Author: CityObservatory Guest
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Should your city build a headquarters hotel?
Around the nation, tourism officials are pushing the construction of publicly subsidized “headquarters” hotels to help fill publicly subsidized convention centers. One person who has tracked this industry carefully is University of Texas at San Antonio professor Heywood Sanders, author of the recent book, Convention Center Follies. In this commentary for City Observatory, Woody shares…
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Urban Employment: How does your city compare?
As chronicled in our report here and commentary here, we are seeing evidence of a shift in employment back to city centers. We believe that this is driven by a number of forces, including the increasing preference of young, talented workers for urban living; some of this shift is cyclical and coincides with the fact that more…
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Best Bar Cities
Great public spaces make great cities. But so do great private spaces. They provide opportunities for people to socialize, and provide the character that make a city more livable and unique. We have already talked about how restaurants add value to a city– but thought we’d look at bars in the same way. Now, what…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 2)
Recently, we discussed the growth in the number of urban high-poverty neighborhoods, which we illustrated by examining the distribution of poverty rates among census tracts. This analysis showed that high poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in urban areas. Today we will use this distribution to discuss what few of us have directly experienced: extremely…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1)
Many talk about poverty—its causes, its effects, and its possible remedies. There is literature on this issue from almost every social science, and no one can summarize it all in one blog post. However, there’s one aspect of our most recent report that I wanted to highlight: the deepening of poverty. Not only are we…
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Happy New Year from City Observatory
Those of us at City Observatory wish you all a Happy New Year. Its been just three months since we launched in October, and its been a busy period for us. We’ve released two major reports–Young and Restless and Lost in Place. We’ve been gratified at the reception that this research has received with media…
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How we build our cities: What’s at stake
Guest Commentary by Carol Coletta It’s a glorious moment to be in the business of promoting the built environment. I use “built environment” to encompass the way we build our buildings, arrange our neighborhoods and public spaces, and interact with one another in place. We’re all consumers of place as individuals, and we are constantly…
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Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago?
We recently released our latest report, Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. It speaks to a national trend that’s been largely ignored– that urban poor are being concentrated into poorer neighborhoods, and that those neighborhoods are increasing in number. We speak here about some of…
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How distinct is your city?
Every city has its own unique characteristics. We know that industrial and occupational specializations can be measured using standard economic tools like location quotients. But some of the more intangible characteristics of cities are harder to measure. We’re always on the look out for new and interesting ways of discerning city distinctiveness. The Internet search…
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Gender Differences in Unemployment
To celebrate the Census Bureau’s release of the 5-year American Community Survey estimate, we decided to do a quick analysis of some of its information. So for some light Friday afternoon reading, we present you with an analysis of unemployment rates by gender throughout the country. The 2009-2013 data spans the Great Recession and its…
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Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It
If you’ve ever contemplated getting up at 3, 4, or 5 am only to brave large crowds to fight over scarce merchandise, well, think again. Instead of looking into census data this Thanksgiving, we thought we’d look at more “fun” data, specifically, Black Friday shopping habits– and whether or not they make sense. Recently, several…
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Focus: Detroit’s Young and Restless
Last month, we released our Young and Restless report, tracing the growth of well-educated young adults in in the nation’s largest metro areas. We found that across the nation, college-educated 25 to 34 year olds were much more likely than other metro area residents to choose to live in close-in urban neighborhoods. While the trend…
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Young and Restless: How is your city doing?
We just released our first CityReport looking at the “Young and Restless,” detailing where young talent is going in the U.S.- and why it matters. (Download the report here.) Here we show how the nation’s largest cities do with this important demographic. The Young and Restless–25 to 34 year-olds with a 4-year degree or higher–play…
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Boo! The annual Carmaggedon scare is upon us.
A new report detailing the “costs” of congestion twists the data to become little more than talking points for the highway lobby. For transportation geeks, Halloween came early this year. A new report claims that traffic congestion is costing us $124 billion a year and is “draining” our economy. But just as those ghoul and…
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Talent & Prosperity
Talent drives city success: The biggest single factor explaining urban economic success is human capital.
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Questioning Congestion Costs
It’s frequently claimed that traffic congestion imposes high and rising costs on the economy. But is that true?
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Urban Form & Transportation
Density, land use patterns and the transportation system interact to determine how well cities fulfill their fundamental task of bringing people together.
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Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Generating new ideas and creating new businesses drives city economies and national economic growth.
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Economic Opportunity
A key measure of economic success has to be whether we provide widely shared opportunities for economic advancement.
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Placemaking & the Consumer City
The quality of life in cities is an essential ingredient and contributor to economic prosperity.
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Housing Markets
The creation and allocation of living space within a metropolitan area shapes our well-being and the regional economy.
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Metro Economics
Metropolitan areas are the fundamental organizational units of our global, knowledge-based economy.
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Distinctiveness
Every city has its own unique character and strengths which shape its economic opportunities.
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Widening the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway
Should Portland spend $800 million to widen the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway?
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Portland
Portland is our home and a local laboratory for many interesting developments in urban living.
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Finding your way around City Observatory
The City Observatory homepage is designed to provide you with access to the latest in urban policy analysis and research, and the background to make sense of it all. At the top of the site, you will find navigation links that will take you to the all of the content that we post on City…