Author: Joe Cortright
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The New Urban Crisis: Cliff Notes version
Your 1,200 word bluffer’s guide to Richard Florida’s new book Richard Florida’s new book “The New Urban Crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class–and what we can do about it,” came out last week. The book touches on many of the issues that are near and dear to…
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The Week Observed, April 14, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Too soon to write off city revival? The release of the Census county-level population estimates two weeks ago led to a series of quick-reaction analyses of what the data portend for the “back-to-the-city” movement that’s been seen in the past several years. Unfortunately, county level data is a…
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Why might Uber & Lyft support road-pricing?
The real disruptive technology for transportation is road-pricing. There’s been a surge of interest in road pricing in the past few weeks. In a new study of growing traffic congestion in New York City, Bruce Schaller attributed traffic delays to the expanding number of Uber and Lyft vehicles on city streets. Given the economics of…
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Has Portland’s rent fever broken?
More evidence that supply and demand are at work in housing markets In early 2016, Portland experienced some of the highest levels of rent inflation of any market in the US. According to Zillow’s rental price estimates, rents were rising between 15 and 20 percent year over year in late 2015 and early 2016. Portland…
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Too soon to write off city revival
County data can’t tell us much about thriving urban neighborhoods New county-level census population estimates became available last week, and Jed Kolko produced an interesting analysis published by FiveThirtyEight concluding that “America’s Shift to the Suburbs Sped Up last year.” While there’s nothing wrong with Kolko’s math, we think there are several reasons to believe…
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The Week Observed, April 7, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta. Following an arson-caused blaze, a key section on Interstate 85 in Atlanta collapsed, and is likely to be out of service for at least a couple of months. Since the roadway carried about a quarter million cars every day, the media were quick to predict…
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New York City isn’t hollowing out; It’s growing
You can’t leave out births and deaths when you examine population trends The release of the latest census population estimates has produced a number of quick takes that say that cities are declining. The latest is Derek Thompson, writing at The Atlantic and bemoaning the net domestic migration out of the New York metro area,…
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Migration is making counties more diverse
Migration, especially by young adults, is increasing racial and ethnic diversity in US counties As we related last week, a new report from the Urban Institute quantifies the stark economic costs of racial and income segregation in the United States. Places with higher levels of segregation have lower incomes for African-Americans, lower rates of educational…
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The Ben & Jerry’s crash course in transportation economics
What one day of free ice cream teaches us about traffic congestion Today’s that day, folks. Ben and Jerry are giving away free ice cream to everyone who comes by their stores. Whether you’re hankering for Cherry Garcia or Chunky monkey, you can now get it for absolutely zero price. Well, there is that one…
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Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta
Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand It had all the trappings of a great disaster film: A spectacular blaze last week destroyed a several hundred foot-long section of Interstate 85 in Atlanta. In a city that consistently has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country, losing…
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The Week Observed, March 31, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. 13 propositions about autonomous vehicles. Despite occasional setbacks–like last week’s crash of an Uber self-driving car in Phoenix–it looks increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles will play an important role in urban transportation in the not-too-distant future. There’s a lot to ponder about what effects they might have on…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
April First falls on Saturday, and that’s a good reason to revisit an old favorite, the Cappuccino Congestion Index We’re continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It’s annoying to queue up for anything, but traffic congestion has spawned a cottage industry of ginning up reports that transform our annoyance with…
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The High Cost of Segregation
A new report from the Urban Institute shows the stark costs of economic and racial segregation Long-form white paper policy research reports are our stock in trade at City Observatory. We see dozens of them every month, and usually read them with great interest, and flagging the best one’s for the “must read” list we…
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Breaking Bad: Why breaking up big cities would hurt America
New York Times columnist Russ Douthat got a lot of attention a few days ago for his Johnathan Swiftian column–”Break up the liberal city“–suggesting that we could solve the problems of lagging economic growth in rural and small town America by whacking big cities into pieces and spreading their assets more widely. Douthat views himself…
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Autonomous vehicles: Peaking, parking, profits & pricing
13 propositions about autonomous vehicles and urban transportation It looks more and more like autonomous vehicles will be a part of our urban transportation future. There’s a lot of speculation about whether their effects will be for good or ill. While there’s a certain “techno-deterministic” character to these speculations, we’re of the view that the…
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The Week Observed, March 24, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The US retail industry is getting marked down in a big way, with hundreds of stores operated by well-established chains including Macy’s, J. C. Penney, and the Gap, as well as others, closing or slated for closing in the next few months. By global standards the U.S. is…
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Big city metros are driving the national economy
The nation’s largest city-centered metro areas are powering national economic growth. 2017 will mark a decade since the peak of the last economic cycle (which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research was December 2007. Since then, we’ve experienced the Great Recession (the biggest economic downturn in eight decades), and a long and arduous…
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Transit and home values
Homes with better transit access command higher prices, especially in cities with good transit. Our friends at Redfin, the real estate data and analytics company, have an interesting new report exploring the connection between transit access and home prices. Redfin computes and freely publishes a Transit Score for all of the nation’s houses. Transit Score…
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Getting to critical mass in Detroit
Last month, we took exception to critics of Detroit’s economic rebound who argued that it was a failure because the job and population growth that the city has enjoyed has only reached a few neighborhoods, chiefly those in and around the downtown. A key part of our position was that successful development needs to achieve…
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How much could US retail shrink? And where?
The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy’s stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other major national retail chains, including The Limited, Gap, Walgreens, Aeropostale and Chico’s, have also announced similarly large closures.…
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The Week Observed, March 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls “cafe urbanism” is at risk if there’s a collapse in the restaurant sector. Apparently, a number of restaurants in…
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Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther
Speed doesn’t seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems. Yesterday, we presented some new estimates of the average speed of travel in different metropolitan areas developed by the University of California’s Victor Couture. His data shows that average travel speeds in some metropolitan areas (like Louisville)…
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Speed: Fast cities
Which cities move the fastest? Does it matter? The raison d’etre of the highway engineer is making cars go faster. That’s reflected in chronic complaints about traffic congestion, and codified in often misleading studies, like those produced by the Texas Transportation Institute. The latest contribution to the literature on inter-metropolitan differences in transportation system performance…
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Are restaurants dying, and taking city economies with them?
Alan Ehrenhalt is alarmed. In his tony suburb of Clarendon, Virginia, several nice restaurants have closed. It seems like an ominous trend. Writing at Governing, he’s warning of “The Limits of Cafe’ Urbanism.” Cafe Urbanism is a “lite” version of the consumer city theory propounded by Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, who noted that one of the…
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The Week Observed, March 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Shrinking offices: What it means for cities. Its not just you’re imagination: offices are becoming less common and smaller, and a variety of space-sharing and space-saving practices are taking hold in businesses around the nation. The number of square feet of office space leased per new office employee…
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Twilight of the NIMBYs? LA’s Measure S Fails
La-La Land voters deal a crushing defeat to a “NIMBYism on steroids” The latest returns show Los Angeles’ Measure S–the self-styled “Neighborhood Integrity Initiative”–failing by a 31 percent “Yes” to 69 percent “No” margin. If it had passed, Measure S was predicted to bring new housing development in Los Angeles to a screeching halt for the…
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What we know about rent control
Today, partly as a public service, we’re going to dig into the academic literature on an arcane policy topic: rent control. We also have a parochial interest in the subject: the Oregon Legislature is considering legislation that would lift the state’s ban on cities imposing rent control. The legislation is being proposed by Oregon House…
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The implications of shrinking offices
The amount of office space allotted to each worker is shrinking. What does that mean for cities? Last week a new report from real estate analytics firm REIS caught our eye. Called “The Shrinking Office Footprint” this white paper looks at changes in the demand for office space over the last couple of business cycles.…
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The Week Observed, March 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. More flawed congestion rankings. Traffic analysis firm Inrix released yet another report purporting to estimate the dollar cost of congestion and ranking the world’s cities from most to least traffic burdened. Our review shows that the report suffers from many of the same problems that plagued its predecessors. Chief…
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What Travis Kalanick’s meltdown tells us about Uber
As has been well chronicled in the media, it’s been a tough month for Uber. The company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick was vilified in the press for the company’s tolerance for sexual harassment of its female employees, and derided for his participation in President Trump’s business advisory council (from which he resigned after an estimated 200,000…
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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…
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Houston (Street), we have a problem.
A lesson in the elasticity of demand, prices and urban congestion. It looks like Uber, Lyft and other ride sharing services are swamping the capacity of New York City streets Every day, we’re being told, we’re on the verge of a technological revolution that will remedy our persistent urban transportation problems. Smart cities, replete with…
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Yet another flawed congestion report from Inrix
Big data provides little insight Cue the telephoto lens compressed photo of freeway traffic; it’s time for yet another report painting a picture of the horrors inflicted on modern society by traffic congestion. This latest installment comes from traffic data firm Inrix, which uses cell phone, vehicle tracking and GPS data to estimate the speed…
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The Week Observed, February 24, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.Busting the urban myth about high income housing and affordability. One of the most widespread beliefs about housing is that the construction of new high income housing somehow makes the housing affordability problem worse. Widely believed, but wrong. We marshal the economic evidence for filtering–how as apartments and houses…
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Cursing the candle
How should we view the early signs of a turnaround in Detroit? Better to light a single candle than simply curse the darkness. The past decades have been full of dark days for Detroit, but there are finally signs of a turnaround, a first few glimmers that the city is stemming the downward spiral of…
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Playing Apart
Our City Observatory report, Less in Common, catalogs the ways that we as a nation have been growing increasingly separated from one another. Changes in technology, the economy and society have all coalesced to create more fragmentation and division. As Robert Putnam described this trend in his 2000 book, we are “Bowling Alone.” And while…
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Urban myth busting: Why building more high income housing helps affordability
After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series ended last year. If you didn’t see the show-and it lives on at Youtube, of course–co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman constructed elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, it…
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The Week Observed, February 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Anti-social capital. You’re probably familiar with the term “social capital” which Robert Putnam popularized with his book Bowling Alone. In it Putnam devised a series of indicators that show the extent to which we associate with and trust one another, ranging from membership in clubs and civic organizations…
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Let’s not demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it
At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…
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Postcard from Louisville: Tolls Trump Traffic
Tolls cut traffic levels on I-65 in half; So did we really need 6 more lanes? Last month, we wrote about Louisville’s newly opened toll bridges across the Ohio River. As you may recall, Ohio and Indiana completed a major expansion of highway capacity across the Ohio, doubling the I-65 freeway crossing from six lanes…
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Are young adults moving less?
Conflicting data sources present very different pictures of young adult migration rates The Pew Research Center presented an analysis of census data reporting that today’s young adults are less likely to move in a given year than were their predecessors. A new article from Pew concludes: “Americans are moving at historically low rates, in part…
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Anti-Social Capital?
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s…
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The Week Observed, February 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The persistence of talent. City Observatory regularly stresses the strong connection between educational attainment and economic success at the metro level. We step back and look at how education attainment has influenced state level economic success over the past 25 years. The data shows that the fraction of…
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Visions of the City Part III: You don’t own me
What kind of future do we want to live in? While that question gets asked by planners and futurists in an abstract and technical way, some of the most powerful and interesting conversations about our future aspirations are reflected in the mass media. Lately, we’ve been struck by the visions embedded in recent television commercials.…
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Visions of the City Part II: A Perfect Day
Yesterday we took a close look at Ford’s vision for the future of cities. Our take: Ford’s preferred narrative of the places we’ll live is all about optimizing city life for vehicles. But is that the narrative that should guide us? Another big global corporation has, perhaps unwittingly, given us a very different vision of…
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Visions of a future city, Part I
What stories do we tell ourselves about the kind of world we want to live in? In his recent presidential address to the American Economics Association, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller talked about “narrative economics.” He argues that economists, like other disciplines need to begin to recognize that human cognition is structured around story-telling. ”…
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The enduring effect of education on regional economies
One of the themes we stress at City Observatory is the large and growing importance of talent (the education and skills of the population) to determining regional and local economic success. As we shift more and more to a knowledge-based economy, the places that will do well, and that are resilient in the face of…
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The Week Observed, February 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.What HOT Lanes tell us about the value of travel time. The economic underpinning of claims that traffic congestion costs Americans billions and billions of dollars each year is the assumption that travelers would value time savings at about half their average wage rate, or around $15 per hour.…
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Happy Groundhog’s Day, Oregon
Climate change gets lip service, highways get billions. Like many states and cities, Oregon has been a leader in setting its own local goals for reducing greenhouse gases. In a law adopted in 2007, the state set the goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020,…
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Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick. What purport…
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Openness to immigration drives economic success
Last Friday, President Trump signed an Executive Order effectively blocking entry to the US for nationals of seven countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. We’ll leave aside the fearful, xenophobic and anti-American aspects of this policy: others have addressed them far more eloquently than we can at City Observatory. And while there’s no…
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What HOT lanes reveal about the value of travel time
Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute, and traffic monitoring firms like Inrix and Tom-Tom trot out scary sounding reports that claim that Americans lose billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of time sitting in traffic. And just as regularly, highway advocates parrot these dire sounding numbers as the justification for spending billions and billions…
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The Week Observed, January 27, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity. Our colleague Daniel Hertz is back this week with an examination of the way we look at and think about neighborhood identities. He points out that in many urban neighborhoods the amount of land taken up by single family homes creates the impression…
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Constant change and gentrification
A new study of gentrification sheds light on how neighborhoods change. Here are the takeaways: The population of urban neighborhoods is always changing because moving is so common, especially for renters. There’s little evidence that gentrification causes overall rates of moving to increase, either for homeowners or renters. Homeowners don’t seem to be affected at…
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Suburban Renewal: Marietta demolishes affordable housing
Just say the words “urban renewal” and you immediately conjure up images of whole neighborhoods–usually populated by poor families and people of color being dislocated by big new publicly funded development projects. It seems like a relic of the past. But it appears to be getting a new lease on life in the suburbs. For…
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Flood tide–not ebb tide–for young adults in cities
The number of young adults is increasing, not declining, and a larger share of them are living in cities. Yesterday’s New York Times Upshot features a story from Conor Dougherty–”Peak Millennial? Cities Can’t Assume a Continued Boost from the Young.” It questions whether the revival in city living is going to ebb as millennials age,…
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The Week Observed, January 20, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The long journey toward greater equity in transportation. The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday got us thinking about how far we’ve come–and how far we have yet to go–having a truly equitable society. We reviewed two recent studies that address lingering racial disparities in transportation. The first…
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Louisville’s experiment in transportation economics
As we pointed out yesterday, there’s some initial visual evidence–from peak hour traffic cameras–suggesting that Louisville’s decision to toll its downtown freeway bridges but leave a parallel four-lane bridge un-tolled has produced a significant diversion of traffic away from the freeway. Perhaps without knowing it, Louisville has embarked on an interesting and useful economic experiment. One…
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Has Louisville figured out how to eliminate traffic congestion?
Louisville is in the transportation world spotlight just now. It has formally opened two big new freeway bridges across the Ohio River, and also rebuilt its famous (or infamous) “spaghetti junction” interchange in downtown Louisville. A story at Vox excoriated the decision to rebuild the interchange rather than tear out the riverfront freeway as a…
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Nothing’s worse than funky beer, except funky beer data
You know the feeling: you’re thirsty, you’re primed for a cool, refreshing beverage, and the anticipation has your taste buds tingling. But you pop the cap on the bottle only to find that the beer has turned skunky. It’s very disappointing. Well, we had a small taste of funky beer a couple of week back at…
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Race & transportation: Still a long way to go
January 17 is the day we celebrate the life and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This year is also the first year that we’re observing a national day of racial healing. We thought we’d take a minute to reflect on two recent studies that provide some strong statistical evidence for the unfortunate persistence of…
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The Week Observed, January 13, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in? Data from the newly released 5-year American Community Survey tabulations give us an updated picture of the demographics of urban neighborhoods. A new report from the Brookings Insitutiton’s Bill Frey shows that the typical US metropolitan area is continually…
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Who pays the price of inclusionary zoning?
Requiring inclusionary housing seems free, but could mean less money for schools and local services Last month, the Portland City Council voted 5-0 to adopt a sweeping new inclusionary housing requirement for new apartment buildings. The unanimous decision came with the usual round of self-congratulatory comments about how they were doing something to address the…
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Housing supply is catching up to demand
As Noah Smith observed, economists invariably encounter monumental resistance to the proposition that increasing housing supply will do anything meaningful to address the problem of rising rents–especially because new units are so costly. One of the frustrations that we (and increasingly cost-burdened) renters share is the “temporal mismatch” between supply and demand. Demand can change…
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Pulling it all together
At City Observatory, we post several new commentaries each week on a variety of urban themes, and aim to provide discrete, coherent analyses of specific questions, and contributing to the policy dialog about cities. At the start of a new year, we’d like to pull back a bit, and reflect on what we think we’ve…
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How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in?
Overall, America is becoming more diverse, but in many places the neighborhoods we live in remain quite segregated. The population of the typical US metropolitan area has a much more ethnically and racially mixed composition than it did just a few decades ago. Overall, measured levels of segregation between racial and ethnic groups are declining.…
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The Week Observed, January 6, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. A Toast to 2017: Beer and Cities. Its traditional to begin the New Year with a delicious beverage, and more and more Americans are choosing to celebrate with a locally brewed ale. That’s gotten much easier in the past decade, as microbreweries have flourished around the country. Microbreweries…
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Pollyanna’s ride-sharing breakthrough
A new study says ride-sharing apps cut cut traffic 85 percent. We’re skeptical We’ve developed a calloused disregard for the uncritical techno-optimism that surrounds most media stories about self-driving cars and how fleets of shared-ride vehicles will neatly solve all of our urban transportation problems. But a new story last week re-kindled our annoyance, because…
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Beer and cities: A toast to 2017
Celebrating the new year, city-style, with a local brew Champagne may be the traditional beverage for ringing in the new year, but we suspect that a locally brewed ale may be the drink of choice for many urbanists today. Much has changed about American beer in the past two decades. Most of the post-prohibition era…
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How not to fix housing affordability
Plans to subsidize renters and homebuyers will likely just fuel housing cost inflation Rising rents and home prices are becoming unbearable–or at least politically unpalatable–in cities around North America. Over the past year, two Pacific Northwest cities, Portland and Vancouver, have seen some of the biggest rent and home price increases anywhere. Portland’s reported double…
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The Week Observed, December 30, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The illegal city of Somerville. Just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Somerville is one of the most sought after suburbs in the Boston area. It has a combination of attractive neighborhoods and dense housing, nearly all of it the legacy of the city’s 19th and early 20th century roots.…
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Our ten most popular posts of 2016
As 2016 draws to a close, we look back at our most popular commentaries of the year. Hear they are, in reverse order: #10. Introducing the sprawl tax #9. Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median income households #8. What filtering can and can’t do. #7. What I learned playing Sim City #6. In…
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For whom the bridge tolls
A crazy toll structure that encourages more driving. Kentucky and Indiana have just put the finishing touches on two new bridges crossing the Ohio River. Built at a cost of about $2.6 billion, the bridge project also includes a rebuilding “Spaghetti Junction” an elaborate system of on- and off-ramps in Louisville, where I-65 and I-64…
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Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
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The Week Observed, December 23, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A rebound in millennial car-buying?. Stories purporting to debunk the tendency of younger adults to move to cities, buy fewer houses and drive less seem to have great appeal to editors everywhere. We look into recent reports claiming that ride-sharing millennials crave car ownership after all. A recent…
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Denver backs away from inclusionary zoning
At the top of most housing activist wish-lists is the idea that cities should adopt inclusionary housing requirements: when developers build new housing, they ought to be required to set-aside some portion of the units–say 10 or 20 percent–for low or moderate income families. Dozens of cities around the country have adopted some variant of…
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Some timely technologies to help pedestrians deal with self-driving cars
City Observatory has its own modest proposals for making “Smart City” streets safer. Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country. While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road carnage, there’ve been good reasons to be…
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A rebound in millennial car-buying?
Except for boomers, we’re all less likely to be buying new cars today One of the favorite “we’re-going-to-debunk-the-claims-about-millenials-being-different” story ideas that editors and reporters seem to love is pointing out that millennials are actually buying cars. Forget what you’ve heard about bike-riding, bus-loving, Uber-using twenty-somethings, we’re told, this younger generation loves its cars, even if…
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The Week Observed, December 16, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban transportation’s camel problem. Naive optimism is the order of the day in speculating about the future of urban transportation. In theory, some combination of autonomous vehicles, fully instrumented city streets, and transportation network companies will help us solve all of our problems, from congestion to traffic fatalities…
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More evidence for peer effects: Help with homework edition
There’s a large a growing body of research that shows the importance of peer effects on lifetime economic success of kids. For example, while the education level your parents is a strong determinant of your level of education, it turns out that the education level of your neighbors is nearly half as strong. Much of…
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You are where you eat.
The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists…
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Copenhagen: More than bike lanes
This month, traffic counters in Copenhagen pointed to an important milestone. According to their data, for the first time, the number of trips taken by bicycle in the city surpassed the number of trips taken by car. The Guardian reports–“Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen.”–that the number of bike trips…
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Urban Transportation’s Camel Problem
There’s a lot of glib talk about how technology–ranging from ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, to instrumented Smart Cities and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles–will fundamentally reshape urban transportation. We’re told, for example, that autonomous vehicles will eliminate traffic fatalities, obviate the need for parking lots, and solve transit’s “last mile” problem. But there are good…
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The Week Observed, December 9, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Pollution and poor neighborhoods. Environmental justice advocates point out–quite correctly–that poor neighborhoods tend to suffer much higher levels of pollution than the typical neighborhood. While this is often due to the callous indifference of public officials to the plight of the poor and people of color (as well as…
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Some thoughts on Portland’s proposed inclusionary housing plan
Why Portland’s proposed inclusionary zoning plan will likely make housing less affordable As we reported in September, Portland Oregon is moving ahead with plans to enact an inclusionary housing requirement. Briefly, the proposal would require all newly constructed apartment buildings with 20 or more units to set aside 20 percent of units for housing affordable…
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A policy that works: Raising the minimum wage
Higher minimum wages result in greater earnings for low wage workers, and no loss of jobs We’re always casting about for effective policies to address poverty. And there’s new evidence that higher minimum wages accomplish just that. In a new review of the literature and data by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers shows that…
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Are the ‘burbs really back?
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal came out with another eye-catching headline story in the city versus suburbs battle of the bands: “Suburbs outstrip cities in population growth, study finds. Big cities may be getting all the attention, but the suburbs are holding their own in the battle for population and young earners. . . .…
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Pollution and poor neighborhoods: A blast from the past
It’s been widely noted that poor neighborhoods tend to bear a disportioncate share of the exposure to environmental disamenities of all kinds. In the highway building era of the 1950s and 1960s, states and cities found it cheaper and politically easier to route new roads through poor neighborhoods, not only dislocating the local populace, but…
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The Week Observed, December 2, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Does Rent Control Work: Evidence from Berlin. Economists are nearly unanimous about rent control: they think it doesn’t work. Berlin’s recent adoption of a new rent control scheme in 2015 provides a new test case to see if they’re right. An early analysis of the Berlin program shows that…
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Why biotech strategies are often 21st century snake oil
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…
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Destined to disappoint: housing lotteries
Affordable housing is in short supply in many US cities, perhaps nowhere more chronically than in New York City. Even though New York has more public housing than any other US city, the demand for subsidized units is far greater than supply. As a result, the city regularly conducts lotteries to allocate available units to…
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Does Cyber-Monday mean delivery gridlock Tuesday?
Yesterday was, famously, cyber-Monday, the day in which the nation’s consumers took to their web-browsers and started clicking for holiday shopping in earnest. Tech Crunch reports that estimated e-commerce sales will yesterday were predicted at $3.36 billion, coming on top of almost $5 billion in on-line sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The steady growth…
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Does rent control work? Evidence from Berlin
As housing affordability becomes an increasingly challenging and widespread problem in many US cities, there are growing calls for the imposition of rent control. While there’s broad agreement among economists that rent control is ineffective and even counterproductive, it still seems like a tempting and direct solution to the problem. In Oregon, State House speaker…
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The Week Observed, November 25, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The rise of global neighborhoods. A new paper published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live in multi-ethnic “global neighborhoods”—places that…
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More evidence on the migration of talent
At City Observatory, we’ve long maintained that the location patterns of talented young workers are an economically important signal. (You can read our report on “The Young and Restless here). Well-educated young adults are the most mobile people in our society, and are flexible, adaptable, and have recent vintage human capital, and generally command lower…
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Your guide to the debate over the Trump Infrastructure Plan
There’s a lot of ink being spilled — or is it pixels rearranged? — over the size, shape, merits and even existence of a Trump Administration infrastructure plan. Infrastructure was one of just a handful of substantive policy talking points in the campaign, and the President-elect reiterated this one on election night. It also appears…
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The growth of global neighborhoods
As the US grows more diverse, so too do its urban neighborhoods. A new paper—“ Global Neighborhoods: Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis”–published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live…
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The Week Observed, November 18, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Daytime and nighttime segregation. Economic, racial and ethnic segregation are persistent features of the American metropolis. Most studies measure segregation using Census data on place of residence, but that’s at best an incomplete picture of the way different groups interact in urban space. Using data from social media,…
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Supply starting to catch up with demand
Fundamentally, the nation’s housing affordability problems are due to demand outpacing supply: there’s more demand to live in some cities–and especially in great urban neighborhoods–than can be met from the current supply of housing, especially apartments. As demand surges ahead of supply, rents get bid up, which is the most visible manifestation of the affordability…
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Parking: The Price is Wrong
One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordability, especially in the more desirable urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest and most prosperous metropolitna areas. As…
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Daytime and nighttime segregation
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…
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The Week Observed, November 11, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A tax credit for renters. The Terman Center for Housing Innovation at the UC Berkeley has come up with three fleshed-out and cost-estimated models for providing tax credits for low income renters. The FAIR tax credit would help rectify the strong tilt in the tax system toward home…
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Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course! Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…
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An infographic summarizing neighborhood change
One of City Observatory’s major reports is “Lost in Place,” which chronicles the change in high-poverty neighborhoods since 1970. In it, you’ll find a rich array of data at the neighborhood level showing how and where concentrated poverty grew. We know it’s a complex and wonky set of data, so we’ve worked with our colleagues…
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Cities and Elections
It’s election day, 2016. Here’s some of what we know about cities and voting. Well, at last. Today is election day. While we’re all eagerly awaiting the results of the vote, we thought we’d highlight a few things we know about voting, especially as they relate to cities. Its food for thought as we get…
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A tax credit for renters
A new proposal from Berkeley’s Terner Center aims to broaden favorable tax treatment for housing to include the nation’s renters Our tax code is highly skewed towards homeownership. Between the deductions for mortgage interest expenses and property taxes, the exclusion of capital gains on sales of homes, and the non-taxation of the imputed rent of owner-occupied homes,…
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The Week Observed: November 4, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The myth of a revealed preference for suburban living. It’s often argued that most Americans must prefer to live in suburbs because so many persons do so. We take a close look at this thesis, and summarize some key research findings from work of Jonathan Levine, which explore…
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Market timing and racial wealth disparities
One of the enduring features of American inequality is the wide disparity in homeownership rates between white Americans and Latinos and African-Americans. And because homeownership has — or at least was, historically — a principal means by which families built wealth, this disparity in homeownership translated into or amplified racial and ethnic wealth disparities. There…
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Affordable Housing: Not just for a favored few
As we all know, 2016 is the year that reality television made its way to the national political stage. Less well noticed is how another idea from reality television has insinuated its way into our thinking about housing policy. From 2006 to 2011, ABC television featured a popular reality television show called “Extreme Makeover: Home…
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Halloween was yesterday: Let’s stop scaremongering about cities
We love scary stories. That’s what Halloween was all about–dressing up as something terrifying, if only for a day. Being scary one day a year can be fun. But constant scaremongering is one way that attitudes and beliefs become detached from facts, in ways that can have truly negative effects. Lately, the presidential campaign has gotten…
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The myth of revealed preference for suburbs
If so many people live in suburbs, it must be because that’s what they prefer, right? But the evidence is to the contrary. One of the chief arguments in favor of the suburbs is simply that that is where millions and millions of people actually live. If so many Americans live in suburbs, this must…
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The Week Observed: October 28, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1.Measuring Walkability: Non-car modes of transportation have always been at a disadvantage in policy discussions because of a profound lack of widely available quantitative measures of walkability, and because all of the metrics developed to guide transportation focused on moving cars. That’s begun to change with the advent of…
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Lies, damn lies, and (on-line shopping) statistics.
Here’s an eye-catching statistic: “people in the US buying more things online than in brick-and-mortar stores.” This appears in the lead of a story published this week by Next City. There’s one problem with this claim: it’s not remotely close to true. One of the things we pay taxes for is the Census Bureau, which…
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Reversed Polarity: Bay Area venture capital trends
The greater San Francisco Bay area has been a hotbed of economic activity and technological change for decades, bringing us ground-breaking tech companies from Hewlett-Packard and Intel, to Apple and Google, to AirBNB and Uber. Its a great place to spot trends that are likely to spread elsewhere. One such trend is the growing tendency…
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Our infographic for thinking about the civic commons
City Observatory is about cities, and while much of the discussion of urban policy surrounds the physical and built environment, ultimately cities are about people. When cities work well, they bring people together. Conversely, when cities experience problems, its often because we’re separated from one another or driven apart. A critical feature of cities…
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Walk on by: How not to improve walkability measures.
Last week, we noticed a small item on Streetsblog: “Where Walk Score falls short.” Because we’re keenly interested in to walkability, and routinely use Walk Score to benchmark walkable places, we clicked the link. It took us to a blog entry from Mariela Alfonzo asking “Does walk score walk the walk?” Dr. Alfonzo has been…
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The Week Observed: October 21, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities for Everyone: Our Birthday Wish. October 15 marked City Observatory’s second birthday. We reviewed some of the highlights of the past year, focusing on the growing evidence of the economic resurgence building around the nation’s cities. For the coming year, we’re planning on focusing on what it…
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The new mythology of rich cities and poor suburbs
There’s a new narrative going around about place. Like so many narratives, it’s based on a perceptible grain of truth, but then has a degree of exaggeration that the evidence can’t support. Cities, we are told, are becoming playgrounds of the rich. Last week, Quartz headlined Richard Florida’s recent talk about the future of cities…
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Cities and the price of parking
What the price of parking shows us about urban transportation Yesterday, we rolled out our parking price index, showing the variation in parking prices among large US cities. Gleaning data from ParkMe, a web-based directory of parking lots and rates, we showed how much it cost to park on a monthly basis in different cities.…
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The price of parking
How much does it cost to park a car in different cities around the nation? Today, we’re presenting some new data on a surprisingly under-measured aspect of cities and the cost of living: how much it costs to park a car in different cities. There are regular comparisons of rents and housing costs between cities. The…
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Our birthday wish: Cities for everyone
Two years and two days ago–on October 15th, 2014–we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. Since then, we’ve weighed in daily on a whole series of policies issues set in and around urban spaces. So today, we’re taking a few moments to celebrate our birthday, reflect back on the past…
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The Week Observed: October 14, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence job growth is shifting to city centers. A recent paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Daniel Hartley has some interesting data on the pattern of job growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. They find that while suburban area job growth greatly outpaced that of the central…
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Where is ridesharing growing fastest?
There’s a revolution afoot in transportation. Transportation network companies, aka “ridesharing” firms, like Uber and Lyft are disrupting both the markets for urban transportation and labor markets. Their business model–treating drivers as independent contractors, is fueling the so-called “gig economy.” A new report from the Brookings Institution uses federal tax and administrative records to plot…
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The most interesting neighborhood in the world
Where are the most interesting streetscapes and popular destinations in your city? Even among your friends and colleagues, there might be some lively disagreement about that question. But recently, search giant Google weighed in on this question when it overhauled Google Maps this summer. Now it has a new feature, an creamsicle orange shading in…
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More fuzzy math: Vancouver real estate edition
As regular readers of City Observatory already know, the use, misuse and abuse of real estate price indices is one of our pet peeves. We’ve repeatedly excoriated Abodo, Zumper and others for mis-representing median values calculated from their apartment listings, as rental inflation gauges, because they work more like random number generators than measures of…
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More evidence job growth is shifting to the center
One trend we’ve tracked at City Observatory has been the movement of jobs back to city centers. While there are an increasing number of examples of prominent firms moving downtown — GE abandoning its suburban campus for a location in Boston’s Seaport district, McDonalds moving from Oak Brook to a site near Chicago’s Loop —…
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The Week Observed: October 7, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Bubble Logic. A major and persistent change in the housing market from a decade ago has been the decline in the number of “trade-up” home-buyers. While some fret that recent first-time homebuyers have become locked in to so-called starter homes, we point out that in many ways, trade-up…
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Memo to Stockholm
Next Monday, very early, before anyone in North America is out of bed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the name of the 2016 Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. No doubt the decision has already long since been made by the prize committee. But if they’re still undecided, we have a suggestion. Its…
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Are integrated neighborhoods stable?
Its rare that some obscure terminology from sociology becomes a part of our everyday vernacular, but “tipping point” is one of those terms. Famously, Thomas Schelling used the tipping point metaphor to explain the dynamics of residential segregation in the United States. His thesis was that white residents were willing to live in a mixed…
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A lottery isn’t the answer to our housing problems
Every few months, the national prize pool in the multi-state Powerball lottery piles up to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Early this year, three lucky winners split a prize with a total value of $1.6 billion dollars. Bucking odds of about one in 262 million, Marvin and Mae Acosta’s purchase of a…
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Bubble logic
We shouldn’t expect the return of the trade-up buyer anytime soon. Is the American homebuyer increasingly stuck in a starter home? That’s the premise of a recent commentary from the Urban Institute “Do we have a generation stuck in starter homes?” Looking at data on the share of home mortgages going to first time home…
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The Week Observed: September 30, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Where are African-American entrepreneurs? A new Census Bureau survey, undertaken in cooperation with the Kauffman Foundation provides a detailed demographic profile of the owners of the nation’s businesses. It reports that there are about 108,000 African-American owned businesses with paid employees (i.e., not counting self-employed entrepreneurs). We look…
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The price of autonomous cars: why it matters
If you believe the soothsayers–including the CEO of Lyft–our cities will soon be home to swarms of autonomous vehicles that ferry us quietly, cleanly and safely to all of our urban destinations. The technology is developing–and rolling out–at a breakneck pace. Imagine some combination of Uber, electrically powered cars, and robotic control. You’ll use your…
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How much will autonomous vehicles cost?
Everyone’s trying hard to imagine what a future full of autonomous cars might look like. Sure, there are big questions about whether a technology company or a conventional car company will succeed, whether the critical factor will be manufacturing prowess or software sophistication, and all manner of other technical details. But for economists —…
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Counting People and Cars: Placemeter
We confess: we’re data geeks. We love data that shows how cities work, and that give depth and precision to our understanding of policy problems. But truth be told, most data we — and other analysts — work with is second-hand: its data that somebody else gathered, usually for some other purpose, that uses definitions…
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Where are African-American entrepreneurs?
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. Historically, discrimination and lower levels of wealth and income have been barriers to entrepreneurship by African-Americans, but that’s begun to change. According to newly released data from the Census Bureau, its now estimated that there…
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The Week Observed: September 23, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. America’s most creative metros, ranked by Kickstarter campaigns. One of the most popular ways to raise funds for a new creative project–music, a video, an artistic endeavor, or even a clever new product–is Kickstarter. Website Polygraph.cool has created an impressive visualization of nearly 100,000 kickstarter campaigns. We use…
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Lessons in Supply and Demand: Housing Market Edition
Its apparent to almost everyone that the US has a growing housing affordability problem. And its generating more public attention and public policy discussions. Recent proposals to address housing affordability in California by Governor Jerry Brown and in New York, by Mayor Bill de Blasio have stumbled in the face of local opposition. Its…
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Caught in the prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
The fundamental conundrum underlying many of our key urban problems is the conflict between broadly shared regional interests and impacts in local communities. While we generally all share an interest in housing affordability, and therefore it makes sense that we ought to support an expansion of housing supply in our region, it becomes a different…
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Successful cities and the civic commons
At City Observatory, we’ve been bullish on cities. There’s a strong economic case to be made that successful cities play an essential role in driving national economic prosperity. As we increasingly become a knowledge-driven economy, it turns out that cities are very good at creating the new ideas of all kinds that propel economic…
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Kickstarting your local creative economy
One of the cleverest adaptations of web-technology is the development of crowd-sourced funding for new products and business ideas. The biggest of these crowd-sourced funding platforms is Kickstarter, which since its launch in 2009, has generated funding for ideas like the pebble smartwatch, the “coolest” cooler and a revival of the Mystery Science Theater 3000…
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Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth
Behind the big headlines about an national income rebound: thriving city economies are the driver. As economic headlines go, it was pretty dramatic and upbeat news: The US recorded an 5.2 percent increase in real household incomes, not only the first increase since 2007, but also the biggest one-year increase ever recorded. Its a signal…
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Portland considers inclusionary zoning
What should cities do to tackle growing housing affordability problems? Is inclusionary zoning a good way to provide more affordable housing, or will it actually worsen the constrained housing supply that’s a big cause of higher rents? In the next few months, the city of Portland, Oregon will be considering the terms of a new…
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McMansions Fading Away?
Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.” The…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Counting Women Entrepreneurs. The Census Bureau has just released the results of its new survey of entrepreneurs, and we report its key findings on the extent and geography of women-owned businesses. There are more than 1.1 million women-owned businesses with more than 5 million employees; about one in…
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Back to school: Three charts that make the case for cities
Its early September, and most of the the nation’s students are (or shortly will be) back in the classroom. There may be a few key academic insights that are no longer top of mind due to the distractions of summer, so as good teachers know, now is a good time for a quick refresher–something that…
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Counting women entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. For much of our history, entrepreneurship has been dominated by men. But in recent decades, women have overcome many of the social and other obstacles entrepreneurship and as a result, the number of women active…
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Transatlantic advice on city development strategies
We’ve all been paying a lot more attention to developments in Britain since June’s Brexit vote. As we noted at the time, some of the same kinds of political divides that play out in America—between globally-integrated, knowledge driven cities and more rural areas that are older, less-educated—also happen in Britain. (Population density helps explain the…
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The Economic Value of Walkability: New Evidence
One of the hallmarks of great urban spaces is walkability–places with lots of destinations and points of interest in close proximity to one another, buzzing sidewalks, people to watch, interesting public spaces–all these are things that the experts and market surveys are telling us people want to have. Its all well and good to acknowledge walkability in…
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Who patronizes small retailers?
Urban developers regularly wax eloquent over the importance of local small businesses. But ultimately, businesses depend on customer support. So, in what markets do customers routinely support small businesses? Getting data that reflects on this question is often very difficult. A new source of “big data” on consumer spending patterns comes from the JPMorganChase…
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More Driving, More Dying (2016 First Half Update)
More grim statistics from the National Safety Council: The number of persons fatally injured in traffic crashes in the first half of 2016 grew by 9 percent. That means we’re on track to see more than 38,000 persons die on the road in 2016, an increase of more than 5,000 from levels recorded just two…
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Why Talent Matters to Cities
The biggest single factor determining the success of a city’s economy is how well-educated is its population. As the global economy has shifted to knowledge-based industries, the jobs with the best pay have increasingly gone to those with the highest levels of education and skill. For a long time, we’ve been talking about the talent…
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How economically integrated is your city?
Last week, we looked at some of the growing body of academic evidence that shows that mixed income neighborhoods play a key role in helping create an environment where kids from poor families can achieve economic success. One of our key urban problems is that economically, we’ve grown more segregated over time: the poor tend…
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The role of mixed income neighborhoods in lessening poverty
Its a truism that the zip code that you are born in (or grow up in) has a lot to do with your life chances. If you’re born to a poor household, a neighborhood with safe streets, good schools, adequate parks and public services, and especially some healthy and successful peers and neighbors has a…
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The limits of data-driven approaches to planning
City Observatory believes in using data to understand problems and fashion solutions. But sometimes the quantitative data that’s available is too limited to enable us to see what’s really going on. And incomplete data can lead us to the wrong conclusions. Our use of data is subject to what we call the “drunk under the…
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The Summer Driving Season & The High Price of Cheap Gas
Cheaper gas comes at a high price: More driving, more dying, more pollution. We’re at the peak of the summer driving season, and millions of Americans will be on the road. While gas prices are down from the highs of just a few years ago, there’s still a significant price to be paid. As the…
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Court: Don’t spend billions on outdated travel forecasts
Last week, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered new ridership projections for the proposed Purple Line light rail line, which will connect a series of Maryland suburbs. Like any multi-billion dollar project that serves a densely settled metropolitan area—and this one connects some of its wealthiest suburbs—there’s…
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Patents, place, and profit
Readers of the Aug. 19 Week Observed: here’s the piece you’re looking for. Here’s a puzzle: If 89 percent of Apple’s ideas are invented in the U.S., why is 92 percent of its profit overseas? The link between local economies and tax bases has long been obvious and physical. Companies paid property taxes on their…
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A postcard from Marietta
Last summer, we told here the story of Marietta, Georgia, where local officials used $65 million in taxpayer funds to buy up and begin demolishing some 1,300 apartments along Franklin Road. This is a striking case where the displacement of low income families was an explicit objective of public policy, rather than the side-effect of…
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Five consecutive years of job growth: a clear cause for optimism in Detroit
Back in 2009, in the darkest days of the Great Recession, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke attempted to reverse the economic pessimism that gripped the nation. He pointed to what he called “green shoots,” small bits of good news around the country. To him, the green shoots showed that the economy was turning around, the…
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How Racial Segregation Leads to Income Inequality
Less Segregated Metro Areas Have Lower Black/White Income Disparities Income inequality in the United States has a profoundly racial dimension. As income inequality has increased, one feature of inequality has remained very much unchanged: black incomes remain persistently lower than white incomes. But while that pattern holds for the nation as a whole, its interesting to…
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A To-Do List for Promoting Competitive Ride-Sharing Markets
Making a market for shared mobility services Yesterday, we urged cities to think hard about how they can craft the rules for the transportation network companies that offer “ride sharing” systems to maximize competition, and encourage innovation and low prices. “Let a thousand Ubers bloom,” we said. The rules and regulations that cities set…
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Let a thousand Ubers bloom
Why cities should promote robust competition in ride sharing markets We’re in the midst of an unfolding revolution in transportation technology, thanks to the advent of transportation network companies. By harnessing cheap and ubiquitous communication technology, Uber and other firms organizing what they call “ride sharing” services have not only disrupted the taxi business, but…
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The Week Observed: July 29, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Economist Paul Romer Joins the World Bank. Paul Romer, a leading exponent of the New Growth Theory has been hired as chief economist for the World Bank. We explore how his thinking about the role of knowledge-driven growth and the key role of cities in fostering institutional and…
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The triumph of the City and the twilight of nerdistans
This is a story about the triumph of the City—not “the city” that Ed Glaeser has written about in sweeping global and historic terms—but the triumph of a particular city: San Francisco. For decades, the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy has been a microcosm and a hot house for studying the interplay between innovation, economic…
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Housing Cost Calculators
Suddenly, we’re awash in calculators. Housing calculators. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you remember the day you saw your first electronic calculator. It had an electronic display–red or green light-emitting diode segments, usually eight or ten of them that would display numbers, arithmetic operators and a decimal point. They had a few hard-to-press chicklet type…
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Paul Romer to the World Bank
Today we’re getting really wonky. Paul Romer, who’s currently at New York University’s Marron Institute has just been appointed to be the chief economist for the World Bank. Personnel decisions involving technocratic positions at global NGOs is about as wonky as it gets, of course. But this is a genuinely interesting development, especially if you’re…
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The Week Observed: July 22, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Homeownership: A failed wealth creation strategy. Its an article of faith that owning a home is the most reliable route to wealth building in the US. But this hasn’t been true over the past decade, and its especially problematic for low income households and minorities. The housing market…
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Homeownership can exacerbate inequality
In yesterday’s post, we described why homeownership is such a risky financial proposition for low income households, who tend to be disproportionately people of color. From a wealth-building standpoint, lower income households tend to buy homes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, face higher financing costs, and have less financial resilience to withstand the…
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Homeownership: A failed wealth-creation strategy
It’s an article of faith in some quarters—well, most quarters—that in the United States, owning a home ought to be a surefire way to build wealth. Whether it’s presidents, anti-poverty groups, foundations, or realtors, we’re always being told that that homeownership is the foundation of the American dream, and a key way secure one’s financial…
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Rules of the road
Earlier, we wrote about the first fatal crash of a partly-self-driving car. A Tesla, operating on autopilot mode, failed to detect a semi-trailer crossing in its path, and the resulting collision killed its human driver. The crash has provoked a great deal of discussion in the media about safety data, the potential for future technology,…
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Less than perfect
Last week, sadly, two tragic deaths represented unfortunate, but predictable firsts in transportation. They are also reminders that despite the very real potential benefits of new technology, operating large metal objects at high speeds is an inherently dangerous activity, and public safety is best served by reducing people’s exposure to the risk—which means designing urban…
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Review: State of the Nation’s Housing 2016
At City Observatory, we love fat reports full of data, especially when they shed light on important urban policy issues. Last week, we got the latest installment in a long-running series of annual reports on housing produced by Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies (JCHS). The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2016—aka SONH2016—presents copious details…
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Three challenges for the civic commons
In Philadelphia last week, the Gehl Institute convened Act Urban—a global group of leaders and practitioners in the field of the civic commons. After three days of fieldwork and observation, expert presentations and intense discussion, I was asked, along with other panelists to sum up what we’d heard and what the challenges are for this…
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More evidence on the “Dow of Cities”
Last summer, we flagged a fascinating study by Fitch Investment Advisers which tracked twenty five years of home price data, stratified by the “urbanness” of housing. Fitch showed that particularly since 2000, home prices in neighborhoods in the center of metropolitan areas increased in value relative to all other metropolitan housing. We termed the price…
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Sprawl and the cost of living
Over the past three weeks, we’ve introduced the “sprawl tax”—showing how much more Americans pay in time and money because of sprawling urban development patterns. We’ve also shown how much higher the sprawl tax is in the US than in other economically prosperous countries, and how sprawl and long commutes impose a psychological, as well…
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Cities and Brexit
Last week’s big news was Britain’s decision, via referendum, to leave the European Union. The results of the vote lead Prime Minister Cameron to resign and sent markets reeling, and it’s still unclear what the ultimate economic and political effects will be. For some keen, if depressing, insight on the ramifications of Brexit, you may…
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21st century snake oil
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…
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The market cap of cities
What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe the current…
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How sprawl taxes our well-being
In the first installment of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we explained how laws and patterns of development that make our homes, businesses, and schools farther apart cost us time and money—on average, nearly $1,400 a year per commuter in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. In the second installment, we showed how the Sprawl Tax is…
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Achieving scale in affordable housing
There’s little question that housing affordability is a growing problem in many cities around the country. Rents have been rising faster than incomes, especially for low- and moderate-income households. One of the most widely touted policy responses is “inclusionary zoning,” which requires developers who build new housing to set aside at least a portion (typically…
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Sprawl Tax: How the US stacks up internationally
In our first post on the “Sprawl Tax,” we’ve explored the ways that our decisions about how to build American cities have imposed significant costs—in money, time, and quality of life—on all of us. We pay more to drive more, spend more time traveling instead of being at our destinations, and as a result deal…
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Neighborhood change in Philadelphia
Last week, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a fascinating report detailing neighborhood change in Philadelphia over the past decade and a half. “Philadelphia’s Changing Neighborhoods” combines a careful, region-wide analysis of income trends with detailed profiles of individual neighborhoods. Using tract-level income data, Pew researchers classified Philadelphia neighborhoods according to their median income in 2000…
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Schools and economic integration
There’s a growing body of evidence that economic integration—avoiding the separation of rich and poor into distinct neighborhoods—is an important ingredient in promoting widely shared opportunity. The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues shows that poor kids who grow up in mixed income communities experience far higher rates of economic success than those who…
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Self-driving cars versus pedestrians
For many, it’s all but a certainty that our world will soon be full of self-driving cars. While Google’s self-driving vehicles have an impressive safety record in their limited testing, it’s just a matter of time until one is involved in a serious crash that injures someone in a vehicle, or a pedestrian. So, in…
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Cities are adding people, jobs and businesses
A trio of reports released in the past week provide new data showing the economic strength of the nation’s cities. Whether we look at population growth, new business formation, or job creation, big cities, urban centers and close-in urban neighborhoods are big drivers of national growth. While the data are drawn from different sources and…
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The demand for city living is behind the urban rent premium
The US faces a shortage of cities. More and more Americans, especially talented, young workers with college degrees, are looking to live in great urban locations. As we’ve explored at City Observatory, the demand for urban living has increased faster than the supply of great urban spaces—with the predictable result that the price of land…
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Nationally, apartment supply may be catching demand
There’s more evidence that housing market supply is beginning to catch up to demand in a way that is likely to moderate rent increases. Nothing, it seems, is more infuriating to those caught in a market of steady rent hikes that being lectured by some economist that what is needed to resolve the problem is…
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Storefronts and job growth
Earlier this week, we introduced the Storefront Index, a measure of the location and clustering of customer-facing retail and service businesses. A primary use of the index is to identify places that have the concentration of retail activity that we generally associate with a vibrant neighborhood commercial area, and that can support a high level…
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The Storefront Index
As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along the margins of public spaces (streets, sidewalks, parks and squares) and in and out of quasi-private spaces (stores,…
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The Storefront Index
As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along the margins of public spaces (streets, sidewalks, parks and squares) and in and out of quasi-private spaces (stores,…
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On the road again?
Hot on the heels of claims that Millennials are buying houses come stories asserting that Millennials are suddenly big car buyers. We pointed out the flaws in the home-buying story earlier this month, and now let’s take a look at the car market. The Chicago Tribune offered up a feature presenting “The Four Reasons Millennials…
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A new look at neighborhood change
One of City Observatory’s major reports is “Lost in Place,” which chronicles the change in high-poverty neighborhoods since 1970. In it, you’ll find a rich array of data at the neighborhood level showing how and where concentrated poverty grew. We know it’s a complex and wonky set of data, so we’ve worked with our colleagues…
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Excessive expectations: A first look at the DOT’s new road performance rules
We’ve just gotten our first look at the new US Department of Transportation performance measurement rule for transportation systems. The rule (nearly three years in gestation, since the passage of the MAP-21 Act) is USDOT’s attempt to establish performance measures to guide investment and operation of the nation’s urban transportation system. One of the criticisms—fair,…
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A surprising message about the connection between place and life expectancy
There aren’t many economists whose research findings are routinely reported in the New York Times and Washington Post. But Raj Chetty—and his colleagues around the country—have a justly earned reputation for clearly presented analyses with detailed findings and direct policy relevance. Last year, they released the most detailed study yet on how place affects intergenerational…
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Note to journalists: Stop quoting bogus rent numbers
Hey reporters! We know you love rankings, especially ones that show some measure of widely shared pain, like traffic congestion or rent increases. And some people, armed with a database and an infographic are more than happy to feed your hunger for this type of analysis. But please: Stop using Abodo’s rent numbers. They’re wrong.…
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The limits of technology: Let’s hack an app
A Hollywood staple of the 1930s and 1940s was the story of a plucky band of young kids—usually led by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland—who, their dreams of making it on Broadway dashed by some plot twist, decide to stage a show of their own. They would find a barn or a warehouse, sing and…
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What lifecycle and generational effects tell us about young people’s homebuying
It’s been debunked, right? Though we’ve long been told that millennials want to live in cities, renting rather than owning, and biking instead of driving, a new round of articles are here to tell us that all of that is a myth: as soon as they find their financial footing, young people are buying homes…
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Introducing the Pedestrian Pain Index
America’s pedestrians are in pain. Every day, tens of millions of Americans waste tens of thousands of hours stuck waiting on the side of streets for car traffic to get out of their way. We estimate that the annual value of time lost waiting to walk totals $25 billion annually. Today, City Observatory announces the…
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How brain drain measures can mislead
A new measure purports to gauge city attractiveness by measuring whether local college graduates stick around. But these raw numbers can be a misleading indicator, and we’ll show how it can be adjusted to more accurately measure how good a job a city is doing of producing and retaining talent. There’s powerful evidence that the…
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Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter: lifting kids out of poverty
There’s a hopeful new sign that how we build our cities, and specifically, how good a job we do of building mixed income neighborhoods that are open to everyone can play a key role in reducing poverty and promoting equity. New research shows that neighborhood effects—the impact of peers, the local environment, neighbors—contribute significantly to…
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Not peak Millennial: the coming wave
It’s an eye-catching, convention-tweaking claim: We’ve reached peak Millennial. And, so the argument goes, because Millennials have hit their “peak,” it’s time to junk all these crazy theories about Millennials not wanting to own cars, and not buying homes, especially in the suburbs. Sure, they had a youthful dalliance with city living, and the numbers…
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The beat goes on: More misleading congestion rankings from TomTom
Yesterday, TomTom released its annual rankings of the levels of congestion in world and US cities. Predictably, they generated the horrified, self-pitying headlines about how awful congestion is in the top-ranked cities. Cue the telephoto lens shots of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and tales of gridlock. As we’ve long pointed out, there are big problems with the…
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It’s time for a “big short” in parking
Last year’s hit film The Big Short depicted various investors who, realizing that there was a housing bubble in the years before the 2000s crash, found ways to “short” housing, betting against the market and ultimately making a killing when the crisis hit. Looking forward, there’s a plausible case to be made that this might…
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When supply catches up to demand, rents go down
Today, we spend a few minutes reviewing the recent history of housing markets in rural North Dakota. In a microcosm, we can see how the interplay of demand and supply drive housing market cycles. The speed and scale of changes in North Dakota dwarf what we usually see, but provide an illustration of the forces…
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Why the new Inrix Traffic Scorecard deserves a “D”
At City Observatory, we’ve long been critical of some seemingly scientific studies and ideas that shape our thinking about the nature of our transportation system, and its performance and operation. We’ve pointed out the limitations of the flawed and out-dated “rules of thumb” that guide our thinking about trip generation, parking demand, road widths and…
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Super long commutes: a non-big, non-growing, non-problem
Last week, the Washington Post published an article repeating an old-refrain in transportation journalism—the horror of long commutes. According to the Post, more and more Americans are commuting longer and longer distances to work each day. There’s growing scientific evidence that long commutes are bad for your physical and mental health, reduce happiness, and even…
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How should cities approach economic development?
Everyone interested in state or local economic development should read “Remaking Economic Development: The Markets and Civics of Continuous Growth and Prosperity.” In it, the Brookings Institution’s Amy Liu neatly synthesizes important lessons from the field about how metropolitan centered economic strategies are vitally important not just to revitalizing city economies, but to national economic…
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Muddling income inequality and economic segregation
The big divides between rich and poor in the US are drawing increased attention, which is a good thing. Income inequality has been steadily growing in the US, and it’s a big problem. As we’ve pointed out, this problem has an important spatial dimension as well. The concentration of poverty, in particular, amplifies all of…
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CBO on highway finance: The price is wrong
A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report confirms what we’ve known for a long time: our nation’s system of assessing the costs of roads—and paying for their construction and maintenance—is badly broken. Entitled “Approaches to Making Federal Highway Spending More Productive,” the new CBO report is a treasure trove of details about the recent history…
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Cities can’t solve all our problems
As our name implies, we’re very focused on cities. We think cities are the key to solving many of the nation’s most challenging problems, from economic opportunity and social justice, to environmental sustainability. And we’re not alone: more and more, activists are looking to cities to take the lead on critical policy issues. Cities should…
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Designed to fail
A breathless feature article at the New York Times describes how the design wizards at IDEO are helping stodgy old Ford Motor Company re-imagine how transportation might work in the future. IDEO conceptualized the design task by sending groups of its employees to a restaurant a few miles away via different transportation modes, so…
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Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households
After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series is coming to an end later this year. If you haven’t seen the show, co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman construct elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, you can’t…
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More driving means more dying
New data from the national traffic safety administration shows an ominous trend: traffic related deaths are up 11.3 percent for the first nine months of 2015, as compared to the same period a year earlier. Although the NHTSA warns that the data are subject to revision, and cautions that it’s too early to discern the…
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Why the first-time homebuyer is an endangered species
First-time home buyers play a critical role in the housing market. The influx of new households into the owner-occupied market is a key source of sales, and provides impetus for existing homeowners to move, liquidate their investment, or trade up to a bigger or better house. They’re the bottom of the home-buying pyramid. The number…
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More evidence on the “Dow of cities”
Last year, we described the widening gap between typical housing values in cities and suburbs as the “Dow of cities”: Just as differences in stock prices signal the performance of companies, variations in average home prices are a market signal of the performance of cities. High and rising prices, relative to the overall market, are…
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Bursting Portland’s urban growth boundary won’t make housing more affordable
Like many cities in the US, Portland has been experiencing an affordable housing crisis as rents have risen substantially over the last several years. One proposed solution to this problem is inclusionary zoning—requiring people who build new apartments to hold some units’ rent at below-market rates. In the coming month or so, the Oregon Legislature…
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Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it
At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…
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The market cap of cities
What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe the current…
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Are jobs really returning to the city?
At City Observatory, we’ve cataloged a series of indicators that point to the the growing economic strength of city centers—including on the metric of job growth. But in a new blog post, Jed Kolko looks at county-level data for the past 15 years, and declares that city jobs aren’t really back, concluding: “It’s hard to…
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For highway advocates, it’s about the journey, not the destination
Last month, we called out the American Highway User’s Alliance (AHUA) for trumpeting the Katy Freeway as a congestion-fighting success story. The Katy, as you will recall, is Houston’s 23-lane freeway, which was recently expanded at a cost of $2.8 billion. Although the AHUA hailed that expansion in a report as the kind of project…
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Which federal agency has a big role to play in housing affordability? The answer might surprise you
The big economic news of the past month was the Federal Reserve Board’s decision to begin raising interest rates after years of leaving them at near-zero levels. The first increase in the short-term interest rate the Fed charges banks will be one-quarter of one percent, but there’s an expectation that the Fed will continue to…
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Pulling it all together
At City Observatory, we post several new commentaries each week on a variety of urban themes, and aim to provide discrete, coherent analyses of specific questions, and contributing to the policy dialog about cities. At the start of a new year, we’d like to pull back a bit, and reflect on what we think we’ve…
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Bending the carbon curve in the wrong direction
Gas prices are down, driving is up, and so, too, is carbon pollution. In a little over a year, the US has given up about one-sixth of the progress it made in reducing transportation’s carbon footprint. For more than a decade, America was making real progress in reducing is car dependence. The growth of driving…
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The economic strength of American cities in four charts
Cities are becoming more important to the economic health of the country. How do we know? We can boil the answer down to four charts, each of which plots a key indicator of urban economic strength. 1. The Dow of Cities The market value of housing in urban centers is increasing much more rapidly than…
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Our favorites from 2015, part 1
Over the last two days, we’ve give you readers’ favorite posts from 2015. Now we’re choosing our own. Here are Joe Cortright’s five favorite: 5. Want to close the black/white income gap? Work to reduce segregation The income gap between black and white households is one of the major racial inequalities in American society. It’s also…
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The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup
When it comes to selling huge new road projects to the public, the highway lobby and their allies in government have many tools. Last week, we wrote about one of them: touting initial declines in congestion as success, without bothering to follow up as induced demand eliminates those gains in just a matter of years.…
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Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
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Don’t bank on it
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton laid out the broad outlines of her plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would make low interest loans to help fund all kinds of public and private infrastructure. In an explainer for Vox, Matt Yglesias lays out the case for an infrastructure bank, and sets out some of the…
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Cities have reason to be wary of Fed moves
Later this month, the Federal Reserve Board (or “the Fed,” as it’s often referred to) will raise interest rates. After seven years of very loose monetary policy designed to facilitate economic recovery from the Great Recession, the Fed now apparently thinks that the economy is healthy enough to stand higher interest rates. Clearly, the financial…
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Climate concerns steamrolled by FAST Act and cheap gas
There’s plenty of high-minded rhetoric at the UN climate change conference in Paris about getting serious about the threat of climate change. According to the Los Angeles Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic that, “even without a specific temperature-change limit and legally binding structure, a climate change agreement that negotiators in Paris are…
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Pulling a FAST one
Whatever remained of the fig leaf claim that the US has a “user pays” system of road finance disappeared completely with the passage of the so-called FAST Act. It would be better to call the new transportation bill the “Free Ride” Act, because that’s exactly what it does: gives auto users something for nothing. It’s…
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Is foreign capital destroying our cities?
Be afraid: Big foreign corporations are buying up our cities and stamping out our individuality. Or so warns Saskia Sassen in a piece ominously entitled, “Who owns our cities—and why this urban takeover should concern us all,” published in the Guardian Cities. The harbinger of our doom, according to Sassen: large corporations are buying up…
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Zoning and cities on the national economic stage
It’s hard to think of an issue that is more quintessentially local than zoning. It’s all about what happens on the ground on a specific piece of property in a particular neighborhood. It’s the bread and butter of local governments and neighborhood groups. Zoning and land use seem about as far removed from national economic…
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It’s a good time for buyers to beware
It’s the hardiest perennial in the real estate business: “Now,” your realtor will tell you, “is a great time to buy a home.” Back in 2006, just as the housing market was faltering, that’s exactly what the National Association of Realtors (NAR) was telling us. In fact, in November of that year, the NAR launched…
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The high price of cheap gas
At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion.…
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A “helicopter drop” for the asphalt socialists
The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees paid by member banks—to bail out the Highway Trust Fund. For years, many macro economists…
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More doubt cast on food deserts
It’s a plausible and widely-believed hypothesis: Poor people in the United States suffer from measurably worse nutrition because they have such limited access to good food. Confronted with a high concentration of poor diet choices (like fast food, and processed food in convenience stores) and with few markets offering fresh fruit and vegetables, the poor…
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Truthiness in gentrification reporting
Recently, we’ve received three new pieces of evidence on how gentrification affects the lives of poor people in changing neighborhoods. First, a study from NYU’s Furman Center suggests that residents of public housing in wealthier and gentrifying neighborhoods make more money, suffer from less violence, and have better educational options for their children, despite also…
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Beyond gas: The price (of driving) is wrong
Our recent conversation about the future of American driving habits, and the role of the price of gas in changing them, is a good reminder of a broader truth about transportation policy: prices are important, and getting prices right (or wrong) is crucial. And when it comes to driving, prices are frequently wrong. That’s because driving is extremely costly:…
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Happy birthday to us!
A year ago today, October 15th, 2014, we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. The past year has been a whirlwind: We’ve released four major reports—Young and Restless, Lost in Place, Surging City Center Job Growth, and Less in Common—each of which use data to examine some of the…
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The danger of taking policy lessons from extreme cases
Two recent press features have suggested that one Utah city has worked out the recipe for equitable development. The cover story from Newsweek’s October 2, issue offers “Lessons from America’s most egalitarian zip code.” It proposes that Ogden, Utah is a model for how the US can address income inequality. The article is at…
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The end of peak driving?
A little over a year ago, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.70. Since then, that price has plummeted, and remains more than a dollar cheaper than it was through most of 2014. Over the same period, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick in driving in the US. After nearly a decade of steady…
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One of the biggest myths about cities: Crime is rising
There’s a lot happening in American cities these days, which means that there’s a lot to read about! Even for those of us at City Observatory, sometimes good, important articles slip through the cracks. In recognition of that, periodically, we’ll dig back into our archives to republish a piece that we think deserves another go-around.…
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Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy
Cities have always played a vital role in the national economy, but in the past few years their importance has increased. Last month, we highlighted the “Dow of Cities”—how the rising value of housing in the most central portions of the nation’s metropolitan areas signals the market’s verdict about the growing demand for urban living.…
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What does it mean to be a “smart city”?
In light of Smart Cities Week, we’re updating this post from March about the role of smart technology, people, and successful cities. The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the “smart city” banner. But what does that mean?…
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My illegal neighborhood
Editor’s note: City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities. by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really…
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Contradictory conclusions and disappearing data
Part 2: A curious discrepancy between two major congestion reports using the same data Yesterday, we explained why one of the most common takes on the Texas Transportation Institute’s “Urban Mobility Report” is actually totally unjustified: Though many media outlets repeat the UMR’s claim that traffic delays are worse today than it has been since…
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Updated: Is traffic worse now? The “congestion report” can’t tell us
Part 1: Resurrecting discredited data to paint a false history The Texas Transportation Institute claims that traffic congestion is steadily getting worse. But its claims are based on resurrecting and repeating traffic congestion estimates from 1982 through 2009 that were based on a deeply flawed and biased model. Since 2009, TTI has used different data…
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New Orleans’ missing black middle class
Washed away? Or moved to the suburbs? At FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman writes: “Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class.” It’s a provocative piece showing the sharp decline in the black population of the city of New Orleans, particularly the city’s black middle class. While the city has rebounded in many ways since Katrina, the…
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UPDATED (again): Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute
UPDATE: A chorus of congestion cost critiques By this point, researchers and practitioners from around the country (and beyond!) have laid out their problems with TTI’s congestion reports. Here’s a roundup of some of the best: Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute comprehensively debunks the TTI methodology: “The UMR ignores basic research principles:…
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Growing e-commerce means less urban traffic
The takeaway: Urban truck traffic is flat to declining, even as Internet commerce has exploded. More e-commerce will result in greater efficiency and less urban traffic as delivery density increases We likely are overbuilt for freight infrastructure in an e-commerce era Time-series data on urban freight movements suffer from series breaks that make long term…
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The Week Observed, August 21, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. The suburbs: where the rich ride transit. In many cities, transit ridership is dominated by a transit dependent population: people who can afford to own private cars don’t use the transit system. But in some places transit is a mode of choice for higher income commuters. Daniel Kay…
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The Dow of Cities
OK, we admit it. We’re data geeks. To us, sometimes — well, often — a single number or data set is compelling proof of an important proposition: bare-naked, and with no verbal embellishment or deeply personal anecdote or cutesy infographic. Here’s the simple number: since 2000, home prices in city centers have outperformed those in…
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The war of words: rhetoric and the city
Over at Belt Magazine, editor Anne Trubek is fed up with the overuse of planning cliches in writing about cities. She’s asking, nay demanding, that everyone stop using ten words: walkability liveability placemaking civic engagement sustainability smart growth mixed-use accessibility adaptive reuse gentrification She’s put her finger on something. These words are used, and over-used…
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The edifice complex and our infrastructure problems
As Robert Caro chronicled in his riveting biography “The Power Broker,” the great builder Robert Moses had a foolproof strategy for getting new highways approved. He’d take a little bit of money and get the project started, driving stakes in the ground and manufacturing expectations about future development opportunities. Then he’d dare the Legislature not…
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The Week Observed: August 14, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. City home prices outpacing suburbs by 50 percent. Joe Cortright examines a new study prepared by investment firm Fitch looking at the growing value premium in central cities. Since 2000, home prices have grown 50 percent faster in urban centers than in their surrounding metro areas. For hard…
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City home prices outpacing metro by 50%
Since 2000, home prices have grown 50 percent faster in urban centers than in their surrounding metro areas. If your are an urban data geek, like we are, this is big news. A dramatic shift in city-suburb price differentials strongly signals a deep and enduring market demand for cities. A new research report from investment…
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The McMansion mirage reappears
OK, we admit we might be a bit obsessed with this story. But if you can, bear with us one more time. Here’s the most basic fact: The number of newly-built McMansions—single family homes of 4,000 square feet or larger—is down 43 percent since 2007. By any standard that’s a stunning decline. But because the market…
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Revisiting Marietta
Last month, we questioned why people weren’t paying more attention to Marietta, the Atlanta suburb that is tearing down 1,300 apartments and permanently displacing their low-income residents. We wondered why this large-scale displacement of poor households—most of whom are black or Latino—didn’t generate the same kind of outcry as much more ambiguous situations in urban…
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The difficulty of applying inequality measurements to cities
Earlier this year, our friends at the Brookings Institution released a new tabulation of Census data on levels of inequality in the nation’s largest cities. Inequality, in this case, is measured by dividing the income of a household at the 95th percentile of the population by the income of a household at the 20th percentile.…
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Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick. What purport…
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How cutting back on driving helps the economy
There are two kinds of economics: macroeconomics, which deals in big national and global quantities, like gross domestic product, and microeconomics, which focuses on a smaller scale, like how the prices of specific products change. Macroeconomics gets all the attention in the news cycle, as people talk about the unemployment rate, the money supply, inflation,…
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The value of walkability across the US
One of the factors that seems to be propelling the resurgence of cities around the nation is the growing demand for housing in walkable locations. One of the best sources of evidence of the value of walkability is home values, and some new evidence confirms that walkability adds to home values, and also shows that…
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Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia?
Imagine this: A city government takes $65 million in public money and buys up more 1,300 units of aging but affordable housing, which is home mainly to low income and minority residents. It demolishes the housing, and plans to sell the land to private developers for office and retail development. A pretty cut-and-dried case of…
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The devilish details of getting a VMT fee right
At City Observatory, we’re big believers that many of our transportation problems come from the fact that our prices are wrong – and solving those problems will require us to get prices right. While we desperately need a way to pay for roads that better reflects the value of the space we use, just moving…
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Paving Paradise
Vancouver and Seattle are regularly rated among the most environmentally conscious cities in North America. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked them among the top five greenest cities in 2012. The State of Washington has enacted a law setting a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2035 (RCW 70.235.20); British Columbia’s…
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Climate concerns crush Oregon highway funding bill
While headlines focus on the nearly-bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund, state and local departments of transportation across the country are facing declining revenues, maintenance backlogs, and an insatiable desire for funding new projects. As a result, this summer, a number of states are working on new highway funding packages. So far in 2015, eight states…
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The new trend in homeownership: Gerontrification
Two major reports in the last week have painted a stark picture of the future of the US housing market. Last week’s report from the Urban Institute predicted that the decline in homeownership over the past seven years will be “the new normal.” Then, on June 24, Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies released its…
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Playing together is getting harder to do
In our CityReport, Less in Common, we explored a key symptom of the decline in social capital: Americans seem to be spending less time playing together. One major driver of this trend is a dramatic privatization of leisure space. Instead of getting together in public parks and pools (or just playing in the street),…
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The Civic Commons & City Success
Why we wrote “Less in Common,” our latest CityReport. We’ve come increasingly to understand the role of social capital in the effective function of cities and urban economies. The success of both local and national economies hinges not just on machines and equipment, skilled workers, a financial system and the rule of law, but also…
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Less in Common
The essence of cities is bringing people—from all walks of life—together in one place. Social interaction and a robust mixing of people from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different incomes and interests is part of the secret sauce that enables progress and creates opportunity. This ease of exchange underpins important aspects of our personal…
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Is gentrification a rare big city malady?
Gentrification is a big issue in a few places, and not an issue at all elsewhere. Big cities with expensive housing are the flashpoint for gentrification. The city-policy-sphere is rife with debate on gentrification. Just in the past weeks, we have a French sociologist’s indictment of bourgeois movement to the central city, the Mayor of…
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The Convention Center Business Turns Ugly
There’s probably no better example of the faddish, “me too” approach to urban economic development than the pursuit by cities of every size for a slice of the convention and trade show business. Cities have built and expanded convention centers for decades, and in the past few years it’s become increasingly popular to publicly subsidize…
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Show Your Work: Getting DOT Traffic Forecasts Out of the Black Box
Traffic projections used to justify highway expansions are often wildly wrong The recent Wisconsin court case doesn’t substitute better models, but it does require DOTs to show their data and assumptions instead of hiding them The road less traveled: Wisconsin Highway 23 There’s a lot of high-fiving in the progressive transportation community about last month’s…
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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…
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Fake city, flawed thinking
There’s little question that technology is important to cities. Without elevators and electricity, for example, it would be almost inconceivable that we could have dense urban centers. So thinking about how advances in technology are likely to affect city success is critically important. And while technology captures our imagination, sometimes we become so fixated on…
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New evidence on integration and economic mobility
It’s unusual to flag an economics article as a “must-read” for general audiences: but if you care about cities and place, and about the prospects for the American Dream in the 21st Century, you owe it to yourself to read this new article by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility:…
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There’s no such thing as a Free-Way*
(* with apologies to Donald Shoup) A new report from Tony Dutzik, Gideon Weissman and Phineas Baxandall confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation finance that’s widely disbelieved or ignored: drivers don’t come close to paying the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Groups and U. S.…
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City of ideas, and the idea of cities
Notes from your far flung correspondent, in the shadow of the Acropolis. Though the local economy is still in turmoil, Athens is still awash in the steady tramping of tourists. Compared to your correspondent’s last visit to this city three decades ago, the distinguishing mark of tourism is no longer the long lines of foreigners…
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More evidence on city center job growth
In February, we released our latest CityReport documenting a remarkable turnaround in the pattern of job growth within metropolitan areas. After decades of steady job decentralization, the period 2007-2011 marked the first time that city centers in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas recorded faster job growth than their surrounding peripheries. Much of that rebound seemed…
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On Baltimore: Concentrated Poverty, Segregation, and Inequality
Yet again, a black citizen dies at the hands of the police. This event and the ensuing riots in Baltimore are a painful reminder of the deep divisions that cleave our cities. There’s little we can add to this debate, except perhaps to say that there’s a strong evidence for a point made by Richard…
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Young People are Buying Fewer Cars
Will somebody teach the Atlantic and Bloomberg how to do long division? In this post, we take down more breathless contrarian reporting about how Millennials are just as suburban and car-obsessed as previous generations. Following several stories drawing questionable inferences from flawed migration data claiming that Millennials are disproportionately choosing the suburbs (they’re not) come…
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Our six month anniversary!
It’s spring in the city On October 20 of last year, just six months ago, we launched City Observatory, a website and think tank devoted to data-driven analysis of cities and the policies that shape them. We are delighted to have participated in ongoing national discussions about a number of important policy issues facing cities.…
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Want to close the Black/White Income Gap? Work to Reduce Segregation.
Nationally, the average black household has an income 42 percent lower than average white household. But that figure masks huge differences from one metropolitan area to another. And though any number of factors may influence the size of a place’s racial income gap, just one of them – residential segregation – allows you to…
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Walkability rankings: One step forward, one step back
To begin, let’s be clear about one thing: we’re huge fans of Walk Score–the free Internet based service that rates every residential address in the United States (and a growing list of other countries) of a scale of 0 to 100, based on their proximity to a series of common destinations. The concept and implementation…
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More evidence of surging city job growth
In February, we released our latest CityReport Surging City Center Job Growth, presenting evidence showing employment growing faster in the city centers of the nation’s largest metros since 2007. Another set of analysts has, independent of our work, produced findings that point to renewed job growth in the nation’s inner city neighborhoods. A new report…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
City Observatory, April 1. 2015 A new City Observatory analysis reveals a new and dangerous threat to the nation’s economic productivity: costly and growing coffee congestion. Yes, there’s another black fluid that’s even more important than oil to the functioning of the U.S. economy: coffee. Because an estimated 100 million of us American workers can’t…
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How important is proximity to jobs for the poor?
More jobs are close at hand in cities. And on average the poor live closer to jobs than the non-poor. One of the most enduring explanations for urban poverty is the “spatial mismatch hypothesis” promulgated by John Kain in the 1960s. Briefly, the hypothesis holds that as jobs have increasingly suburbanized, job opportunities are moving…
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Twenty-somethings are choosing cities. Really.
Over at 538, Ben Casselman offers up a provocative, contrarian article “Think Millennials prefer cities? Think Again.” He claims that newly released census data show that, contrary to the “all the hipsters are moving to cities” meme, millennials–like previous generations–are actually migrating towards the suburbs. This is a case where we think the usually reliable…
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On the Road Again
The last few months have witnessed a notable rebound in vehicle miles traveled. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that for the year ended December, 2014, American’s drove 3.015 trillion miles, up about 1.7 percent from the previous year–the first noticeable increase in driving in more than a decade. The upward trend has led the…
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Who’s Vulnerable to Retail Retrenchment?
This week comes news that Target is laying off 1,700 workers at its Minneapolis headquarters, looking to become leaner and more efficient. It’s just the latest move in a shifting retail landscape in the United States. Target is not just downsizing its headquarters, it’s shifting to smaller urban stores–Target Express. Other retailers like Walmart and…
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Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage
A story published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog last week made the headline claim that “The McMansion is back, and bigger than ever.” The article says that new homes are an average of 1,000 feet larger than in 1982, and that the “death of the McMansion” has been highly exaggerated, as have claims that development…
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Has the Tide Turned?
Last month, City Observatory released a new report—Surging City Center Job Growth—chronicling a widespread rebound in city center jobs. For the first time in decades, job growth in city centers around the country has surpassed the rate of job growth in peripheral areas. In an article called “Fool for the City,” Jacob Anbinder of The…
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Florida’s Biotech Bet
For more than a decade, one of the hottest trends in economic development has been pursuing biotechnology. Cities and states around the nation have made considerable investments in biotech research, ranging from California’s voter-approved $3 billion research program, to smaller efforts in cities around the country, including Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Phoenix. One of the…
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What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the Smart City banner. But it seems each observer defines “city” in the image of their own profession. CEOs of IT firms say that cities are “a system of systems” and…
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Any Port in a Storm?
Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of media furor over the slowdown in container traffic handling on the West Coast as dockworkers and shipping companies negotiated the new terms of a labor deal. You no doubt heard a fair amount of hyper-ventilation about the economic consequences of disruptions to this international…
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Jobs Return to City Centers
(This post coincides with the newly released report, Surging City Center Job Growth. The report and more details are found here.) For decades, urban economists have chronicled the steady decentralization of employment in our metropolitan areas. First people moved to the suburbs for low density housing, and then businesses followed—especially retail and service businesses that catered…
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Surging City Center Job Growth
For over half a century, American cities were decentralizing, with suburban areas surpassing city centers in both population and job growth. It appears that these economic and demographic tides are now changing. Over the past few years, urban populations in America’s cities have grown faster than outlying areas, and our research shows that jobs are…
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The Perils of Conflating Gentrification and Displacement: A Longer and Wonkier Critique of Governing’s Gentrification Issue
It’s telling that Governing calls gentrification the “g-word”—it’s become almost impossible to talk about neighborhood revitalization without objections being raised almost any change amounts to gentrification. While we applaud the attempt to inject some rigor and precision into a debate that has been too often fueled by emotion and anecdote, Governing’s analysis serves only to…
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How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 2: Small Business)
We recently featured a post regarding how venture capital is associated with economic mobility. We know that these are strongly correlated—and that, if we are concerned with the ability of children today to obtain ‘The American Dream,’ we should be concerned with how to increase economic mobility. To understand more about how cities can increase…
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How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)
The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity project has spurred intense interest in the extent of economic mobility, measured by the likelihood that children born to low-income parents achieve higher economic status when they are adults. Their work shows a remarkable degree of geographic variation in intergenerational economic mobility.…
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How Governing got it wrong: The problem with confusing gentrification and displacement
Here’s a quick quiz: Which of the following statements is true? a) Gentrification can be harmful because it causes displacement b) Gentrification is the same thing as displacement c) Gentrification is a totally different thing than displacement d) All of the above If the only studying you did was a reading of the latest series…
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New Findings on Economic Opportunity (that you should know)
Our recent report, Lost in Place, closely tracks the growth of concentrated poverty in the nation’s cities; this is particularly important because of the widespread evidence of the permanent damage high-poverty neighborhoods do to children of poor families. Two new studies shed additional light on the importance of economic and racial integration to the life…
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Keeping it Weird: The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success
Note: This article appeared originally in the February 13, 2010, edition of The Oregonian. Forgive any anachronistic references. These are tough economic times. Although economists tell us the recession is officially over, a double-digit unemployment rate tells us something different. The bruising battle over the economic consequences of tax Measures 66 and 67 underscored deep disagreement…
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How productive is your city?
Which metropolitan economies are the most productive? Our broadest measure of economic output is gross domestic product — the total value of goods and services produced by our economy. Economists usually compare the productivity of national economies by looking at GDP per worker or per employee. At the sub-national level, the Bureau of Economic Analysis…
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One tip for a prosperous city economy
Local media over the course of the last several months have asked us variations on one question repeatedly: if our city wants to do better – be more productive, retain more young people, reduce poverty—how can it do that? That’s a very complicated question of course, and each metro area and urban core has its…
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You are where you eat.
The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists…
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Is life really better in Red States (and cities)?
The red state/blue state divide is a persistent feature of American politics. Political differences among states are also associated with important economic differences, and a similar patterns hold across and within metro areas. Big cities are more likely to be blue, and smaller towns and rural areas are red. The more densely populated portions of…
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How Should Portland Pay for Streets?
For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fees on households and businesses, a progressive income tax, and a kind of Rube Goldberg income tax pro-rated to average gasoline consumption,…
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Where are the food deserts?
One of the nation’s biggest health problems is the challenge of obesity: since the early 1960s the number of American’s who are obese has increased from about 13 percent to 35 percent. The problem is a complex, deep-seated one, and everything from our diet, to our inactive life-styles, to the built environment have been implicated…
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Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data
At City Observatory, we’ve come the conclusion that every city has its own unique characteristics that both define its identity and which play a key role in shaping its economic opportunities. These distinctive traits don’t always shine through in conventional economic data, which leads us to look for the rare statistics that convey more nuance…
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Anti-Social Capital?
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s…
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Ten More you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects. In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues. Here we offer ten more of the more interesting arguments that have been put forward as a follow up to our previous post, as well as…
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Lost in Place
Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. A close look at population change in our poorest urban neighborhoods over the past four decades shows that the concentration of poverty is growing and that gentrification is rare. While media attention often focuses on those few places that…
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Ten things you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects. In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues. Here we offer a baker’s dozen of some of the more interesting arguments that have been put forward. Daniel Kay Hertz explores the contradictions that emerge…
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City Report: Lost in Place
Here’s a summary of our latest CityReport: Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. Lost in Place traces the history of high poverty neighborhoods in large US cities, and constructs a new view of the process of neighborhood change. This article summarizes some of our key…
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Metro’s “Why Bother” Climate Change Strategy
If you’ve hung around enough espresso joints, you’ve probably heard someone order a “tall, non-fat decaf latte.” This is what baristas often call a “why bother?” That would also be a good alternate description for the Metro Climate Smart Communities Plan. Framed in glowing rhetoric, the plan purports to be a two-decade long region-wide strategy…
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Are suburbs really happier?
A few months back our friends at CityLab published the results of a survey looking at differences in attitudes about cities and suburbs under the provocative headline, “Overall, Americans in the suburbs are still the happiest.” Their claim is buttressed with a reported finding that 84 percent of all the respondents in suburbs said that…
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Our Shortage of Cities: Portland Housing Market Edition
The big idea: housing in desirable city neighborhoods in getting more expensive because the demand for urban living is growing. The solution? Build more great neighborhoods. To an economist, prices are an important signal about value: rising prices for an object or class of objects signal increasing value relative to other objects. In our conventional supply…
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Parking: The Price is Wrong
There is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wrong price for using roads. Nowhere are the effects of mispriced roads more apparent than on-street parking. Only for car storage…
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The four biggest myths about cities – #4: Traffic is getting worse
The Myth: Traffic congestion is getting worse The Reality: Congestion has declined almost everywhere It’s a common movie trope – a busy commuter rushes out of his downtown office at 5pm, hoping to get only to enter a citywide traffic jam. In reality, traffic congestion across the country has been in steady decline thanks to…
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The four biggest myths about cities – #3: Crime is rising in cities
The Myth: Crime in cities is on the rise The Reality: Cities are getting safer For decades, the common perception about cities is that they were dangerous, dirty, and crowded. A look at the facts tells a different story: our cities are cleaner, safer, quicker, and healthier than ever. Today I’ll take a look at…
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And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . .
Akron, Ohio! With a 20.2 percent increase in post-secondary degrees awarded over the past three years, Akron outpaced the 56 other metro areas entered in the Talent Dividend Prize contest. As the winner of the Talent Dividend Prize, Akron will receive one million dollars to promote further efforts to raise college attainment in Northeast Ohio. …
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The four biggest myths about cities – #2: Cities are dirty
The Myth: Cities are polluted and have dirty air The Reality: Urban air quality has improved dramatically since 1990 For decades, the common perception about cities is that they were dangerous, dirty, and crowded. A look at the facts tells a different story: our cities are cleaner, safer, quicker, and healthier than ever. Today I’ll…
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The four biggest myths about cities – #1 Cities aren’t safe for children
If your impression of cities came entirely from watching the evening news, you might think that cities are saddled with ever-increasing traffic congestion and rising crime rates. From talking to your Great Aunt Ida at Thanksgiving, you’d think that New York was more dangerous for children than the suburbs and that Los Angeles was still…
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Young and Restless
The Young and Restless—25 to 34 year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education—are increasingly moving to the close-in neighborhoods of the nation’s large metropolitan areas. This migration is fueling economic growth and urban revitalization. Using data from the recently released American Community Survey, this report examines population change in the 51 metropolitan…
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Welcome to City Observatory!
Welcome to what matters for city success. Our original analysis and in-depth research on cities and urban issues is designed to inform community leaders, policy makers, policy wonks and the rest of us.
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Upcoming Reports
In the next few weeks, look for new City Observatory reports addressing city job growth, the unfolding process of neighborhood change, and the changing way we create, use and interact with public spaces in cities.
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Is Portland really where young people go to retire?
Forget the quirky, slacker stereotype, the data show people are coming to Portland to start businesses. A recent New York Times magazine article “Keep Portland Broke,” echoed a meme made popular by the satirical television show “Portlandia” asking whether the city will always be a retirement community for the young. Far from being a retirement…
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Our Shortage of Cities
The Big Idea: High housing prices in American cities are a symptom of our shortage of great urban neighborhoods. The tried-and-true solution to a shortage is to supply by building new neighborhoods—places where people want to live.