How we did the Storefront Index We’ve received many questions on how we did the analysis behind our Storefront Index. This post will describe our dataset, our method, and how we created our visualizations. We hope that this will spur future research an... → By Dillon Mahmoudi 23.5.2016
The Storefront Index 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... → By Joe Cortright 26.4.2016
The way we measure housing affordability is broken This week, we're running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what's wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what "affordable" means. Tomorro... → By Daniel Hertz 20.7.2015
On the Road Again The last few months have witnessed a notable rebound in vehicle miles traveled. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that for the year ended December, 2014, American’s drove 3.015 trillion miles, up about 1.7 pe... → By Joe Cortright 16.3.2015
Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage A story published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog last week made the headline claim that “The McMansion is back, and bigger than ever.” The article says that new homes are an average of 1,000 feet larger than in ... → By Joe Cortright 9.3.2015
Any Port in a Storm? Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of media furor over the slowdown in container traffic handling on the West Coast as dockworkers and shipping companies negotiated the new terms of a labor deal. You ... → By Joe Cortright 27.2.2015
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?” 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 3.3.2015
Who’s Vulnerable to Retail Retrenchment? This week comes news that Target is laying off 1,700 workers at its Minneapolis headquarters, looking to become leaner and more efficient. It’s just the latest move in a shifting retail landscape in the United States. ... → By Joe Cortright 13.3.2015
How much could US retail shrink? And where? The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy's stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other maj... → By Joe Cortright 20.3.2017
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?” 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.4.2017
“Smart Cities” have to be about much more than technology 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. ... → By Joe Cortright 10.9.2019
Jobs Return to City Centers (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... → By Joe Cortright 23.2.2015
Urban Employment: How does your city compare? 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 25.2.2015
Surging City Center Job Growth 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... → By Joe Cortright 23.2.2015
Lost in Place Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty--not gentrification--is our biggest urban challenge. A close look at population change in our poorest urban neighborhoods over the past four decades sh... → By Joe Cortright 9.12.2014
America’s Most Diverse Mixed Income Neighborhoods In a nation increasingly divided by race and economic status, where our life prospects are increasingly de ned by the wealth of our zip codes, some American neighborhoods are bucking the trend. These neighborhoods... → By Joe Cortright 18.6.2018
How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital) 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 11.2.2015
Best Bar Cities 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 13.2.2015
One tip for a prosperous city economy 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... → By Joe Cortright 27.1.2015
How productive is your city? 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.1.2015
Keeping it Weird: The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success 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... → By Joe Cortright 2.2.2015
Is life really better in Red States (and cities)? The red state/blue state divide is a persistent feature of American politics. Political differences among states are also associated with important economic differences, and a similar patterns hold across and within metro ... → By Joe Cortright 14.1.2015
Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place” 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... → By Dillon Mahmoudi 20.1.2015
How Should Portland Pay for Streets? For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fe... → By Joe Cortright 8.1.2015
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1) Many talk about poverty—its causes, its effects, and its possible remedies. There is literature on this issue from almost every social science, and no one can summarize it all in one blog post. However, there’s one asp... → By CityObservatory Guest 12.1.2015
How we build our cities: What’s at stake 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 24.12.2014
Young and Restless 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 ... → By Joe Cortright 19.10.2014
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago? 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 17.12.2014
Gender Differences in Unemployment To celebrate the Census Bureau’s release of the 5-year American Community Survey estimate, we decided to do a quick analysis of some of its information. So for some light Friday afternoon reading, we present you with an ... → By CityObservatory Guest 5.12.2014
Are suburbs really happier? A few months back our friends at CityLab published the results of a survey looking at differences in attitudes about cities and suburbs under the provocative headline, “Overall, Americans in the suburbs are still the hap... → By Joe Cortright 25.11.2014
Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It If you’ve ever contemplated getting up at 3, 4, or 5 am only to brave large crowds to fight over scarce merchandise, well, think again. Instead of looking into census data this Thanksgiving, we thought we’d look at mor... → By CityObservatory Guest 26.11.2014
Metro’s “Why Bother” Climate Change Strategy If you've hung around enough espresso joints, you've probably heard someone order a “tall, non-fat decaf latte.” This is what baristas often call a "why bother?" That would also be a good alternate description for the ... → By Joe Cortright 1.12.2014
Data At CityObservatory, we strive to make data the driving force behind our operations. We know that many of you share our keen interest in digging through the data, and we strongly believe that everyone benefits when data sou... → By Dillon Mahmoudi 23.2.2015
Focus: Detroit’s Young and Restless 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... → By CityObservatory Guest 19.11.2014
Parking: The Price is Wrong One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordabi... → By Joe Cortright 15.11.2016
And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . . 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... → By Joe Cortright 29.10.2014
Parking: The Price is Wrong There is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wron... → By Joe Cortright 6.11.2014
Young and Restless: How is your city doing? 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 ... → By CityObservatory Guest 20.10.2014
Talent & Prosperity Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital. → By CityObservatory Guest 14.10.2014
Kids in Cities Young adults are increasingly choosing cities--what will happen when they have kids? → By CityObservatory Guest 14.10.2014
Is Portland really where young people go to retire? Forget the quirky, slacker stereotype, the data show people are coming to Portland to start businesses. A recent New York Times magazine article “Keep Portland Broke,” echoed a meme made popular by the satirical... → By Joe Cortright 14.10.2014
Questioning Congestion Costs It's frequently claimed that traffic congestion imposes high and rising costs on the economy. But is that true? → By CityObservatory Guest 14.10.2014
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How we did the Storefront Index
We’ve received many questions on how we did the analysis behind our Storefront Index. This post will describe our dataset, our method, and how we created our visualizations. We hope that this will spur future research an... →
The Storefront Index
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... →
The way we measure housing affordability is broken
This week, we're running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what's wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what "affordable" means. Tomorro... →
On the Road Again
The last few months have witnessed a notable rebound in vehicle miles traveled. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that for the year ended December, 2014, American’s drove 3.015 trillion miles, up about 1.7 pe... →
Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage
A story published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog last week made the headline claim that “The McMansion is back, and bigger than ever.” The article says that new homes are an average of 1,000 feet larger than in ... →
Any Port in a Storm?
Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of media furor over the slowdown in container traffic handling on the West Coast as dockworkers and shipping companies negotiated the new terms of a labor deal. You ... →
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
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 ... →
Who’s Vulnerable to Retail Retrenchment?
This week comes news that Target is laying off 1,700 workers at its Minneapolis headquarters, looking to become leaner and more efficient. It’s just the latest move in a shifting retail landscape in the United States. ... →
How much could US retail shrink? And where?
The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy's stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other maj... →
What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
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... →
“Smart Cities” have to be about much more than technology
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. ... →
Jobs Return to City Centers
(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... →
Urban Employment: How does your city compare?
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... →
Surging City Center Job Growth
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... →
Lost in Place
Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty--not gentrification--is our biggest urban challenge. A close look at population change in our poorest urban neighborhoods over the past four decades sh... →
America’s Most Diverse Mixed Income Neighborhoods
In a nation increasingly divided by race and economic status, where our life prospects are increasingly de ned by the wealth of our zip codes, some American neighborhoods are bucking the trend. These neighborhoods... →
How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)
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 ... →
Best Bar Cities
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... →
One tip for a prosperous city economy
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... →
How productive is your city?
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... →
Keeping it Weird: The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success
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... →
Is life really better in Red States (and cities)?
The red state/blue state divide is a persistent feature of American politics. Political differences among states are also associated with important economic differences, and a similar patterns hold across and within metro ... →
Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place”
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... →
How Should Portland Pay for Streets?
For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fe... →
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1)
Many talk about poverty—its causes, its effects, and its possible remedies. There is literature on this issue from almost every social science, and no one can summarize it all in one blog post. However, there’s one asp... →
How we build our cities: What’s at stake
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... →
Young and Restless
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 ... →
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago?
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... →
Gender Differences in Unemployment
To celebrate the Census Bureau’s release of the 5-year American Community Survey estimate, we decided to do a quick analysis of some of its information. So for some light Friday afternoon reading, we present you with an ... →
Are suburbs really happier?
A few months back our friends at CityLab published the results of a survey looking at differences in attitudes about cities and suburbs under the provocative headline, “Overall, Americans in the suburbs are still the hap... →
Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It
If you’ve ever contemplated getting up at 3, 4, or 5 am only to brave large crowds to fight over scarce merchandise, well, think again. Instead of looking into census data this Thanksgiving, we thought we’d look at mor... →
Metro’s “Why Bother” Climate Change Strategy
If you've hung around enough espresso joints, you've probably heard someone order a “tall, non-fat decaf latte.” This is what baristas often call a "why bother?" That would also be a good alternate description for the ... →
Data
At CityObservatory, we strive to make data the driving force behind our operations. We know that many of you share our keen interest in digging through the data, and we strongly believe that everyone benefits when data sou... →
Focus: Detroit’s Young and Restless
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... →
Parking: The Price is Wrong
One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordabi... →
And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . .
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... →
Parking: The Price is Wrong
There is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wron... →
Young and Restless: How is your city doing?
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 & Prosperity
Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital. →
Kids in Cities
Young adults are increasingly choosing cities--what will happen when they have kids? →
Is Portland really where young people go to retire?
Forget the quirky, slacker stereotype, the data show people are coming to Portland to start businesses. A recent New York Times magazine article “Keep Portland Broke,” echoed a meme made popular by the satirical... →
Questioning Congestion Costs
It's frequently claimed that traffic congestion imposes high and rising costs on the economy. But is that true? →