Daniel Hertz

This week, we’re running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. Yesterday, we looked at exactly what’s wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what “affordable” means. Today, we’re looking at an alternative measure, “residual income.” In the final part, we’ll examine the particular challenges of understanding “affordability” […]

What City Observatory did this week 1. Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia? Joe Cortright covers a Robert Moses-style case of “slum clearance” in suburban Atlanta. The city of Marietta is demolishing a complex of apartments that, over the last few generations, have transitioned from upper-income and homogeneously white to relatively high-poverty and mostly people

Imagine an urban policy agenda defined by simplifying business regulations and promoting entrepreneurship as the key to prosperity. Add to that an attack on overly restrictive zoning laws that hold back housing construction, inflate real estate prices, and keep high-opportunity cities closed to low-income people looking to improve their lives. Round out the party platform

What City Observatory did this week 1. In More evidence on the changing demographics of American downtowns, Daniel Kay Hertz looks at a recent study from the Cleveland Fed on growing high-income neighborhoods in city cores. While there has been dramatic growth in “upper-third” areas near American downtowns – with New York, Chicago, and Portland

Earlier this year, Daniel Hartley of the Cleveland Fed and Nathan Baum-Snow of Brown University published a novel analysis of what has been called the “Great Inversion”: the shift of higher-income people from the periphery of American metropolitan areas towards the center. (Previously, we covered another excellent visualization of this phenomenon from the University of

What City Observatory did this week 1. Three more takeaways from Harvard’s “The State of the Nation’s Housing” report. Daniel Kay Hertz picks out three important but overlooked findings from the massive study released last week: a nationwide shortage of rental housing is pushing up prices for many black and brown homeowners, home prices are too

“The State of the Nation’s Housing 2015,” the report published last week by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, has already garnered a lot of attention. We wrote about how it points to a new “gerontrification” of homeownership, with all the growth in non-renter households predicted to come from the 65+ age range; Emily Badger focused

Below is the inaugural issue of The Week Observed, City Observatory’s weekly newsletter. Every Friday, we’ll give you a quick review of the most important articles, blog posts, and scholarly research on American cities. Our goal is to help you keep up with—and participate in—the ongoing debate about how to create prosperous, equitable, and livable cities,

It would be tempting to call the eight hours of testimony over a proposed moratorium on housing construction in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and the SF Board of Supervisor’s subsequent failure to approve that moratorium earlier this month, a climactic moment in the battle of two very different perspectives about affordable housing. Tempting, but almost certainly