Daniel Hertz

What City Observatory did this week 1. When we measure segregation, we almost always use Census numbers that reflect where people live—ie, where their homes are. But people don’t spend all day in their homes, so a team of researchers used Twitter data from Louisville, KY to figure out where they spend their days. The […]

In the last several years, marijuana legalization has gone from a fringe issue treated as a joke or third rail to a mainstream, enacted policy in parts of the country. Broadly, the change seems to be driven by growing recognition of the general failure and costs of the drug war; growing understanding and acceptance of

In cities, you’ll sometimes hear people talk about a “daytime population”: not how many people live in a place, but how many gather there regularly during their waking hours. So while 1.6 million people may actually live in Manhattan, there are nearly twice that many people on the island during a given workday. Most studies

What City Observatory did this week 1. More than half of commuters to jobs in classically suburban DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to walk, bike, or take transit—but nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? A closer look finds that decades of avowedly auto-centric planning has led to a situation

For most of the 20th century, cities and their accoutrements were associated with immigrants, people of color, and relative economic deprivation. The very phrase “inner city” became a synonym of “poor,” and in certain contexts “urban” itself became a word that referred to people of color, especially black people. The “great inversion” has challenged that

More than half of workers in DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to get to work without a car. But nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? First, a little context. Your city probably has a DuPage County—if not by name, by profile. Beginning about 15 miles due west of Chicago’s

What City Observatory did this week 1. Even in a relatively dense city like Chicago, large amounts of off-street parking goes unused daily. A new report from the Center for Neighborhood Technology documents the over-supply of residential parking, and lays the blame on municipal parking requirements that force developers to build parking lots or garages

Another column from Paul Krugman today on the ways that US-style zoning laws are detrimental to economic opportunity is a pleasant reminder that the role of building regulations in broader questions of inequality is no longer such a fringe issue. Particularly in places with the greatest “shortage of cities”—where the gap between available housing and

There’s not enough parking in Chicago: it’s an article of faith among many drivers, and has been a key assumption in many of the city’s planning efforts. But a new report from the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology finds that one of those efforts, mandatory off-street parking requirements for residential buildings, is causing an over-supply

What City Observatory did this week 1. Have we reached “peak Millennial”? One researchers argues that because new births peaked in 1990, today’s 26-year-olds represent the high water mark of a youth-led urban renaissance. But a closer look shows that’s not the case: the US Census predicts that we have a number of years until