Daniel Hertz

It’s naive to assume that existing housing stock sprang to life magically (We’re pleased to reprise this classic essay from Daniel Kay Hertz, long-time contributor to City Observatory, and now author of the newly released Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago). A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, […]

It’s election day, everyone.  If you haven’t voted, please do so. In honor of the election, today we’re please to reprise one of Daniel Kay Hertz’s essays on urban politics.  Daniel has just released his new book, The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago. There are two big theories about who

A fundamental contradiction lies beneath most of our housing policy debates At City Observatory, we’ve frequently made the case that promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one

Too often, the descriptions of urban form are reduced to excessively simple binary classifications (city v. suburb), or rely on data grouped by counties, which are maddeningly disparate units. County-level population data is bad at telling us much of anything about cities and housing preferences. Counties just contain too many multitudes – of built environments,

What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere? Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient

Is it better to build affordable housing in low income neighborhoods, or higher income neighborhoods? A recent study has run the numbers, and argues that social welfare is optimized by putting affordable housing in very poor neighborhoods, rather than wealthier (and especially whiter) ones. Authored by Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade of the Stanford School

At City Observatory, we’ve written quite a bit about the phenomenon of city center job growth. We did a whole CityReport about the phenomenon, showing that since the Great Recession, urban cores have been outperforming the rest of their metropolitan areas on employment, reversing earlier trends. And just this week, we covered new job numbers

Affordable housing is an issue rife with statistics: median rents, median housing costs, percentage of people who are “housing cost burdened,” and so on. Previously, we’ve written about some of the issues with many of these statistics, including the untrustworthiness of most “median rent” reports and which rent statistics are more trustworthy. But another issue—which

A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer