Kalanick was vilified in the press for the company's tolerance for sexual harassment of its female employees, and deride... →

Last month, we took exception to critics of Detroit's economic rebound who argued that it was a failure because the job and population growth that the city has enjoyed has only reached a few neighborhoods, chiefly those in... →

The amount of office space allotted to each worker is shrinking. What does that mean for cities? Last week a new report from real estate analytics firm REIS caught our eye. Called "The Shrinking Office Footprint" this w... →

Today, partly as a public service, we're going to dig into the academic literature on an arcane policy topic: rent control. We also have a parochial interest in the subject: the Oregon Legislature is considering legislatio... →

A lesson in the elasticity of demand, prices and urban congestion. It looks like Uber, Lyft and other ride sharing services are swamping the capacity of New York City streets Every day, we're being told, we're on the ve... →

How should we view the early signs of a turnaround in Detroit? Better to light a single candle than simply curse the darkness. The past decades have been full of dark days for Detroit, but there are finally signs of a t... →

Which cities have the strongest concentrations of independent bookstores? Last week, we explored what we called the "mystery in the bookstore." There's a kind of good news/bad news set of narratives about bookselling in... →

Patents rates are a useful indicator of innovative activity The US is increasingly becoming a knowledge-based economy, and as a result, the markers of wealth are shifting from the kinds of tangible assets that character... →

What kind of future do we want to live in? While that question gets asked by planners and futurists in an abstract and technical way, some of the most powerful and interesting conversations about our future aspirations are... →

The biggest challenge for creating great cities is imagination, not technology There's a definite technological determinism to how we approach future cities. Some combination of sensors, 5G Internet, sophisticated compu... →

Yesterday we took a close look at Ford's vision for the future of cities. Our take: Ford's preferred narrative of the places we'll live is all about optimizing city life for vehicles. But is that the narrative that should ... →

One of the themes we stress at City Observatory is the large and growing importance of talent (the education and skills of the population) to determining regional and local economic success. As we shift more and more to a ... →

Every year, the same story:  We profess to care about climate change, but we're driving more and transortation greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant ... →

Every year, the same story:  We profess to care about climate change, but we're driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zer... →

Every year, the same story:  We profess to care about climate change, but we're driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zer... →

Every year, the same story:  We profess to care about climate change, but we're driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zer... →

Every year, the same story:  We profess to care about climate change, but we're driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zer... →

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 Da... →

A year later, and we're still stuck with the same hypocrisy on climate change The 1993 movie, Groundhog's day has been a cultural touchstone for the endless do-loop of futility. Bill Murray finds himself waking up every... →

Climate change gets lip service, highways get billions. Like many states and cities, Oregon has been a leader in setting its own local goals for reducing greenhouse gases. In a law adopted in 2007, the state set the goa... →

We celebrate the fourth of July by remembering that a nation composed overwhelmingly of immigrants owes them a special debt. [caption id="attachment_4083" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Lighting the way to a stronger ... →

Happy Independence Day, America! All Americans are immigrants (Even the Native American tribes trace their origins to Asians who migrated over the Siberian-Alaskan land bridge during the last ice age). And this nation o... →

Last Friday, President Trump signed an Executive Order effectively blocking entry to the US for nationals of seven countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. We'll leave aside the fearful, xenophobic ... →

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 a... →

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 a... →

A new study of gentrification sheds light on how neighborhoods change.  Here are the takeaways: The population of urban neighborhoods is always changing because moving is so common, especially for renters. There's... →

As we pointed out yesterday, there's some initial visual evidence–from peak hour traffic cameras–suggesting that Louisville's decision to toll its downtown freeway bridges but leave a parallel four-lane bridge un-toll... →

Tolls cut traffic levels on I-65 in half; So did we really need 6 more lanes? Last month, we wrote about Louisville's newly opened toll bridges across the Ohio River.  As you may recall, Ohio and Indiana completed a ma... →

Even with the free alternative closed, traffic is very light on the new I-65 bridges Time for one of our periodic check-ins on our real world transportation pricing experiment in Louisville, Kentucky.  As you recall, w... →

Requiring inclusionary housing seems free, but could mean less money for schools and local services Last month, the Portland City Council voted 5-0 to adopt a sweeping new inclusionary housing requirement for new apartm... →

Louisville is in the transportation world spotlight just now.  It has formally opened two big new freeway bridges across the Ohio River, and also rebuilt its famous (or infamous) "spaghetti junction" interchange in downto... →

As Noah Smith observed, economists invariably encounter monumental resistance to the proposition that increasing housing supply will do anything meaningful to address the problem of rising rents–especially because new un... →

A new study says ride-sharing apps cut cut traffic 85 percent. We're skeptical We've developed a calloused disregard for the uncritical techno-optimism that surrounds most media stories about self-driving cars and how f... →

Celebrating the new year, city-style, with a local brew Champagne may be the traditional beverage for ringing in the new year, but we suspect that a locally brewed ale may be the drink of choice for many urbanists today... →

As 2016 draws to a close, we look back at our most popular commentaries of the year.  Hear they are, in reverse order: #10. Introducing the sprawl tax #9. Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median income hou... →

At the top of most housing activist wish-lists is the idea that cities should adopt inclusionary housing requirements:  when developers build new housing, they ought to be required to set-aside some portion of the units--... →

Minneapolis is considering inclusionary zoning (IZ), but has qualms based on Portland's experience. Ironically, a non-existent Minneapolis IZ program was a key part of the argument for adopting Portland's IZ law in Decembe... →

There's a large a growing body of research that shows the importance of peer effects on lifetime economic success of kids.  For example, while the education level your parents is a strong determinant of your level of educ... →

The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat -- and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competin... →

There's a lot of glib talk about how technology--ranging from ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, to instrumented Smart Cities and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles--will fundamentally reshape urban transportation. We... →

As housing affordability becomes an increasingly challenging and widespread problem in many US cities, there are growing calls for the imposition of rent control.  While there's broad agreement among economists that rent ... →

As the US grows more diverse, so too do its urban neighborhoods. A new paper—“ Global Neighborhoods:
 Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis”--published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the chang... →

There's a lot of ink being spilled -- or is it pixels rearranged? -- over the size, shape, merits and even existence of a Trump Administration infrastructure plan. Infrastructure was one of just a handful of substantive po... →

It's election day, 2016. Here's some of what we know about cities and voting. Well, at last. Today is election day. While we’re all eagerly awaiting the results of the vote, we thought we’d highlight a few things we... →

As we all know, 2016 is the year that reality television made its way to the national political stage. Less well noticed is how another idea from reality television has insinuated its way into our thinking about housing po... →

Here’s an eye-catching statistic: “people in the US buying more things online than in brick-and-mortar stores.” This appears in the lead of a story published this week by Next City. There’s one problem with this... →

What the price of parking shows us about urban transportation  Yesterday, we rolled out our parking price index, showing the variation in parking prices among large US cities.  Gleaning data from ParkMe, a web-based d... →

There’s a new narrative going around about place. Like so many narratives, it's based on a perceptible grain of truth, but then has a degree of exaggeration that the evidence can’t support. [caption id="attachment_3... →

Where are the most interesting streetscapes and popular destinations in your city? Even among your friends and colleagues, there might be some lively disagreement about that question. But recently, search giant Google weig... →

How much does it cost to park a car in different cities around the nation? Today, we're presenting some new data on a surprisingly under-measured aspect of cities and the cost of living: how much it costs to park a car... →

Next Monday, very early, before anyone in North America is out of bed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the name of the 2016 Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. No doubt the decision has already long si... →

Why the leading economist of innovation sees a central role for cities Two years ago, in 2016, we did our best to nudge the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to give the Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences to Paul Romer... →

If you believe the soothsayers--including the CEO of Lyft--our cities will soon be home to swarms of autonomous vehicles that ferry us quietly, cleanly and safely to all of our urban destinations. The technology is develop... →

It's easy to focus on technology, but pricing will determine autonomous vehicles impact. Everyone's trying hard to imagine what a future full of autonomous cars might look like. Sure, there are big questions about wheth... →

Everyone's trying hard to imagine what a future full of autonomous cars might look like. Sure, there are big questions about whether a technology company or a conventional car company will succeed, whether the critical fac... →

Behind the big headlines about an national income rebound: thriving city economies are the driver. As economic headlines go, it was pretty dramatic and upbeat news:  The US recorded an 5.2 percent increase in real hous... →

Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. For much of our history, entrepreneurship has been dominated by men. But in recent decades... →

Just a few months ago we were being told--erroneously, in our view--that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg publish... →

Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. Historically, discrimination and lower levels of wealth and income have been barriers to e... →

  Urban developers regularly wax eloquent over the importance of local small businesses.  But ultimately, businesses depend on customer support. So, in what markets do customers routinely support small businesses?... →

One of the hallmarks of great urban spaces is walkability--places with lots of destinations and points of interest in close proximity to one another, buzzing sidewalks, people to watch, interesting public spaces--all these... →

More grim statistics from the National Safety Council:  The number of persons fatally injured in traffic crashes in the first half of 2016 grew by 9 percent.  That means we're on track to see more than 38,000 persons die... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The national party platforms on transit. In November, most Americans will be choosing between a party whose platform offers the barest details and seemingly little understanding of ... →

Its early September, and most of the the nation's students are (or shortly will be) back in the classroom. There may be a few key academic insights that are no longer top of mind due to the distractions of summer, so as go... →

Cheaper gas comes at a high price: More driving, more dying, more pollution. We're at the peak of the summer driving season, and millions of Americans will be on the road. While gas prices are down from the highs of jus... →

What City Observatory did this week 1. The case for more Ubers. From mobile phones to microchips, it's clear that even mega-companies must act in consumer interest when competition forces them to. When Uber and Lyft can p... →

The greater San Francisco Bay area has been a hotbed of economic activity and technological change for decades, bringing us ground-breaking tech companies from Hewlett-Packard and Intel, to Apple and Google, to AirBNB and ... →

This is a story about the triumph of the City—not “the city” that Ed Glaeser has written about in sweeping global and historic terms—but the triumph of a particular city: San Francisco. For decades, the San Fran... →

Why cities should promote robust competition in ride sharing markets We’re in the midst of an unfolding revolution in transportation technology, thanks to the advent of transportation network companies. By harnessing ch... →

Last week, our friend and colleague, Carol Coletta delivered a "master talk" to the 66th Annual Conference of the International Downtown Association. Carol is President & CEO, Memphis River Parks Partnership, and a ... →

This is the text of a speech delivered in Detroit to the Congress for New Urbanism conference by Carol Coletta, a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation's American Cities Practice. Could there be a more apt place to... →

As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along t... →

Signs of a rebound in independent bookstores, but not in the statistics Lately, there've been a spate of stories pointing to a minor renaissance of the independent American bookstore. After decades of glum news and clos... →

The takeaway: Urban truck traffic is flat to declining, even as Internet commerce has exploded. More e-commerce will result in greater efficiency and less urban traffic as delivery density increases We likely are o... →

Traffic projections used to justify highway expansions are often wildly wrong The recent Wisconsin court case doesn’t substitute better models, but it does require DOTs to show their data and assumptions instead of ... →

Our City Observatory report, Less in Common, catalogs the ways that we as a nation have been growing increasingly separated from one another.  Changes in technology, the economy and society have all coalesced to create mo... →

In February, we released our latest CityReport Surging City Center Job Growth, presenting evidence showing employment growing faster in the city centers of the nation's largest metros since 2007. Another set of analysts ha... →

  Nationally, the average black household has an income 42 percent lower than average white household. But that figure masks huge differences from one metropolitan area to another. And though any number of factors ... →

Less Segregated Metro Areas Have Lower Black/White Income Disparities Income inequality in the United States has a profoundly racial dimension.  As income inequality has increased, one feature of inequality has remained... →

More jobs are close at hand in cities.  And on average the poor live closer to jobs than the non-poor. One of the most enduring explanations for urban poverty is the "spatial mismatch hypothesis" promulgated by John Ka... →

April First falls on Saturday, and that's a good reason to revisit an old favorite, the Cappuccino Congestion Index We're continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It's annoying to queue ... →

The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions We're continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It's annoying to queue up for any... →

The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions We're continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It's annoying to queue up for any... →

The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions We're continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It's annoying to queue up for any... →

City Observatory, April 1. 2015 A new City Observatory analysis reveals a new and dangerous threat to the nation’s economic productivity: costly and growing coffee congestion. Yes, there’s another black fluid... →

The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue.  Many have embraced the Smart City banner.  But it seems each observer defines �... →

Cities are organisms, not machines; So a smart city has to learn and not be engineered The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long ov... →

A framework for thinking about smart cities Cities are organisms, not machines The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue.  ... →

It’s telling that Governing calls gentrification the “g-word”—it’s become almost impossible to talk about neighborhood revitalization without objections being raised almost any change amounts to gentrification. W... →

(This post coincides with the newly released report, Surging City Center Job Growth. The report and more details are found here.) For decades, urban economists have chronicled the steady decentralization of employment in... →

We recently featured a post regarding how venture capital is associated with economic mobility. We know that these are strongly correlated—and that, if we are concerned with the ability of children today to obtain ‘The... →

As chronicled in our report here and commentary here, we are seeing evidence of a shift in employment back to city centers. We believe that this is driven by a number of forces, including the increasing preference of young... →

The essence of cities is bringing people—from all walks of life—together in one place.  Social interaction and a robust mixing of people from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different incomes and intere... →

For over half a century, American cities were decentralizing, with suburban areas surpassing city centers in both population and job growth. It appears that these economic and demographic tides are now changing. Over the p... →

Here’s a quick quiz:  Which of the following statements is true? a) Gentrification can be harmful because it causes displacement b) Gentrification is the same thing as displacement c) Gentrification is a totally diff... →

The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity project has spurred intense interest in the extent of economic mobility, measured by the likelihood that children born to low-income parents achieve ... →

Great public spaces make great cities. But so do great private spaces. They provide opportunities for people to socialize, and provide the character that make a city more livable and unique. We have already talked about ho... →

Local media over the course of the last several months have asked us variations on one question repeatedly: if our city wants to do better – be more productive, retain more young people, reduce poverty—how can it do th... →

The number of eating places per capita is a key measure of a city's livability Cities are great places for consumers.  They provide an abundance and variety of choices, especially in the form of experiences. While our ... →

The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat -- and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competin... →

Which metropolitan economies are the most productive?  Our broadest measure of economic output is gross domestic product -- the total value of goods and services produced by our economy.  Economists usually compare the p... →

Note: This article appeared originally in the February 13, 2010, edition of The Oregonian. Forgive any anachronistic references. These are tough economic times. Although economists tell us the recession is officially o... →

One of the nation’s biggest health problems is the challenge of obesity:  since the early 1960s the number of American’s who are obese has increased from about 13 percent to 35 percent. The problem is a complex, de... →

In this post, we'll go over the data and mapping steps that were used to create our Lost In Place report on the concentration of poverty and the interactive web map. This post is one of several commentary posts that accomp... →

At City Observatory, we’ve come the conclusion that every city has its own unique characteristics that both define its identity and which play a key role in shaping its economic opportunities.  These distinctive traits ... →

Guest Commentary by Carol Coletta It’s a glorious moment to be in the business of promoting the built environment. I use “built environment” to encompass the way we build our buildings, arrange our neighborhoods a... →

The Young and Restless—25 to 34 year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education—are increasingly moving to the close-in neighborhoods of the nation’s large metropolitan areas.   This migration is ... →

We recently released our latest report, Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. It speaks to a national trend that’s been largely ignor... →

The big idea: housing in desirable city neighborhoods in getting more expensive because the demand for urban living is growing. The solution? Build more great neighborhoods. To an economist, prices are an important signa... →

The Myth: Crime in cities is on the rise The Reality: Cities are getting safer For decades, the common perception about cities is that they were dangerous, dirty, and crowded. A look at the facts tells a differen... →

Last month, we released our Young and Restless report, tracing the growth of well-educated young adults in in the nation's largest metro areas. We found that across the nation, college-educated 25 to 34 year olds were much... →

Akron, Ohio!  With a 20.2 percent increase in post-secondary degrees awarded over the past three years, Akron outpaced the 56 other metro areas entered in the Talent Dividend Prize contest.  As the winner of the Talent D... →

We just released our first CityReport looking at the "Young and Restless," detailing where young talent is going in the U.S.- and why it matters. (Download the report here.) Here we show how the nation's largest cities do ... →

Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital.   →