Daniel Hertz

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy. New data from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis builds on our “Dow of Cities” post and Surging City Center Job Growth report to show that urban centers are at the heart of the country’s recovery. Large metropolitan areas—those with over a […]

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

Averting a housing crisis: Panel Discussion from oregonmetro on Vimeo. Last week, City Observatory’s own Joe Cortright took part in a panel hosted by the Portland regional planning agency, Metro, where a standing-room-only crowd heard him, TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler, Elissa Harrigan of the Meyer Memorial Trust, and developer Eli Spevak talk about whether Oregon’s largest

What City Observatory did this week 1. Zoning in everything—even the education gap. By now, thanks to renewed attention in major media outlets from writers like the New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones, many observers of housing policy debates are aware of the role of exclusionary zoning in promoting residential segregation. We look at a paper

Last week, 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 a

This week, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and the affordable housing organization Enterprise Community Partners released a report sketching out various scenarios of rental cost and income growth for the next ten years. The headlines are fairly bleak: JCHS and Enterprise project the number of “severely rent-burdened” households to grow under almost any scenario.

To butcher Orwell, all cities are unequal, but some cities are more unequal than others. While working with some of the Census-calculated income inequality numbers—in particular, the Gini index—we noticed an interesting pattern: the central city of a metropolitan area is almost always more unequal than its metropolitan area as a whole. What’s going on?

A few weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones produced a tour de force report on school segregation in America, which became a two-part episode on the public radio show This American Life. In the first part, she dove into the complex legal and racial geography of the St. Louis metro area, explaining how the imaginary lines of

What City Observatory did this week 1. Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere. Daniel Kay Hertz follows up on our earlier piece about illegal neighborhoodsto point out that most other wealthy countries allow the kinds of mixes of density and uses that most American cities have outlawed. Based on Sonia Hirt’s great

A recent post from the excellent DC blog Greater Greater Washington has made a few ripples among transit advocates. In it, David Alpert takes the growth rate of WMATA’s operating costs (about 6% annually) and its operating revenue (about 1% annually) and makes the straightforward point that this isn’t really sustainable.   After all, these