Daniel Hertz

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week’s big news was Brexit: the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. What does that have to do with urban policy on our side of the Atlantic? Well, it turns out that just as urban density predicts voting behavior in America, with denser […]

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban housing is a massive asset. How massive? Well, a comparison to the valuation of our nation’s biggest corporations shows it’s no comparison at all—housing in major cities has them beat, often handily: housing in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas is worth about $22 trillion, versus $8.8 trillion

For advocates of less restrictive building regulations, especially in high-cost cities where more homes might help bring down housing prices and create more equitable, diverse neighborhoods, state governments often seem like the best bet. At a local level, for reasons we’ve explained before, the politics are incredibly difficult—not least because local elected officials represent nearly

We got quite a bit of interest on our post last week about how the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts had written itself a zoning code that would have prevented the construction of virtually the entire city of 80,000 people if it had been adopted at its founding. According to Somerville’s own planning department, just 22

What City Observatory did this week 1. In previous installments of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we’ve calculated the billions of dollars that longer distances between homes and workplaces cost American commuters, and shown that US workers pay more for transportation, and spend more time getting to and from their jobs, than peers in other rich

A little while ago, in a post called “Sprawl beyond zoning,” we argued that even though Houston doesn’t technically have a zoning code, it still regulates the built environment in lots of ways that make it difficult or impossible to safely or conveniently get around without a car. But we also promised to get into

Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and

This is the text of a speech delivered in Detroit last week at 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 observe “The Transforming City” than Detroit? On behalf of Rip Rapson and my colleagues at

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week, we introduced the “Sprawl Tax”: the time and money American commuters spend just because their cities are more spread out than they might be. This week, we compare American sprawl to that of our international peers, and it’s not pretty. On average, in 17 European countries

One of the first posts I ever wrote for City Observatory was called “Undercounting the transit constituency,” and it made a simple point: We dramatically undercount the number of people who depend on public transit to get around. While we usually talk about transit use in terms of the number of people who ride a