Category: Commentary
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History shows IBR modeling is simply wrong
Highway department’s are selling multi-billion dollar highway widening projects based on flawed traffic projections. The projections prepared for the predecessor of the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project predicted traffic would grow 1.3 percent per year after 2005. In reality, traffic across the I-5 bridges has increased by only about 0.1 percent per year…
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The Week Observed, November 9, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments. Portland’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan commits the Metro area to reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 12 percent over the next twenty-five years. But the traffic forecasts used to justify the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project call for more…
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IBR: Planning for a world that no longer exists
The Interstate Bridge Project’s traffic projections pretend that the massive shift to “work-from-home” never happened The IBR traffic projections rely almost entirely on pre-Covid-pandemic data, and ignore the dramatic change in travel patterns. Traffic on I-5 is still 7 percent below pre-pandemic levels, according to Oregon DOT data Traffic on the I-5 bridge is lower…
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IBR’s DSEIS uses the least accurate forecast
Oregon and Washington have commissioned not just one forecast of future traffic levels on I-5 and I-205, but three different forecasts. IBR officials are clinging to the one forecast that is the least accurate, and most error-prone, and have chosen to ignore two more accurate forecasts. IBR relies on Metro’s Kate Model, which has an…
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IBR contradicts region’s climate commitments
IBR Traffic Forecasts Violate Portland Region’s Climate Commitments Portland’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan commits the Metro area to reduce total vehicle miles traveled by 12 percent over the next twenty-five years. But the traffic forecasts used to justify the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project call for more than a 25 percent increase in…
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Needless purposes: How IBR violates NEPA
The $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s two-decade old “Purpose and Need” statement is simply wrong, and provides an invalid basis for the project’s required Environmental Impact Statement. Contrary to claims by project proponents, the “Purpose and Need” statement isn’t chiseled in stone, rather it is required to be evolve to reflect reality and better…
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The Week Observed, November 1, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week There’s a critical flaw in the planning of the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge project: Metro’s Kate travel demand model is wildly inflating I-5 traffic numbers. The model claims 164,050 vehicles crossed the I-5 bridges daily in 2019, but ODOT’s own traffic counters tell a drastically different story – only…
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Metro’s Kate Model: 25,000 phantom cars a day on the I-5 bridge
How can we trust Metro’s model to predict the future, when it can’t even match the present? Metro’s Kate travel demand model, used to plan the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge, includes 25,000 phantom cars per day in its base year estimates. The existing I-5 bridges over the Columbia River carried 138,800 vehicles on an average…
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IBR traffic modeling violates professional standards and federal rules
Traffic modeling is guided by a series of professional and administrative guidelines. In the case of the proposed $7.5 Interstate Bridge Replacement Project, IBR and Metro modelers did not follow or violated these guidelines in many ways as they prepared their traffic demand modeling. IBR modelers: Didn’t assess accuracy of their previous modeling Failed to…
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Cooking the Books: How IBR used “Post-Processing” to alter the Metro Model
To hear project officials tell it, traffic projections emerge from the immaculate and objective Metro “Kate” traffic model But in reality, IBR traffic projections are not the outputs of the Kate travel demand model. Instead, IBR consultants have altered the Metro numbers, something the label “post-processing.” But what they’ve done, doesn’t meet the professional standards…
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Inventing millions of phantom trucks to sell a wider bridge
The $7.5 billion plan to widen the I-5 bridges across the Columbia River is being sold, in part, based on claims that it will be used by millions of phantom trucks. Metro’s biased truck modeling over-states current I-5 truck traffic by almost 70 percent: more than 2 million phantom trucks per year. Metro’s model says…
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They’re digging in the wrong place
The Interstate Bridge Project proposes spending $7.5 billion to widen I-5, but misses the real bottleneck. A new, independent analysis by national traffic expert Norm Marshall of Smart Mobility, Inc., shows that the proposed IBR project fails to fix the real bottlenecks affecting I-5 traffic. Traffic problems on I-5 are caused by bottlenecks outside the…
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Moving the goalposts: Redefining traffic congestion
IBR re-wrote the definition of congestion to make I-5 traffic look worse For decades, Oregon DOT has defined traffic congestion as freeway speeds below 35 MPH. Now, for the Interstate Bridge project, IBR has moved the goalposts: now any speed under 45 MPH is counted as “congested.” The definition of “congested” matters because its central…
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The Week Observed, October 25, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week They’re digging in the wrong place: A new, independent analysis by national traffic expert Norm Marshall of Smart Mobility, Inc., shows that the proposed IBR project fails to fix the real bottlenecks affecting I-5 traffic. The Interstate Bridge Project proposes spending $7.5 billion to widen I-5, but misses the real bottleneck. …
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The Week Observed, October 18, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Forecasting the impossible: The case for the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is based on deeply flawed traffic models that ignore the bridge’s capacity limits, and predict plainly unrealistic levels of traffic growth if the bridge isn’t expanded. These grossly overestimated projections make future traffic look worse and…
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IBR: Forecasting the impossible
The case for the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is based on deeply flawed traffic models that ignore the bridge’s capacity limits, and predict plainly unrealistic levels of traffic growth if the bridge isn’t expanded. These grossly overestimated projections make future traffic look worse and overstate the need and understate the environmental and financial…
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Kate: Metro’s wildly inaccurate model overstates current traffic levels
The case for the $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project is based on traffic projections from Metro’s “Kate” travel demand model. But there’s a huge problem: Kate doesn’t accurately model even current levels of traffic. The model has a high overall error factor, and importantly, consistently over-estimates traffic on the existing I-5 bridges. Metro has…
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The Interstate Bridge Project’s Flawed Traffic Data
The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project simply can’t tell the truth about current traffic levels or recent growth rates. IBR reports inflate the current level of traffic on I-5 bridges by nearly 5,000 vehicles per day IBR reports falsely claim that I-5 bridge traffic is growing twice as fast as ODOT’s own data show IBR officials…
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The Week Observed, August 30, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week There’s no evidence of a housing bubble. Strong Towns Chuck Marohn has a recent blog post proclaiming that the US housing market is the midst of another bubble, similar to 2008. But a closer look at housing market fundamentals, especially mortgage debt, shows few parallels to that earlier debacle.…
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Another housing bubble brewing? Not really
Another housing bubble? Strong Towns Chuck Marohn argues that we’re in the midst of another housing bubble. He claims the housing market is full of fraud and is a bubble that’s “ready to pop,” just like in 2008. Is there really a new housing bubble? Marohn’s cites the surge in house prices and worries about…
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City Observatory’s Joe Cortright on the Housing Bubble–2005
In an op-ed published in the Portland, Oregonian on July 17, 2005, City Observatory director Joe Cortright predicted that the US was in the throes of a housing bubble. The text of this op-ed follows: THE ECONOMIST: High-flying house prices fueled by fervor can’t last July 17, 2005 | Oregonian, The (Portland, OR) Author/Byline: JOE CORTRIGHT;…
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The Week Observed, August 23, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week How Metro’s RTP illegally favors driving and violates state climate rules. Oregon’s planning rules require Portland area transportation plans to prioritize investments that reduce vehicle miles traveled–but the region’s transportation plan illegally prioritizes spending for freeway expansions. Metro’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan devotes most of its resources to providing additional…
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How Metro’s RTP Illegally favors car travel and violates climate rules
Oregon’s planning rules require Portland area transportation plans to prioritize investments that reduce vehicle miles traveled Metro’s adopted Regional Transportation Plan devotes most of its resources to providing additional capacity for car travel Metro’s own climate analysis shows investments in roads are the least effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Transit, biking, walking and…
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The Week Observed, August 16, 2024
Must Read Portland advocates sue to block Rose Quarter Freeway widening. There’s a new chapter in the long-running battle to block the Oregon Department of Transportation’s I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project, a 10-lane mile and a half expansion that has quadrupled in cost to $1.9 billion. Local advocates, led by No More Freeways, have…
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The Week Observed, August 2, 2024
Must Read Induced Demand and Climate Denial. As we’ve long said, the favorite folk tale of state DOTs and highway boosters is the idea that the primary solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions is lowering the amount of time cars spend indling in traffic. If we widening the highway so that cars could just go…
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The Week Observed, July 26, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week The cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) is going up: But we won’t tell you how much . . . And we’re not going to tell you until a year from now, after the 2025 Legislature adjourns In January, 2024, IBR official publicly acknowledged that their 13 month-old cost…
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Hiding the growing cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement
The cost of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) is going up: But we won’t tell you how much . . . And we’re not going to tell you until a year from now, after the 2025 Legislature adjourns In January, 2024, IBR official publicly acknowledged that their 13 month-old cost estimate of up to $7.5 billion…
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The Week Observed, July 19, 2024
Must Read Denser cities = Less expensive infrastructure. A new study from New Zealand confirms one of the fundamental intuitions about cities: Places with higher levels of residential density have lower per capita and per dwelling costs of providing physical infrastructure. This study looked at the cost of providing roads, water lines and sewers to…
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The Week Observed, July 12, 2024
Must Read The problem with elevators in America. Market Urbanism’s Stephen Smith has an op-ed in the New York Times opening up a new front in the YIMBY effort to expand housing supply in the US. Smith argues that the development of affordable, sustainable multi-family housing in the US is thwarted by two arcane regulatory…
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The Week Observed, June 28, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Unique Local Experiences: The Hidden Value in Urban Economies. An often-overlooked aspect of urban economics: the value of unique, local, and seasonal experiences. We take as an example the case of Hood strawberries in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, we explore how scarcity and locality can enhance economic and cultural value…
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Strawberries and economic prosperity
Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences I pity you, dear reader. You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around the Summer Solstice in the shadow of this mountain, chances are you have never tasted a Hood strawberry. The Hood is…
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The Week Observed, June 21, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Inventing a “commitment” to megaproject cost-overruns. Oregon’s Department of Transportation is is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to unapproved freeway s and massive cost overruns. They’re using this fiction to argue that the state is somehow obligated to pay for expensive freeway expansions and can’t first fix…
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Inventing a “commitment” to freeway cost overruns
How ODOT is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to freeway cost overruns. The 2017 Legislature authorized zero funding for the I-205 Bridge project In 2024, ODOT now falsely claims that the I-205 project was a “commitment” of the 2017 Legislature The original HB 2017 only directed ODOT to produce a “cost to…
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An 18 month delay for the IBR due to flawed traffic projections
The $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project (IBR) is likely delayed up to 18 months because of flawed traffic modeling. The Oregon and Washington DOTs are in denial about the problem, but previously secret records obtained by City Observatory show ODOT and WSDOT have long known that traffic modeling needed to be fixed, and put…
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The Week Observed, June 14, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project is facing significant delays of up to 18 months. The culprit? Flawed traffic modeling that overestimates future traffic use. City Observatory and others have long pointed up flaws in IBR’s traffic modeling, arguing it overestimates traffic growth and…
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The Week Observed, June 7, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week We grade the city clean energy scorecard. A new scorecard tires to measure how cities are promoting energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases—a laudable goal. But the scorecard has some serious limitations.This scorecard emphasizes policies and process over measurable progress—only 6 of a possible 250 points are tied directly…
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Grading the City Clean Energy Scorecard
A new scorecard tries to measure how cities are promoting energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases—a laudable goal. But the scorecard has some serious limitations. This scorecard emphasizes policies and process over measurable progress—only 6 of a possible 250 points are tied directly to lowering greenhouse gas emissions Scores and rankings can help motivate action,…
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How “anti-social” capital varies by city
The number of security guards is a good measure of a city’s level of “anti-social” capital We thought we’d take an updated look at one of our favorite indicators of “social-capital”–the number of private security guards as a share of the local workforce. Having lots of security guards is likely an indicator of distrust and…
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The Week Observed, May 24, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week A costly cargo cult in Portland: A proposal to spend $30 million per year subsidizing the revival of container shipping operations at the Port of Portland is misguided effort based on outdated economic thinking. Portland was never more than a very minor player in containerized shipping, handling less than…
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Cargo Cult Comeback: Cost–$30 million a year
Portland’s $30 Million Container Shipping Folly Cargo cults are a well-documented sociological phenomenon: Cargo cults were religious movements that emerged among indigenous people in Melanesia during the early to mid-20th century. The cults were inspired by the arrival of European colonizers and the material goods they brought. The islanders observed the seemingly magical ability of outsiders…
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The Week Observed, May 17, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation can and should mitigate the negative impacts of its highway construction projects, including social and economic impacts. ODOT’s massive $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter highway project is billed as “restorative justice” because it would construct caps over the freeway that decimated Portland’s historically Black…
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Oregon DOT can and should mitigate past damage from highways
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has proposed a $1.9 billion freeway widening project for Portland’s Rose Quarter. The agency proposes to cover a portion of the freeway in what it calls “restorative justice” for the Albina neighborhood, that was decimated by decades of earlier ODOT highway building. But ODOT claims it can’t spend highway…
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The Week Observed, May 10, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Another Oregon Department of Transportation exploding whale.* The cost of one of OregonDOT’s megaprojects, the expansion of the I-205 Abernethy Bridge over the Willamette River south of Portland just jumped $750 million, now triple the amount the agency said the project would cost when it moved forward five years…
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The Interstate Bridge Replacement is Two Years Behind Schedule
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Project is two years behind schedule IBR’s Draft SEIS was supposed to be complete in December 2022—It now won’t be done before December 2024. This two-year delay means the environmental review has taken twice as long as IBR promised Not to worry, because the consultants will continue billing, and their…
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Abernethy Bridge Cost Triples to $750 million
Oregon DOT’s I-205 Abernethy Bridge rebuild, advertised as costing $248 million, will really cost $750 million The project’s estimated cost has tripled in just over five years, and still has further cost overrun risk ODOT’s plans to cover these cost overruns would mean cancelling dozens of other projects around the state, and/or a huge statewide…
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The Week Observed, May 3, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Beware of phony claims that highway projects are “On-time and Under-Budget.” For highway departments, the key to being on-time and under-budget is Orwellian double-speak. Oregon DOT projects are always on-time and under budget–because the agency simply “disappears” its original schedules and budgets. Delayed, half-finished projects are officially described as…
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Moving the goalposts
The key to being on-time and under-budget: Orwellian double-speak Oregon DOT projects are always on-time and under budget–because the agency simply disappears its original schedules and budgets. Delayed, half-finished projects are officially described as “On-time and on-budget” Oregon DOT routinely hides its waste, mismanagement and incompetence The last bits of fresh asphalt have been rolled…
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The Week Observed, April 26, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week Earth Day: Oregon is spending billions to widen freeways in a move that will only worsen the increase in greenhouse gases from transportation. Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gases in Oregon (and in the US) and unlike other sectors, GHGs from transportation are increasing. That’s the opposite…
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The Week Observed, April 12, 2024
Must Read The high, high cost of “affordable housing.” The Voice of San Diego takes a look at the pricetag of several affordable housing projects in California and finds they’re pushing and breaking through the million-dollar a unit mark. Across the 17 projects it examined, average costs were $574,000 a unit. Many factors contributed to higher…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Widening Freeways Kills the Planet!
Despite legal pledges to reduce greenhouse gases to address climate change, Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions are going up, not down. State, regional and city governments have adopted climate goals that purport to commit us to steadily reducing greenhouse gases, but we’re not merely failing to make progress, we’re going in the wrong direction. April…
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The Week Observed, April 19, 2024
What City Observatory Did This Week A teachable moment: Free Ice Cream Day. Traffic was lined up around the block last Tuesday at your local Ben and Jerry’s, for the same reason roadways are clogged most weekday afternoons: the price is too low. April 16 was Ben and Jerry’s annual free ice cream day. In…
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Bye Containers, Again
Once again, Portland loses container service: the economic effects will be minimal. Economic development has long been obsessed with “cargo cult” thinking: the idea that economic prosperity is caused by ports and highways moving raw materials and finished goods. That may have been partly true in the 19th Century, but today the sources of prosperity…
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A teachable moment: Ben & Jerry’s seminar in transportation economics
They’ll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads Your highway department is broke, and thinks it needs much bigger roads because it gives its produce away for free every day. Charging a fair price for using roads, just like charging a fair price for…
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The Week Observed, April 5, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Thirty seconds over Portland: Spending $7.5 billion on a freeway widening project will save the typical affected commuter about 30 seconds a day, according to the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s yet-to-be-released Environmental Impact Statement. IBR officials have said they fear leaks of the EIS could create a negative perception…
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Another thing IBR doesn’t want you to know: 30 seconds over Portland
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project will save the average commuter just 30 seconds in daily commute time IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project Guess what: We have an advance copy of the draft EIS: You can now see what they don’t want…
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States need honest reporting on transportation greenhouse gases
You can’t tell if you’re winning or losing if you don’t keep score, especially when it comes to transportation greenhouse gas emissions. But a close look at the data shows we’re not making much progress, and not making it fast enough, primarily because we’re driving more. Your state highway department is likely to be in…
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The Week Observed, March 29, 2024
What City Observatory did this week What the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project doesn’t want you to know. The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement. IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project. Guess…
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Carmageddon does a no show, again (Baltimore edition)
On Tuesday, March 26, the containership Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing it to collapse into the Patapsco River. Tragically, six workers on the bridge were killed, but fortunately the collision occurred in the middle of the night, rather than during peak travel hours, when hundreds of vehicles would likely…
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What IBR doesn’t want you to know
The $7.5 Billion Interstate Bridge Replacement project is afraid of what you’ll find out when they release their Environmental Impact Statement IBR officially determined that “leaking” the project EIS would result in “negative public reaction” to the project Guess what: We have an advance copy of the draft EIS: You can now see what they…
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The Week Observed, March 22, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The high cost of covering freeways. The latest fashion in highway urbanism is “capping” freeways. In theory, highway builders claim that capping freeways will repair past damage and even create new urban land. They produce gauzy green renderings of what capped freeway might look like. But urban leaders need…
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Freeway covers are an expensive way to create new urban land
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could create valuable new urban land by decking over freeways? Turns out, its massively uneconomical, and doesn’t eliminate many of the most negative effects of urban freeways Its massively uneconomical because that “land” thats created by capping freeways costs at least three times more to build than the land…
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The Week Observed, March 15, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Abandoning road pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation, traffic reduction and climate plans. This week, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek terminated Oregon’s Regional Mobility Pricing Program, which would have imposed per mile fees on major Portland-area freeways. The plan, approved by the legislature seven years ago, has been developed at a snail’s…
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Monkey-wrenching road pricing
R.I.P. Road Pricing in Oregon: Dead before its even tried More than just money, the demise of pricing monkey-wrenches state transportation policy It’s no surprise: ODOT’s attempts to implement pricing have been half-hearted and still-born Without pricing, Portland traffic congestion will grow worse, and this blows a hole in state and regional climate plans This…
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The Week Observed, March 8, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A yawning chasm in neighborhood distress among metro areas. Almost every metropolitan area has some neighborhoods that face serious economic distress, but the patterns of distress vary widely across the nation. We use data from the Economic Innovation Group’s latest distressed communities index to identify clusters of contiguous zip…
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A yawning chasm: Patterns of neighborhood distress in US metros
There’s a yawning chasm of neighborhood level economic distress across US metro areas. While about 1 in 6 US neighborhoods is classed as distressed, some metro areas have large concentrations of distress, while others have almost no distressed neighborhoods at all. Focusing on groups of contiguous zip codes classified as “distressed” shows that in some…
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The Week Observed, March 1, 2024
What City Observatory Did this Week Is it time to address the problem of “Missing Massive” housing? This past week marked the latest convening of YIMBYTown, this year, held in Austin, Texas. One of the perennial topics was state strategies to promote “missing middle” housing—as evidenced by multiple initiatives to allow duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes…
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Housing: Missing Middle or Missing Massive?
Gradually, more people and elected leaders are admitting that more housing density is needed if we’re to tackle housing affordability, and provide equitable opportunities to live in great cities and neighborhoods. But like a swimmer cautiously dipping a toe in a fresh stream, we’re proceeding slowly: It’s been (relatively) easy to talk about “missing middle”…
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The Week Observed, February 16, 2024
Must Read The freeway cap mirage. Don’t like freeways? Let’s just cover up the problem. It’s increasingly popular to try to repair the damage done to urban neighborhoods by “capping” freeways: building a cover so that the road is less visible. While that’s widely seen as an improvement, some are pushing back that its really…
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The Week Observed, February 9, 2024
What City Observatory did this week Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study. Some of the most important policy decisions are buried deep in seemingly technocratic documents. Case-in-point: Oregon’s Highway Cost Allocation Study. The state’s truckers are using the latest report to claim that they’re being overcharged, but the real story is very…
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Three big flaws in ODOT’s Highway Cost Allocation Study
There are good reasons to be dubious of claims that trucks are being over-charged for the use of Oregon roads. The imbalance between cars and trucks seems to stem largely from the Oregon Department of Transportation”s decision to slash maintenance and preservation, and spend more widening highways. ODOT could largely fix this “imbalance” by spending…
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The Week Observed, February 2, 2024
Must Read How CalTrans cheated on its environmental reporting. Some months back, former Deputy Director of CalTrans,Jeanie Ward-Waller blew the whistle on the agency’s effort to evade environmental laws and illegally use maintenance funds to widen I-80 between Sacramento and Davis. Now the National Resources Defense Council has laid out a strong case that the…
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Climate: Our Groundhog Day Doom Loop
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and transortation greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Case in point: Portland’s Regional Transportation Plan: It claims to do something about climate, but…
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The Week Observed, January 26, 2024
What City Observatory this week Robert Moses strikes again: One of the most infamous decisions of “The Power Broker” was to build the overpasses on the Long Island Expressway too low to allow city buses to use the roadway, cementing auto-dependency and blocking easy and economical transit access to many suburbs. And eight decades later,…
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Bus on shoulder: Stalking horse for freeway widening
ODOT isn’t giving buses the shoulder, it’s giving transit the finger. IBR is planning a transitway for the new $7.5 billion interstate bridge that can’t be used by buses. It’s sketching in a “bus on shoulder” option as an excuse to justify building an even wider highway crossing. Meanwhile it plans to place light rail…
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The Week Observed, January 19, 2024
What City Observatory this week Why does it take four years and $200 million for consultants to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing? The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admitted that he’s just pushing “basically the same” project that failed a decade ago, but in the process, he’s spent $192 million…
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Why spend $200 million on consultants for “basically the same project”?
Why does it take four years and $200 million to serve up a warmed-over version of the Columbia River Crossing? The Interstate Bridge Replacement Project’s director admitted that he’s just pushing “basically the same” project that failed a decade ago, but in the process, he’s spent $192 million on consultants, with the largest single chunk…
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The Week Observed, January 12, 2024
What City Observatory did this week The pernicious myth of “Naturally Occurring” Affordable Housing. One of the most dangerous and misleading concepts in housing reared its ugly head in the form a a new publication from, of all places, the American Planning Association. The publication “Zoning Practice: Preserving Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing” purports to offer…
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The pernicious myth of “naturally occurring” affordable housing
Housing doesn’t “occur naturally” Using zoning to preserve older, smaller homes doesn’t protect affordability There’s no such thing as “Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing”–older, smaller homes become affordable only if supply and demand are in balance, usually because it’s relatively easy to build more housing. The parable of the ranch home shows that old, small homes…
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The Week Observed, January 5, 2024
What City Observatory did this week A $9 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project? Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the Oregon and Washington DOTs say it will cost even more. We estimate project costs are likely to increase 20 percent or more,…
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It looks like the Interstate Bridge Replacement could cost $9 billion
Just 13 months after raising the price of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project by more than 50 percent, the state DOTs ay it will cost even more We estimate project costs are likely to increase 20 percent or more, which would drive the price tag to as much as $9 billion, almost double the…
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The Week Observed, December 22, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Bad data. What appears, at first glance, to be a big decline in trip-making is really an object lesson in failing to read the footnotes. Every five years or so, the US Department of Transportation produces the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which provides essential information about American travel…
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Bad data: Not a decline in travel
An imagined decline in trip-making is the result of bad data analysis USDOT counted fewer trips in 2022, because it used a different, and less reliable survey method USDOT’s social media created a false perception that 2022 data were comparable with earlier years For all the time we spend talking about transportation, it’s surprising how…
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The Week Observed, December 15, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle. A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness. The Interstate Bridge Project is a value-destroying proposition: it costs more to build than it provides in economic benefits Federal law requires that highway projects be demonstrated to be “cost-effective” in…
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Exaggerated Benefits, Omitted Costs: The Interstate Bridge Boondoggle
A $7.5 billion highway boondoggle doesn’t meet the basic test of cost-effectiveness The Interstate Bridge Project is a value-destroying proposition: it costs more to build than it provides in economic benefits Federal law requires that highway projects be demonstrated to be “cost-effective” in order to qualify for funding. The US Department of Transportation requires applicants…
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The Week Observed, December 8, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Tolling i-5 will produce massive traffic diversion. The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers. These tolls will cause tens of thousands of vehicles per day to stop crossing the I-5 bridge; and most traffic will…
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Diversion: IBR tolls will gridlock I-205
The proposed I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project will be paid for in part by $2.80 to $4.30 tolls charged to travelers. These tolls will cause tens of thousands of vehicles per day to stop crossing the I-5 bridge; and most traffic will divert to the parallel I-205 bridge, producing gridlock, according to IBR consultant…
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Down is not up: The truth about traffic, congestion and trucking
A central message of the highway building sales pitch is that traffic is ever-growing and ever worsening, and that we have no choice but to throw more money at expanded capacity. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) claims that traffic is every-rising, congestion is ever-worsening, and we’re always moving more and more trucks. The reality,…
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The ten lane freeway hiding in Rose Quarter Plans
Secret ODOT plans obtained by City Observatory show ODOT is planning a ten-lane freeway through the Rose Quarter Though the agency claims its “just adding one auxiliary lane” in each direction, the I-5 Rose Quarter project is engineered with a 160-foot wide footprint, enough for 10 full travel lanes and extra wide shoulders. In places…
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The Week Observed, December 1, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Secret plans show ODOT is planning a 10-lane freeway in the Rose Quarter. City Observatory has obtained previously un-released plans showing that the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter project is being build with a 160-foot wide roadway, enough to accommodate a ten through traffic lanes, contradicting the Oregon Department…
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The Week Observed, November 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week 5 million miles wide of the mark.Portland’s regional government Metro, has proposed a regional transportation plan (RTP) that purports to achieve state and regional policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But there’s a 5 million mile problem: The climate analysis of the Metro RTP assumes that the region will…
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Lying about climate: A 5 million mile a day discrepancy
Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) claims it will meet state and regional climate objectives by slashing vehicle travel more than 30 percent per person between now and 2045. Meanwhile, its transportation plan actually calls for a decrease in average travel of less than 1 percent per person. Because population is expected to increase, so too…
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The Week Observed, November 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Snow-Job: Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) threatens to slash snow-plowing and other safety maintenance unless it is given more money, while spending billions on a handful of Portland area freeway widening projects. ODOT claims it’s too broke to plow state roads this winter, with the not-at-all-subtle message that people…
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ODOT Snow Job: Give us more money, or we’ll stop plowing your roads
Oregon’s Department of Transportation (ODOT) says it doesn’t have enough money to maintain roads, fix potholes or even plow snow. This is a Big Lie: Mega-projects and their cost-overruns, not maintenance, are the cause of ODOT’s budget woes ODOT has chosen to slash operations, while funneling hundreds of millions to billion-dollar-a-mile mega-projects and consultants Plowing is…
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The Week Observed, November 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Killer off-ramps. The Oregon Department of Transportation’s $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter widening has been repeatedly (and falsely) portrayed as a “safety” project, but the latest re-design of the project may make it even more dangerous than it is today. An earlier “Hybrid 3” re-design, added one dangerous hairpin…
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Rose Quarter’s Killer Ramps
The proposed re-design of the I-5 Rose Quarter Project now includes two deadly hairpin freeway off-ramps. Just last week, Brandon Coleman was killed at a similar hairpin highway ramp in downtown Portland The Oregon Department of Transportation doesn’t really care about safety. The plan to widen I-5 through the Rose Quarter, at the staggering cost…
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Doubling down on climate fraud in Metro’s RTP
Earlier, we branded Portland Metro’s proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed the region was reducing greenhouse gases, and falsely claimed its transportation investments were on track to meet adopted state climate goals. Metro’ staff has responded to these critiques, but proposes only to fix these mistakes at some vague…
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Britain’s Caste System of Transportation
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaims the primacy of drivers “We are a nation of drivers” Those who don’t own cars, or can’t, or choose not to drive, are second class citizens The transportation culture war is flaring up in Britain. Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has cancelled the nation’s big high speed rail initiative…
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What if we regulated cars like we do houses?
What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? A recent story about Singapore caught our eye: In Singapore, you can’t even buy a car without a government issued “certificate”—and the number of certificates is fixed city wide. The government auctions a fixed number of certificates each year, and the…
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The Week Observed, September 15, 2023
What City Observatory did this week This is what victory looks like. Freeway fighting is hard, drawn-out work. StateDOTs and their allies have vast funding for public relations campaigns to sell giant projects; citizen activists work from a shoestring budget, and have to attend interminable meetings that are invariably organized by project proponents. In general,…
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This is what victory looks like, Freeway Fighters
Bad projects die with a whimper, not a bang Freeways are promoted with extravagant—and usually false—p.r. campaigns, but their death is just a bureaucratic footnote Freeway fights are often long, drawn-out affairs, that involve challenging poorly conceived and wasteful projects at a seemingly unending series of public meetings. In practice, freeway fighters generally lose every…
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The Week Observed, October 27, 2023
What City Observatory did this week More climate fraud in Portland Metro’s proposed regional transportation plan. We branded Metro’s proposed Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) a climate fraud because in falsely claimed the region was reducing greenhouse gases, and falsely claimed its transportation investments were on track to meet adopted state climate goals. Metro’ staff has…
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The Week Observed, October 13, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Britain’s Caste system of transportation. In a cynical ploy to revive the Conservative Party’s flagging electoral hopes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has engaged in some blatant pro-motorist posturing. Saying that drivers “feel under attack” Sunak has declared that Britain is “a nation of drivers.” Sunak’s claim highlights what we’ve…
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The Week Observed, October 20, 2023
Must Read Portland: Four Floors and Corner Stores–Upzoning for urban development and housing affordability. A coalition of community, enviornmental and social justice groups is advocating for a YIMBY strategy for more housing in Portland’s close-in Eastside neighborhoods. Like many US cities, Portland faces tight housing markets, affordability challenges. This strategy aims at improving affordability by…
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The Week Observed, October 6, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What if we regulated new car ownership the same way we do new housing? Getting a building permit for a new house is difficult, expensive, and in some places, simply impossible. In contrast, everywhere in the US, you can get a vehicle registration automatically, just for paying a prescribed…
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The Week Observed, September 8, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What apartment consolidation in New York tells us about housing markets and gentrification. A new study shows that over the past several decades, New York City lost more than 100,000 homes due to the combination of smaller, more affordable apartments into larger, more luxurious homes When rich people can’t…
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Gentrification and Housing Supply
New York lost more than 100,000 homes due to the combination of smaller, more affordable apartments into larger, more luxurious homes When rich people can’t buy new luxury housing, they buy up, and combine small apartments to create larger homes. This is a negative sum game: the number of housing units gained by high income…
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Rose Quarter: Death throes of a bloated boondoggle
For years, we’ve been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland. The past few months show this project is in serious trouble. Here’s a summary of our reporting of key issues Another exploding whale: The cost of the Rose Quarter has quadrupled to…
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The Week Observed, September 1, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter: Death throes of a bungled boondoggle. For years, we’ve been following the tortured Oregon Department of Transportation Plans to widen a 1.5 mile stretch of I-5 near downtown Portland. The past few months show this project is in serious trouble. Here’s a summary of our reporting of…
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The Week Observed, August 25, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Metro’s Climate-Denial Regional Transportation Plan. Portland’s regional governtment, Metro, has published a draft Regional Transportation Plan, outlining priorities for transportation investments for the next two decades, and ostensibly, aiming to deal with transportation greenhouse gas emissions, the largest source of climate pollution in the region. But unfortunately, the RTP,…
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Metro’s Climate-Denying Regional Transportation Plan
Portland Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) does nothing to prioritize projects and expenditures that reduce greenhouse gases Metro falsely asserts that because its overall plan will be on a path to reduce GHGs (it wont), it can simply ignore the greenhouse gas emissions of spending billions to widen freeways The RTP’s climate policies don’t apply…
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The Week Observed, August 18, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Climate fraud in the Portland Metro RTP. Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gases in Portland. For nearly a decade, our regional government, Metro, has said it…
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The climate fraud in Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan
Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan rationalizes spending billions on freeway expansion by publishing false estimates and projections of greenhouse gas emissions Transportation is the number one source of greenhouse gases in Portland. For nearly a decade, our regional government, Metro, has said it is planning to meet a state law calling for reducing greenhouse gas emissions…
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The Week Observed, August 11, 2023
Must Read Some Texas-sized greenwashing for highway widening in Austin. TXDOT is aiming to spend close to $5 billion to widen I-35 through downtown Austin, and to sweeten the deal, they’re producing project renderings showing lengthy caps over portions of the widened freeway. One hitch though: while TXDOT will pay to build the highway, it…
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The Week Observed, August 4, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Eating local: Why independent, local restaurants are a key indicator of city vitality. Jane Jacobs noted decades ago that“The greatest asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place.” While much of our food scene is dominated by national chains, some cities have many,…
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Local flavor: Independent restaurants indicate city vitality
Which US cities have the most independent restaurants? One of the chief advantages of cities is the range of consumption choices they afford to their residents. In general, larger cities offer more choices than smaller ones. One of the things that makes a city special and distinctive is its food and culture. Too much of…
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The Week Observed, July 28, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Myth-busting: Idling and greenhouse gas emissions. Highway boosters are fond of claiming that they can help fight climate change by widening highways so that cars don’t have to spend so much time idling. It’s a comforting illusion to think that helping you drive faster is the solution to climate…
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Urban myth busting: Congestion, idling, and carbon emissions
Increasing road capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will backfire Widening roads to reduce idling simply induces more travel and more pollution Cities with faster travel have higher greenhouse gas emissions Time for another episode of City Observatory’s Urban Myth Busters, which itself is an homage to the venerable Discovery Channel series “Mythbusters” that featured co-hosts Adam Savage…
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The Week Observed, July 21, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Few highway construction dollars for Black-owned firms in Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged business enterprises. One-tenth of one percent of construction contracts for the I-205 Abernethy Bridge, ODOT’s largest current project, went to Black construction firms. ODOT…
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ODOT’s I-205 Bridge: 1/10th of 1 Percent for Black Contractors
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is falling short of its own goals of contracting with disadvantaged business enterprises One-tenth of one percent of I-205 contracts went to Black construction firms ODOT professed a strong interest in helping Black contractors as a selling point for the I-5 Rose Quarter project, but instead advanced the I-205…
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The Week Observed, July 14, 2023
What City Observatory did this week We have an in-depth series of reports on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s imploding I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. The cost of the I-5 Rose Quarter project has now quadrupled to $1.9 billion—it was a mere $450 million when it was sold to the Legislature in 2017. ODOT…
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Rose Quarter: So expensive because it’s too damn wide
The cost of the $1.9 billion Rose Quarter freeway is driven by its excessive width ODOT is proposing to more than double the width of the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway through the Albina neighborhood ODOT could easily stripe the roadway it is building for ten traffic lanes The high cost of building freeway covers stems…
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Who sold out the HAAB?
The members of ODOT’s “Historic Albina Advisory Board” (HAAB) are hopping mad. As related by Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland, they feel board betrayed by a decision to postpone construction of the $1.6 billion I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. For years, the staff of the Oregon Department of Transportation have been promising the HAAB…
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Pens down!
The price of ODOT’s trouble plagued Rose Quarter project has quadrupled to $1.9 billion, and the agency has no way to pay for it, because it spent the money the Legislature provided in 2017 on another project. And agency staff is telling the state Transportation Commission there’s nothing that can be done to consider modifying…
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Extend and Pretend: ODOT’s Zombie Rose Quarter project
The Oregon Department of Transportation is playing “Extend and Pretend” with the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project The cost of the 1.5 mile freeway widening has quadrupled from $450 million in 2017 to $1.9 billion today. Meanwhile, the agency has diverted money earmarked for the Rose Quarter to other projects, and now…
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The Week Observed, July 7, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Yet another exploding whale: One of the Internet’s most popular videos shows employees of the Oregon Department of Transportation blowing up a dead whale carcass stranded on an Ocean beach, with bystanders running in terror from a rain of blubber. ODOT’s latest fiasco is the exploding price tag of…
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Another exploding whale: ODOT’s freeway widening cost quadruples
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s I-5 Rose Quarter $450 million freeway widening project will cost more than $1.9 billion The project’s estimated cost has nearly quadrupled in just six years, and still has further cost overrun risk Even OTC commissioners question whether it’s worth more than a billion dollars to widen a 1.5 mile stretch…
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Testimony to the Oregon Transportation Commission
On June 28, 2023, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Transportation Commission about the agency’s dire financial situation. Background: The Oregon Department of Transportation is pushing a multi-billion dollar freeway widening program in Portland, dubbed the “Urban Mobility Plan.” The agency has never fully identified how the plan would be paid for, and…
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The Week Observed, June 30, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Scratch one flat top! That was the famous cry of US Naval aviators, when, early in World War II they chalked up their first victory, sinking the Japanese aircraft carrier Shoho. Portland’s freeway fighters, who’ve been battling for years against the multi-billion dollar expansion plans of the Oregon Department…
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Scratch one flat top!
Oregon freeway fighters chalk up a key victory—but the fight continues On June 26, the Oregon Department of Transportation finally bowed to reality that it simply lacks the funds to pay for a seven-mile long widening of I-205 just outside of Portland. Predictably, ODOT conceded defeat in the most oblique possible terms; the I-205 project…
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The Week Observed, June 23, 2023
What City Observatory did this week We took the week off to celebrate the Summer Solstice and gorge on Hood strawberries! We’ll be back next week. Must Read The amazing non-appearance of Carmageddon. Echoing the point we made a City Observatory in the days—Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly —after the I-95 freeway closure in Philadelphia,…
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The Week Observed, June 16, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Carmageddon does a no-show in Philly. A tanker truck caught fire and the ensuing blaze caused a section of I-95 in Philadelphia to collapse. This key roadway may be out of commission for months, and predictably, this led to predictions of “commuter chaos.” But on Monday morning, traffic in…
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Carmageddon does a no show, again (Philadelphia edition)
On Sunday June 11, a tanker truck caught fire on I-95 and the intense heat caused a section of the freeway to collapse. I-95 is one of the nation’s principal north-south connections, and carries 160,000 vehicles per day. It’s expected that repairs to the roadway could take months. What would commuters and travelers do without…
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The Week Observed, June 9, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Guest contributor Miriam Pinski observes that getting the prices right could produce dramatic improvements in how US transportation systems perform. New York is on the verge of implementing congestion pricing, and other US cities are strongly considering similar policies. Pricing turns out to be the cornerstone of encouraging widespread…
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Getting prices right to improve urban transportation
City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Miriam Pinski. With the needed federal environmental approvals in hand, New York looks set to be the first American city to implement congestion pricing. This may be a watershed moment in transportation policy: if it can make it there, it can make it anywhere. Other cities, including Los…
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The Week Observed, June 2, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What computer renderings really show about the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project: It’s in trouble. The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer graphic renderings showing possible designs for a new I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland. But what they show is a project in real trouble. And they…
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What new computer renderings really show about the IBR
The Interstate Bridge Project has released—after years of delay—computer graphic renderings showing possible designs for a new I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland. But what they show is a project in real trouble. And they also conceal significant flaws, including a likely violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. Here’s what they really show: IBR…
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The Week Observed, May 26, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Pricing is a better, cheaper fix for congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to squander $1.45 billion to widen about a mile and a half of I-5 in Portland—that’s right about $1 billion per mile. But a new analysis prepared by ODOT…
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The Week Observed, May 19, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter tolls: Available, but not foreseeable? There’s a glaring–and illegal–contradiction in the planning for the Oregon Department of Transportation’s $1.45 billion Rose Quarter project. While ODOT’s financial plan claims that needed funds for the project will come from tolling I-5, the project’s environmental analysis claims that there’s no…
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Pedestrian safety: There’s no technical fix
Engineers would have us believe that we’re just one shiny new technology away from making streets safer for people walking 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…
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The Week Observed, May 12, 2023
What City Observatory did this week There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project. Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrinking costly and damaging highway widening projects In Cincinnati, the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project Was downsized 40…
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What Cincinnati’s Brent Spence Bridge can tell Portland
There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrinking costly and damaging highway widening projects In Cincinnati, the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project Was downsized 40 percent without causing delays due to…
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The Week Observed, May 5, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why can’t Oregon DOT tell the truth? Oregon legislators asked the state transportation department a simple question: How wide is the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement they want to build? Seems like a simple question for an engineer. But in testimony submitted to the Legislature, Oregon DOT officials…
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Why can’t ODOT tell the truth?
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) can’t tell the truth about the width of proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project ODOT is more than doubling the width of the bridge from its existing 77 feet to 164 feet. The agency can’t even admit these simple facts, and instead produces intentionally misleading and out of…
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The Week Observed, April 21, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state? Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily commuters, and two-thirds of all traffic on the bridge are Washington residents. On average, these commuters earn more than…
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A blank check for the highway lobby: HB 2098-2
The HB 2098 “-2” amendments are perhaps the most fiscally irresponsible legislation ever to be considered by the Oregon Legislature. They constitute an open-ended promise by the Oregon Legislature to pay however much money it costs to build the Interstate Bridge Replacement and Rose Quarter freeway widenings—projects that have experienced multi-billion dollar cost overruns in…
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Why should Oregonians subsidize suburban commuters from another state?
Oregon is being asked to pay for half of the cost of widening the I-5 Interstate Bridge. Eighty percent of daily commuters, and two-thirds of all traffic on the bridge are Washington residents. On average, these commuters earn more than Portland residents. The 80/20 rule: When it comes to the I-5 bridge replacement, users will…
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The Week Observed, April 14, 2023
What City Observatory did this week The case against the Interstate Bridge Project. We offer 16 reasons why Oregon and Washington lawmakers should question the current plans for the proposed $7.5 billion I-5 freeway expansion project between Portland and Vancouver. Here’s reason #10 (but click through to read all 16!) 10. IBR traffic projections have…
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Put a bird on it: Highway Greenwashing
There’s no shortage of cynical greenwashing to sell climate-killing highway widening projects GeorgiaDOT and AASHTO have a new PR gimmick to promote the same old product In a famous season one sketch of Portlandia, Fred Armisten and Carrie Brownstein popularized the catch-phrase, “Put a bird on it” about a hipster couple who transformed all manner…
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The Case Against the Interstate Bridge Replacement
Here are our 16 top reasons Oregon and Washington need to re-think the proposed Interstate Bridge Replacement Project. The bloated size of the project and its $7.5 billion cost, and the availability of better alternatives, like a bascule bridge, call for rethinking this project, now. It’s not a bridge, it’s a freeway widening and interchange…
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The Week Observed, April 7, 2023
What City Observatory did this week IBR’s plan to sabotage the “moveable span” alternative. The proposed $7.5 billion Portland area freeway widening project is supposedly looking at a moveable span option to avoid illegally impeding water navigation. But state DOT officials are planning to sabotage the analysis of a moveable span options as part of…
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Wile E. Coyote hits bottom: Portland’s inclusionary zoning
Portland’s inclusionary zoning requirement is a slow-motion train-wreck; apartment permits are down by sixty percent in the City of Portland, while apartment permitting has more than doubled in the rest of the region Inclusionary zoning in Portland has exhibited a Wile E. Coyote pattern: apartment starts stayed high initially, until a backlog of grandfathered units…
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IBR’s plan to sabotage the moveable span option
IBR officials are planning to sabotage the analysis of a moveable span options as part of the Interstate Bridge Project The Coast Guard has said a replacement for the existing I-5 bridges would need a 178 foot navigation clearance. The highway departments want a 116′ clearance fixed span. The Oregon and Washington DOTs say they…
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The Week Observed, March 31, 2023
What City Observatory did this week What are they hiding? Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge: Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses trick to make their oversized bridge appear smaller than it…
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The Color of Money: Bailing out highways with flexible federal funds
ODOT grabs a billion dollars that could be used for bikes, pedestrians and transit, and allocates it to pay highway bills. Oregon highways are out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the cost of fixing them can–and should–be paid for out of the State Highway Fund. But instead, ODOT plans to take…
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What are they hiding? Why highway builders won’t show their $7.5 billion freeway
Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge: Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses trick to make their oversized bridge appear smaller than it really is. The bridge will blot out much…
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The Week Observed, March 23, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Oregon’s transportation finance in crisis: Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. On March 16, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature’s budget-writing committee about the financial crisis confronting the state’s transportation agency. The Oregon Department of Transportation’’s traditional sources of revenue are collapsing, and will certainly…
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Oregon’s transportation fiscal crisis
Oregon’s transportation finance in crisis: Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee. On March 16, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature’s budget-writing committee about the financial crisis confronting the state’s transportation agency. The Oregon Department of Transportation’’s traditional sources of revenue are collapsing, and will certainly decline further in coming years. The…
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Housing affordability? Localism is the problem, not the solution
Do we need a federal commission on housing affordability? Bruce Katz, author of “The New Localism” is calling for a national commission to come up with recommendations for dealing with the nation’s housing crisis. A truly serious, national discussion of housing affordability, and what we could do to expand housing supply, is a…
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The Week Observed, March 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge cost $7.5 billion? For almost two decades the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been saying they want to replace the I-5 bridges over the Columbia River connecting Portland and Vancouver. Late last year, they announced that the total cost of the project…
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The Week Observed, April 28, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Testifying on the Oregon Transportation Finance. City Observatory director Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature on HB 2098, a bill being proposed to fund bloated freeway widening projects in the Portland Metropolitan area. As we’ve previously reported at City Observatory, proposed amendments to this bill would give the…
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Houston’s I-45: Civil rights or repeated wrongs?
Editor’s Note: For the past two year’s the Federal Highway Administration has been investigating a civil rights complaint brought against the proposed I-45 freeway expansion project in Houston. This week, FHWA and TxDOT signed an agreement to resolve this complaint. Urban freeways have been engines of segregation and neighborhood destruction for decades, a fact that…
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The Week Observed, March 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion? For the past several years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing for construction of something they call the “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project, which is a warmed-over version of the failed Columbia River Crossing. The project’s budget…
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Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion?
The “bridge replacement” part of the Interstate Bridge Replacement only costs $500 million, according to new project documents So why is the overall project budget $7.5 billion? Short answer: This is really a massive freeway-widening project, spanning five miles and seven intersections, not a “bridge replacement” Longer (and taller) answer: The plan to build half-mile…
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The Week Observed, March 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week More induced travel denial. Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel. We offer our rebuttal to a reason column posted at Planetizen, attempting to minimize the importance of induced demand for highways. Induced travel is a well established scientific fact: any increase in roadway capacity in…
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More induced travel denial
Highway advocates deny or minimize the science of induced travel Induced travel is a well established scientific fact: any increase in roadway capacity in a metropolitan area is likely to produce a proportional increase in vehicle miles traveled Highway advocates like to pretend that more capacity improves mobility, but at best this is a short…
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The Week Observed, February 24, 2023
What City Observatory did this week IBR admits its bridge is too steep. After 15 years of telling the region that the only feasible alternative for crossing the Columbia River was a pair of side-by-side double-decker bridges, the IBR project let slip that it was now thinking about a single level crossing, ostensibly because it…
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I-205 tolls will cost you $600 per year
ODOT’s planned I-205 tolls will cost the average local household $600 annually. Regular commuters on I-205 will have to pay $2,200 per year in tolls under the ODOT plan The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to pay for its widening of the I-205 Interstate South of Portland by charging tolls. These tolls will represent…
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IBR floats new bridge design, proving critics right
For four years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing a revival of the failed multi-billion dollar I-5 Columbia River Crossing. Their key sales pitch is that the size and design of the project can’t vary in any meaningful way from the project’s decade-old record of decision, for fear of delaying construction or…
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The Week Observed, February 17, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15. Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-way, at the peak hour. Drive from Vancouver to a job in Wilsonville? Get ready to shell out as much…
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Driving between Vancouver and Wilsonville at 5PM? ODOT plans to charge you $15
Under ODOT’s toll plans, A driving from Wilsonville to Vancouver will cost you as much as $15, each-way, at the peak hour. Drive from Vancouver to a job in Wilsonville? Get ready to shell out as much as $30 per day. Tolls don’t need to be nearly this high to better manage traffic flow and…
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The Week Observed, February 10, 2023
What City Observatory did this week CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project. Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the cost of the I-5 Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) had ballooned 54 percent, to as much as $7.5 billion. To allay…
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CEVP: Non-existent cost controls for the $7.5 billion IBR project
Oregon DOT has a history of enormous cost overruns, and just told the Oregon and Washington Legislatures that the cost of the I-5 Bridge Replacement Program (IBR) had ballooned 54 percent, to as much as $7.5 billion. To allay fears of poor management and further cost overruns, IBR officials testified they had completed a “Cost…
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The Week Observed, February 3, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Groundhog’s Day for Climate. So you think you’re not Bill Murray in the classic “Groundhog’s Day?” Oregonians, ask yourself: are we anywhere closer to seriously addressing the climate crisis than we were a year ago? Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing, chiefly because we’re driving more, and our policies…
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What the City of Portland said about the Rose Quarter
City of Portland raises big questions about the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project (translated). Last month was the deadline for comments on the supplemental environmental analysis for the proposed $1.45 billion I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project. Our friends at Bike Portland got a copy of the city’s comment letter, signed by then Portland…
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Climate: Our Groundhog Day Doom Loop
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress If it seems to you like you’ve read this before, you have: We’re marking this year’s…
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The Week Observed, January 27, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Driving stakes, selling bonds, overdosing on debt. The Oregon Department of Transportation is following a well trodden path to push the state toward a massive highway expansion project. For example, Oregon DOT has kicked off the half billion dollar I-205 project with no permanent funding in place, instead relying…
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Driving stakes, selling bonds: ODOT’s freeway boondoggle plan
The Oregon Department of Transportation is launching a series of boondoggle freeways, with no idea of their ultimate cost, and issuing bonds that will obligate the public to pay for expensive and un-needed highways. Future generations will have to pay off the bonds AND suffer the climate consequences The classic Robert Moses scam: Drive stakes,…
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The Week Observed, January 20, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. We’re reminded this year of Dr. Martin Luther King’s observation that our cities, and the public policies that shape them, are deeply enmeshed in our history of racism. Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges…
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Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor
It’s a long road to redressing inequality Fifty-five years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the stilted rhetoric used use to talk about public spending to promote the social good: Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and…
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The Week Observed, January 13, 2023
What City Observatory did this week A reporter’s guide to congestion cost studies. For more than a decade, we and others have been taking a close, hard and critical look at congestion cost reports generated by groups like the Texas Transportation Institute, Tom-Tom, and Inrix. The reports all follow a common pattern, generating seemingly alarming,…
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Another flawed Inrix Congestion Cost report
Sigh. Here we are again, another year, and yet another uninformative, and actively misleading congestion cost report from Inrix. More myth and misdirection from highly numerate charlatans. Burying the lede: Traffic congestion is now lower than it was in 2019, and congestion declined twice as much as the decline in vehicle travel. Today, Inrix released…
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A reporter’s guide to congestion cost studies
Reporters: read this before you write a “cost of congestion” story. Congestion cost studies are a classic example of pseudo-science: Big data and bad assumptions produce meaningless results Using this absurd methodology, you can show: Waiting at traffic signals costs us $8 billion a year—ignoring what it would cost in time and money to have…
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The Week Observed, January 6, 2023
What City Observatory did this week The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening. This week marked the end of public comment on the Supplemental Environmental Assessment for the Oregon Department of Transportation’s proposed $1.45 billion I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening projects. At a billion dollars a mile, its one of the world’s most…
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The case against the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening
Portland is weighing whether to spend as much as $1.45 billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter near downtown. We’ve dug deeply into this idea at City Observatory, and we’ve published more than 50 commentaries addressing various aspects of the project over the past four years. Here’s a…
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Flat Earth Sophistry
The science of induced travel is well proven, but state DOTs are in utter denial Widening freeways not only fails to reduce congestion, it inevitably results in more vehicle travel and more pollution The Oregon Department of Transportation has published a technical manual banning the consideration of induced travel in Oregon highway projects. The Oregon…
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Traffic is declining at the Rose Quarter: ODOT growth projections are fiction
ODOT’s own traffic data shows that daily traffic (ADT) has been declining for 25 years, by -0.55 percent per year The ODOT modeling inexplicably predicts that traffic will suddenly start growing through 2045, growing by 0.68 percent per year ODOT’s modeling falsely claims that traffic will be the same regardless of whether the I-5 freeway…
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The truth about Oregon DOT’s Rose Quarter MegaFreeway
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) desperately wants to build a mega-freeway through NE Portland, and is planning to double the freeway from 4 lanes to 8 or 10 lanes. But it has hidden its true objective, by claiming only to add two “auxiliary” lanes to the existing 4 lane freeway, and arguing (falsely) that…
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The IBR project: Too much money for too many interchanges
The real expense of the $5 billion I-5 bridge replacement project isn’t actually building a new bridge over the Columbia River: It’s widening miles of freeway and rebuilding every intersection north and south of the river. A decade ago, an independent panel of experts convened by OR and WA governor’s strongly recommended to ODOR and WSDOT…
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The Week Observed, December 16, 2022
Editor’s Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project Between now and January 4, 2023, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. If you’re interested, you can make your voice heard. For more information on how to comment, we urge…
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Blame inflation now: Lying about the latest IBR Cost Overrun
The price of the I-5 “bridge replacement” project just increased by more than 50 percent, from $4.8 billion to $7.5 billion ODOT and WSDOT are blaming “higher inflation” for IBR cost overruns As we’ve noted, the Oregon Department of Transportation has a long string of 100 percent cost-overruns on its major projects. Almost every large…
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Pricing works better than spending $1.45 billion to fix I-5 traffic
A recently disclosed ODOT memo shows that congestion pricing would do a better job of fixing I-5 congestion than spending $1.45 billion widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter Congestion pricing would would be more than a billion dollars cheaper, would make traffic on I-5 move faster, and would produce less pollution than widening…
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ODOT doesn’t care about covers, again
ODOT’s Supplemental Environmental Analysis shows it has no plans for doing anything on its vaunted freeway covers It left the description of cover’s post-construction use as “XXX facilities” in the final, official Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement The report makes it clear that “restorative justice” is still just a vapid slogan at the Oregon Department of…
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ODOT’s I-5 Rose Quarter “Improvement”: A million more miles of local traffic
ODOT’s proposed relocation of the I-5 Southbound off-ramp at the Rose Quarter will add 1.3 million miles of vehicle travel to local streets each year. Moving the I-5 on ramp a thousand feet further south creates longer journeys for the 12,000 cars exiting the freeway at this ramp each day. The new ramp location requires…
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The Week Observed, December 2, 2022
Editor’s Note: Public Comment on the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Project In the next month, the public will be asked to weigh in with its comments on the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway Widening project. If you’re interested, you can make your voice heard. For more information on how to comment, we urge you to…
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Why won’t ODOT tell us how wide their freeway is?
After more than three years of public debate, ODOT still won’t tell anyone how wide a freeway they’re planning to build at the Rose Quarter ODOT’s plans appear to provide for a 160-foot wide roadway, wide enough to accommodate a ten lane freeway, not just two additional “auxiliary” lanes ODOT is trying to avoid NEPA,…
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The black box: Hiding the facts about freeway widening
State DOT officials have crafted an Supplemental Environmental Assessment that conceals more than it reveals The Rose Quarter traffic report contains no data on “average daily traffic” the most common measure of vehicle travel Three and a half years later and ODOT’s Rose Quarter’s Traffic Modeling is still a closely guarded secret The new SEA…
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The Week Observed, November 18, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve? The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from Interstate 5. This supposed “safety” project may really creating a new “Deadman’s Curve” at the Moda Center. A key part of the project’s re-design is moving an off-ramp about…
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ODOT: Our I-5 Rose Quarter safety project will increase crashes
A newly revealed ODOT report shows the redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project will: creates a dangerous hairpin turn on the I-5 Southbound off-ramp increase crashes 13 percent violate the agency’s own highway design standards result in trucks turning into adjacent lanes and forcing cars onto highway shoulders necessitate a 1,000 foot long “storage area”…
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The Rose Quarter’s Big U-Turn: Deadman’s Curve?
The redesign of the I-5 Rose Quarter project creates a hazardous new hairpin off-ramp from a Interstate 5 Is ODOT’s supposed “safety” project really creating a new “Deadman’s Curve” at the Moda Center? Bike riders will have to negotiate on Portland’s busy North Williams bikeway will have to negotiate two back-to-back freeway ramps that carry…
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ODOT reneges on Rose Quarter cover promises
The soon-to-be released Rose Quarter I-5 Revised Environmental Assessment shows that ODOT is already reneging on its sales pitch of using a highway widening to heal Portland’s Albina Neighborhood. It trumpeted “highway covers” as a development opportunity, falsely portraying them as being covered in buildings and housing—something the agency has no plans or funds to…
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The Week Observed, November 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are blundering ahead with a $5 billion plan to widen I-5 between Portland and Vancouver, and are making many of the same mistakes they made with the failed Columbia River Crossing a decade ago. A key difference: last time, there was…
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Highway officials misrepresent Coast Guard permit requirements
The Interstate Bridge Project falsely claimed to a legislative committee that the USDOT/Coast Guard agreement on bridge permits doesn’t apply to the IBR project. This is part of a repeated series of misrepresentations about the approval process for bridges and the impact of the Coast Guard’s preliminary navigation determination that a new crossing must provide…
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The Week Observed, November 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Risky bridges: If you’re going to spend several billion dollars, you might want to get some independent expert advice. Oregon and Washington are on the verge of committing 5 billion dollars to the construction of the so-called I-5 “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project between Portland and Vancouver. But they’re doing…
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The Week Observed, October 28, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A toll policy primer for Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to finance billions in future road expansions with tolling. While we’re enamored of road pricing as a way to better manage our transportation system, the movement to raise moeny with tolls, and in particular by borrowing…
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Risky Bridges: Deja vu all over again
Needed: An independent review of technical mistakes that could cost billions The proposed multi-billion dollar Interstate Bridge Replacement is shaping up a repeat of the Columbia River Crossing (CRC) fiasco because the two states haven’t done anything to independently verify the work of their staff. Oregon DOT and WSDOT are repeating all the key mistakes…
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A Toll Policy Primer for Oregon
Oregon doesn’t have tolls on any of its major roads or bridges. But faced with stagnant gas tax revenues, and with an appetite for huge freeway expansion projects, the Oregon Department of Transportation has committed itself to using tolls to generate billions of dollars in revenue. And let’s be clear, as economists, we support the…
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The Week Observed, October 21, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Using phony safety claims to sell a billion dollar freeway widening. This past week, Sarah Pliner, a promising young Portland chef was killed when she and her bike were crushed by a turning truck at SE Powell Boulevard and 26th Avenue. This intersection is an Oregon Department of Transportation…
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ODOT’s safety lie is back, bigger than ever
Oregon DOT is using phony claims about safety to sell a $1.45 billion freeway widening project People are regularly being killed on ODOT roadways and the agency claims that it lacks the resources to fix these problems Meanwhile, it proposes to spend billions of dollars widening freeways where virtually no one is killed or injured…
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The Week Observed, October 14, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Two of the three candidates for Oregon Governor are Climate Deniers. Oregon will elect a new Governor next month, and two of the three candidates for the job insist on repeating the discredited myth that greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by widening freeways so that people don’t spend…
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Two out of three candidates for Oregon Governor are climate denialists
The Republican and Independent candidates for Oregon Governor are happy to spout a convenient myth that we can fight climate change by widening highways. That myth has been completely disproven: wider roads encourage more driving and more greenhouse gases Advocating for more and wider roads is climate change denial Oregon has been one of the…
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The Week Observed, July 29, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Fix it Last. The Oregon Department of Transportation claims that it has a “Fix-it” first policy–prioritizing spending funds to preserve existing roads and bridges. But their actual budget priorities make it clear that they routinely short change maintenance and repair in favor of costly and ineffective road expansion projects. …
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ODOT’s “Fix-it first” fraud
ODOT claims that its policy is “fix-it first” maintaining the highway system. But it is spending vastly less on maintenance and restoration than is needed to keep roads and bridges from deteriorating It blames the Legislature for not prioritizing repair over new construction But it chooses to advance policies that prioritize spending money on new…
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Failing to Learn from Failed CRC
Metro Council voted on July 14th to wave on the proposed “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project which is really a bloated, 5 mile long, 12-lane wide freeway that will cost $5 billion and likely much more. It’s a scene-for-scene remake of the disaster that was the failed Columbia River Crossing a decade ago. Metro’s then-President David…
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A bridge too low . . . again
Ignoring the Coast Guard dooms the I-5 Bridge Project to yet another failure The Oregon and Washington DOTs have again designed a I-5 bridge that’s too low for navigation In their rush to recycle the failed plans for the Columbia River Crossing, the two state transportation departments have failed to address Coast Guard navigation concerns…
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Oregon and Washington DOTs plan too low a bridge–again.
The Coast Guard has told Oregon and Washington that a new I-5 bridge must have a 178-foot vertical clearance for river navigation–vastly higher than the 116-foot clearance the state’s have proposed A fixed span with that clearance would be prohibitively expensive and would have to be huge–nearly 2 miles long, and would have steep grades. …
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The Week Observed, June 24, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The economics of fruit, time, and place. It’s berry time in Portland, and that got us thinking about how special local products are in defining quality of life. Recently, Paul Krugman, fresh off a European vacation, waxed poetic about the fleeting joy of summer fruit, and true to form,…
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Fruit and economics: Local goods
Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences I pity you, dear reader. You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around the Summer Solstice in the shadow of this mountain, chances are you have never tasted a Hood strawberry. The Hood…
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“Free parking” isn’t green
No matter how many solar panels it has, your parking garage isn’t green, and especially if you don’t charge parking (This commentary is cross-published at the Parking Reform Network) Almost five years ago, we called out the folks at the National Renewable Energy Lab for claiming that their shiny new LEED-platinum candidate parking structure was…
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The Week Observed, June 10, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon DOT’s “reign of error”—chronic cost overruns on highway projects. The Oregon Department of Transportation is moving forward with a multi-billion dollar freeway expansion plan in Portland. That poses a huge risk to state finances because the agency has a demonstrated track record of cost overruns. We show that…
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ODOT’s Reign of Error: Chronic highway cost overruns
Nearly every major project undertaken by the Oregon Department of Transportation has ended up costing at least double its initial estimate As ODOT proposes a multi-billion dollar series of highway expansions, its estimates pose huge financial risks for the state ODOT refuses to acknowledge its long record of cost-overruns, and has no management strategy to…
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Flying blind: Why public leaders need an investment grade analysis
Portland and Oregon leaders shouldn’t commit to a $5 billion project without an investment grade analysis (IGA) of toll revenues Not preparing an IGA exposes the state to huge financial risk: It will have to make up toll revenue shortfalls, The difference between an IGA and ODOT forecasts is huge: half the traffic, double the…
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The Week Observed, July 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Failing to learn from the failure of the Columbia River Crossing. Last week, Portland’s Metro Council voted 6-1 to wave on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s plan for a multi-billion dollar freeway widening project branded as a bridge replacement. In doing so, the Council is ignoring the lessons of…
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The Week Observed, July 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A Bridge too low. The Oregon DOT is fundamentally misrepresenting the process and legal standards for setting the height of a proposed new multi-billion dollar I-5 bridge across the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver. Ignoring the Coast Guard’s determination that a new bridge must provide 178 feet of…
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The Week Observed, July 8, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Building a bridge too low–again. In their effort to try to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing (a $5 billion freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver) the Oregon and Washington transportation departments are repeating each of the mistakes that doomed the project a decade ago. The latest blunder: …
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The Week Observed, July 1, 2022
Must read The most gas guzzling states. The sting of higher gas prices depends on where you live, not so much because of the variation in prices, but because in some states, you just have drive a lot more. The website Quotewizard took a look at federal data from the energy and transportation departments, and…
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The Week Observed, June 17, 2022
What City Observatory did this week There’s nothing green about free parking, no matter how many solar panels you put on the garage. The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory brags about its sustainable parking garage, festooned with solar panels. But the garage, designed to hold about 1,800 cars is essentially fossil fuel…
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The Week Observed, May 27, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Our apologies to City Observatory readers for our website outage on 19-22 May. More meaningless congestion pseudo science. A new study from the University of Maryland claims that traffic lights cause 20 percent of all time lost in traffic. The estimate is the product of big data analysis of…
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More Congestion Pseudo Science
A new study calculates that twenty percent of all time “lost” in travel is due to traffic lights Finally, proof for the Lachner Theorem: Traffic signals are a major cause of traffic delay Another classic example of pseudo-science: Big data and bad assumptions produce meaningless results When I was in graduate school, I shared a house…
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The Week Observed, May 20, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Another exploding whale: The cost of the I-205 bridge project doubles in four years. Famously in the 1960s, the Oregon State Highway Department tried to dispose of the carcass of a whale that had washed up on an Oregon beach with several cases of dynamite. They predicted that the…
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Yet another exploding whale: ODOT’s freeway widening cost doubles
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s I-205 Abernethy Bridge rebuild, advertised as costing $248 million, will really cost $500 million The project’s estimated cost has doubled in just four years, and still has further cost overrun risk The Oregon DOT has experienced massive cost-overruns on all of its largest construction projects, and has systematically concealed…
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The Week Observed, May 13, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Just Say “No” to freeway widening zealots. George Santayana meet David Bragdon: Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat the failures of the past. A year ago, we published this commentary by David Bragdon, now Director of the Transit Center, but a decade ago, President of…
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Just say no: How to deal with highway widening zealots
The Oregon and Washington highway departments are at it again, pushing a 10- or 12-lane, five mile long freeway widening project that’s likely to cost at least $5 billion. They’re responding to objections with a combination of misleading rhetoric and feigned acceptance of “conditions” to minimize the project’s impacts This is exactly what they did…
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How ODOT & WSDOT are hiding real plans for a 10- or 12-lane I-5 Bridge Project
Ignore the false claims that the Oregon and Washington highway departments are making about the number of lanes on their proposed I-5 project: its footprint will be 164 feet—easily enough for a 10- or 12-lane roadway. This commentary was originally published at Bike Portland, and is re-published here with permission. If you followed Tuesday’s Portland City Council…
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The Week Observed, May 6, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Ten questions that deserve answers before making a multi-billion dollar decision. The Portland metro area is being asked by the Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation to give the go ahead to a $5 billion, 5 mile long freeway widening project. It would be one of the biggest infrastructure…
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Ten unanswered questions about the IBR Boondoggle
In the next month or two, regional leaders in Portland are going to be asked to approve the “modified locally preferred alternative” for the I-5 Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project, an intentionally misnamed, $5 billion, 5 mile long, 12-lane wide freeway widening project between Portland and Vancouver, Washington. There’s a decided rush to judgment, with almost…
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The Week Observed, April 29, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The folly of the frog ferry. One bane of transportation policy discussions is the tendency to believe that miracle technical fixes—self-driving cars, personal aircraft, the Segway, or Elon Musk’s car tunnels–are going to overcome the physics, geometry and economics that make transportation a hard problem. The latest iteration of…
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Frog Ferry: The slow boat to nowhere
A proposed Portland area ferry makes no economic or transportation sense. Why the Frog Ferry is a slow boat to nowhere A ferry between Vancouver and Portland would take 20 minutes longer than existing bus service From flying cars to underground tunnels to ferry boats, there’s always an appetite for a seemingly clever technical fix…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Waste Billions Widening Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. The Oregon Department of Transportation is hell-bent on widening freeways and destroying the planet April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to billions dollars into three Portland area freeway…
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The Week Observed, April 22, 2022
What City Observatory did this week How sprawl and tax evasion are driving demands for wider freeways. The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are proposing to spend roughly $5 billion to widen a 5 mile stretch of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver. The case for the widening is based on the need to accomodate…
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Sprawl and Tax Evasion: Driving forces behind freeway widening
Sprawl and tax evasion are the real forces fueling the demand for wider freeways Highway widening advocates offer up a a kind of manifest destiny storyline: population and traffic are ever-increasing, and unless we accommodate them we’ll be awash in cars, traffic and gridlock. The rising tide of cars is treated as a irresistible force…
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The Week Observed, April 15, 2022
What City Observatory did this week A universal basic income . . . for cars. One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head on is the idea of a “Universal Basic Income”–a payment made to every household to assure it had enough for basic living expenses. While there have been…
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A Universal Basic income . . . for Cars
California is the first in the nation to establish a Universal Basic Income . . . for cars One of the most widely discussed alternatives for tackling poverty and inequality head-on is the idea of a “Universal Basic Income”—a payment made to every household to assure it has enough for basic living expenses. While there…
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The NIMBYs made $6 trillion last year
In 2021, US residential values increased by $6.9 trillion, almost entirely due to price appreciation Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2021 were ten times larger than the total income of the bottom 20 percent of the population. Little of this income will be taxed due…
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The Week Observed, April 1, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The Cappuccino Congestion Index. Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. To illustrate how misleading these fictitious numbers are, we’ve used the same methodology and actual data to compute the value of time lost standing in…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions 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 waiting in lines…
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The Week Observed, March 25, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Who’s most vulnerable to high gas prices? Rising gas prices are a pain, but they hurt most if you live in a sprawling metro where you have to drive long distances to work, shopping, schools and social activities. Some US metros are far less vulnerable to the negative effects…
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Which metros are vulnerable to gas price hikes?
Green cities will be less hurt by higher gas prices; Sprawling cities are much more vulnerable to gas price hikes. In sprawling metros like Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, Nashville and Oklahoma City, higher gas prices will cost the average household twice as much as households living in compact metros like San Francisco, Boston, Portland and Seattle.…
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The Week Observed, March 18, 2022
Must read The problem with the “reckless driver” narrative. Strong Towns Chuck Marohn eloquently points out the deflection and denial inherent in the emerging “reckless driver” explanation for increasing car crashes and injuries. Blaming a few reckless drivers for the deep-seated systemic biases in our road system is really a convenient way to avoid asking…
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The Week Observed, March 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst: Woke-washing the survey data. Highway builders are eager to cloak their road expansion projects in the rhetoric of equity and have become adept at manipulating images and statistics. In their efforts to sell the $5 billion I-5 freeway widening project in Portland, ODOT and WSDOT…
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Biased statistics: Woke-washing the I-5 Boondoggle
The Oregon and Washington transportation departments are using a biased, unscientific survey to market their $5 billion I-5 freeway widening project. The survey over-represents daily bridge users by a factor of 10 compared to the general population. The IBR survey undercounts lower and middle income households and people of color and overstates the opinions of White…
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The Week Observed, March 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon. Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon’s historical Columbia River Gorge Highway. Instead of widening the road, ODOT will use pricing to limit demand. This shows Oregon can quickly implement road pricing on existing roads under current law without a cumbersome…
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Oregon crosses the road-pricing Rubicon
Starting this spring, motorists will pay a $2 toll to drive Oregon’s historical Columbia River Gorge Highway. Instead of widening the road, ODOT will use pricing to limit demand This shows Oregon can quickly implement road pricing on existing roads under current law: No EIS, No equity analysis If you can do it there, why…
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The Week Observed, February 25, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Freeway widening for whomst? Woke-washing is all the rage among those pushing highway projects these days, and there’s no better example that Portland’s I-5 “bridge replacement” project (really a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide, $5 billion road expansion). It’s being sold as a boon for low income workers…
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Freeway widening for whomst?
Widening freeways is no way to promote equity. The proposed $5 billion widening of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver is purportedly being undertaken with “an equity lens,” but widening Portland’s I-5 freeway serves higher income, predominantly white workers commuting from Washington suburbs to jobs in Oregon. The median income of peak hour, drive alone commuters…
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The Week Observed, February 18, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Oregon’s highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge. ODOT has two different standards for forecasting: When it forecasts revenue, it says it will ignore adopted policies—especially ones that will reduce its revenue. When it forecasts greenhouse gas emissions, assumes policies that don’t…
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ODOT’s forecasting double standard
Oregon’s highway agency rigs its projections to maximize revenue and downplay its culpability for climate challenge ODOT has two different standards for forecasting: When it forecasts revenue, it says it will ignore adopted policies–especially ones that will reduce its revenue. When it forecasts greenhouse gas emissions, assumes policies that don’t exist–especially ones that will magically…
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The Week Observed, February 11, 2022
What City Observatory did this week The “replacement” bridge con. It’s telling that perhaps the largest single consulting expense for Oregon and Washington transportation departments’ efforts to revive the failed multi-billion Columbia River Crossing project is $5 million for “communications” consultants. The project has emphasized a misleading rebranding to call it mere “bridge replacement” project,…
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The I-5 bridge “replacement” con
Oregon and Washington highway builders have re-branded the failed Columbia River Crossing as a “bridge replacement” project: It’s not. Less than 30 percent of the cost of the nearly $5 billion project is actually for replacing the existing highway bridge, according to independent accountants. Most of the cost is for widening the freeway and rebuilding…
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The Week Observed, February 4, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Climate and our Groundhog Day Doom Loop. It’s Groundhog Day—again—and we’re stuck in exactly the same place when it comes to climate policy. Scientists are regularly offering up increasing dire warnings and every more irrefutable evidence of climate change. Extreme weather events: fires, floods, drought, hurricanes are becoming increasingly…
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Climate: Our Groundhog Day Doom Loop
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Another year, another Groundhog Day, and another bleak report that we’re not making any progress on…
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Portland: Don’t move or close schools to widen freeways
Adah Crandall is a sophomore at Grant High School. She is the co-lead of Portland Youth Climate Strike and an organizer with Sunrise PDX’s Youth Vs ODOT campaign, a biweekly series of rallies fighting for the decarbonization of Oregon’s transportation systems. City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by Adah Crandall on a proposal currently…
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The Week Observed, January 21, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Metro’s “Don’t look up” climate strategy. In the new film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists who find that the nation’s leaders simply refuse to take seriously their warnings of an impending global catastrophe. Their efforts even produce a backlash, as skeptics simply refuse to look at the…
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Metro’s “Don’t Look Up” Climate Policy
Metro, Portland’s regional government, says it has a plan to reduce transportation greenhouse gases But in the 8 years since adopting the plan, the agency hasn’t bothered to look at data on GHGs—which have increased 22 percent, or more than one million tons annually. Metro’s Climate Plan is “Don’t Look Up” In the new movie…
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The Week Observed, January 14, 2022
What City Observatory did this week What does equity mean when we have a caste-based transportation system? Transportation and planning debates around the country increasingly ponder how we rectify long-standing inequities in transportation access that have disadvantaged the poor and people of color. In Oregon, the Department of Transportation has an elaborate “equitable mobility” effort as…
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Transportation trends and disparities
If you aren’t talking about our two-caste transportation system, you’re not really addressing equity. Portland’s regional government is looking forward at trends in the transportation system and their implications for equity. In December, City Observatory submitted its analysis of these trends for Metro’s consideration. Local and regional leaders are increasingly promoting concerns of equity in…
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The Week Observed, January 7, 2022
What City Observatory did this week 1. Metro’s failing climate strategy. Portland Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure. Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses are up 22 percent since the plan was adopted: instead of falling by 1 million tons per year, emissions have increased by 1 million tons annually, to more…
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The Week Observed, January 28, 2022
What City Observatory did this week Why Portland shouldn’t be moving elementary and middle schools to widen freeways. We’re pleased to publish a guest commentary from Adah Crandall, a high school sophomore and climate activist, who recently testified to the Portland School Board in opposition to move two schools to accommodate the Rose Quarter I-5…
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Oregon, Washington advance I-5 bridge based on outdated traffic projections
The Oregon and Washington Departments of Transportation are advancing their $5 billion freeway widening plan based on outdated 15-year-old traffic projections. No new projections have been prepared since the 2007 estimates used in the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, The two state DOTs are essentially “flying blind” assuming that out-dated traffic projections provide a reasonable…
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Why the proposed $5 billion I-5 bridge is a climate disaster
The plan to spend $5 billion widening the I-5 Bridge Over the Columbia River would produce 100,000 additional metric tons of greenhouse gases per year, according to the induced travel calculator Metro’s 2020 transportation package would have cut greenhouse gases by 5,200 tons per year– 20 times less than the additional greenhouse gases created by freeway…
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Metro’s failing climate strategy
Metro’s Climate Smart Strategy, adopted in 2014, has been an abject failure Portland area transportation greenhouse gasses are up 22 percent since the plan was adopted: instead of falling by 1 million tons per year, emissions have increased by 1 million tons annually, to more than 7 million tons, putting us even further from our…
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The Week Observed, December 17, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The financial fallout from Louisville’s I-65 boondoggle. As we showed earlier, Kentucky and Indiana both wasted a billion dollars on doubling the capacity of I-65 across the Ohio River, and also showed how to eliminate traffic congestion. The $1 to $2 tolls it charges I-65 users slashed traffic in…
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Louisville’s financial disaster: Deep in debt for road capacity that will never be used
Louisville’s I-65 bridges: A huge under-used roadway and hundreds of millions in debt for their kids—who will also have to cope with a climate crisis. Their financial plan kicked the can down the road, saddling future generations with the cost of paying for unneeded roads. The two states mortgaged future federal grant money and borrowed…
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The Week Observed, December 10, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. ODOT’s real climate strategy: Pollution as usual. Oregon’s highway builders are keeping two sets of books, one claiming that it cares about climate issues, the other shows that its financial plans depend on never reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Oregon Department of Transportation has a glossy, highly promoted…
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Drive-thrus are ruining cities and helping kill the planet
Your 12 ounce latte comes with a pound of carbon emissions, just from the drive-thru. How convenience for cars makes cities less livable for everyone, and contributes to climate change. Last week, twitter user Maris Zivarts posted this telling image of 20 car queue wrapping around the block of a Starbucks, all lined up to…
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Oregon DOT’s Real Climate Plan: Keep on polluting
The Oregon DOT’s “Climate Action Plan” claims that the agency wants to decrease greenhouse gases, but its financial plans show otherwise The agency’s revenue projections show it is planning for gasoline consumption not to decline at all, meaning that carbon emissions don’t decline ODOT’s fuel tax projections imply that cars and trucks will continue to produce…
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The Week Observed, December 3, 2021
What City Observatory did this week How Portland powered Oregon’s economic success. After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon’s income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery: It’s not. It all about a flourishing Portland economy, especially in the central city of the region. This success has been powered by an…
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Oregon’s economic success: The triumph of the city
After decades of lagging the nation, Oregon’s income now exceeds the national average. While some seem to think its a mystery: It’s not. It all about a flourishing Portland economy, especially in the central city of the region This success has been powered by an influx of talent, especially well-educated young adults drawn to close-in…
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The Week Observed, November 19, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Why we shouldn’t be whining about higher gas prices. Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for gas. Even with a recent uptick, gas prices are still lower than they were a decade ago. Cheap…
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The Week Observed, November 12, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Has this city discovered how to solve traffic congestion? Why aren’t they telling everyone else how this works? A miracle in Louisville. Louisville charges a cheap $1 to $2 toll for people driving across the Ohio River on I-65. After doubling the size of the I-65 bridges from six lanes…
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Let’s stop whining about gas prices: Gasoline is cheap, too cheap.
Gas prices are going up, and it’s annoying to have to pay more, but let’s take a closer look at how much we’re paying for gas. Even with a recent uptick, gas prices are still lower than they were a decade ago. Cheap gas is burning the planet, and undercuts all of our efforts to…
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How to solve traffic congestion: A miracle in Louisville?
Louisville charges a cheap $1 to $2 toll for people driving across the Ohio River on I-65. After doubling the size of the I-65 bridges from six lanes to 12, tolls slashed traffic by half, from about 130,000 cars per day to fewer than 65,000. Kentucky and Indiana wasted a billion dollars on highway capacity…
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The Week Observed, November 5, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The Opposite of Planning: Why Portland’s Metro government needs to turn down the highway department request for more money to plan future freeway widenings. On paper, and to admirers, Portland has a pretty potent regional government. Metro is directly elected, and empowered to make important regional transportation decisions. It’s…
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The opposite of planning: Why Metro should stop I-5 Bridge con
Portland’s Metro regional government would be committing planning malpractice and enabling lasting fiscal and environmental damage if it goes along with state highway department freeway widening plans The proposed $5 billion, 5-mile long, 12-lane freeway I-5 bridge project is being advanced based on outdated traffic projections using 2005 data. ODOT is pushing freeway plans piecemeal,…
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The Week Observed, October 22, 2021
What City Observatory did this week America’s least and most segregated metro areas: Evidence from Census 2020. Racial segregation remains a chronic problem in US metropolitan areas. Data from Census 2020 provides a hyper-detailed, decadal check-in on the state of segregation. The good news is that Black-white segregation continues, slowly, to decline in virtually all…
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America’s least (and most) segregated metro areas: 2020
The latest Census data show that Black/White segregation is decreasing in large metro areas. Racial segregation still prevails in most American cities, but varies widely across the nation. Portland is one of America’s least segregated metros One pervasive and lingering hallmark American geography is racial residential segregation: our metropolitan areas have literally been divided by…
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The Week Observed, October 15, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Ten reasons you can’t trust DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution. Highway departments are fond of ginning up traffic projections and air quality analyses claiming that wider highways will reduce pollution. It’s an elaborate con. We take a close look at Portland’s proposed $1.2 billion I-5 Rose Quarter…
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Here’s what’s wrong with Oregon DOT’s Rose Quarter pollution claims
10 reasons not to believe phony DOT claims that widening highways reduces pollution We know that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and that our car dependent transportation system is the reason Americans drive so much more and consequently produce far more greenhouse gases per capita than residents of…
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Where we embrace socialism in the US: Parking Lots
How we embrace socialism for car storage in the public right of way Florida Senator Marco Rubio has denounced President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending program as un-American socialism. Rubio claims: In the end, Americans will reject socialism because it fundamentally runs counter to our way of life. That’s not accurate, of course. Socialism is well-established…
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The Week Observed, September 24, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence. The Oregon Department of Transportation has been trying to sell its $1.25 billion freeway widening project as a way of restoring the historically Black Albina neighborhood that was decimated by three highways the agency built in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It’s absurd…
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Freeway-widening grifters: Woke-washing, fraud and incompetence
The Oregon Department of Transportation’s glossy mailer to sell its $1.25 billion I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project is a cynical, error-ridden marketing ploy. ODOT doesn’t show or tell about its wider freeway and more traffic, but instead tries to sell the project based on buildings it won’t contribute any money for building. ODOT sent…
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The Week Observed, September 17, 2021
What City Observatory did this week The cost of Oregon DOT’s Rose Quarter project has nearly tripled to $1.25 billion. Just four years ago, the Oregon Department of transportation sold its mile-and-a-half long I-5 freeway widening project through Portland as costing a mere $450 million. Earlier this month, it revealed new cost estimates that show…
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Another exploding whale: ODOT’s freeway widening cost triples
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s I-5 Rose Quarter $450 million freeway widening project will cost more than $1.25 billion The project’s estimated cost has nearly tripled in just four years, and still has further cost overrun risk Even OTC commissioners question whether it’s worth more than a billion dollars to widen a 1.5 mile…
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The Week Observed, September 10, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Talkin’ ’bout my gentrification. Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification. If we’re concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrification is far from the biggest problem we face. Gentrification is surprisingly rare, and while it brings inequality into sharp focus, there’s precious little evidence of widespread…
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Talkin’ ’bout my gentrification
Jerusalem Demsas of Vox has a thoughtful synthesis of what we know about gentrification. If we’re concerned about poverty and inequality, gentrification is far from the biggest problem we face. Gentrification is surprisingly rare, and while it brings inequality into sharp focus, there’s precious little evidence of widespread harms. The bright spotlight shining on a…
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The Week Observed, September 3, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Portland’s Clean Energy Fund needs accountability. Portland voters approved a ballot measure creating a $60 million annual fund to invest in community-based clean energy projects, particularly ones that promote equity. It’s a well-intended program, but in practice the review process that’s been developed does too little to establish measurable…
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Climate efforts must be cost effective
Portland’s $60 million a year clean energy fund needs climate accountability Any grant writer can spin a yarn that creates the illusion that a given project will have some sort of climate benefits, but if you’re actually investing real money, you should insist on a payback in the coin of the climate realm: a measurable…
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The Week Observed, August 27, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Is the campus 100 percent clean energy? (Only if you don’t count the cars and parking lots). Stanford University announced that its near to realizing a goal to move all of its campus electricity to solar production, and that predictably generated a lot of positive press, some of which…
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A net zero blind spot
Stanford claims its campus will be 100 percent solar powered . . . provided you ignore cars. A flashy news release caught our eye this week. Stanford University is reporting that its campus will be 100 percent powered by solar energy very soon. In the echo chamber that is social media, that claim got a…
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The Week Observed, August 20, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Cost of Living and Auto Insurance. We often compare the affordability of different cities with a clear focus on housing prices and rents. This week at City Observatory we are interested in the role that insurance plays in the cost of living across metropolitan areas. Location has a major influence in the…
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Insurance and the Cost of Living: Homeowners Insurance
Yesterday, we explored the differences in car insurance premiums in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Today, we will take a look at homeowners insurance rates. Unlike car insurance, homeowners insurance is not required in states. Still, this insurance can be required by a mortgage lender, and it is an important action to protect one’s home.…
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Insurance and the Cost of Living: Auto Insurance
Everyone loves to compare the affordability of different cities, and most of the attention gets focused on differences in housing prices and rents. Clearly, these are a major component of living costs, and they vary substantially across the nation. But as we’ve regularly pointed out at City Observatory, transportation costs also vary widely across cities,…
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BIB: The bad infrastructure bill
Four lamentations about a bad infrastructure bill From the standpoint of the climate crisis, the infrastructure bill that passed the Senate is, at a minimum, a tremendous blown opportunity. Transportation, especially private cars, are the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. We have an auto-dependent, climate-destroying transportation system because we’ve massively subsidized…
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To solve climate, we need electric cars—and a lot less driving
Electric vehicles will help, but we need to do much more to reduce driving Editor’s Note: City Observatory is pleased to offer this guest commentary by Matthew Lewis. Matthew is Director of Communications for California YIMBY, a pro-housing organization working to make infill housing legal and affordable in all California cities. For 20 years, he has…
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The Week Observed, August 13, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Tackling climate change will require electric cars, and a lot less driving. We’re pleased to publish a guest commentary from CalYimby’s Matthew Lewis looking at the challenge of addressing the role of transportation in climate change. Electric vehicles are a step in the right direction, to be sure,…
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America’s berry best cities
Why Boston and Portland are the berry-best metros, and why it matters Summer is the height of berry season in most of the US, and nothing beats a fresh, locally grown blackberry, blueberry or raspberry. Today we’re ranking large metro areas in the US based on how many berries they grow (which we’re proxying using…
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The Week Observed, August 6, 2021
What City Observatory did this week America’s berry best cities. It’s the height of the summer fruit season and berries are ripening across the country. Nothing beats a fresh local berry in season. We’ve ranked the nation’s most populous metro areas based on their commercial production of all kinds of berries: cranberries, raspberries, strawberries, blackberries…
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The Week Observed, July 30, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Oregon Department of Transportation’s Climate Fig-Leaf. Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in Oregon, and the state’s Department of Transportation is—yet again—advancing PR heavy strategy documents that contain no measurable objectives or accountability. The latest plan, a so-called “Climate Action Plan,” repeats disproven climate myths (that idling…
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Burn, baby, burn: ODOT’s climate strategy
The Oregon Department of Transportation is in complete denial about climate change Oregon DOT has drafted a so-called “Climate Action Plan” that is merely perfunctory and performative busywork. The devastation of climate change is now blindingly manifest. Last month, temperatures in Oregon’s capital Salem, hit 117 degrees. The state is locked in drought, and already…
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The Week Observed, July 23, 2021
What City Observatory did this week Selling Oregon into highway bondage. Oregon is moving ahead with plans to issue hundreds of millions—and ultimately billions of dollars of debt to widen Portland-area freeways. And it will send the bill to future generations, and perversely, commit the state to ever increasing levels of traffic in order to…
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Selling Oregon into highway bondage
Borrowing billions to widen roads endangers the climate and finances It’s doubly wrong to burden future generations with the environmental costs of wider roads, and then also send them the bill Bond financing of new capacity puts expansion ahead of repair and endangers the financial soundness of the transportation system Oregon Governor Kate Brown has just signed…
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The Week Observed, July 16, 2021
What City Observatory did this week An open letter to Secretary Pete Buttigieg on his visit to Oregon. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg came to Oregon this week to look at some local transportation innovations. The group No More Freeways, which opposes an Oregon Department of Transportation plan to widen I-5 through Portland’s Rose Quarter wanted…
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Welcome to Portland Secretary Pete! Now about the Rose Quarter Freeway
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is visiting Oregon to learn more about local transportation issues. The local advocacy group No More Freeways has sent him an open letter to provide some background for his visit. Here’s what Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg needs to know about Oregon DOT’s proposed $800 million neighborhood-wrecking, climate-destroying I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway…
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The Week Observed, July 9, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Miami’s double standard for charging road users. The City of Miami is hoping to make their streets a safer place for bikes and scooters by building protected lanes along three miles of the city’s downtown. The city plans to pay for this infrastructure by taxing each registered scooter…
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In the bag: Pricing works
Denver’s new bag fee is another object lesson on how to use economics to achieve environmental objectives. Now do it for greenhouse gases Starting this month, you’ll have to pay 10 cents for each disposable paper or plastic bag you fill with groceries in Denver. The requirement goes statewide in 2023, under a Colorado law that is…
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Miami’s E-Scooters: Revisiting the Double Standard
In Miami, e-scooters pay four to 50 times as much to use the public roads as cars If we want to encourage greener, safer travel, we should align the prices we charge with our values Florida is home to some of the most unsafe cities to be a pedestrian or a cyclist. Miami is currently attempting…
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The Week Observed, July 2, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Texas Transportation Institute is back, and it’s still wrong about traffic congestion. Every year or so, a group of researchers at Texas A&M University produce report purporting to calculate the cost of congestion in US metro areas. Their flawed and biased methodology has been discredited multiple times,…
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It’s back, and it’s even dumber than ever: The Urban Mobility Report
There was an unprecedented decline in traffic congestion in the US last year. According to the Urban Mobility Report, there’s essentially nothing we can learn from this experience The Texas Transportation Institute has always been apologists and propagandists for the highway lobby TTI reports fail the basic scientific test of responding to repeated detailed critiques…
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Lower interest rates = More expensive homes
The decline in interest rates in 2020 is a huge factor in explaining the recent surge in home prices. Population growth, a key driver of housing demand, actually slowed dramatically in the past year. The current surge in home prices may be a short-term phenomenon. We’re constantly being told that the housing market is hot,…
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The Week Observed, June 25, 2021
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cars kill city neighborhoods. Across the nation, America’s cities have been remade to accomodate the automobile. Freeways have been widened through city neighborhoods, demolishing homes and businesses, but more than that, the sprawling, car-dependent transportation system which is now firmly rooted across the nation is simply toxic to…
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The Bum’s Rush
The $800 million project transitions from “nothing has been decided” to “nothing can be changed” There’s a kind of calculated phase-shift in the way transportation department’s talk about major projects. For a long, long time, they’ll respond to any challenges or questions by claiming that “nothing has been decided” or that a project is still…
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The Week Observed, June 18, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Race and economic polarization. In the past several decades, racial segregation in the US has attenuated, but economic segregation has increased. This is nowhere more apparent than in the residential patterns of Black Americans. A recent analysis by David Rusk looks at the growing economic polarization of urban neighborhoods…
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More proof of ODOT’s Rose Quarter Freeway coverup
Newly revealed documents show its roadway is vastly wider than needed for traffic, and also makes “buildable” freeway covers prohibitively expensive If you really want just two additional lanes, you can do so much more cheaply and with less environmental destruction The reality is ODOT is planning a 10 lane freeway at the Rose Quarter,…
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Race and economic polarization
The growth of concentrated poverty has been fueled by the secession of successful African Americans David Rusk has summarized his research on race and economic polarization in a series of three commentaries on “The Great Sort,” for the DC Policy Center. The essence of the sorting in question is the sorting of the nation’s African…
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The Week Observed, June 4, 2021
What City Observatory this week What ultimately destroyed Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood: Highways. This past week marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In 1921, a racist mob attacked and destroyed the Black Greenwood neighborhood, killing hundreds. The Greenwood’s residents were resilient, rebuilding a neighborhood that thrived for almost 50 years. According to a new…
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How highways finally crushed Black Tulsa
Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood survived the 1921 race massacre, only to be ultimately destroyed by a more unrelenting foe: Interstate highways Black Tulsans quickly rebuilt Greenwood in the 1920s, and it flourished for decades, but was ultimately done in by freeway construction and urban renewal Even now, Tulsa has money for more road widening, but apparently…
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The Week Observed, May 28, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Why highway departments can and should build housing to mitigate road damage. For decades, American cities have been scarred and neighborhoods destroyed by highway construction projects. Many places are contemplating measures to fix these problems, from freeway removals to pledges of “restorative justice.” Given that highways directly and indirectly…
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Single-Family Zoning and Exclusion in L.A. County: Part 2
Single-family zoning, a policy that bans apartments, is widespread in Los Angeles County. The median city bans apartments on 80% of its land for housing. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning have higher white and Asian population shares, and lower Black and Latino population shares. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning are more segregated relative…
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State DOTs can and should build housing to mitigate highway impacts
If OregonDOT is serious about “restorative justice” it should mitigate highway damage by building housing Around the country, states are subsidizing affordable housing to mitigate the damage done by highway projects Mitigation is part of NEPA requirements and complying with federal Environmental Justice policy The construction of urban highways has devastating effects on nearby neighborhoods. …
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Single-Family Zoning and Exclusion in L.A. County: Part 1
Single-family zoning, a policy that bans apartments, is widespread in Los Angeles County. The median city bans apartments on 80% of its land for housing. Cities with more widespread single-family zoning have higher median incomes, more expensive housing, and higher rates of homeownership. Single-family zoning blocks renter households and low- and moderate-income households from accessing…
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The Week Observed, May 21, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Needed: A bolder, better building back. In response to an invitation from its authors, we take a look at a “grand bargain” proposed by Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger for breaking the political log jam around infrastructure. If there is something to be gleaned from Eisenhower and Lincoln (in…
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What about reparations for people?
ODOT proudly spends road funds on mitigating the impact of its highways: if you’re an invertebrate. The highway department mitigates noise pollution, rebuilds jails, and even compensates neighborhoods But if we repeatedly pushed highways through your neighborhood, all you’ll get is condolences, wider overpasses, and a pictures of housing for which there’s no money The…
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For a grand bargain, think bigger and bolder
Right diagnosis, weak medicine, wrong metaphor In a far ranging thought piece for James Fallows’ Our Towns Civic Foundation—”Learning from Eisenhower and Lincoln: A Grand Bargain for Transportation,” Patrick Doherty and Chris Leinberger invoke Abe Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower as role models for a Biden Administration infrastructure policy. There’s a lot to like in this…
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The Week Observed, May 14, 2021
What City Observatory this week Don’t be fooled again. The Oregon and Washington state highway departments are up to their old tricks in trying to push a multi-billion dollar highway building boondoggle in the POrtland area. A guest editorial from David Bragdon, formerly President of Portland’s regional government, recounts the lies and deceptive tactics the…
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Don’t Repeat the Hard Earned Lessons of the Failed CRC
ODOT has repeatedly lied and misled Portland’s leaders about major highway projects No one should take at face value its assurances or representations A warning from one of Portland’s past leaders about the deceptive high pressure sales tactics used to sell a bloated freeway boondoggle Editor’s Note: David Bragdon was the President of the Metro…
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The Week Observed, May 7, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. It’s not a bridge replacement, it’s a 5 mile long, 12 lane wide freeway that just happens to cross a river. The Oregon and Washington highway departments are trying to revive the failed Columbia River Crossing project, peddling it as the “I-5 bridge replacement” project. That’s incredibly misleading moniker. …
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Who got trillions? We found the real speculators profiting from higher housing costs
In 2020, US residential values increased by $2.2 trillion Those gains went disproportionately to older, white, higher income households Capital gains on housing in 2020 were more than three times larger than the total income of the bottom 20 percent of the population. Little of this income will be taxed due to the exemption on…
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The real “I-5” project: $5 billion, 5 miles, $5 tolls
The intentionally misleading re-brand of the failed Columbia River Crossing conceals the key fact that it is a 12-lane wide, 5 mile long freeway that just happens to cross a river, not a “bridge replacement.” It’s vastly oversized and over-priced, with current cost estimate ranging as high as nearly $5 billion (before cost-overruns), which will necessitate…
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The Week Observed, April 30, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Restorative justice without funding is a sham. Portland’s Albina neighborhood was decimated by the construction of three Oregon Department of Transportation highway projects in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, causing the neighborhood’s population to drop by more than 60 percent. Part of the marketing pitch for the current effort…
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Alexa: What is Cascadia Vision 2050?
A tech-centered vision of the future of the Pacific Northwest envisions creating a series of new urban centers 40 to 100 miles away from the region’s current largest cities—Seattle, Vancouver and Portland. The answer to sustainability isn’t building new cities somewhere else, it’s making the urban centers we already have more inclusive, prosperous and sustainable.…
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ODOT consultant: Pricing is a better fix for the Rose Quarter
Oregon DOT’s own consultants say congestion pricing would be a better way to fix congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter than spending $800 million. Pricing would improve traffic flow and add capacity equal to another full lane of traffic, according to WSP who called it “our best alternative” for dealing with the Rose Quarter Failing…
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Getting real about restorative justice in Albina
Drawings don’t constitute restorative justice ODOT shows fancy drawings about what might be built, but isn’t talking about actually paying to build anything Just building the housing shown in its diagrams would require $160 million to $260 million Even that would replace only a fraction of the housing destroyed by ODOT highway building in Albina…
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The Week Observed, April 23, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Fighting climate change is inherently equitable. While there’s a growing recognition of the existential threat posed by climate change, it’s becoming increasingly frequent to pit equity concerns against decisive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It shouldn’t and doesn’t have to be this way. Climate change disproportionately affects those…
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The freight fable: Moving trucks is not longer the key to economic prosperity
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair It’s even harder to get a trucking industry lobbyist or a highway department booster to understand something when their salaries depend on not understanding it. Oregon’s economy has de-coupled from freight movement; our economic success stems from doing…
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Fighting Climate Change is Inherently Equitable
Happy Earth Day, Everyone! If we care about equity, we need to make rapid progress on climate change Equity needs to be defined by substantive outcomes, not vacuous rhetoric and elaborate process. Ultimately equity is about outcomes, not merely process. The demonstrable results a decade or two from now have to be measurably more equitable…
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The Week Observed, April 16, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Taking Tubman: The Oregon Department of Transportation is planning to widen the Interstate 5 freeway in Portland into the backyard of Harriet Tubman Middle School. The $800 million widening project doubles down on the historical damage that ODOT highway construction has done to this neighborhood, and literally moves the…
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ODOT’s peer review panel admits it didn’t validate Rose Quarter travel forecasts
ODOT has claimed a “peer review panel” vindicated its air pollution analysis Now the panel says they didn’t look into the accuracy of ODOT’s travel forecast Travel forecasts are critical, because they determine air and noise pollution impacts In short: the peers have done nothing to disprove the critiques of ODOT’s flawed traffic modeling A…
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Why cheap gas is our real climate and transportation policy
Forget about lofty greenhouse gas reduction goals and vision zero, our real climate and transportation policy is cheap gas The fall in gas prices in 2014 led to more driving, more SUV purchases, less transit ridership, more deaths and more greenhouse gas emissions In retrospect, 2014 was a turning point for driving, climate and safety. …
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Taking Tubman: ODOT’s plan to build a freeway on school grounds
ODOT’s proposed I-5 Rose Quarter project would turn a school yard into a freeway The widened I-5 freeway will make already unhealthy air even worse Pollution from high volume roads has been shown to lower student achievement ODOT also proposes to build sound walls in Tubman’s school yard Portland’s Harriet Tubman Middle School is one of…
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How ODOT destroyed Albina, part 3: The Fremont Bridge ramps
ODOT’s Fremont Bridge wiped out multiple blocks of the Albina neighborhood A freeway you’ve never heard of leveled dozens of blocks in North and Northeast Portland The stub of a proposed “Prescott Freeway” still scars the neighborhood This is the third of a three-part series looking at how ODOT freeways wiped out much of the…
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Wholly Moses: Pave now, pay later
Oregon legislation goes whole hog on highways HB 3065 would launch a whole new round of freeway boondoggles, and plunge the state into debt to pay for them The classic Robert Moses scam: Drive stakes, sell bonds The Oregon Legislature is considering a bill, HB 3065, which while it sounds technical and innocuous, is really…
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The Week Observed, April 2, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How the Oregon Department of Transportation destroyed a Portland neighborhood, Part 2: The Moses Meat Axe. We continue our historical look at the role that freeway construction (and the traffic it brought) destroyed Portland’s Albina neighborhood. Our story began in the early 1950s with the construction of a waterfront…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions 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 waiting in lines…
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How ODOT destroyed Albina: The I-5 Meat Axe
Interstate 5 “Meat Axe” slashed through the Albina Neighborhood in 1962 This was the second of three acts by ODOT that destroyed housing and isolated Albina Building the I-5 freeway led to the demolition of housing well-outside the freeway right of way, and flooded the neighborhood with car traffic, ending its residential character and turning into…
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The Week Observed, March 26, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina. Urban freeways have been lethal to neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods of color, in cities throughout the nation. While the construction of Interstate freeways gets much of the attention (as it should), the weaponization of highway construction in minority neighborhoods actually predates the Interstate system. In Portland,…
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Greenwashing auto infrastructure: Natick’s diverging diamond
A proposed interchange in Natick, Mass. is a classic example of greenwashing The diverging diamond is an idea entirely given over to making things better for cars, and creates a disorienting, circuitous and dangerous world for pedestrians and cyclists. The intersection of highways 9 and 27 in Natick Massachusetts, just east of Boston, is no…
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How ODOT destroyed Albina: The untold story
I-5 wasn’t the first highway that carved up Portland’s historically black Albina Neighborhood. Seventy years ago, ODOT spent the equivalent of more than $80 million in today’s dollars to cut the Albina neighborhood off from the Willamette River. ODOT’s highways destroyed housing and isolated Albina, lead to a two-thirds reduction in population between 1950 and…
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The Week Observed, March 19, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission. For more than two years, City Observatory and others have been shining a bright light on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s proposed $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project in Portland. All that time, ODOT has maintained its planning a…
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An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission
For years, the Oregon Department of Transportation has concealed its plans to build a ten lane freeway through Portland’s Rose Quarter We’re calling on the state to do a full environmental impact statement that assesses the impact of the project they actually intend to build. An open letter to the Oregon Transportation Commission. Regular readers…
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Is the pandemic driving rents down? Or up?
Since Covid started, rents are down in some cities, but up in most “Superstar” cities have experienced the most notable declines; the demographics of renters in these cities are different than elsewhere. Rent declines are also much more common in larger cities, with higher levels of rents. City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest…
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Inclusionary Zoning: Portland’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived
Portland’s inclusionary zoning requirement is a slow-motion train-wreck; apartment completions are down by two-thirds, and the development pipeline is drying up This will lead to slower housing supply growth and increasing rents for everyone over the next two to three years Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) creates perverse incentives to under-utilize available land In December 2016, Portland’s…
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Progress Zero: Lofty vision but increasing deaths and injuries
Vision Zero is a popular and widely embraced safety campaign, but the latest data shows Portland is not only not on track, it’s going in the wrong direction when it comes to road safety Multi-lane, car-dominated urban arterials are the big killers, and instead of fixing them, the Oregon DOT is wasting billions on widening…
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The Week Observed, April 9, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How ODOT destroyed Albina: Part 3 the Phantom Freeway. Even a freeway that never got built played a key role in demolishing part of Portland’s Albina neighborhood. In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we showed how construction of state highway 99W in 1951 and Interstate 5 in…
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The Week Observed, March 12, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. The failure of Vision Zero. Like many regions, the Portland metropolitan area has embraced the idea of Vision Zero; a strategy of planning to take concrete steps over time to reduce the number of deaths and serious injuries from road crashes to zero. A key step in Vision Zero…
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The Week Observed, March 5, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. The fundamental global law of traffic congestion. For years, urbanists have stressed the concept of induced demand, based on the nearly universal observation that widening urban roadways simply leads to more traffic and recurring congestion. Repeated studies in the United States have confirmed that any increase in urban roadway…
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A new framework for equitable economic development
Editor’s Note: Darrene Hackler is a consultant and a senior advisor with Smart Incentives. Darrene brings economic development expertise in economic equity and inclusive growth, entrepreneurship and small business, and innovation. She helps policy makers, economic developers, and foundations build partnerships that can strengthen local economic development ecosystems through strategic plans, policy analysis, incentives analysis,…
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The Fundamental, Global Law of Road Congestion
Studies from around the world have validated the existence of induced demand: each improvement to freeway capacity in urban areas generates more traffic. The best available science worldwide—in Europe, Japan and North America—shows a “unit-elasticity” of travel with respect to capacity: A 1 percent expansion of capacity tends to generate 1 percent more vehicle miles…
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The Week Observed, February 26, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Revealed: Oregon Department of Transportation’s secret plans for a ten-lane I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter. For years, ODOT has been claiming that its $800 million freeway widening project is just a minor tweak that will add two so-called “auxiliary” lanes to the I-5 freeway. City Observatory has obtained…
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Revealed: ODOT’s Secret Plans for a 10-Lane Rose Quarter Freeway
For years, ODOT has been planning to build a 10 lane freeway at the Rose Quarter, not the 6 lanes it has advertised. Three previously undisclosed files show ODOT is planning for a 160 foot wide roadway at Broadway-Weidler, more than enough for a 10 lane freeway with full urban shoulders. ODOT has failed to…
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Oregon’s I-5 bridge costs just went up $150 million
Buried in an Oregon Department of Transportation presentation earlier this month is an acknowledgement that the I-5 bridge replacement “contribution” from Oregon will be as much as $1 billion—up from a maximum of $850 million just two months earlier. The I-5 bridge replacement project (formerly known as the Columbia River Crossing) is a proposal for…
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The Week Observed, February 19, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Covid migration: Disproportionately young, economically stressed and people of color. Data shows the moves prompted by Covid-19 are more reflective of economic distress for the vulnerable than a reordering of urban location preferences of older professionals. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shines a bright light on…
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Equitable Carbon Fee and Dividend
An equitable carbon fee and dividend should be set to a price level necessary to achieve GHG reduction goals; kicker payment should be set so 70% of people receive a net income after paying carbon tax or at least break even. By Garlynn Woodsong Editor’s note: City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by…
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Covid Migration: Temporary, young, economically insecure
There’s relatively little migration in the wake of Covid-19 Most Covid-related migration is temporary, involves moving in with friends or relatives, and not leaving a metro area It’s not professionals fleeing cities: Covid-related movers tend to be young (many are students), and are prompted by economic distress From the earliest days of the pandemic, pundits…
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How freeways kill cities
Freeways slash population in cities, and prompt growth in suburbs Within city centers, the closer your neighborhood was to the freeway, the more its population declined. In suburbs, the closer your neighborhood was to the freeway, the more it tended to grow. It’s been obvious for a long, long time that the automobile is fundamentally…
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The Week Observed, February 12, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. How housing segregation reduces Black wealth. Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas. There’s a strong correlation between metropolitan segregation and black-white housing wealth disparities. Black-owned homes in less segregated metro areas suffer a much smaller value reduction…
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How housing segregation reduces Black wealth
Black-owned homes are valued at a discount to all housing, but the disparity is worst in highly segregated metro areas There’s a strong correlation between metropolitan segregation and black-white housing wealth disparities More progress in racial integration is likely a key to reducing Black-white wealth disparities It’s long been known that US housing markets and…
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Congestion Pricing: ODOT is disobeying an order from Governor Brown
More than a year ago, Oregon Governor Kate Brown directed ODOT to “include a full review of congestion pricing” before deciding whether or not to do a full environmental impact statement for the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project. ODOT simply ignored the Governor’s request, and instead is delaying its congestion pricing efforts, and…
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The Week Observed, February 5, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Calculating induced travel. Widening freeways to reduce traffic congestion in dense urban areas inevitably fails because of the scientifically demonstrated problem of induced demand; something so common and well-documented it’s called the “fundamental law of road congestion.” Experts at the UC Davis National Center for Sustainable Transportation have developed…
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Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households
The price of new housing is a poor gauge of housing affordability Increasing housing supply over time, coupled with individual housing units moving down-market as they age, provides affordability New cars are unaffordable to most households; used cars are the source of affordable driving Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series ran for fourteen seasons before…
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America’s K-shaped housing market
Home prices are soaring, rents are falling The disparate impact of the recession on high income and low income households in driving the housing market in two directions at once. Job losses have been concentrated among the lowest earning workers, who are disproportionately renters. Meanwhile high earning workers have seen no net job losses, and…
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Again, it’s Groundhog’s Day, again
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Another year, another Groundhog’s Day, and another bleak report that we’re not making any progress on…
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Albina Then and Now
Albina then and now Basically, Albina was wiped out by Interstate Ave 99E (ODOT) 1951 Memorial Coliseum (City) 1958 I-5 1962 Emmanuel Hospital (PDC) 1970s Blanchard Center (PPS) 1980 Convention Center 1990 (expanded 2003) Moda Center/Rose Garden 1995 But ODOT’s two highways cut all this off from the rest of the city. 99E/Interstate cut the…
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Calculating induced demand at the Rose Quarter
Widening I-5 at the Rose Quarter in Portland will produce an addition 17.4 to 34.8 million miles of vehicle travel and 7.8 to 15.5 thousand tons of greenhouse gases per year. These estimates come from a customized calibration of the induced travel calculator to the Portland Metropolitan Area. It’s scientifically proven that increasing freeway capacity…
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The Week Observed, January 29, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. Why Portland’s Rose Quarter Freeway widening will increase greenhouse gas emissions. The Oregon Department of Transportation hashas falsely claimed its $800 million freeway widening project has no impact on greenhouse gas emissions. We examine traffic data produced by ODOT which shows that the widening will increase average daily traffic…
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Widening I-5 at the Rose Quarter will increase greenhouse gases
Adding more freeway capacity at the Rose Quarter will thousands of tons to the region’s greenhouse gas emissions If you say you believe in science, and you take climate change seriously, you can’t support spending $800 million or more to widen a freeway. SYNOPSIS: Wider freeways—including additional ramps and “auxiliary lanes”—induce additional car travel which increases…
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More performative pedestrian infrastructure
Houston’s “Energy Corridor” gets a pedestrian makeover, but just one thing seems to be missing. Bollards and better landscaping can’t offset the increased danger from wider, faster slip lanes. Most “pedestrian” infrastructure projects are often remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic. Houston’s “Energy Corridor” is a commercial district west…
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The Week Observed, January 22, 2021
What City Observatory this week Institutionalized housing discrimination. A recent study of housing discrimination in Detroit came to a seemingly surprising conclusion: Fair housing complaints were less likely to be filed in higher income, higher priced predominantly white neighborhoods than in lower income neighborhoods that were predominantly Black. The study’s authors were puzzled by the…
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Housing discrimination is baked into zoning
The real housing discrimination today is institutional, not personal The unfinished business of dismantling the institutional racism built into zoning Overt, personal discrimination in housing is just the tip of the iceberg, the great and devastating mass of discrimination is below the surface, in the form of apartment bans and minimum lot sizes. Is there…
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The Week Observed, January 15, 2024
What City Observatory this week 1. The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards. The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive. The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying some of the nation’s most exclusive places as “inclusive.” Highly equal cities…
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Why parking should pay its way instead of getting a free ride
Hartford Connecticut considers a pioneering move to make parking pay its way A higher parking tax works much like a “lite” version of land value taxation (LVT) Surface parking lots are highly subsidized polluters As Donald Shoup lays out in exhaustive detail in his 733-page masterpiece, The High Cost of Free Parking, the subsidies we…
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The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards, again
The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive. The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying some of the nation’s most exclusive places as “inclusive.” We all want our cities to be more inclusive. While it’s an agreed…
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The Week Observed, January 8, 2021
What City Observatory this week 1. 2021 is when we have to get real about tackling climate change. We’ve boiled our analysis of the climate challenge down to four key points: Pledges alone won’t accomplish anything. Saying you support the Paris Accords and plan to emit much less greenhouse gas a two or three decades…
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A regional green new deal for Portland
by Garlynn Woodsong Editor’s note:City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by Garlynn Woodsong. Garlynn is the Managing Director of the planning consultancy Woodsong Associates, and has more than 20 years of experience in regional planning, urban analytics and real estate development. Instrumental in the development and deployment of the RapidFire and UrbanFootprint urban/regional scenario…
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Portland carbon tax should apply to all big polluters
By all means, Portland should adopt its proposed healthy climate fee, a $25 ton carbon tax But make sure it applies to the biggest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases in the region The healthy climate fee should apply to freeways and air travel, not just 30 firms who produce 5 percent of regional…
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2021: Time to get serious about climate
Our new year’s resolution should be to take climate action seriously. Time is running out to actually do something that will reduce the steady growth of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, which is triggering irreversible damage to ecosystems around the planet. There are four big takeaways you should know about climate: 1. We’re falling further…
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2020: The Year Observed
2020 was a trying, tumultuous and often tragic year. Here are some of the top commentaries that marked the year. Like so many, we were preoccupied with global crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic. Early on there was a chorus of voices blaming cities and urban density for the rapid spread of the pandemic. We pushed…
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City Observatory on housing supply and affordability
Here’s just some of what we’ve had to say about research on housing markets at City Observatory. Building more housing lowers rents for everyone December 14, 2020 A new study from Germany shows that added housing supply lowers rents across the board. A 1 percent increase in housing is associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent…
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The Week Observed, December 18, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Want lower rents? Build more housing! A new study from Germany provides more evidence that the fundamentals of economics are alive and well in the housing market. The study looks at how increments to housing supply affect local rents, and finds that a one percent increase in the…
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Sustainability is about more than electrification
Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish this guest commentary by Kevin DeGood, Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress. This commentary originally appeared as a tweetstorm, and is republished with his permission. The text has been consolidated and edited for publication at City Observatory. Earlier City Observatory essays have questioned the sustainability of…
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Highway to Hell: Climate denial at the TRB
The Transportation Research Board, nominally an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is engaged in technocratic climate arson with its call for further highway expansion and more car travel. The planet is in imminent peril from global warming, with much of the recent increase in emissions in the US coming from increased driving. In…
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Building more housing lowers rents for everyone
A new study from Germany shows that added housing supply lowers rents across the board A 1 percent increase in housing is associated with a 0.4 to 0.7 percent decrease in rents Housing policy debates are tortured by the widespread disbelief that supply and demand operate in the market for housing. In our view, its…
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The Week Observed, December 11, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The only reason many people drive is because we pay them to. There’s an important insight from recent applications of tolling to urban highways. When asked to pay even a modest amount for using a fast (and expensive) asset, many drivers vote with their feet/wheels and choose other…
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City Beat: Another sketchy claim of Covid-driven urban flight
Again: It’s anecdotes, not data that are fueling claims of an urban exodus due to Covid-19 The virus is now deadlier in the nation’s rural areas than it is in cities, undercutting the basis for the urban flight theory Since the early days of the Coronavirus, the media has regularly trumpeted anti-city screeds, a kind…
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The only reason some people drive is because we pay them to
Here’s an insight from tolling: A substantial portion of the people driving on our roadways are only there because we’re subsidizing the cost of their trip. When we charge a toll to use a road, suddenly many of those using it find they don’t value it enough to pay even a fraction of the cost…
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Phoenix: Climate Hypocrisy
You can’t be a climate mayor—and your city can’t be a climate city — if you’re widening freeways Phoenix says it’s going to reduce greenhouse gases 90 percent by 2050, but the city’s transportation greenhouse gases have risen 1,000 pounds per person since 2014, and it’s planning to spend hundreds of millions widening freeways. Around the…
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The real $3.4 billion hole in the I-5 bridge project
The Oregon and Washington transportation departments understated the funding gap for a revived I-5 Columbia River Bridge by more than $1 billion Correcting for an arithmetic error increases the gap between identified revenues and potential costs from $2.3 billion to $3.4 billion. ODOT & WSDOT also used too low an inflation factor for escalating project…
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Black Friday, Cyber-Monday and the myth of gridlock Tuesday
Far from increasing traffic congestion, more on-line shopping reduces it, by reducing personal shopping trips Delivery trucks generate 30 times less travel than people traveling to stores to make the same purchases The more deliveries they make, the more efficient delivery services become The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced “Zoom Thanksgiving” we’ll…
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The Week Observed, November 30, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Gridlock Tuesday? The day after a nation celebrates its socially distanced “Zoom Thanksgiving” we’ll look to see how the pandemic affects the traditional “Black Friday” shopping spree. It seems likely that more retail sales than ever will gravitate to on-line shopping. That’s got many self-styled…
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More cynical greenwashing from the highway industry
There’s no shortage of cynical greenwashing to sell climate-killing highway widening projects GeorgiaDOT and AASHTO have a new PR gimmick to promote the same old product AASHTO—the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials—was touting one of their innovative environmental programs, something called “Planning and Environmental Linkages.” Its currently being deployed by the Georgia…
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The Week Observed, November 13, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Seven reasons you should be optimistic about cities in a post-pandemic world. There’s widespread pessimism about the future of cities. With the pandemic-induced advent of work-at-home, many people reason that soon there won’t be any reason to go into the office, or have offices, or even cities. We…
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Why—and where—Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond measure failed
Portland voters resoundingly defeated a proposed multi-billion dollar payroll tax to pay for transportation projects The two areas slated for the biggest benefits voted against the measure: The Southwest Corridor and East Portland both opposed the measure A generous electorate didn’t want to spend billions on transportation A few months back, we laid out the…
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Covid & Cities: Reasons for optimism
There are several compelling reasons—the seven “C’s”—to believe cities will thrive and prosper in a post-pandemic world: Competition: Zooming it in works when everyone has to do it, but if you work remotely while others are in the office, you are at a competitive disadvantage in contributing to and advancing in your work, especially if…
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The Week Observed, November 6, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Achieving equitable transportation: Reallocate road space and price car travel. New York has recorded a kind of “Miracle on 14th Street.” By largely banning through car traffic, its speeded bus travel times 15 to 25 percent, with virtually no effect on traffic on adjacent streets. Buses now run…
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Systemic racism and automobile insurance
Does geographic rating of car insurance amount to 21st Century redlining? Car insurance rates vary more based on who your neighbors are than on your driving record The premium penalty for living in a Black neighborhood is twice as large as for being an aggressive driver. States should ban using small geographies, like zip codes,…
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Achieving equitable mobility: Reallocate road space, price driving
Reallocating street space to buses is inherently equitable Charging a very high price to cars for using scarce road space promotes equity Just a year ago, New York took the bold step of of restricting traffic on 14th Street in Manhattan to buses and a relative handful of local deliveries. The improvement in local travel…
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Equity and Metro’s $5 Billion Transportation Bond
Advocates for a $5 billion transportation bond that Portland area voters will be deciding in November are making a specious argument about it being an equity measure. Its largest single project, a multi-billion dollar light rail line serves the some of the region’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods and has as its destination a suburban lifestyle…
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The Week Observed, October 23, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are six. We marked City Observatory’s sixth birthday this week, and took a few moments to reflect back on the journey, and to thank all those who helped us on our way, and to look forward to the vital role that cities will continue to play…
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The amazing disappearing urban exodus
The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities. US Post Office data show that the supposed urban exodus was just a trickle, and Americans moved even less in the last quarter than they did a year ago. At City Observatory, we’ve regularly challenged two…
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Now we are six.
We’re six! On October 17, 2014, we launched City Observatory, with the aim of providing solid, data-driven research on cities, and offering a timely and informed voice on urban policy issues. Six years—and more than a thousand posts later—we want to reflect on the journey we’ve taken and those who’ve helped, and spend a few…
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The Week Observed, October 16, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 is now worst in rural areas and red states. Early on in the pandemic, it seemed like everyone attributed the spread of the Coronavirus to big cities and density. It turns out, more than half a year on, that’s not the case. The epidemic is now far…
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Equity and Parks
Last week, our friend and colleague, Carol Coletta delivered a “master talk” to the 66th Annual Conference of the International Downtown Association. Carol is President & CEO, Memphis River Parks Partnership, and a recognized thought leader on urban issues. Here are her reflections on the role of parks and public spaces in meeting the key challenges of our…
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Red states are now the red zone for Covid-19
Covid-19 now disproportionately affects rural America, and is hitting red states harder than blue ones. Rural counties have 14 percent of US population and 21 percent of new Covid-19 cases. The nation’s largest, densest urban counties now have Covid-19 rates lower than mid-sized and smaller metros and rural areas. This shift to a largely rural…
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The Week Observed, October 9, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Let’s fight congestion with a PR campaign. For decades, when pressed to do something to improve road safety, city and state transportation officials have responded with . . . marketing campaigns. As the federally funded publicity around October’s National Pedestrian Safety Month makes clear, this mostly amounts to shifting…
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Let’s use a marketing campaign to solve traffic congestion
Here’s a thought: Let’s fight traffic congestion using the same techniques DOT’s use to promote safety. Let’s have costumed superheroes weigh in against congestion, and spend billions on safety, instead of the other way around. Why don’t we insist that driver’s take responsibility for the length of their commutes? Today marks the first day of…
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The Week Observed, October 2, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon never comes, Portland edition. It’s a favored myth that any reduction in road capacity will automatically trigger gridlock, and highway engineers regularly inveigh against reallocating road capacity to promote safety or facilitate other users. But real world experience with abrupt and significant reductions in road capacity shows…
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The Great Disconnect: The perverse rhetoric of gentrification
The Great Disconnect By Jason Segedy City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Akron’s Jason Segedy. It originally appeared on his blog. As this decade draws to a close, the story of urban America is increasingly about the great disconnect between a small number of large cities that are thriving, and…
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Carmaggedon does a no-show in Portland
Once again, Carmaggedon doesn’t materialize; Shutting down half of the I-5 Interstate Bridge over the Columbia River for a week barely caused a ripple in traffic It’s a teachable moment if we pay attention: traffic adapts quickly to limits in road capacity The most favored myth of traffic reporters and highway departments is the notion…
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The Week Observed, October 30, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Equity and Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond. This week, Portland residents are voting on a proposed $5 billion payroll tax/bond measure to fund a range of transportation projects. A favorite talking point of advocates is that the measure advances equity, because it will expand transit to black and brown…
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The Week Observed, September 25, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why free parking is one of the most inequitable aspect of our transportation system. There’s a lot of well-founded anger over the inequitable aspects of transportation: the burdens of policing, fare enforcement, and road crashes all fall disproportionately on low income households and communities of color. But a…
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Parking and equity in cities
The average price of a monthly parking permit in cities is $2.25, compared to $70.00 for a transit pass. Everything you need to know about equity and privilege in urban transportation is reflected in how much we charge for parking compared to transit The triumph of asphalt socialism is reflected in providing unlimited free or…
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How to make gentrification even worse
Banning new construction is a great way to push up home values and accelerate gentrification Cities are conflicted and confused about how to protect affordability “Stop the world – I want to get off” was the title of Anthony Newley’s 1961 musical, but it seems like the core policy vision of a growing number of…
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Vancouver Columbian: Suburban drivers matter
Who are the real beneficiaries of the $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter project? Vancouver, Washington commuters, who won’t pay a dime for its construction. Wider freeways just double down on the damage done to city neighborhoods and privilege suburban commuters over communities of color. The editors of a suburban newspaper say the quiet part out…
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The Week Observed, September 18, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Lived segregation in US cities. Our standard measure of urban segregation, whether people reside in different neighborhoods, doesn’t really capture the way people from different racial and ethnic groups interact in cities on a daily basis. A new paper uses data gathered from cell phone records to look…
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City Beat: No flight to Portland’s suburbs
Another anecdote-fueled, data-starved article repeats the “suburban flight” meme, this time for Portland. Actual market data show the central city’s market remains strong Janet Eastman, writing in the Portland, Oregonian, offers up yet another example of a popular journalistic trope, the “Coronavirus is triggering a flight to the suburbs.” Never mind, of course, the point…
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The toxic flood of cars, not just the freeway, crushed Albina
Restorative Justice & A Viable Neighborhood What destroyed the Albina community? What will it take to restore it? It wasn’t just the freeway, it was the onslaught of cars, that transformed Albina into a bleak and barren car-dominated landscape. In the 1950s, Portland’s segregation forced nearly all its African-American residents to live in or near…
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Covid-19 is now a rural and red state pandemic
Covid-19 now disproportionately affects rural America, and is hitting red states harder than blue ones. OK, reporters, we’re waiting for the stories about rural Americans decamping to cities (or suburbs) and from red states to blue ones, where they will be safe from the pandemics. In the early months of the pandemic, reporters were quick…
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Lived segregation in US cities
We’re much less segregated during the day, and when we’re away from home Commercial and public spaces are important venues for interaction with people from other racial/ethnic groups Patterns of experienced segregation tend to mirror residential segregation across metro areas. In the US, we measure racial and ethnic segregation using census data that reports where…
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Why this Portland transit veteran is voting no on Metro’s bond
Editor’s Note: City Observatory is pleased to present this guest commentary from GB Arrington, longtime veteran of Portland’s transit and land use planning systems, explaining why he’s against a proposed $5 billion transportation bond measure proposed by Metro that will be voted in the Portland region this November. By GB Arrington When I stepped down…
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Manufacturing consent for highway widening
ODOT doesn’t want to hear the questions its Community Advisory Committee raises about the proposed $800 million Rose Quarter Freeway widening project–so it fires them. Agency staff misrepresent public testimony to public officials, minimizing objections, and failing to report substantive critiques of agency errors. An ever-shifting set process with constantly changing committees lacks legitimacy. As…
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Is there anything “smart” about smart cities?
Big data and new technology make bold promises about solving urban problems, but not only fall well short of solutions, but actually can end up making things worse. Why we’re skeptical of the “smart city” movement. You can’t be an urbanist or care about cities without hearing—a lot—from the folks in the “Smart Cities” movement.…
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The Week Observed, September 11, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Manufacturing consent for highway widening. In the early days of freeway battles, state highway departments were power blind and tone-deaf, and citizen activists often triumphed in the court of public opinion. In the past several decades though, highway builders have become much more adept at manipulating the process…
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The Week Observed, September 4, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Why most pedestrian infrastructure is really car infrastructure. One of the most misleading terms you’ll hear in transportation is “multi-modal” which in practice means a highway for cars and trucks, with largely decorative provisions for pedestrians and bicyclists. We look at a couple of examples of pedestrian overpasses in…
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The myth of pedestrian infrastructure in a world of cars
Big money “pedestrian” projects are often remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic. One of the biggest lies in transportation planning is calling something “multi-modal.” When somebody tells you a project is “multi-modal,” you can safely bet that its really for cars and trucks with some decorative frills appended for…
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The Week Observed, August 28, 2020
What City Observatory did this week The case against Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond. Portland’s regional government, Metro, is asking voters to approve a $5 billion package of transportation improvements, to be funded by borrowing against an increase in payroll taxes. We take a close look at the proposal, and conclude that its a bad…
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The case against Metro’s $5 billion transportation bond
Metro’s proposed $5 billion transportation measure makes no sense for the region, for transportation, for our economy, for our kids and for our planet. Portland’s regional government, Metro, will be asking voters in November to approve a $5 billion transportation bond measure. There’s a strong case to be made that this is a badly flawed…
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The Week Observed, August 21, 2020
What City Observatory did this week America’s most and least segregated cities. Residential racial segregation is a fundamental and persistent aspect of system racism in the United States. Segregation cuts of disfavored groups from economic and social opportunity, and cities with higher levels of segregation tend to have lower levels of intergenerational economic mobility. In…
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America’s least (and most) segregated cities.
Racial segregation still prevails in most American cities, but varies widely across the nation. Portland is the nation’s least segregated large city. The murder of George Floyd by police has reignited national interest in making more progress toward racial justice. It’s prompted a new round of introspection about the racism that’s deeply embedded in many…
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“Let them drive Teslas” is not a climate or a justice plan
Portland’s climate emergency efforts are tarnished by an inability to plainly speak the facts about climate change But the tragic fact is that the city is utterly failing to meet even its own previous goals, and more alarmingly, isn’t owning up to the failure of its 2015 plan to reduce emissions. Instead, the Bureau of…
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The Week Observed, August 7, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Is it random, or is it Zumper? Are rents going up or down in your city? Listicles showing which places have the biggest jumps (or declines) in rents are a perennial media favorite, but as we’ve warned before, when it comes to data on rent changes, caveat rentor. …
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Climate Fail: Metro’s 2020 Transportation Package
Metro’s multi-billion dollar transportation package does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions Spending $5 billion reduces Portland’s transportation greenhouse gases by .05 percent This package costs $50,000 per ton in reduced GHG emissions Metro Portland knows that climate change is one of the most serious problems we face. We know that transportation, particularly automobiles are…
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Is it random, or is it Zumper?
Pay no attention to Zumper’s claims about rent trends Zumper claims rents for one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments are moving in opposite directions in about a fifth of all markets There’s a lot of hyperventilation in the media about falling rents in different places in the US. It’s certainly likely that in the midst of the…
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The Week Observed, July 31 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. The abject failure of Portland’s Climate Action Plan. Last month, Portland issued the final report on its 2015 Climate Action Plan. It emphasizes that the city took action on three-quarters of the items on the plan’s checklist, but glosses over the most important measure of results: the fact…
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Portland awards itself a participation trophy for climate
Portland is utterly failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, but not to worry, its ticking lots of boxes in its bureaucratic check-list. The city walks away from its 2015 Climate Action Plan after an increase in greenhouse gases, but promises to do better (and more equitably) in the future. Portland’s greenhouse gas emissions…
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A world of fewer cars and less driving
Auto industry consultants KPMG see fewer cars and less driving in our future That may be bad for the car business, but good for the environment and cities One clear implication: hold off building new road capacity There’s little question that the pandemic has altered the way we live in the present, the big unresolved…
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The Week Observed, July 24 2020
What City Observatory did this week The exodus that never happened. You’ve probably seen stories bouncing around the media for the past few months claiming that fears that density makes people more susceptible to the pandemic are prompting people to leave cities in droves. While and enterprising reporter can always find an anecdote to build…
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The Exodus that never happened
The greatest urban myth of the Covid-19 pandemic is that fear of density has triggered an exodus from cities. The latest data show an increase in interest in dense urban locations. At City Observatory, we’ve regularly challenged two widely repeated myths about the Corona Virus. The first is that urban density is a cause of…
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The Week Observed, July 17, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Dominos falling on Portland’s Rose Quarter freeway widening project. In the space of just a few hours two weeks ago, local political support for an $800 million freeway widening project collapsed, after local African-American groups pulled out of the project’s steering committee. We trace the rapid-fire chronology of local…
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Dominos falling on Rose Quarter freeway widening
Last week, over the space of about 24 hours, the prospects for Portland’s proposed the Rose Quarter freeway widening dimmed almost to extinction. Leaders of Portland’s African-American community have concluded that the Oregon DOT had no intention of altering the project in response to community concerns, and when they withdrew, a host of local leaders…
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The Week Observed, July 10, 2020
What City Observatory did this week CityBeat: NPR urban flight story. The pack animals of the media have settled on a single, oft-repeated narrative about cities and Covid-19; that fear of the virus will lead people to move to the suburbs. The latest iteration of this trope is an NPR story, focused on a couple…
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CityBeat: NPR’s suburban flight story
Yet another entry in the trumped-up pandemic-fueled suburban flight narrative Anecdotes aside, there’s no data that people are fleeing cities to avoid the Coronavirus The data show young, well-educated adults moving to urban centers everywhere, and no decline in interest in urban markets during the pandemic As we’ve chronicled at City Observatory, there’s a welter…
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Covid-19: Surging in Sunbelt cities
The pandemic is exploding in Sunbelt Cities, from the Carolinas to California Covid-19 is subdued in the North and surging in the South Hotter southern temperatures and a move indoors, coupled with looser reopening regulations, may explain the Southern surge In June, there’s been a dramatic change in the geography of the Covid-19 pandemic. For…
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The Week Observed, June 26, 2020
What City Observatory did this week When NIMBYs win, everyone loses. Two land use cases from different sides of the country are in the news this week. In both cases, local opponents of new housing development have succeeded in blocking the construction of new apartments in high demand neighborhoods. The high profile case is in…
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Triumph of the NIMBY’s: Less affordable, more displacement
When NIMBYs win, everybody loses Constricting housing supply drives up the price of housing further, and accelerates displacement, in rich neighborhoods and in poor ones. Two recent cases from different sides of the country illustrate the perverse effects of NIMBY fights against the construction of new housing. One from California, was a community effort to…
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The Week Observed, June 19, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Youth Movement: Our latest CityReport. America’s urban revival is being powered by the widespread and accelerating movement of well-educated young adults to the densest, most central neighborhoods in large metro areas. Our new report looks at the latest census data and finds that the number of college-educated 25-…
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City Beat: When workers can live anywhere
Another anecdote-fueled tale predicting of urban decline Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Rachel Feintzeig and Ben Eisen add another story, this one headlined “When workers can live anywhere” to the growing pile of claims that fear of Covid-19 and the possibility for remote work are likely to lead to the demise of cities. “Still,…
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COVID Lessons for Portland (and others)
COVID Lessons for Portland (and others) by Ethan Seltzer (. . . with profound thanks to anonymous reviewers) Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish this essay by City Observatory friend Ethan Seltzer, reflecting on our experience with the Covid-19 pandemic, with widespread civic unrest over police violence and racism, and what the experience of the…
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Youth movement: A generational shift in preference for urbanism
Well-educated young adults are increasingly moving to city centers Real estate search activity shows no decline in interest in city living due to the pandemic Our new report—Youth Movement: Accelerating America’s Urban Renaissance—confirms a powerful and still growing generational shift toward urban living. Increasing numbers of well-educated young adults are living in close-in urban neighborhoods…
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Youth Movement Dashboard
See how your city’s close-in neighborhoods did in attracting well-educated young adults Our CityReport, Youth Movement: Accelerating America’s Urban Renaissance, charts the growing concentration of well-educated young adults in the most central neighborhoods in the nation’s large metro areas. The trend is universal and accelerating. Every one of the 52 largest metro areas recorded an…
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The Week Observed, June 12, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 rates are spiking in five cities. Stay-at-home policies and social distancing have dramatically slowed the spread of the pandemic in the US, but as many state’s begin re-opening, there’s a concern that the virus could rebound. Looking at the data for the 50 largest US metro areas shows…
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Covid-19: A catalyst for more inclusive cities
Will the Covid-19 pandemic be a catalyst for better, more inclusive cities? The media fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic has been a series of largely baseless stories predicting a panicky flight from cities to avoid the virus. As we’ve pointed out the correlation between urban density and the prevalence of disease is spurious; some of…
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Covid-19 accelerating in five cities
New Covid-19 cases are increasing in five metro areas: Phoenix, Tucson, San Antonio, Tampa and Raleigh These are the places to watch to see how well re-opening plans manage to avoid re-igniting the pandemic. Metro areas, not states, are a better lens for monitoring Covid-19. We’ve been tracking the spread of the Coronavirus for the…
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Covid-19 and segregation
Segregated cities seem to be harder hit by the pandemic Covid-19 prevalence is more strongly correlated with metropolitan racial and economic segregation than with urban density The New York City metro area has been the epicenter of the nation’s Covid-19 pandemic and because it is the nation’s most densely settled area, it is easy to…
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The Week Observed, June 5, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. Covid-19 and Cities: An uneven pandemic. We’ve been following the progress of the Covid-19 virus in the nation’s metropolitan areas for the past three months, and with the benefit of hindsight we can now trace out some key facts and trends. Overall, its apparent that the pandemic has…
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Whitewashing the freeway widening
A so-called “peer review” panel was kept in the dark about critiques of the highway department’s flawed projections This is a thinly veiled attempt These are the products of a hand-picked, spoon-fed group, asked by ODOT to address only a narrow and largely subsidiary set of questions and told to ignore fundamental issues. As we’ve…
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The convention business is cratering, and cities are getting stuck with the bill
By Mike McGinn and Joe Cortright Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to publish this commentary jointly authored by former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and City Observatory’s Joe Cortright. Mike McGinn served as Mayor of Seattle from 2010 to 2013. He is also a former lawyer, Sierra Club state chair, neighborhood activist, and founder of sustainability non-profit Great…
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Memo to the Governor: Recovering from Covid-19
Some advice on economic policy for states looking to rebound from the pandemic City Observatory’s Joe Cortright has served as Chair of the Oregon Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers under three Governors. The Council met (virtually) with Oregon Governor Kate Brown on May 29, to discuss how the state’s economy could recover from the effects…
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Covid-19 and Cities: A very uneven pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic has played out very differently in different metro areas; some have been devastated, others only lightly touched and these patterns have shifted over time. Among US metro areas with a million or more population there is a more than 20-fold difference in cases per capita between the hardest hit and the least…
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The Week Observed, May 29, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. LA Covid correlates with overcrowding and poverty, not density. City Observatory is pleased to publish a guest analysis and commentary from Abundant Housing LA’s Anthony Dedousis. Los Angeles County has released detailed geographic data on the incidence of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Anthony offers a series of charts, maps and…
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Coronavirus in L.A. County: Separating Fact from Fiction
Are cities the latest victim of coronavirus? Editor’s Note: City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary by Anthony Dedousis of Abundant Housing LA. Some elected officials and journalists have drawn a link between urban density and the spread of COVID-19. A few anti-urban pundits have gone further, arguing that suburban living patterns are reducing…
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City Beat: Why Portland is not like NYC when it comes to Covid
Once again, there’s a naive and unsubstantiated association between urbanism and the pandemic Portland and Multnomah County have some of the lowest rates of Covid-19 cases of any large metro area The big drivers of Covid-19 susceptibility are poverty, housing over-crowding and a lack of health care. Like many states, Oregon is starting to re-open. …
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The Week Observed, May 22, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Postcards from the Edges: Looking at the relationship between density and the pandemic. There’s a widely circulating meme associating urban density with the spread of the Covid-19 virus, undoubtedly because people know that the virus has hit New York City particularly hard, and well, it is America’s densest city. …
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Postcards from the edges: Density is not Destiny
There’s a meme equating density with Covid-19 risk. Two polar cases shows that density (or lack thereof) has little to do with the spread of the pandemic. Many, including New York’s Governor, have been quick to blame density for the spread of Covid-19. Last month, we looked at data for one of North America’s densest…
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Is the pandemic worse in cities or suburbs?
Using county-level data, it depends on who’s classification system you use Counties may not be the right basis for diagnosing the contributors to Covid. One of the oft-repeated claims in the pandemic is the notion that cities and density are significant contributors to the risk of being infected with the Covid-19 virus. Some of this,…
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What is urban?
Shape of the urban/suburban divide: Views differ There’s a lot of debate about the relative merits and performance of cities and suburbs. You’ll read that the migration to cities has come to a halt, that suburbs are growing faster than cities or that cities have a higher rate of Covid-19 infections than suburbs. All those…
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The Week Observed, May 15, 2020
What City Observatory did this week 1. City Beat: We push back on a New York Times story claiming that people are decamping New York City on account of pandemic fears. You can always find an anecdote about someone leaving New York (or any city, for that matter) because people are always moving out of…
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City Beat: No evidence that people are fleeing to the suburbs
Today’s misleading and incomplete take on cities: There isn’t any evidence that people are fleeing cities for the suburbs; plus it wouldn’t help them avoid the virus if they did. We’ve addressed the claim that the pandemic will lead to an exodus from cities before; today we’ll tackle another iteration. The New York Times…
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Oregon DOT: The master of three-card monte
The highway department’s claims it doesn’t have enough for maintenance are a long-running con You’ve all seen the classic street con three-card monte. All you have to do to double your money is follow one of three cards that the dealer is sliding around the on the surface of the little table. No matter how…
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Don’t make “equity” the enemy of improving cities for people
Invoking concerns about equity to block providing more street space for people is destructive A cautionary tale from Chicago, with some keen insight from Greg Shill. Let’s begin by stipulating one thing: There’s much about American cities, and our transportation system, that is deeply inequitable to low income households and people of color. Our auto-dependent…
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The Week Observed, May 1, 2020
What City Observatory this week Our updated analysis of the prevalence of Covid-19 in US metro areas. It continues to be the case that the pandemic is most severe in the Northeast Corridor. The New York Metro area is the epicenter, as everyone knows, but far less noticed are the very high rates of reported…
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The state of the pandemic by metro area
Updated April 29 with data through April 28. In geographic terms, the Corona Virus has become the Northeast Corridor Virus: NE Corridor metros account for 6 of the 8 hardest hit large metros, and have 6 of the 8 highest rates of reported new cases per capita. Among the 53 metro areas with a million…
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The Week Observed, April 24, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. What the Covid-19 Shutdown teaches us about freeways. Everyone knows that speeds are up on urban roadways around the nation because of the stay-at-home orders to fight the pandemic. But there’s a hidden lesson here. In Portland, for example, one of the most regularly congested roadways is not only…
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What Covid-19 teaches us about how to fix freeways
Limiting demand actually makes freeways work better Portland’s I-5 North freeway now carries more cars, faster at the peak hour than it did prior to the pandemic. Average speeds on I-5 between the Marquam and Interstate Bridges between 4:30 and 5:30 have doubled to more than 55 miles per hour–and the road is carrying about…
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Why suburbs aren’t safer from the pandemic than cities
Whether you live in a city its suburbs, your metro area is the biggest geographic factor in variations in Covid-19 rates Suburban incidence is lower, but there’s about a six-day difference between the reported rate of Covid-19 cases per capita between a city and its suburbs. About 40 percent of suburbs of large metro areas…
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Is Covid-19 the end of cities? (Spoiler: No.)
The New York Times tells us that cities were “losing their allure” before the Covid-19 pandemic, and that now people are preparing to flee urban areas. Sure, cities had a bit of a resurgence after 2000, But by the mid-2010s, the growth slowed. Big cities had become expensive, with rents far out of the range…
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Density is not Destiny: Covid in Cascadia
One of the densest cities in North America has recorded relatively few Covid-19 cases. There’s a popular theory going around–unfortunately being propagated by the Governor of New York–that somehow density is to blame for the spread of Covid-19. There’s little question that New York is the epicenter of the pandemic (pandemicenter?) and it is, famously,…
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The Covid Corridor: The pandemic is worst in the NE Corridor
The incidence of reported Covid-19 cases, and their daily growth is higher in the metros of NE corridor than the rest of the country. The Northeast Corridor has all four of the cities with the highest rate of newly reported cases. New Cases per 100,000 population, April 17 A new metric: New cases per 100,000…
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The Week Observed, April 17, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Regional Patterns of Covid-19 Incidence. The pandemic has struck every corner of the nation, but has clearly hit some areas harder than others. We’ve focused on those metro areas, like New Orleans and New York, that have the highest rates of reported cases per 100,000 population. But stepping back…
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A Note on Covid-19 Case Data
Reported case data correlate strongly with Covid-19 deaths, and provide a reasonable basis for assessing the geographic pattern of the pandemic across US metro areas. A critical question in judging the state of the Covid-19 pandemic is understanding how many people have the virus, and how fast it is spreading. Because of a shortage of…
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Regional Pandemic Hotspots: NE Corridor and Great Lakes
Originally published April 12; Revised and Corrected April 14 The Covid-19 pandemic is hitting two regions in the US much harder than others: The NE Corridor and the Great Lakes Metro areas in these regions have the highest rates of reported cases per capita, and the highest levels of growth In contrast, incidence and growth…
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The Week Observed, April 10, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. What cities are showing us about the progression of the Covid-19 pandemic. In an important sense, each large US metro area is a separate test case of the path of the Covid-19 virus. By observing the path of the pandemic in different cities, we can get a sense of…
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Covid-19 Prevalence by Metro Area (April 17 data)
REVISED April 18; Data through April 17, 2020 Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New York, New Orleans, Detroit, Boston and Philadelphia have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. The rate of growth in new cases in New York, New Orleans, and Detroit has declined to less than…
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Who’s flattening the curve? Evidence from Seattle & San Jose
Seattle and San Jose had the first outbreaks of Covid-19 but now have the slowest rates of growth of any large US metro area Their progress seems closely related to the fact that they’ve cut back on travel more than nearly every other metro area. For the past several weeks, City Observatory has been compiling…
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Staying at home: Estimates for large metro areas
How well are “stay at home” and “shelter in place” policies working in different metro areas? “Big data” from smartphones gives us a picture of how we’re dialing back on travel in response to “stay-at-home” orders to combat the Covid-19 pandemic. We’ve compiled the data from Google and Cuebiq on the variations in travel behavior in…
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What cities tell us about the trajectory of the pandemic
Each metro area represents a different instance of the Covid-19 pandemic; we can use the varied experiences and timing of the virus in each metro area to better understand where we’re headed. Seattle is 10 days to 2 weeks ahead of the rest of the country and signals our possible future trajectory Growth rates are…
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Covid-19 Prevalence by Metro Area (April 8 data)
SUPERSEDED: Please see latest data here. Original post below is for archival purposes. REVISED April 9; Data through April 8, 2020 Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: The situation in New Orleans is the worst of any large metro area: Its rate of reported cases is now 50 percent higher…
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Covid-19 Prevalence by Metro Area (April 2 data)
UPDATED April 3, 2020 Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New Orleans, New York, Detroit, Boston and Seattle have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. New Orleans rate of reported cases has surged past New York; Seattle’s rate of new cases has declined to the lowest level among…
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Anatomy of a rental marketplace
A new report from the DC Policy Center shows the inner-workings of the shadow rental market that is a key to housing affordability Too often, our debates about housing policy are shaped by inaccurate pictures of how the housing market really works. A new report from the D.C. Policy Center provides a remarkably clear and…
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The Week Observed, April 3, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Counting Covid- Cases in US Metro Areas. We’ve been updating our metro area tabulations of the number of reported Covid-19 cases on a daily basis. You can find our latest tabulations here. There’s a mixture of positive and negative developments. Seattle, the metro first hit hard by the pandemic,…
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Covid-19 Prevalence by Metro Area (April 1 data)
NOTE: This post has been superseded with more recent data: click here. Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New York, New Orleans, Detroit, Boston and Seattle have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. Seattle’s rate of new cases has declined to the lowest level among large metro areas;…
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Covid-19 Prevalence by Metro Area (March 31 data)
UPDATED April 1, 2020 Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New York, New Orleans, Detroit, Seattle and Boston have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. Seattle’s rate of new cases has declined to the lowest level among large metro areas; Boston’s cases per 100,000 are nearly equal to…
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Covid-19 Prevalence by Metro Area (March 30 data)
UPDATED March 31, 2020 Note: More recent data is now available here. Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New York, New Orleans, Detroit and Seattle have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. Seattle’s rate of new cases has declined to the lowest level among large metro areas Detroit,…
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How bad is the Covid-19 pandemic in my metro area?
Our “how to” guide to interpreting metro level Covid-19 data Here”s our explainer for understanding where your metro area stands compared to others A word of caution: Reported case data can be noisy and potentially misleading You’ll want to understand two metrics: prevalence (the number of cases per capita) and growth (how fast the number…
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Prevalence of Covid-19 in large US metro areas
UPDATED, March 30, 2020 Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New York, New Orleans, Detroit and Seattle have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. Detroit has now surpassed Seattle in cases per capita New York had the highest level of reported cases per 100,000: 340 The typical (median)…
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Prevalence of Covid-19 in large US metro areas
UPDATED, March 29, 2020 NOTE: More recent data is now available here. Among the 53 metro areas with a million or more population: New York, New Orleans, Detroit and Seattle have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. Detroit has now surpassed Seattle in cases per capita New York had the highest level of…
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The Week Observed, March 27, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. The Geography of Covid-19. A week ago, we issued a call to get much more granular with our statistical analysis of the pandemic’s spread. In just the past few days, a number of new localized measures have emerged. We highlight some of the best practices from around the world. …
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Covid-19: Metro Incidence Estimates, 25 March [SUPERSEDED]
A note to our readers: This post has been superseded by new analysis published on March 28. In addition, the original post contains an error: The original version of estimates for the New York Metropolitan area reported on March 25 included an incorrect estimate of the rate of reported Covid-19 cases per 100,000 population. The actual reported…
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Covid-19: Metro Incidence Estimates, 22 March
New York, New Orleans and Seattle have the highest incidence of pandemic among large metros. The typical metro is only about 1-2 weeks behind these cities in the progression of the virus. Editor’s Note: As of 26 March, we have produced updated estimates with data through 25 March: These data are here. We’ve estimated the…
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Growth rates of Covid-19 in counties with many cases
The key to flattening the curve is reducing the daily rate of growth in Covid-19 cases We’ve charted the daily average growth rate for the counties with the most cases. The results are mixed: Covid-19 growth is slowing in some areas, but accelerating in others As City Observatory readers know, we’re very focused on the…
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Understanding the geography of Covid-19
What maps and charts can–and can’t–tell us about the spread of the pandemic National dashboards now have county data We need to shift our focus to changes in rates of growth at smaller geographies South Korea shows its possible to do high-definition, point-mapping of Covid-19 cases NOTE: City Observatory’s has tabulations of metropolitan data through…
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Covid-19: County-level Incidence Estimates, 19 March 2020
We’ve estimated the incidence of Covid-19 by county in states with 200 or more cases as of March 19, 2020. Incidence is calculated as diagnosed cases per 100,000 population. Data are shown for counties with 100,000 population or more. Highlights: Among these counties, the incidence of Covid-19 is highest in New York City (all five…
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The Week Observed, March 20, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Cheap gas means more pollution and more road deaths. Russia and Saudi Arabia have engineered a big decline in oil prices in the past few weeks, and as a result, US gas prices are now expected to decline by about 50 cents a gallon in the coming months. While…
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Cities and coronavirus: Some thoughts
The Coronavirus pandemic is already worse in several American states than anywhere in China outside Hubei Province The pandemic is all about geography, and we need to do more to pinpoint hotspots and contagion The very thing that makes cities special–their ability to bring people together–is their kryptonite in the Coronavirus pandemic The harsh and…
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Oregon DOT admits it lied about I-5 safety
Oregon’s Department of Transportation concedes it was lying about crashes on I-5 at the Rose Quarter For more than a year, we and others have been calling out the Oregon Department of Transportation for its false claims wider freeways are needed to improve road safety. And we’ve repeatedly show that ODOT’s claim that I-5 at…
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Declining bus ridership is no mystery
We know what’s responsible for declining bus ridership: Cheap gas And now, its about to get worse, thanks to $30 a barrel oil Prices matter. Last Friday’s New York Times has a nice data-driven article by the paper’s very smart Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui, illustrating the decline in bus ridership in cities across the…
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Cheaper gas: Bad for climate and safety
Gasoline prices will drop 50 cents per gallon in the next week or so, and cheap gas will fuel more bad results: more air pollution, more greenhouse gases and more road deaths Now is the perfect time to put a carbon tax in place Lower gas prices mean more driving, more pollution, more road deaths…
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The Week Observed, March 13, 2020
What City Observatory this week Exploding whales and cost overruns. For years, the Oregon Department of Transportation has been pushing a mile-and-a-half long freeway widening project at Portland’s Rose Quarter, telling the Legislature in 2017 that it would cost $450 million. That number has now ballooned to nearly $800 million, and could easily go over…
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ODOT: Exploding whales and cost overruns
It now looks like Oregon DOT’s $450 million freeway widening project will cost over a billion dollars Whales aren’t the only than blow up on ODOT One of the most viewed clips on YouTube depict the handiwork of Oregon Department of Transportation engineers. Nearly 50 years ago, in the fall of 1970, confronted with the…
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The Week Observed, March 6, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. The thickness of the blue line. Robert Putnam popularized the notion of social capital in his book “Bowling Alone,” which he illustrated with a number of indicators of social interconnectedness, like membership in non-profit organizations and clubs, including bowling leagues. We have our own indices of “anti-social” capital, including…
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Unsafe Uber? Lethal Lyft? We’re still skeptical
We’re still skeptical about an updated study claiming ride-hailing increases crashes and deaths In the Fall of 2018, we took a close look at a draft study from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business which made the provocative claim that the advent of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber has actually led to…
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Unsafe Uber? Lethal Lyft? We’re still skeptical
We’re still skeptical about an updated study claiming ride-hailing increases crashes and deaths In the Fall of 2018, we took a close look at a draft study from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business which made the provocative claim that the advent of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber has actually led to…
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The varying thickness of the blue line
Cops per capita: An indicator of “Anti-social” capital?” Why do some cities have vastly fewer police officers relative to their population than others? In the 1966 film “The Thin Blue Line” director William Friedkin explored the role police officers played in protecting the broader populace from violence and disorder. As we’ve frequently noted at City…
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The Week Observed, February 28, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. The inequity built into Metro’s proposed homeless strategy. Portland’s Metro is rushing forward with a plan asking voters to approve $250 million per year in income taxes to fight homelessness and promote affordability in Metro Portland. It’s pitched as redressing the inequities of the past: homelessness disproportionately affects communities…
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Why Atlanta’s anti-gentrification moratorium will backfire
Blocking new development will only accelerate demand for existing homes The moratorium makes flipping houses even more lucrative Atlanta’s making a major investment in Westside Park at Bellwood Quarry, not far from the Beltline that has triggered a wave of redevelopment around the city. It’s going to be a gem. When completed, Westside Park will…
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Gentrification: the case of the missing counter-factual
Why are there so few studies charting displacement and cultural decline in non-gentrifying neighborhoods? The implicit assumption in most gentrification research is that if a neighborhood doesn’t change, that it stays the same, but almost no one looks at that question Displacement by decline is much more common, and more harmful than displacement due to…
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Equity and Homelessness
What’s equitable about spending six times as much per homeless person in the suburbs as in the city? The “equity” standard that’s guiding the division of revenue for Metro’s housing initiative is based on politics, not need. Portland’s regional government Metro is rapidly moving ahead with a proposed $250 million per year program to fight…
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The Week Observed, February 21, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Local flavor: Which cities have the most independent restaurants. Local eateries are one of the most visibly distinctive elements of any city. As Jane Jacobs said, the most important asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place. Independent restaurants are a great indicator…
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Climate failure and denial at the Oregon Department of Transportation
Oregon is utterly failing to reduce transportation greenhouse gas emissions Instead of being down 10 percent by 2020, transportation greenhouse gas emissions are up more than 20 percent Oregon will miss its 2020 GHG goal by 6.5 million tons per year ODOT’s so-called “strategy” is really technocratic climate denial In 2007, Oregon boldly adopted the…
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Understanding Walkable Density
A new way of measuring urban density that explicitly considers walkability by DW Rowlands Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to offer this guest commentary by DW Rowlands. DW Rowlands is a human geography grad student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her current research focuses on characterizing neighborhoods based on their amenability to public transit and…
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Mapping Walkable Density
Walkable density mapped for the nation’s largest metropolitan areas by DW Rowlands Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to offer this guest commentary by DW Rowlands. DW Rowlands is a human geography grad student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her current research focuses on characterizing neighborhoods based on their amenability to public transit and on the…
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How driving ruins local flavor
Car-dependent metros have fewer independent restaurants Chain restaurants and cars go together Yesterday, we used data compiled by Yelp on chain and independent restaurants to compute the market share of chains in the nation’s largest metro areas. Overall, about a quarter of all restaurants are part of a chain, but that fraction varies widely across…
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Local flavor: Cities with the most independent restaurants
Which US cities have the most independent restaurants? One of the chief advantages of cities is the range of consumption choices they afford to their residents. In general, larger cities offer more choices than smaller ones. One of the things that makes a city special and distinctive is its food and culture. Too much of…
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Climate crisis: Cities are the solution
A new report shows how cities are central to any strategy to fight climate change Cities have the “3 C’s: Clean, compact, connected National government policies need to support cities Let’s describe a low carbon future in positive, aspirational terms Will the future be brighter or darker than today? That’s a central question in the…
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Lying about safety to sell freeway widening
ODOT’s lies about safety at the Rose Quarter are so blatant they can be seen 400 miles away. Freeway widening isn’t about deaths or injuries, but “motorist inconvenience” according to this safety expert, making this $800 million project an egregious waste of funds Traffic safety is a real issue, and by any objective measure, Oregon…
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The Week Observed, February 7, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. Talent drives economic development. We know the single most important factor determining metropolitan economic success: It’s determined by the education level of your population. The latest data on educational attainment and per capita incomes show that two-thirds of the variation in income levels among large metro areas is explained…
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Memo to the Oregon Transportation Commission: Don’t Dodge
Climate change? Not our job. We’re just following orders. The Oregon Transportation Commission is on the firing line for its plans to build a $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project in Northeast Portland. There’s been a tremendous outpouring of community opposition to the project: more than 90 percent of the 2,000 comments on…
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Bags, bottles and cans: Pricing works
Oregon’s new mandatory bag fee harnesses market forces to promote environmental objectives Now do it for greenhouse gases On January 1, a new law went into effect in Oregon, which mostly bans single use plastic grocery bags, and requires grocery stores to charge a 5 cent fee for every paper bag they provide to customers.…
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Jealous billionaires: The story behind Amazon’s HQ2
Cash prizes for bad corporate citizenship: When we incentivize anti-social behavior by big corporations, we get more of it Bloomberg Business has a behind-the-scenes post-mortem of the Great Amazon HQ2 sweepstakes, “Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk.” In the Fall of 2017, Amazon announced a high stakes competition for cities across…
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Talent: The key to metro economic success
Educational attainment explains two-thirds of the variation in economic success among metropolitan areas. Each additional percentage point increase in the four-year college attainment rate increases metro per capita income by $1,500 We’re increasingly living in a globalized, knowledge based economy. In that world, the single most important factor determining a region’s economic success is the…
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The Week Observed, January 31, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. A massive regional transportation spending plan that does nothing for climate change. Portland’s leaders are in the process of crafting a $3 billion plus regional transportation package. One of its stated objectives is to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But a recently released staff analysis shows the multi-billion dollar…
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With climate change, it’s always Groundhog’s Day
Every year, the same story: We profess to care about climate change, but we’re driving more and greenhouse gas emissions are rising rapidly. Oregon is stuck in an endless loop of lofty rhetoric, distant goals, and zero actual progress Sunday, February 2nd is Groundhog’s Day, and City Observatory has an annual tradition of looking around…
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Climate Fail: Metro’s 2020 Transportation Package
Metro’s multi-billion dollar transportation package does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions Spending $3 billion reduces Portland’s transportation greenhouse gases by .05 percent This package costs nearly $40,000 per ton in reduced GHG emissions Metro Portland knows that climate change is one of the most serious problems we face. We know that transportation, particularly automobiles…
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The Week Observed, January 24, 2020
What City Observatory did this week Remembering Dr. King. We were reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech about the pronounced tendency in public policy to prescribe socialism for the rich and rugged, free market capitalism for the poor. Much has changed in the half century since that remark, but sadly, it’s still the case…
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Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor
It’s a long road to redressing inequality A half-century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the stilted rhetoric used use to talk about public spending to promote the social good: Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and…
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Walkable places are growing in value almost everywhere
Over the past decade, across the nation, the most walkable homes have appreciated the most In two-thirds of large metro areas, walkable neighborhoods have higher home values than car-dependent ones Walkable neighborhoods appreciated faster than car-dependent ones in 44 of 51 large metro areas in the past seven years. For some time, our research, and…
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Our updated list from A to Z of everything that causes gentrification
Gentrification: Here’s your all-purpose list, from artists to zoning, of who and what’s to blame We first published this list in 2019, but the search for scapegoats has expanded, and now includes little libraries and microbreweries. When bad things happen, we look around for someone to blame. And when it comes to gentrification, which is…
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The Week Observed, January 10, 2020
What City Observatory this week 1. 2019: The Year Observed. We take a look back at 2019 and review some of the most important City Observatory commentaries, interesting stories and valued research. Our most read post of 2019 was “Ten things more inequitable than road pricing.” Other highlights were our “A to Z” list of…
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Why TOPA isn’t the tops
Turning renters into owners is not a simple solution to housing affordability Housing affordability is a tough, multi-faceted problem. Portland is wrestling with one approach to that, a new ordinance that would make it easier to build “missing middle” housing, like duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes in city neighborhoods. According to a recent article in Willamette Week,…
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Why we should enable more people to move to opportunity
Enabling low income households to move to high opportunity neighborhoods is one way to promote equity and intergenerational mobility. But some people apparently don’t want anyone to move. Last year, we profiled an experiment in Seattle that tapped into the insights of the Equality of Opportunity Project. As regular City Observatory readers will know, Raj…
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2019: The Year Observed
What City Observatory did in 2019 We spent a lot of time this year addressing Portland’s proposed half-billion dollar Rose Quarter freeway widening project. You may have thought Portland put its freeway fights behind it in the 1970s, when it killed the Mt. Hood freeway and used the money saved to start a light rail…
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The Week Observed, December 20, 2019
What City Observatory this week 1. Portland’s progress (or lack thereof) on climate. Portland likes to present itself as a climate leader, but the latest data on transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions shows that Portland is losing ground in a big way. Portland’s transportation greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 1,000 pounds per person since 2013,…
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Transportation planners flunk Econ 101: Price elasticity of demand
The most basic concept in economics is that higher prices lead to less consumption, yet this fact is routinely ignored in transportation planning and policy. If we got the prices right, many of our most pressing transportation problems would be much easier to tackle If we have too much of some things, and not enough…
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Portland’s Phony, Failing Climate Strategy
Portland has soaring climate rhetoric, but 1,000 pounds per person more in greenhouse gases from driving Portland has adopted bold climate goals, but when it comes to the single largest local source of greenhouse gas emissions, we’re moving rapidly in the wrong direction. Greenhouse gas emissions in the Portland area have grown by more than…
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The Week Observed, December 13, 2019
What City Observatory this week 1. Oregon DOT repeats its idle lie about emissions. It’s every highway builder’s go-to response to climate change: we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we could just keep cars from having to idle in traffic. That turns out to be a great way to rationalize any highway-widening project. Which…
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Freeway deja vu all over again: The freeway builders ignore school kids
The Oregon Department of Transportation has a decades long-tradition of ignoring Portland Public Schools when it comes to freeway projects So here’s our story so far. The Oregon Department of Transportation, ODOT, is proposing to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile long stretch of freeway in Portland adjacent to the Rose Quarter. We’ve…
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ODOT’s Climate Lie: An idle theory of greenhouse gas emissions
ODOT Director Kris Strickler makes a phony claim that we can fight climate change by reducing traffic idling in congestion Asked about how his agency will respond to the challenge of climate change, newly nominated Oregon Department of Transportation Director Kris Strickler repeated a long discredited lie, claiming that measures to speed traffic by reducing…
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The Week Observed, December 6, 2019
What City Observatory did the past couple of weeks 1. Using seismic scare stories to sell freeways. The Pacific Northwest is living on the edge; sometime (possibly tomorrow, possible several hundred years from now) we’ll experience a Cascadia subduction earthquake that will do significant damage to the region’s infrastructure. Fear of that event is real,…
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The shaky argument for the Columbia River Crossing
Despite claims from Oregon DOT officials, the only published seismic studies suggest the I-5 bridges will survive a Cascadia earthquake. It’s far from clear that spending billions to replace this bridges is a good investment to protect lives and the economy By Robert Liberty City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Robert…
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Why Cyber-Monday doesn’t mean delivery gridlock Tuesday?
Far from increasing traffic congestion, more on-line shopping reduces it, by reducing personal shopping trips Delivery trucks generate 30 times less travel than people traveling to stores to make the same purchases The more deliveries they make, the more efficient delivery services become December first is famously “Cyber-Monday,” the day on which the nation’s consumers…
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The Week Observed, November 22, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. No Deposit, No Return: Another lie to try and sell the $3 billion Columbia River Crossing. The state’s of Oregon and Washington spent nearly $200 million planning the failed Columbia River Crossing, a 12-lane, five mile long freeway project connecting Portland and Vancouver, Washington. The two states walked…
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Want more housing? Build a landlord.
If we’re going to have a lot more missing middle housing; we’re also going to have a lot more landlords Accessory dwellings, duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes are suited to “mom-and-pop” landlords, but tough tenants rights requirements may discourage many homeowners from creating more housing. By Ethan Seltzer City Observatory is pleased to feature this guest…
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No deposit, no return: Another lie to sell the Columbia River Crossing
State DOT’s are using a false claim about financial liability to revive the Columbia River Crossing folly There’s no requirement to repay $140 million in federal funds, if states choose the “No-Build” option The Oregon and Washington department’s of transportation have a scary argument for reviving the failed $3 billion Columbia River Crossing project. They’re…
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The Week Observed, November 15, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Copenhagen’s cycling success hinges on tax policy and pricing, not just bike lanes. The New York Times offers up yet another postcard view of cycling in Copenhagen, where riding a bike to school or work is the most common mode of transportation. The Times reports that this is…
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The city as labor saving device
Great cities, especially ones with dense, walkable mixed use neighborhoods are an economic boon to households because they save the precious commodity of time Labor-saving devices and economic welfare Stories of economic progress appropriately revolve around major technological breakthroughs. There’s little question that the advent of steam, the harnessing of electricity, and the development of…
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Carmaggedon does a no-show in Seattle, again
Once again, Carmaggedon doesn’t materialize; this time when Seattle started asking motorists to pay a portion of the cost of their new highway tunnel Initial returns suggest that tolling reduced congestion by reducing the overall volume of traffic in downtown Seattle The most favored mythology of traffic reporters and highway departments is the notion of…
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Copenhagen’s cycling success: Make cars pay their way, not just bike lanes
Promoting biking requires ending the big, hidden subsidies to car ownership and use It easy to be in love with cycling in Copenhagen. Bikes are the mode of transport most favored for trips to work and school by local residents. American’s traveling to the Danish capital are always blown away by how well the system…
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The Week Observed, November 8, 2019
What City Observatory did this week A two cent solution to climate change? Around the world, plastic bags are an environmental scourge, both in the form a litter (a nuisance) and as a threat to wildlife. In response, many cities have implemented plastic bag fees, asking consumers to pay a nickel or more per bag.…
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Climate Change: A 2-cent solution
Let’s put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon It works for plastic bags; let’s use the same idea for carbon Consider the plastic bag: It’s a highly visible environmental problem, one that we all encounter. Around the world, retailers routinely provide shoppers with “free” plastic bags to carry home…
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The Week Observed, November 1, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Tim Bartik explains business incentives. States and cities spend about $50 billion a year on tax breaks and other incentives to try to influence business location decisions. The nation’s leading scholar on the subject, Upjohn Institute’s Tim Bartik, has a new book explaining succinctly and in non-technical terms…
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Here’s what climate change denial looks like
Pretending that climate change can be solved by widening roads to keep cars from idling in traffic is dishonest and reprehensible, yet that’s exactly what Portland’s regional government is doing. A new poll in Portland is promoting the discredited myth that cars idling in traffic congestion are a principal cause of climate change. Portland’s regional…
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Bartik: The verdict on business tax incentives
Political rationalizations and exceptionalism will always be used to justify giveaway policies With the possible exception of Greg LeRoy (who tracks state and local incentives for Good Jobs Now) and Amazon’s site location department, there’s no one in the nation who knows more about business incentives and their effectiveness than the Upjohn Institute’s Tim Bartik.…
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Revealed: the secret of a successful urban economy
One factor trumps all others in determining economic success: Educational attainment Brookings researchers pile on more evidence of this key fact, and outline strategies for increasing skills. But remember: talented workers are mobile, so you also have to have a great urban environment to attract and retain smart workers. Our friends at the Brookings Institution…
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How homeownership as wealth is rigged against people of color
Timing is everything in real estate, and mortgage availability cycles mean that people of color buy high and sell low. The Urban Institute has an informative new report charting the swings of home prices across the nation since 2000. It shows a familiar boom-bust-recovery pattern. Home prices surged through about 2006, and collapsed in the…
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Does walkability promote economic mobility?
A new study shows a tantalizing connection between more walkable places and intergenerational economic mobility City Observatory readers will be familiar with the findings of Raj Chetty and his colleagues in the Equality of Opportunity Project. In a revelatory use of big data, they used anonymized tax records to track the lifetime earnings of kids…
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Why its important for your city to be unequal
If your city isn’t unequal, it’s either poor or exclusionary Measured income equality, which is sensible goal nationally, is a perversely misleading indicator of which cities are the most just and and inclusive Income and wealth inequality in the United States are large and growing problems. In the past several decades most of the increased…
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The Week Observed, October 18, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Our 5th Anniversary. October 17 marked 5 years since we started publishing our research and commentary at City Observatory. We reflect back on five years of work, and thank all those who made it possible, and especially you, our readers. 2. Rites of Way. A complex set of…
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City Observatory turns five
We observe our fifth birthday On October 17, 2014, we launched City Observatory, with the aim of providing solid, data-driven research on cities, and offering a timely and informed voice on urban policy issues. Five years–and a thousand posts later–we want to reflect on the journey we’ve taken and those who’ve helped, and spend a…
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Reduced demand: Tolling or restricting cars reduces traffic
We have urban traffic congestion because we heavily subsidize people driving in cities. Reducing subsidies and lowering road capacity reduces traffic and congestion. Why are we building highway capacity for users who won’t pay its costs at 90 percent discount? By now, we all know about “induced demand” the idea that when we build more…
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Buses, Bike Lanes, Crosswalks: Reclaiming public space
Renegotiating the right of way in public space They erased the lines on 24th Avenue. Just a few blocks from my house is NE 24th Avenue in Portland, a principal North-South route through the Irvington neighborhood. For the decades I’ve lived here, there’s been a painted yellow double stripe down the middle of the road. …
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The Week Observed, October 11, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Transportation for America won’t be fooled again.. After years of getting rolled by the freeway lobby, it appears that T4America has finally said “Enough.” Transit and active transportation activists have been roped into an unholy alliance with highway advocates, pressing the federal government for more money for “multi-modal”…
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Won’t be fooled again: Transportation for America
Too often, progressive transportation advocates have been rolled by the highway crowd; No more, says Transportation for America Three principles for reform: Fix it First, Safety before Speed, Accessibility, not Mobility. There’s been a kind of Kabuki theatre around federal transportation funding legislation over the past two decades. Advocates for transit, biking and walking form…
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The Week Observed, October 4, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. We debunk the Wall Street Journal’s claim of an exodus of young adults from cities. Last week, the Wall Street Journal trumpeted an “exodus” of 25 to 39 year old adults from cities. Upon closer inspection, the data cited by the Journal simply don’t support this conclusion. When…
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No youth exodus from cities: WSJ is detecting noise, not signal
There’s no statistically significant news on young adults in cities in the latest Census release Pro-tip: Ignore changes smaller than the margin of error: they’re noise, not signal It’s hard to underestimate the journalistic zeal to report a contrarian story. In the world of urbanism, a recent favorite has been “young adults are leaving cities.”…
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A modest proposal: An EIS for the DMV
Many states subject housing approval to environmental reporting requirements; what if we extended this same principle to car registrations. Back in the early days of the environmental movement–the late sixties and early seventies, one lawyerly idea that was in vogue was the notion of requiring government policy decisions to be undertaken only after fair consideration…
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The Week Observed, September 27, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why diversification is a simplistic, often flawed economic strategy. When it comes to personal investment everyone understands (or certainly should understand) the concept of portfolio diversification–by having a wide variety of different investments, one lowers the risk of loss. That same principle is widely applied in economic development,…
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A lack of nearby jobs doesn’t cause urban poverty
There’s scarcely any evidence that proximity to jobs matters for escaping poverty. One of the most popular and persistent theories of urban poverty is that the poor are poor because they don’t live particularly close to jobs. John Kain popularized the “spatial mismatch” theory in the late 1960s, explaining increased and persistent urban unemployment as…
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Why economic diversification is a poor guide to local strategy
Too much economic development policy is based on a naive analogy to portfolio theory Cities looking to strengthen their economies should concentrate on building upon and extending current specializations One of the most widely agreed upon bits of folk wisdom in economic development is the idea of “economic diversification.” The notion is that your local…
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The Week Observed, September 20, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. What super-commuters really mean. Media coverage of super-commuters–people who travel more than 90 minutes each way to and from work–is invariably sympathetic, treating these folks as hapless victims, and lamenting the congestion on the highway system. But despite all the attention they get, these long-distance commuters are remarkably…
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Portland’s Climate Fail: More Driving
Carbon emissions from transportation in Portland increased 6 percent last year In the one are where city policy can make the most difference, greenhouse gas emissions are increasing Portland has long prided itself in being one of the first cities in the US to adopt a legislated goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. The…
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What supercommuting really means
Super-commuting is a really a plea for more housing and better transit If long distance commutes are up, its probably because gas prices are so low If you’re covering the transportation beat, the plight of the poor super-commuter is a reliably evergreen story. Profile some poor person who gets up at 4.00 AM to travel…
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How Ecotopia is failing its biggest test
West Coast political leaders talk a good greenhouse gas game, but actions speak louder Throughout Ecotopia, carbon emissions are rising due to more driving, yet the region’s leaders are throwing even more money at subsidizing car travel This weekend, leaders of some of the world’s most environmentally progressive cities are meeting in Copenhagen for the…
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The Week Observed, September 13, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Beto O’Rourke brings a strong inclusive urbanist message to the Presidential contest. While its been great to see housing affordability and climate change grow in prominence on the national stage, some of what’s been proposed, especially to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, has been too much alternative fuels and…
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“Smart Cities” have to be about much more than technology
A framework for thinking about smart cities Cities are organisms, not machines 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…
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Inclusive urbanism comes to the presidential race
Beto O’Rourke brings a strong urbanist, inclusive message to the presidential campaign The 2020 Democratic presidential race has been remarkable for addressing both climate change and housing policy issues that have long been ignored. For example, as the Brookings Institution’s Jenny Schuetz has chronicled, several of the candidates have stated policy positions on improving housing…
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The Week Observed, September 6, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Highway to Hell. There’s a new report out on the the future of the Interstate Highway System, and its a shocker. It’s a shock because it shows that the National Academies of Engineering, ostensibly a pillar of the nation’s scientific establishment, is willfully blind to the problems of…
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Highway to Hell: Climate denial at the TRB
The Transportation Research Board, nominally an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, is engaged in technocratic climate arson with its call for further highway expansion and more car travel. The planet is in imminent peril from global warming, with much of the recent increase in emissions in the US coming from increased driving. In…
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Seeing red
We’re killing more people because more people are ignoring traffic signals We’ve charted the ominous increase in road deaths in the past several years, and now there’s a new bit of evidence of just how bad the problem has become. In 2017, according to an American Automobile Association analysis of NHTSA data reported by the…
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The Week Observed, August 30, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Must read 1. Why Detroit (and other cities) need more gentrification and congestion. Michigan Future’s Lou Glazer has a provocative essay arguing that Detroit and other struggling cities would actually benefit from more gentrification and congestion. In a word, both phenomena are indicators that there’s growing demand for…
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Portland’s freeway fight: Round 1 goes to the scrappy upstarts
Community opposition forces Oregon Department of Transportation to do a full Environmental Impact Statement on its half-billion dollar Rose Quarter freeway widening project. For the past two years, we’ve been deeply engaged in the unfolding battle over the Oregon Department of Transportation’s proposal to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile long stretch of…
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The top twenty reasons to ignore TTI’s latest Urban Mobility Report
It’s hard to find a more biased and misleading example of pseudo-science than the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Report. Here are our top 20 reasons why you should ignore the latest version. Since the 1980s, Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has periodically trotted out various versions of its “Urban Mobility Report,” which purports to estimate…
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The Week Observed, August 23, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Portland’s food cart pods are dead; long live Portland’s food cart pods. Portland is famous as a foodie town, and one of the city’s claims to fame is having more than 500 food carts, mostly grouped in pods offering a range of different cuisines. One of the oldest and…
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Its back, and its still wrong: the Urban Mobility Report
After a four year hiatus, the Texas Transportation Institute has once again generated its misleading Urban Mobility Report–and its still wrong. The UMR has been comprehensively debunked–it has never been peer-reviewed nor have its authors responded to authoritative critiques, it relies on a series of false premises, penalizes cities with compact development patterns and short…
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Portland’s food cart pod is dead, long live Portland’s food cart pods!
How food carts illustrate the importance of dynamic change in cities. There’s a tension in the city between the permanent (or seemingly permanent) and the fleeting, between the immutability of the built environment and the minute-by-minute change in human behavior. Great cities not only change, but the excel at incorporating and encouraging change. There are…
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The Week Observed, August 16, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Copenhagen’s success: More than just bike lanes. Copenhagen is one of the world’s great cycling cities, and its accomplishments are a a beacon to those looking to build more bike friendly places. Most commuters in the city now travel by bike on a daily basis. Part of the city’s…
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Copenhagen: More than bike lanes
Correctly pricing car use and promoting dense urban development are keys to promoting cycling The Los Angeles Times has a gushy article–“Copenhagen has taken bicycle commuting to a whole new level,“–extolling the virtues of cycling in Copenhagen. What with a vast network of bike lines and even bike-superhighways, and a robust public commitment to making…
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The Week Observed, August 9, 2019
What City Observatory did this week How helping families move to better neighborhoods reduces segregation and promotes opportunity. The work of the Opportunity Insights project, led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty, has shown convincingly that where you grow up has a profound influence on your life’s path. Kids from low income families that grow up in…
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Get Out!: Moving to a new neighborhood to escape poverty
For many families, the way out of poverty is to move to a better neighborhood A new study shows modest investments in information combined with supportive services can help them make that move. We need to rethink attachment to neighborhood, and see moving as one way out of poverty for many low income households The…
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The Week Observed, August 2, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. CityLab: Everything you think you know about gentrification is wrong. We take a look at a recent CityLab article reporting (faithfully) the findings of some recent research on gentrification in New York City. The study, which looked at households with kids in the Medicaid program, found that low…
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CityLab: Everything you think you know about gentrification is wrong
Facts are stubborn things: And they don’t support the folk wisdom equating gentrification with displacement. There’s a palpable and growing amount of cognitive dissonance between the accepted conventional wisdom about the intrinsically evil nature of gentrification, and a body of careful detailed research that shows that its either not bad, or actually produces measurable benefits.…
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Economists & Scientists agree: To save the planet, we have to price carbon
One thing economists agree about: pricing carbon is essential to saving the planet; but if you don’t believe economists, you ought to believe Bill Nye, the Science Guy. Economists are famous for disagreeing with one another. For every proposition, there is an equal and opposite economist. An even economists frequently have trouble selecting a single…
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A modest proposal: Extend the Americans with Disabilities Act to highways
Let’s require that highways really be accessible to those who can’t drive: State highway departments should provide bus service on state roads for the disabled The Americans with Disabilities Act was landmark legislation to make sure that the disabled were not denied equal access to the public realm. The ability to travel freely is an…
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The Week Observed, July 26, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why gentrification is good for long time residents of low income neighborhoods. We take a close look at a new study from the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank that challenges much of the frequently repeated claims about gentrification. It finds that there’s relatively little displacement from gentrifying neighborhoods, that…
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Devaluation of housing in black neighborhoods, Part 2: Appreciation
Are home prices appreciating more or less in black neighborhoods? Is that a good thing? Today, in part 2 of our analysis of the home price gap between majority black and predominantly white neighborhoods we look at the pattern of home price appreciation for black and white home buyers. Yesterday, in part 1 of our…
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The devaluation of black neighborhoods: Part 1.
Lingering racism holds down property values in majority black neighborhoods For most American households, their home is their largest financial asset; how valuable that asset is, and whether it appreciates has a profound impact on a household’s financial well-being. Unsurprisingly, a big component of the racial wealth gap in the United States has to do…
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How gentrification benefits long-time residents of low income neighborhoods
The new Philadelphia Fed study of gentrification is the best evidence yet that gentrification creates opportunity and promotes integration To many “gentrification” is intrinsically negative. When wealthier, whiter people move into the neighborhood, it must necessarily mean that lower income people of color are either driven away (to even worse neighborhoods) or suffer from higher…
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Why homeownership is frequently a bad bet
Home buying is a risky bet: There’s a 30% chance your house will be worth less in five years It’s a widely agreed that promoting homeownership is a key means to help American households build wealth. But as we and others have argued, homeownership can be a risky and problematic investment for many households–and is…
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The Week Observed, July 12, 2019
What City Observatory did this week About those swelling suburbs. Much was made last week of a Wall Street Journal story noting that 14 of the 15 fastest growing cities with populations greater than 50,000 were suburbs. As with previous such reports, that’s been taken to mean that America’s urban revival is waning and that…
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About those swelling suburbs
Faster suburban population growth doesn’t signal a preference for suburbs: Here’s why Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported suburbs growing faster than cities. The article, “American suburbs swell again as a new generation escapes the city.” The article looks at Census data showing that some of the nation’s fastest growing cities are sunbelt suburbs.…
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The Week Observed, July 5, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. What Oregon’s “single family zoning ban” signals for housing policy. Just before adjourning, the 2019 Oregon Legislature adopted the nation’s first statewide ban on exclusive, single family zoning. The legislation effectively re-legalizes duplex, triplex and fourplex housing in urban neighborhoods that have been restricted to one-family homes. While…
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Happy Birthday America; Thanks Immigrants!
We celebrate the fourth of July by remembering that a nation composed overwhelmingly of immigrants owes them a special debt. America is a nation of immigrants, and its economy is propelled and activated by its openness to immigration and the new ideas and entrepreneurial energy that immigrants provide. Its commonplace to remind ourselves that many…
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In Oregon: The middle isn’t missing any more
Oregon moves decisively to legalize missing middle housing Oregon became the first state in the nation to comprehensively bar local governments from imposing exclusive single-family residential zoning, and to effectively open up nearly all residentially zoned land to duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes. HB 2001 passed the Oregon House and Senate, and is on its way…
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The Week Observed, June 28, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why is the US killing so many pedestrians? The grim data from 2018 are now available: More than 6,200 US pedestrians were killed by automobiles last year, an increase of more than 50 percent in the past decade. Many reasons are given to explain the trend, and some…
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The Week Observed, July 19, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Homeownership is frequently a bad bet. Although homeownership gets treated as the best way to built wealth, it’s actually a highly risky financial strategy for many households, especially those with modest incomes. It turns out that buying a home is a highly leveraged, and non-diversified investment that exposes the…
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Why are US drivers killing so many pedestrians?
US drivers are killing 50 percent more pedestrians, European drivers are killing a third fewer If anything else–a disease, terrorists, gun-wielding crazies–killed as many Americans as cars do, we’d regard it as a national emergency. Especially if the death rat had grown by 50 percent in less than a decade. But as new data from…
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Valuing Walkability
A new report confirms the growing market for walkable places George Washington University and Smart Growth America have a new report on the economic value of and growing market for walkable places. Called “Foot Traffic Ahead–2019” this latest report is an update of research done originally in 2007 and published by the Brookings Institution and…
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The Week Observed, June 21, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. It’s official: The Rose Quarter Freeway Widening is a Boondoggle. Frontier Group and USPIRG released the latest version of their annual Highway Boondoggle report, and the Oregon Department of Transportation’s half-billion dollar Rose Quarter freeway widening. The report underscores the verdict from national experts that the project will…
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It’s official: I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening is a boondoggle
Frontier Group and USPIRG’s annual report on highway boondoggles calls out the Oregon DOT’s wasteful, ineffective I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project as a national level boondoggle. Portland is famous for making top ten lists when it comes to urban transportation policy, what with its number one in the nation share of big city bike…
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Job Density: A new metric for urban economies
Employment is increasingly concentrating, and a few cities lead the way The Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program has a new report out, Where jobs are concentrating and why it matters to cities and regions” looking at the density of employment in the nation’s metro areas, and how its changed in the past decade. Here are…
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A solution for displacement: TIF for affordable housing
The case for using tax increment financing for affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods The problem with gentrification is that rising property values may make it expensive or impossible for lower and moderate income residents to live in an area. But what if we could tap some of that increase in land values to subsidize affordable…
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Fruit and economics: Riffing on Krugman
Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences Friday night on Twitter, Paul Krugman waxed poetic about fruit and economic theory. Krugman is back from Europe, and thirsting for summer fruits coming into season. That led him to reflect on a fundamental flaw in economic logic, the notion that more choice is…
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The Week Observed, June 7, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Myth-busting: Building new market rate housing doesn’t drive up nearby rents. A favorite assertion of some housing supply-side skeptics is the theory that building new market rate housing in a neighborhood drives up rents in the immediate area. It’s a mistaken analogy to the idea of “induced demand”…
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The Week Observed, June 14, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The economics of fruit, time, and place. Last week, Paul Krugman, fresh off his European vacation, waxed poetic about the fleeting joy of summer fruit, and true to form, may an economic argument about how this illustrates the value of such perishable time-limited experiences. Here in Portland, we’re…
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Portland is winning the fight against congestion!
New data from TomTom shows Portland number one nationally in reducing traffic congestion: Where’s the celebration? Portland chalked up the biggest reduction in traffic congestion of any city in the US over the past year. But neither the media nor the state transportation department seem to care. If what they’re doing is working, why aren’t…
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Electric vehicle subsidies: Inefficient & Inequitable
Subsidizing electric vehicle purchases is an expensive way to reduce carbon emissions, and mostly subsidizes rich households who would have bought electric vehicles anyhow There’s a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research that looks at the effectiveness and distribution of the electric vehicle (EV) purchase credits. The study, by economists from Peking…
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Another housing myth debunked: Neighborhood price effects of new apartments
New research shows new apartments drive down rents in their immediate neighborhood, disproving the myth of “induced demand” for housing If you’re a housing supply skeptic, there’s one pet theory that you’ve been able to hang your hat on, in the face of a barrage of evidence that increasing the supply of housing helps hold…
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The Week Observed, May 31, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Who bikes? Discussions of investing in bike infrastructure are often fraught with arguments about who benefits, with oft-expressed fears that bike lanes chiefly benefit a spandex-wearing elite. How does cycling correspond to income. There’s a misleading claim floating around the twitterverse that the single largest group of bike…
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The constancy of change in neighborhood populations
Neighborhoods are always changing; half of all renters move every two years. There’s a subtle perceptual bias that underlies many of the stories about gentrification and neighborhood change. The canonical journalistic account of gentrification focuses on the observable fact that different people now live in a neighborhood than used to live there at some previous…
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Who bikes?
Workers in low income households rely more on bikes for commuting, but the data show people of all income levels cycle to work There’s a lot of hand-wringing and harrumphing about the demographics of cycling. Some worry that bike lanes cater to higher income, spandex clad commuters, and are yet another signal of gentrification. In…
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The Week Observed, May 24, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Exit, hope and loyalty: What’s behind neighborhood change? America’s neighborhoods are always changing, and it’s often a question of whether change is driven more by hope or despair. We offer a slight tweak to Albert Hirschman’s trinity of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” to explore the choices and decision-calculus confronting…
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Exit, Hope and Loyalty: The fate of neighborhoods
How neighborhood stability hinges on expectations: If people don’t believe things are going to get better, many will leave One of the most perplexing urban problems is neighborhood decline. Once healthy, middle-class or working class-places seem to gradually (and then abruptly) fall from grace. As we documented in our report Lost in Place, the number…
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The Week Observed, May 17, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Will upzoning help housing affordability? Housing supply denialism–claims that the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to housing markets–have a ready audience in the NIMBY community. The latest study to make the rounds comes from Andres Rodriguez-Pose and Michael Storper, with an added boost from CityLab’s Richard…
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Will upzoning ease housing affordability problems?
More housing supply denialism–debunked It appears that we have been a bit premature in calling the housing supply debate over. Last week’s urbanist Internet was all a flutter with the latest claim of an academic study purporting to show that allowing more density in cities wouldn’t do anything to ameliorate the housing affordability problem. The…
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The Young and Restless in Black and White
A sharp divide by race in urban residence for young adults Well-educated young whites are increasingly living in central cities, while well-educated young African-Americans are shifting increasingly to the suburbs For some time, we’ve been tracking the location decisions of a group we call the “young and restless”–25 to 34 year olds with a four-year…
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Inclusionary Zoning’s Wile E. Coyote moment
You won’t know that your inclusionary zoning program is wrecking the housing market until it’s too late to fix. How lags and game theory monkey wrench inclusionary zoning. One of the toughest problems in economics and economic forecasting is dealing with markets and decisions that involve considerable lags. There’s often a lag, or length of…
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The Week Observed, May 10, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of design thinking. Really good design can frequently improve the utility and performance of everyday objects, and there’s little question that the attentiveness to software design and user experience has made smart phones indispensable adjuncts to our lifestyle. But while design thinking can improve many things,…
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Why road pricing is inherently equitable: Faster buses
Road pricing is inherently fairer to the poor because it speeds up buses As economists, we’re keen on the idea of road pricing. The reason we have congestion and delay is because we charge a price for peak hour road use (zero), that doesn’t come close to covering the costs of providing roadway capacity and…
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The limits of design thinking
The most difficult design challenge is asking the right question Not long ago, a feature article at the New York Times described 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…
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The Week Observed, May 3, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The idea of cities and the city of ideas. What cities do is bring people together, and the heightened interaction among people invariably generates friction, but also new ideas. City Observatory’s Joe Cortright delivered the annual Harold Vatter Memorial Lecture on Economics at Portland State University on May…
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City of ideas, and the idea of cities
Cities have always been about bringing people together and creating new ideas Editor’s Note: City Observatory Director Joe Cortright will be giving the Harold Vatter Memorial Lecture in Economics at Portland State University on Thursday, May 2. His theme will be “Cities in the Knowledge Economy.” As a prelude to that lecture, we’re offering this…
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The Week Observed, April 26, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The high cost of low house prices. We generally take low house prices as a sign that housing is affordable, but the reality isn’t that simple. In the case of cities and urban neighborhoods, low house prices may say a lot more about decline and dysfunction than about…
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You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs
The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location At City Observatory, we’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons to believe that a single, fixed percentage of income standard does a poor job of reflecting whether housing is priced…
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Let’s have an honest discussion about the Rose Quarter freeway widening project
Good decisions result only if state officials are transparent and honest City Observatory has been closely following the proposal to spend $500 million widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter in Portland. In the process, we and others have repeatedly uncovered instances of state agency officials misrepresenting facts, suppressing key data, denying the existence…
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The high cost of low house prices
Low house prices signify problems, not affordability There’s a presumption that low housing prices are a sign of affordability, and a related belief that if housing prices rise, that its “a bad thing” because it must mean that a neighborhood is becoming less affordable. If only it were that simple. To economists, prices are signals…
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The Week Observed, April 19, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Kevin Bacon and Musical Chairs teach us housing economics. It’s an article of faith among economists that more housing, even higher end housing, will help ease rising rents. But to lay-people, that seems counterintuitive. A new paper from the Upjohn Institute shows that the construction of new housing…
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Everything that causes gentrification, from A to Z
Gentrification: Here’s your all-purpose list, from artists to zoning, of who and what’s to blame When bad things happen, we look around for someone to blame. And when it comes to gentrification, which is loosely defined as somebody not like you moving into your neighborhood, there’s no shortage of things to blame. We’ve compiled a…
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Is Uber Unsafe? Is Lyft Lethal? Let’s dig into the data to find out
We have the data: Let’s do a real test of whether Uber and Lyft lead to more crashes Last year, we asked some hard questions about a study from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business that made the provocative claim that the advent of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber has actually led…
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Kevin Bacon & musical chairs: How market rate housing increases affordability
Building more market rate housing sets off a chain reaction supply increase that reaches low income neighborhoods Households moving into new market rate units move out of other, lower cost housing, making it available to other households; the propagation of this effect produces additional housing supply in lower income neighborhoods There’s a lot of resistance…
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The Week Observed, April 12, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The annual Ben and Jerry’s advanced seminar in transportation economics. If you love ice cream–who doesn’t?–Tuesday was your chance to get a free cone at Ben and Jerry’s and while you were there, pick up a fundamental insight into transportation economics. Around the country, people were lined up…
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Measuring the civic commons
Using a data driven approach to understanding the health of the public realm We know that the civic commons, everything from parks and libraries, to city centers, the streetscape and other public spaces, play vital roles in enabling and promoting social interaction. Communities invest significant resources in these assets, but often find it difficult to…
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Time for the annual Ben & Jerry’s seminar in transportation economics
They’ll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads You can learn everything you need to know about transportation economics today, just by helping yourself to a free ice cream cone. One day a year, and today is that day, Ben and Jerry are giving away…
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How Portland thrives without a port
The myth of a freight dependent economy: debunked by a thriving reality Imagine a port city, whose port went away. It’s economy would surely wither and die, right? That’s what you might expect if you believed decades of civic shibboleths about the Portland having a freight dependent economy. The symbol of is the marine crane. …
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The Week Observed, April 5, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. More Orwell from the Oregon Department of Transportation. When it comes to any public policy decision, but especially one that involves spending $500 million (and likely a good deal more), the public has the right to expect that public employees will be truthful and candid. That hasn’t been…
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Integration and social interaction: Evidence from Intermarriage
Reducing segregation does seem to result in much more social interaction, as intermarriage patterns demonstrate Change doesn’t happen fast, but it happens more frequently and more quickly when we have integrated communities One of the regular critiques of urban integration is that while we might get people from different backgrounds to live in the same…
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25 reasons not to widen Portland freeways
Portland is weighing whether to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile-long stretch of the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter near downtown. We’ve dug deeply into this idea at City Observatory, and we’ve published 25 commentaries addressing various aspects of the project. Here’s a synopsis: Traffic congestion Wider freeways don’t reduce congestion. March…
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More Orwell from the Oregon Department of Transportation
We have always been at war with Eastasia. Concealing and lying about key facts regarding the proposed Rose Quarter Freeway widening process is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act and a betrayal of public trust In less than 24 hours, ODOT spokes-people maintained with equal assurance that the CRC was “no where on…
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The Week Observed, March 29, 2019
What City Observatory did this week A note to City Observatory readers: Bear with us, folks: We’re in the last week of our month-long deep dive into Portland’s debate about whether to spend a half billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of freeway near the city’s downtown. Based on all we’ve learned in our…
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The Lemming Model of Traffic
Highway planners use a deeply flawed “lemming” model of traffic that rationalizes highway widenings The traffic projections made as part of the Environmental Assessment for the $500 million Rose Quarter I-5 widening project make an audacious claim that the project will reduce traffic congestion and greenhouse gases, and completely unlike any other freeway expansion project,…
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There’s a $3 billion bridge hidden in the Rose Quarter Project EA
ODOT hid its plans to build a $3 billion Columbia River Crossing in the Rose Quarter Freeway Widening Environmental Assessment The carefully crafted marketing campaign for the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway widening project is adamant that you don’t call it an expansion. It’s an “improvement project” they say. We’re not widening the freeway, we’re just…
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Congestion pricing is a better solution for the Rose Quarter
Congestion pricing is a quicker, more effective and greener way to reduce congestion at the Rose Quarter than spending $500 million on freeway widening. Failing to advance pricing as an alternative in the environmental review is a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act For the past month, we’ve been taking a hard look at…
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National transportation experts: Portland, you’re doing it wrong
Long regarded as a national leader in transportation policy, Portland is being called out by some of the best and brightest for a wrong-headed decision to spend half a billion dollars widening freeways. The damage done is not just to the city’s reputation. Janette Sadik-Khan: Once king of sustainable transpo, Portland could be come jester…
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The Week Observed, March 22, 2019
What City Observatory did this week A note to City Observatory readers: We’re deep in the thick of Portland’s debate about whether to spend a half billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of freeway near the city’s downtown. Based on all we’ve learned in our research at City Observatory, and our analysis of the…
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Safety last: What we’ve learned from “improving” the I-5 freeway.
Expanding freeway capacity on I-5 hasn’t reduced crashes in Woodburn, but did triple in cost Today, we’re pleased to offer a guest commentary from Naomi Fast. Naomi currently lives in Beaverton, Oregon. Previously, she lived in Portland, where she learned to ride a bicycle as transportation while earning graduate degrees at Portland State University. Her…
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Safety: Using the big lie to sell wider freeways
Oregon’s Department of Transportation is lying about safety to sell a half billion dollar freeway project Fear-mongering is the one of the lowest, if unfortunately most effective, means of selling anything. Threaten anyone with a danger to their health and safety, and they’ll acquiesce to a sales pitch. Oregon’s Department of Transportation is using an…
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How a freeway destroyed a neighborhood, and may again
Portland’s Albina neighborhood was devastated by the I-5 freeway; Widening it repeats that mistake Freeways and the traffic they generate are toxic to vibrant urban spaces. The great lesson of the urban freeway building boom of the 1960s was that it served chiefly to destroy, devalue and depopulate city neighborhoods throughout the nation. Freeways accomplished…
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How tax evasion fuels traffic congestion in Portland
Tax free shopping in Oregon saves the typical Southwest Washington household $1,000 per year Cross border shopping accounts for 10-20 percent of all trips across the I-5 and I-205 bridges Tax avoidance means we’re essentially paying people to drive and create traffic congestion Those who live in “the ‘Couv”–Vancouver, Washington–often like to poke at their…
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The Week Observed, March 15, 2019
What City Observatory did this week A note to City Observatory readers: We’re deep in the thick of Portland’s debate about whether to spend a half billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of freeway near the city’s downtown. Based on all we’ve learned in our research at City Observatory, and our analysis of the…
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Distorted images: Freeway widening is bad for pedestrians
The proposed I-5 Rose Quarter freeway widening project creates a bike- and pedestrian-hostile environment The Oregon Department of Transportation has crafted distorted images that exaggerate pedestrian use by a factor of 200 As part of its effort to sell its $500 million dollar project to widen Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter, the Oregon Department…
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The Hidden Rose Quarter MegaFreeway
ODOT is really building an 8-lane mega-freeway at the Rose Quarter You can tell from the tortured rhetoric about “auxiliary” lanes that the Oregon Department of Transportation is falling all over itself to make the freeway widening project it has proposed for the I-5 Rose Quarter area seem absolutely as small as possible. They maintain…
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The black box: Hiding the facts about freeway widening
`State DOT officials have crafted an Environmental Assessment that conceals more than it reveals In theory, the National Environmental Policy Act is all about disclosing facts. But in practice, that isn’t always how it works out. The structure and content of the environmental review is in the hands of the agency proposing the project, in…
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The Rose Quarter: ODOT’s Phony safety claims
There’s no evidence that widening the I-5 freeway at the Rose Quarter will reduce crashes. ODOT used a model that doesn’t work for freeways with ramp-meters When ODOT widened I-5 lanes and shoulders near Victory Boulevard in 2010, crash rates did not decline Research shows interstate freeway shoulder widths aren’t correlated with crash rates The…
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Why Portland shouldn’t be widening freeways
Why Portland’s freeway fight is so important to the future of cities everywhere The plan to widen the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway in Portland, at a cost of $500 million, is a tragic error for one city, and an object lesson to others. A wider freeway will induce more traffic and pollution (and ironically, worsen…
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The Week Observed, March 8, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Widening freeways increases car travel and carbon emissions. Induced demand from additional freeway capacity is now so well proven that it’s referred to “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion.” Based on the scientific literature showing how more road capacity produces more driving, the University of California Davis has…
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Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuter’s pollution?
The fundamental injustice of pollution from urban freeways Item: In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. This money will buy an expensive state-of-the-art air filtration system that will make the air inside the school safe…
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Freeway widening for whomst?
There’s a huge demographic divide between those who use freeways and neighbors who bear their costs When it comes time to evaluate the equity of freeway widening investments, it’s important to understand that there are big differences between those who travel on freeways and those who bear the social and costs in the neighborhoods the…
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Orwellian freeway-widening
What pretends to be an environmental assessment is actually a thinly-veiled marketing brochure In theory, an environmental impact statement is supposed to be a disclosure document. The idea behind the National Environmental Policy Act was to force thoughtful consideration of potentially environmentally harmful projects and policies, and by providing the public and decision-makers with clear…
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Wider freeways don’t reduce congestion
Portland’s $500 million Rose Quarter Freeway Widening Project is being sold as a way to reduce congestion: But it won’t work In three recent commentaries at City Observatory, we’ve explored whether a wider freeway at Portland’s Rose Quarter would have any meaningful impact on daily traffic congestion. All of the available evidence says that even…
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Widening the I-5 Freeway will add millions of miles of vehicle travel
We can calculate how much added freeway lanes will induce additional car travel The takeaway: the I-5 freeway widening project in Portland lead to 10 to 17 million more miles of vehicle travel annually, which will in turn produce thousands of tons of additional greenhouse gas emissions. A key part of the selling point for…
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The Week Observed, March 1, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. The most fundamental point in economics is that people respond to incentives. Make something cheaper to buy, and people will buy more of it. Make something more expensive, and they’ll buy less. That’s plainly the case when it comes to driving, and one…
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Backfire: How widening freeways can make traffic congestion worse
Widening I-5 in Portland apparently made traffic congestion worse Oregon’s Department of Transportation (ODOT) is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to add two lanes to Interstate 5 at the Rose Quarter in Portland, with the hope that it will help relieve traffic congestion. But practical experience with freeway widenings in this area shows…
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The high price of cheap gasoline
When gas prices stopped diving, Americans again began to drive less The most fundamental point in economics is that people respond to incentives. Make something cheaper to buy, and people will buy more of it. Make something more expensive, and they’ll buy less. That’s plainly the case when it comes to driving, and one of…
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The Week Observed, February 22, 2019
What City Observatory did this week It’s time to get serious about climate change. We published a guest commentary from City Observatory friend Ethan Seltzer, who takes a critical look at the largely rhetorical approach that the Portland region is taking to the increasing serious menace that is climate change. Globally, the International Panel on…
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Time to get real about climate change
To change the world, we need to change the world… Editor’s Note: Ethan Seltzer is an Emeritus Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. He previously served as the President of the City of Portland Planning Commission and as the Land Use Supervisor for Metro, the regional government. He…
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A wider freeway won’t reduce traffic
Widening I-5 actually increased crashes, instead of reducing them, and an even wider freeway won’t be less congested if crashes don’t decline. We’re going to dig deep into Portland’s proposed freeway-widening controversy today, and in the process we’re going to get into some very wonky traffic engineering details. Here’s the background: the Oregon Department of…
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The Week Observed, February 8, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Measuring Anti-Social Capital. Thanks to the scholarship of Harvard’s Robert Putnam, the idea of social capital has become firmly entrenched in the policy lexicon. Putnam and others developed some innovative measures of social capital, looking at voting, volunteering, and attitudes about civic affairs and behaviors of personal engagement.…
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Angie’s List: The problem isn’t ride hailing, it’s the lack of road pricing
Streetsblogger extraordinaire Angie Schmidt is not happy with Uber and Lyft. They’re not really the ones to blame. Are Uber and Lyft to blame for growing urban transportation problems? Streetsblog’s Angie Schmit makes a strong case that they’re the villains her February 4 article starts out tough: All the bad things about Uber and Lyft in…
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Rose Quarter freeway widening won’t reduce congestion
Spending half a billion dollars to widen a mile of I-5 will have exactly zero effect on daily congestion. The biggest transportation project moving forward in downtown Portland isn’t something related to transit, or cycling (or even bringing back shared electric scooters). It’s a proposal to spend half a billion dollars widening a mile long…
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Measuring “anti-social” capital
The number of security guards is a good measure of a city’s level of “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…
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The market cap of cities, 2019
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 ($25.7 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest publicly listed corporations ($11 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe…
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The Week Observed, February 1, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of our current approaches to providing affordable housing. We present a summary of some remarks offered by Rob Stewart, a principal with JBG Smith Real Estate, reflecting on his experience working on housing issues in Washington DC. Broadly speaking, there are two ways we tend to…
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It’s Groundhog’s Day yet again, Oregon: How’s your climate change strategy working?
Another year later, and we’re still stuck with the same hypocrisy on climate change If it seems like you’ve read this post before at City Observatory, you’re not wrong. For the past couple of years, every Groundhog’s Day, we’ve stuck our heads up and looked around to see whether anything has changed when it comes…
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More driving, more dying: Dangerous by Design, 2019
More driving and our car-oriented transportation system killed 50,000 pedestrians in the past decade Each year, Smart Growth America produces its annual report Dangerous by Design looking at pedestrian deaths and injuries. Once again, this is grim reading, but the report, as always, is a vital public service that brings home just how serious this…
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A third-way for approaching affordable housing
Here’s a provocative proposal for getting more affordable housing, especially in rapidly changing, opportunity neighborhoods In part I of this series we laid out a key challenge to housing affordability described by Washington developer Rob Stewart based on his experience working in development in the Washington DC area. Today we turn to a possible proposal,…
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A third way for more affordable housing? Part I. The problem
How can affordable housing help minimize, rather than perpetuate, income segregation? At City Observatory, we’ve long focused on the challenge of concentrated poverty, starting with our first report Lost in Place, in 2014. American metropolitan areas have become more segregated by income, and the results of concentrated poverty have been devastating for families that live…
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The Week Observed, January 25, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Remembering Dr. King. We were reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech about the pronounced tendency in public policy to prescribe socialism for the rich and rugged, free market capitalism for the poor. Much has changed in the half century since that remark, but sadly, it’s still the…
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The outlook for the Portland housing market
Coping with the nation’s shortage of cities is a key factor in the Portland housing market in 2019 On January 9, I was invited to talk to the annual housing outlook seminar convened by HFO Oregon. A video of my remarks is available on YouTube. My presentation addressed a number of themes that will be…
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Measuring the Civic Commons
A New DIY toolkit helps neighborhoods and cities measure the state of their civic commons At City Observatory, we’re all about metrics, and especially keen on metrics that help us better understand the function of cities. We’ve mapped everything from the location and changing status of the nation’s neighborhoods of concentrated poverty to identifying the…
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Dr. King: Socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor
It’s a long road to redressing inequality A half-century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the stilted rhetoric used use to talk about public spending to promote the social good: Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and…
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The Week Observed, January 18, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Scooters are a success in Portland, but there’s an insidious double standard. A new report from Portland’s Bureau of Transportation details the success of the city’s 120-day long experiment allowing about 2,000 scooters from Bird, Lime and Skip to be operated on city streets. The report judges the…
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Scooter Lessons: Success, but a stark double standard
Data shows Portland’s scooter experiment worked. Maybe it’s time to critically appraise the failed 110 year experiment with cars. Starting in July, Portland, Oregon began allowing fleets of e-scooters, as an experiment, to see how they would work. Portland’s Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) just released its 36-page report on the city’s 120-day trial of allowing…
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Why Carmaggedon never comes (Seattle edition)
Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand Seattle has finally closed its aging Alaskan Way viaduct, a six-lane double-decker freeway that since the 1940s has been a concrete scar separating Seattle’s downtown from Elliott Bay. In a few weeks, much of this capacity will be replaced by a…
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No deal: Why a CRC revival is going nowhere
Reviving the Columbia River Crossing will never happen: the two sides have incompatible aims There are continued rumblings in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area about reviving the abandoned plan to spend $3 billion or more on a grand Columbia River Crossing to replace the existing 6-lane Interstate 5 freeway bridge with a 12-lane structure and a…
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The Week Observed, January 11, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. You’re going to need a bigger boat. We’re excited that Minneapolis has pushed forward with the legalization of duplexes and triplexes in formerly single-family only zones, and that others (including Oregon) appear to be following suit. It’s a major achievement to recast “missing middle” housing as one way…
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Ten things more inequitable than road pricing
Don’t decry congestion pricing as inequitable until after you fix, or at least acknowledge, these ten other things that are even more inequitable about the way we pay for transportation. There’s a growing interest in using congestion pricing to help tackle traffic issues in major cities. Putting a price on peak hour road capacity is…
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You’re going to need a bigger boat
Eliminating exclusively single-family zones won’t provide enough density: Recognizing the limits of “missing middle” as a solution to urban affordability At City Observatory, we’re excited as anyone that there seems to be a growing groundswell of support around the nation for eliminating exclusively single-family zoning. Minneapolis has garnered national headlines by legalizing duplexes and triplexes…
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The Week Observed, February 15, 2019
What City Observatory did this week Widening freeways doesn’t reduce crashes or crash related delay. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to spend half a billion dollars to widen a mile-long stretch of Interstate 5 near downtown Portland. They’ve already conceded that the project will do nothing to reduce the recurring daily delay that…
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The Week Observed, January 4, 2019
What City Observatory did this week 1. Displacement by decline. Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy offers a guest post on our misplaced obsession with gentrification. He argues that pundits and urban policy people are fighting the wrong battle. Too much time is spent on the challenges of urban success, and not enough time is spent…
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Is Oregon’s road tax limit a paper tiger?
The Oregon Constitution exempts refunds and debt repayment from the limits on how revenue from taxing cars and fuel is spent Note: What follows is a hypothesis and a question. What’s presented here is not a legal opinion, nor does it purport to be one. This commentary raises the question–which deserves a thorough examination in…
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Displacement by decline
An obsession with gentrification obscures the urban problem: concentrated poverty Editor’s Note: We’re again pleased to offer a guest commentary from Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy, who has some keen insights on cities, poverty and neighborhood change. Like City Observatory, Segedy puts great stock in the longer argument made in Alan Mallach’s book “The Divided City.”…
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The Week Observed, December 21, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of Nieman Marcus environmentalism. It’s fashionable to demonstrate one’s green credibility by conspicuous acts of non-consumption, but framing our environmental problems as fundamentally those of personal or moral failures misses the point that we’ve set up a social and economic system that generates powerful incentives to…
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Where you can walk and shop locally: The Storefront Index
Where are walkable local shopping districts in your city? There are just six shopping days left until Christmas; while much of our shopping is done on-line or with at big box stores and national chains, many consumers look to support their local businesses during the holiday season. Where, exactly, can you find the clusters of…
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The limits of Nieman Marcus environmentalism
Conspicuous non-consumption is really faux environmentalism; climate change is a social problem, not a personal one We’re in the midst of the holiday shopping season, a potent reminder of how consumerism dominates so much of our lives. Even before black Friday, merchants have been flogging their holiday wares; even before all the Halloween candy had…
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The Week Observed, December 14, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities, Ideas and Us: Paul Romer’s Nobel Address. Romer, who won this year’s Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences had some interesting things to say about cities in his address to the Royal Swedish Academy this past weekend. A key insight of his work is the observation that…
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A tool kit for value capture policies
Harnessing the value of public assets to support the civic commons It’s widely recognized that public assets, like parks, libraries and community centers, generate important and tangible benefits for their neighborhoods. But it’s seldom the case that the value of these benefits is tapped to help generate revenue to enhance and maintain the public assets.…
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Consuming the city: Ranking restaurants per capita
The number of eating places per capita is a key measure of a city’s livability Cities are great places for consumers. They provide an abundance and variety of choices, especially in the form of experiences. While our conventional economic indicators don’t fully capture the nature and depth of choices in cities, there are some measures…
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Cities, Ideas and Us: Paul Romer’s Nobel Address
Cities are critical to expanding the circle of “us” and generating the new ideas that propel progress In October, Paul Romer was awarded the Nobel Prize in the Economic Sciences for his work on technology and economic growth. This past weekend, he gave an address in Stockholm, explaining the gist of his work and its…
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The Week Observed, December 7, 2018
What City Observatory did for the past two weeks Alert followers will know the City Observatory has been preoccupied for the past two weeks; we’re filling in with a “Two-Weeks Observed” edition this week, and will be back to normal editorial approach this coming week. 1. Does Cyber Monday mean Gridlock Tuesday? The rapid growth…
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When planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
Some commonly used “rules of thumb” produce very bad results 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…
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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. If there’s one big complaint people seem to have about the transportation system its that they can’t get from place to place as quickly as they like. TV traffic reporters are always alerting us to delays; Google…
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Does Cyber-Monday mean delivery gridlock Tuesday?
Today is famously “Cyber-Monday,” the day on which the nation’s consumers take to their web-browsers and started clicking for holiday shopping in earnest. Last year, its is estimated that online shoppers orders more than $3 billion worth of merchandise on this single day, and the expectation is this will grow even further this year. The…
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The Week Observed, November 23, 2018
Editors Note: We’re offering an abbreviated Thanksgiving Week version of the Week Observed. Our regular features–must read, new knowledge, and in the news–will return next Friday. What City Observatory did this week 1. The long tail of the housing bust. It’s been a little more than a decade since the collapse of the housing bubble,…
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The immaculate conception of your neighborhood
It’s naive to assume that existing housing stock sprang to life magically (We’re pleased to reprise this classic essay from Daniel Kay Hertz, long-time contributor to City Observatory, and now author of the newly released Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago). A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger,…
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Real home prices: A regional view
Wide variations in regional home price patterns tell us a lot about housing markets and cities Yesterday, we looked at the path of inflation-adjusted home prices in the US. While much attention has been paid to the fact that nominal prices of homes have, in many markets caught up to or surpassed levels recorded in…
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The long tail of the housing bust
Adjusted for inflation, US home prices are still lower than in 2006 For most US households, the home they own is their biggest financial asset. After the housing bust of 2007, when collectively about $7 trillion in home value was wiped out by declining house prices, many people have looked to subsequent increases in home…
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The Week Observed, November 16, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. If your corporate campus has 10,000 parking spaces, it isn’t really “walkable.” With great fanfare, American Airlines has announced its building a new corporate campus in Fort Worth. While American calls it highly walkable–it will have pedestrian paths, parks and some bikes, it is surrounded by freeways, it’s…
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You can’t feel ’em, if you can’t see ’em
We can’t have empathy for those we can’t encounter due to the way our cities are built Editor’s Note: Last month, our friend Carol Coletta spoke to the Kinder Institute in Houston about the critical role that place plays in building a shared sense of community. We’re pleased to reprint her remarks here. Monday night…
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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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Why suburban office campuses aren’t really walkable
A suburban campus with 10,000 parking spaces and virtually no transit isn’t walkable A recent news item caught our eye: The Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that American Airlines was putting a premium on promoting walkability as it built its new headquarters in that Texas city. The Star Telegram’s headline: “Why American Airlines doesn’t want…
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The Week Observed, November 9, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. There will be two HQ2, just as we predicted. Back in January, we took a close look at the Amazon HQ2 location contest. We said that the decision to build a second headquarters wasn’t simply to clone a another version of the existing Seattle operations, but to diversify…
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Why road pricing is inherently equitable: Faster buses
Road pricing is inherently fairer to the poor because it speeds up buses As economists, we’re keen on the idea of road pricing. The reason we have congestion and delay is because we charge a price for peak hour road use (zero), that doesn’t come close to covering the costs of providing roadway capacity and…
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Homevoters v. the growth machine
It’s election day, everyone. If you haven’t voted, please do so. In honor of the election, today we’re please to reprise one of Daniel Kay Hertz’s essays on urban politics. Daniel has just released his new book, The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago. There are two big theories about who…
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2HQ2? Amazon doubles down, just as we predicted
As City Observatory predicted in January, Amazon will select multiple locations for HQ2 The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Amazon’s much ballyhooed headquarters contest will choose not one winner, but two. Amazon.com Inc. plans to split its second headquarters evenly between two locations rather than picking one city for HQ2, according to a person…
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Detroit’s Corktown: Portrait of a diverse neighborhood
One of the places where socioeconomic mixing is highest Despite deep concerns that America is increasingly divided along racial, ethnic and economic lines, there are some neighborhoods that have a diverse array of residents from different racial and ethnic groups and different economic strata. We know that segregation is devastating for the life prospects of…
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The Week Observed, November 2, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The neighborhood you grow up shapes your life chances, especially for black kids. New research from the Equality of Opportunity Project shows the profound effect that neighborhoods have on lifetime economic results. Raj Chetty, Nate Hendren and their colleagues have calculated how much of the effect of place…
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Get out! Why economic mobility might mean leaving home
Part of the disparity in intergenerational economic mobility may stem from a willingness to leave home Raj Chetty, Nate Hendren and their colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project have crafted a rich picture of the role that community plays in long term economic opportunity. We’ve highlighted some of their findings in the past couple…
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Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable
A fundamental contradiction lies beneath most of our housing policy debates At City Observatory, we’ve frequently made the case that promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one…
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Local neighborhoods matter even more for black kids
The Equality of Opportunity Project shows local factors matter, but even more for black kids We now have a rich understanding of how where you grow up influences your life prospects. As we reported last week, the new Opportunity Atlas shows down to the neighborhood level, using big data gleaned from anonymized tax records, how…
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The Week Observed, October 26, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities talent and prosperity. The latest report from the Economic Innovation Group has some interesting zip code data on the relative economic performance of the nation’s neighborhoods. Their work divides the 25,000 most populated zip codes into five broad groups based on economic health. The leading characsteristic distinguishing…
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Unsafe Uber? Lethal Lyft? We’re skeptical
A new study claiming ride-hailing increases crashes and deaths leaves some questions unanswered. A new study from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business makes the provocative claim that the advent of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber has actually led to an increase in car crashes, and related injuries and deaths. If true,…
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Cities, talent and prosperity
America’s economy is increasingly driven by the concentration of talent in cities The Economic Innovation Group (aka EIG, a DC-based think tank) has been compiling some interesting data on the relative economic performance of different parts of the US, in the form of their “Distressed Communities Index.” The recently enacted federal opportunity zones program is…
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The Week Observed, October 19, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are four. October 17 marked City Observatory’s fourth birthday. We celebrated with a shout-out to our founders, funders and partners, and reflected on what we think the most important lessons have been for cities in the past quadrennium. Regular readers will know that we view our…
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The limits of job creation
Whether at the neighborhood or metropolitan level, more job growth doesn’t seem to improve economic mobility There’s a seemingly un-questioned (and unquestionable) truth among economic development practitioners that more job creation is the universal answer to problems of economic opportunity. If our neighborhood (or city or region) could just grow more jobs, or grow them…
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City Observatory’s Fourth Birthday
Today marks the fourth year since we launched City Observatory On October 17, 2014, we started up City Observatory. Many thanks to all those who’ve made this endeavor possible over these past four years. This project simply wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of our contributors and co-authors–including Daniel Kay Hertz, Dillon Mahmoudi, Michael…
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Fresh evidence for Portland’s green dividend
Building a city so its residents don’t have to drive so much powers economic growth A decade ago, we coined the term “green dividend.” We noted that among large US metropolitan areas, Portland residents drove significantly fewer miles per person each day, thanks to the city’s compact development pattern, strong economic integration, good transit system,…
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The Week Observed, October 12, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Carol Coletta on why cities need to embrace change. We publish Carol Coletta’s remarks to the Congress for the New Urbanism, outlining the case for thinking about cities in a more dynamic fashion. There’s a temptation in much urban dialog to hope for stasis: that we can keep…
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A Nobel Prize with a solution for climate change
Let’s put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon Earlier this week, Yale economist William Nordhaus was announced as this year’s co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics (along with Paul Romer, who we profiled yesterday). Nordhaus is a pioneer in environmental economics and has his research has laid the…
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Paul Romer is awarded the Economics Nobel
Why the leading economist of innovation sees a central role for cities Two years ago, in 2016, we did our best to nudge the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to give the Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences to Paul Romer. It turns out we were just a couple of years early. Yesterday, the Academy, announced…
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Why cities need to embrace change
This is the text of a speech delivered in Detroit to the Congress for New Urbanism conference by Carol Coletta, a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Practice. Could there be a more apt place to observe “The Transforming City” than Detroit? On behalf of Rip Rapson and my colleagues at the Kresge…
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Does your neighborhood help kids succeed?
The Opportunity Atlas: Stunning neighborhood maps of economic opportunity Some of the most important research findings of the past decade have come from the work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity Project. They’ve shown convincingly, the effect of community attributes on the life chances of kids. Their latest work, The…
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Vision Zero: Moving from slogan to reality
Editor’s Note: Vision Zero is an impressive sounding slogan, but whether it will amount to more than that is in the hands of city leaders. The choices they make about how to prioritize public space for those who walk and ride bikes (and scooters), will determine whether cities get safer, or whether the current epidemic…
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The Week Observed, September 28, 2018
What City Observatory did this week Peaks, Valleys and Donuts: Visualizing cities in cross-section. The University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has produced a powerful on-line tool for visualizing the spatial patterns of income, poverty, educational attainment and population growth and diversity across the metropolitan area. Their…
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Peaks, valleys, and donuts: Visualizing cities in cross-section
Too often, the descriptions of urban form are reduced to excessively simple binary classifications (city v. suburb), or rely on data grouped by counties, which are maddeningly disparate units. County-level population data is bad at telling us much of anything about cities and housing preferences. Counties just contain too many multitudes – of built environments,…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 5: Exclusive suburbs
Part 5. Are the nation’s richest suburbs really its most economically inclusive cities? A statistical methodology that repeatedly flags high income suburbs as “inclusive” probably isn’t actually measuring inclusiveness. (Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report that attempts to measure and rank the inclusiveness of U.S.…
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The Week Observed, September 21, 2018
What City Observatory did this week This week, we published five posts taking a critical look at how a recent Urban Institute report, Measuring Inclusiveness, illustrates the problems and pitfalls of defining and measuring “inclusion.” 1. Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 1: Parallax distortions in applying equality concepts to small geographies. It seems like…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 4: Metropolitan context
Part 4. Are racially and economically homogeneous cities and suburbs in a segregated metro “inclusive?” Looking only at disparities within cities misses the often far larger disparities across cities within in single metropolitan area. (Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report measuring and ranking city-level inclusiveness. Please…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 3: Annexing growth
Part 3. Do annexations and mergers constitute economic growth? Not adjusting city job growth estimates for changes in city boundaries produces misleading estimates, especially when used for comparing and ranking cities. (Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a part of a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report measuring and ranking city-level inclusiveness.…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part 2: The limits of city limits
Part 2. Are city boundaries the right way to measure inclusion? Municipal boundaries produce a myopic and distorted view of inclusion; the boundaries themselves were often drawn to create exclusion (Editor’s note: This is the second in a five-part series examining a recent Urban Institute report that attempts to measure and rank the inclusiveness of…
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Why inclusive is so elusive, Part I
Inclusiveness is a worthy policy goal, but in practice turns out to be devilishly hard to measure. A recent report from the Urban Institute shows some of the pitfalls: looking just within city boundaries ignores metropolitan context and gives a distorted picture of which places are inclusive. (Editor’s note: Over the next several days, City Observatory…
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The Week Observed, September 14, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of localism. A number of urban luminaries, including Bruce Katz and Richard Florida have been urging that we pin our hopes for social and policy change on local governments. At City Observatory-enamored as we are of cities-we’ve been skeptical of that argument. This week, some of…
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Does new construction lead to displacement?
A careful study of evictions in San Francisco says “No.” There’s a widespread belief among some neighborhood activists that building new housing triggers displacement. We-and most economists are highly skeptical of that argument at the metropolitan level, but its at least theoretically possible that there could be some neighborhood effects, for example, that building a…
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The limits of localism
Overselling localism is becoming an excuse to shed and shred federal responsibility Our friend, and director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Amy Liu, weighs in with a timely commentary on the limits of localism. As regular readers of City Observatory will know, we’ve been concerned that the soaring rhetoric of those enamored of…
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The Week Observed, September 7, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. An affogato theory of transportation. The combination of gelato and espresso is a special treat, and it also neatly captures two of our favorite parables about how transportation really works. The ice cream part focuses on Ben & Jerry’s annual free cone day, which regularly produces lines around…
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An affogato theory of transportation
Coffee and ice cream and jam (or traffic jams) Just once, we are going to sugar-coat our commentary. At City Observatory, we know that a lot of what we present is highly technical, especially when it comes to understanding the complex and dynamic problems of transportation. But when it comes to transportation policy, two of…
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Quantifying Jane Jacobs
Our storefront index shows where there’s a density of destinations to enable walkability 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…
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Let’s stop with the absurd surveys masquerading as serious research
No: Eighty percent of today’s 8 to 23 year-olds won’t be buying houses in the next five years At City Observatory, we get a regular stream of press releases and media advisories about the results of surveys and other market research, purporting to tell us the preferences of the American people. Some of what we…
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The Week Observed, August 31, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. If you want less displacement, build more housing. A common refrain at planning commission meetings around the country is that cities ought to block new housing as a way of insulating neighborhoods from change and displacement. The irony of this position is that making it harder to build…
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Does increased housing supply improve affordability?
Why a recent Fed study tells us very little about supply and affordability The takeaway: A recent Federal Reserve study which seems to show that building more housing won’t improve affordability has little relevance to supply-constrained cities; among other things, it unrealistically assumes that any increase in housing supply will be exactly offset by an…
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Do rich neighbors make low income people unhappy?
Lower income households are happier in higher income neighborhoods How does your neighbor’s income affect your happiness? Do you feel worse off if you have less income than most of your neighbors? The “Keeping up with the Joneses” theory of happiness would suggest that if people live in a neighborhood with people who have more…
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If you want less displacement, build more housing
The more you limit housing, the more you increase displacement In city after city, we see the same refrain: a neighborhood is starting to attract new residents and new investment, current residents are starting to worry about gentrification. They show up at city council meetings or planning meetings to voice objection to new development. Just…
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The Week Observed, August 24, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Philadelphia’s urban policy harmonic convergence. The proposal to build a multi-billion dollar expansion of University City adjacent to Drexel University and Philadelphia’s Center City brings a host of urban issues to the fore all in one small location. The city is making a big bet on knowledge-based economic…
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IoT: The Irrelevance of Thingies
People and social interaction, not technology, is the key to the future of cities Smart city afficianado’s are agog at the prospects that the Internet of Things will create vast new markets for technology that will disrupt and displace cities. Color us skeptical; our experience with technology so far–and its been rapid and sweeping–is that…
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Philadelphia’s urban policy harmonic convergence
Philly’s University City: The urban challenge in a nutshell The knowledge economy . . . tax breaks . . . NIMBYism . . . gentrification . . . Amazon’s HQ2 . . . high speed rail . . . university economic development? All this in one location. Many conversations about the nation’s urban challenges address…
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The Week Observed, August 17, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. We disagree with the Washington Post on housing economics. Two weeks ago, the Washington Post published an article claiming that rents were going down for higher income renters but increasing for lower income renters. That didn’t square with our reading of the data, so we took a closer…
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Whither small towns? Wither small towns?
Rural and small town America faces some tough odds In an article entitled: “How to save the Troubled American Heartland,” Bloomberg’s very smart Noah Smith shares his thoughts on how to revive the smaller towns of rural. For the most part, he’s in agreement with the ideas expressed by James and Deborah Fallows in their…
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Is St. Louis Gentrifying?
Gentrification Debates Without Gentrification? By Todd Swanstrom Editor’s note: We’re pleased to offer a guest commentary from Todd Swanstrom. Todd is the Des Lee Professor of Community Collaboration and Public Policy Administration at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. He is also co-author of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century (http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/drepl3.html). Recent research has provided evidence for…
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We disagree with the Washington Post about housing economics
Contrary to what you think you may have read in last week’s Washington Post, rental housing markets at all levels still conform to the laws of supply and demand Monday’s Washington Post ran a provocative headline: “In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich–but rise for the poor.” Citing data from one of the nation’s…
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The Week Observed, August 10, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Jason Segedy on gentrification. This week we feature a guest column from Akron planning director Jason Segedy. You can’t build new housing in any existing neighborhood, it seems, without some invoking the specter of gentrification. Writing from the perspective of an economically lagging rust-belt city, Segedy makes the…
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Going the wrong way: NYC’s new ride-hailing cap
Capping or taxing ride-hailing services isn’t going to solve NYC’s congestion problem New York’s City Council is moving ahead with a package of measures designed to cap the number of ride-hailed vehicles, like Uber and Lyft, as a way of addressing the city’s growing congestion problem. This is both a mistake and a blown opportunity. …
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More evidence of declining rents in Portland
Zillows data shows Portland rents have dropped 3.5 percent in the past year A couple of weeks ago, we published the latest data from ApartmentList.com on the decline in rents in the Portland metropolitan area. Their benchmark series for one bedroom apartments showed a year-over-year decline of 3 percent in Portland. While we have a…
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Don’t decry new urban housing as “gentrification”
Whenever a distressed neighborhood gets new market rate housing, someone’s bound to cry “Gentrification”. Here’s why that’s wrong. This is a guest post from Jason Segedy, Director of Akron’s Planning Department. This is an excerpt of a two-part essay written by Segedy and published in The American Conservative. Jason writes about a range of urban…
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The Week Observed, August 3, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Your summertime must read: Alan Mallach’s Divided City. We have a review of this newly released book, which we think every urbanist ought to read. Although written primarily from the perspective of lagging Rust Belt cities, Mallach’s book has a lot to say to urbanists through the nation.…
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E-Scooters and Paying for Roads
If charging scooters to use city streets makes sense, let’s charge cars proportionately A little bit late to the party, but today the first electric scooters appeared on the streets of Portland. Bird announced that, with the city’s permission, it was scattering hundreds of its electric scooters in and around the downtown. A second company,…
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Your summertime, urbanist “must read” Allan Mallach’s Divided City
A review of The Divided City Alan Mallach, The Divided City: Poverty and Prosperity in Urban America (Island Books, 2018, 326 pages). Before you head out to the beach or mountains or wherever your summertime plans take you, grab a copy of Alan Mallach’s new “Divided City.” It’s a cogent analysis of the current state…
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The Week Observed, July 27, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland rents are going down. There are those who are skeptical that we can “build our way to affordability.” But the economic evidence suggests that’s exactly what’s happening in Portland. New apartment construction in the Rose City is finally catching up to demand (there’s a long lag between…
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The limited allure of small towns
A few knowledge workers decamp to rural America as they age, but cities are the key It’s an oft-told tale: talented professionals grow weary of the stress and high cost of city-living, and decamp with their spouses, children and knowledge-based businesses to some rural hamlet. It’s a harbinger of the end of cities as we…
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The clear case for congestion pricing in Portland
Why congestion pricing makes sense for Portland by Chris Hagerbaumer Today, City Observatory is pleased to offer a guest commentary from Chris Hagerbaumer on value pricing. Chris is the deputy director of the Oregon Environmental Council. As we’ve reported at City Observatory, the Oregon Legislature directed the state’s transportation department to develop a plan to…
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Portland rents are going down
More supply is driving down rents in the Rose City According to Apartment List.com, rents for one bedroom apartments in Portland have declined 3 percent in the past year. It’s a solid vindication of the standard predictions of economic theory: adding more supply (building more apartments) helps drive down prices. Just a couple of years…
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The Week Observed, July 20, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Nattering nabobs of NIMBYism at the New York Times. Columnist Tim Egan called plans for a limited upzoning to enable more people to live in Seattle an unholy conspiracy of developers and socialists. In a guest commentary, City Observatory friend Ethan Seltzer responds, pointing out that all of…
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Parking: Where we embrace socialism in the US
How we embrace socialism for car storage in the public right of way Comrades, rejoice: In the face of the counter-revolutionary neo-liberal onslaught, there’s at least one arena where the people’s inalienable rights reign supreme: parking. Fear not, comrade sister: you will not have to search for a parking space in our socialist utopia! We…
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Nattering Nabobs of NIMBYism at the NYT
Denouncing developers and density is no way to solve a housing crisis Editor’s Note: Today we’re publishing a guest commentary from Ethan Seltzer responding to New York Times columnist Tim Egan’s recent column on housing and density in Seattle. In it, Egan condemned what he called an “unholy alliance” of developers and socialists who were…
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The Week Observed, July 13, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t demonize cars, just stop subsidizing them. Is there anything in the urban space that is more inflamed than the passion and rhetoric around cars and driving? Advocates on both sides are bitter and uncompromising: with cars (and their parking spaces) regarded as either a fundamental right or…
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How luxury housing becomes affordable
Build expensive new “luxury” apartments, and wait a few decades One of the most common refrains the the affordable housing discussion is “developers are targeting the high end of the market” and new apartments are just unaffordable. Left to its own devices, we’re told, there’s no way the market will build new housing affordable to…
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Envisioning more cohesive communities
What aspects of the built environment give rise to greater social trust? We’re pleased to offer a guest commentary today from Em Friedenberg. Em is a recent graduate of the University of Oregon, who’s studied urban design. Her recent research project provides some compelling illustrations of some of the key building blocks for the kind…
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Rather than demonizing driving—let’s just stop subsidizing it
A “war on cars” won’t win many hearts and minds; let’s ask for responsibility It’s clear that cars, and particular the large numbers of cars we have, and the way in which we and our urban environments have become dependent upon them, is either at the root of many of our most pressing problems (including…
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The Week Observed, July 6, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Envisioning how we want to live in cities. Much of the discussion of the future of cities seems to revolve around what kind of new technologies we might apply in urban settings. But in our view, planning for the future city ought to be guided by our aspirations:…
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What makes America great, as always: Immigrants
Happy Independence Day, America! All Americans are immigrants (Even the Native American tribes trace their origins to Asians who migrated over the Siberian-Alaskan land bridge during the last ice age). And this nation of immigrants has always grown stronger by embracing newcomers who want to share in, and help build the American dream. So here,…
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Envisioning the way we want to live in cities
The biggest challenge for creating great cities is imagination, not technology There’s a definite technological determinism to how we approach future cities. Some combination of sensors, 5G Internet, sophisticated computing and a very centralized command infrastructure will inexorably lead to places that are somehow greener, more prosperous and just. Color us skeptical: the unbridled devotion…
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The Week Observed, June 29, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Closing the Kumbaya Gap. As we documented in our recent report, America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods, a growing number of cities boast neighborhoods with relatively high levels of both racial/ethnic and income diversity. But while people from different demographic groups may live in close proximity in these…
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How smart are “smart” cities, really?
Being a smart city should mean something different than a technology fetish 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? People tend to see cities through the lens of their…
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Portland votes to increase housing supply
Portland’s City Council reversed its denial of one tall apartment building; we commend them Back in March, we were critical of a decision by the Portland City Council to deny approval of a 17-story apartment building in the city’s growing Pearl District. The building was opposed by neighbors (who lived in other, recently build residential…
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Socioeconomic mixing is essential to closing the Kumbaya gap
Integrated neighborhoods produce more mixing, but don’t automatically generate universal social interaction. What should we make of that? Our recent report, America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods identifies those places where people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and from different income strata all live in close proximity to one another. We’ve counted more than…
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The Week Observed, June 22, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. City Report: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods. Our new City Report digs deep into the patterns of racial/ethnic and income segregation in US metro areas. We’ve used an array of census data to identify the places with the highest levels of integration along two dimensions (race/ethnicity and…
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Profiles of Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods
Our new CityReport dives deep in data; but what does a diverse, mixed income neighborhood look like? As we explained in our new report–America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods–nearly seven million Americans live in one of the neighborhoods we’ve identified as America’s most racially and ethnically diverse and mixed income. While we’ve got copious amounts…
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City Report: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods
Today we’re releasing our latest CityReport: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods. In this report, we use Census data to identify those neighborhoods that have the highest levels of both racial/ethnic and income diversity among all urban neighborhoods in the US. We were motivated to take on this analysis, in part, because so much attention…
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The Week Observed, June 15, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Handicapping the city vs. suburb horse race. The latest round of Census population estimates for municipalities has led some observers to claim that city growth has faltered. We take a close look at these claims, and identify the critical weakness of using data for city boundaries to trace…
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Why integration matters
Socioeconomic mixing, in neighborhoods that are diverse in race, ethnicity and income, benefits everyone To some extent, we take for granted that integration and equal opportunity should be valued for their own sake. But its worth noting that achieving greater integration along both racial/ethnic and income dimensions is important to achieving more widespread prosperity and…
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Sisyphus meets Bob the Builder
Why traffic engineers really aren’t interested in reducing traffic congestion We now know with a certainty that investments in additional highway capacity in dense urban environments simply trigger additional travel, what we call “induced demand.” The phenomenon is so well-documented that a recent article called in “The Fundamental Law of Traffic Congestion.” In a sense,…
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Handicapping the City-Suburb Horserace
The simple-minded comparison on city and suburb population growth rates is misleading and incomplete Every year, in the late Spring, the Census Bureau releases its latest population estimates for the nation’s municipalities. That produces a raft of quick knock-on statistical analyses that flag which places are gaining and losing population. Inevitably, these estimates get aggregated…
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The Week Observed, June 8, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Growth in the center. A new report from New York City’s Office of Planning graphically demonstrates the growing centralization of people and economic activity in the nation’s largest metropolitan area. We highlight two sets of dot density maps that show the overall change in population in the New…
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The persistence of residential segregation
How slow growth and industrial decline perpetuate racial segregation As regular readers of City Observatory know, we think that the continuing racial and economic segregation of the nation’s metropolitan areas is at the root of many of the nation’s most persistent problems. We got a fresh reading on the extent and persistence of racial and…
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The increasing centralization of urban economies: New York
Prime working age adults are increasingly clustering in the center of the nation’s largest metro area City Observatory has long been following the movement of people and jobs back to cities. Our inaugural study on the Young and Restless charted the growing propensity of well-educated young workers to live in close-in urban neighborhoods. Our follow…
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The Week Observed, June 1, 2018
What City Observatory did this week Caveat Rentor: the problem with flawed rental inflation statistics. We highlight the continuing problem of erratic and unreliable rental price indices. A recent column by a financial journalist reports an apparent bubble in one-bedroom apartment prices based on an index generated by Zumper. Not only are these data implausible,…
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“Caveat Rentor” – beware of crazy rent statistics
The quality of rent data varies widely, beware of erratic data sources Trying to measure average housing costs for neighborhoods across an entire city—let alone the whole country—is an incredibly ambitious task. Not only does it require a massive database of real estate listings, it requires making those listings somehow representative at the level of…
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Fishy business: the promise and perils of city aquariums
To ballparks, convention centers and starchitect museums, add urban aquariums. To some boosters, your city is only one world-class visitor attraction away from economic prosperity. That pitch has been used to sell and endless series of public subsidies for baseball parks, football stadiums, basketball and hockey arenas, convention centers (and their appurtenant “headquarters hotels”) and…
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State government as an anchor industry
Eds and Meds . . . and Capitol Domes? I recently participated as a part of an expert panel reviewed Sacramento’s economic development strategy. You can learn more about the city’s “Project Prosper” here. It is rightly focused on identifying what can be do to promote economic growth with inclusion. Like most regions, Sacramento has…
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The Week Observed, May 18, 2018
What City Observatory did this week California’s next step in fighting global warming is building more apartments near transit. California has been a leader in climate change policy, being one of the first states to execute a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. In a guest commentary for City Observatory, Environment California’s Dan Jacobson draws a…
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California’s next bold step on climate should be building near transit
While the impetus for State Senator Scott Wiener’s proposed SB 827, which would allow apartment construction near transit lines was addressing housing affordability, the measure should also be a cornerstone of our efforts to tackle climate change. City Observatory is pleased to publish this guest commentary from Dan Jacobson, Director of Environment California. …
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The Week Observed, May 11, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities as selection environments. It’s an article of faith in the economic development business that cheaper is better, or at least more competitive. The claim is that businesses will always gravitate toward and flourish in places with cheap rents, low wages, favorable taxation and generous subsidies. That’s always…
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Why do we make it illegal to build the neighborhoods Americans love most?
Narrow streets, a mix of large houses and tiny apartments, interspersed with shops and businesses in close walking distance. It’s the most desirable neighborhood in the city, and we’ve made it illegal to build any more like it. Editor’s note: City Observatory originally published this commentary in 2015. Our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer…
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Is Fruitvale gentrifying? Did it prevent displacement?
What does Fruitvale tell us about gentrification and displacement? Gentrification solved, or at least prevented. That was the celebratory headline announcing a recent study from UCLA’s Latino Politics and Policy Initiative, looking at changes in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood. Fruitvale, a predominantly Latino neighborhood, the site of a transit-oriented development (TOD) at its BART rapid transit…
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Cities as selection environments
Being cheaper may not be an advantage at all in a dynamic, knowledge based economy It’s axiomatic in the world of local economic development that the sure-fire way to stimulate growth is to make it as cheap and easy as possible to do business in your community. Area Development, a trade journal for industrial recruiters…
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The Week Observed, May 4, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why don’t we have a powerful federal agency who can pre-empt local laws that drive up housing costs? Last week, the Federal Communications Commission took action that invalidated a City Of Philadelphia ordinance that would have regulated the location of satellite antennas and required their removal once they were…
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No exit from housing hell
Distrust and empowering everyone to equally be a NIMBY is a recipe for perpetual housing problems The recent defeat of SB 827–California State Senator Scott Wiener’s bill that would have legalized apartment construction in area’s well served by transit–was the subject of a thoughtful post-mortem in the Los Angeles Times: “A major California housing bill…
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Why doesn’t the federal government protect access to affordable housing the way it does access to TV?
A powerful federal agency can override local laws limiting access to TV. But housing? Nope. Local control. It’s the bedrock principle of land use planning. Cities and neighborhoods should have absolute control over the kinds of buildings that get built in their community. We dare not let state, or especially the federal government interfere in…
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The Week Observed, April 27, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Gerontopoly: Is homeownership a sure route to building wealth? It has been in the US, but increasingly, its only working for older generations. Homeowners 55 and older now hold most of all of equity in owner-occupied homes in the US. Younger adults have only about half as much…
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Dow of Cities: Big data on the urban price premium
Zillow’s data tracking prices of tens of millions of US homes adds further confirmation to the Dow of Cities For some time, we’ve been talking about the Dow of Cities: the notion that the price premium that urban homes command over suburban ones is a market indicator of the growing preference of Americans for city…
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The Mortgage Interest Deduction: Smaller, but even more unfair
Tax changes cut the Mortgage Interest Deduction sharply–but not for the rich The 1.2 percent of households with incomes over $500,000 get 20 times as much tax relief from the mortgage interest deduction as the half of all households with incomes under $50,000. Every year, the federal government spends about $250 billion on subsidized housing–not…
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Gerontopoly: Homeownership, wealth, and age
Is the “dream” of homeownership really just a massive, intergenerational wealth transfer? Recently, that’s just how it has worked out. The takeaways: Homeownership is a gerontopoly. Most housing wealth is held by older Americans. Inequality in the US is increasingly intergenerational. The old get richer and the young get poorer. Most of the growth in…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways!
If you’re serious about dealing with climate change, the last thing you should do is spend billions widening freeways. April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon is moving forward with plans to drop more than a billion dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. It isn’t so much Earth Day as a…
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Video: Portland’s Housing Market
Earlier this month, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright was interviewed for HFO TV. The interview focused on recent developments in Portland’s housing market, and explored the reasons behind the growth in rents in the middle part of this decade and the likely effects of housing policies, including the city’s inclusionary zoning requirements. The full interview is 27…
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Housing reparations for Northeast Portland
Attention freeway builders! Want to make up for dividing the community and destroying neighborhoods? How about replacing the homes you demolished? One of the carefully crafted talking points in the sales pitch for the $450 million proposed Rose Quarter I-5 freeway widening project in Northeast Portland is the idea that it is somehow going to…
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The Week Observed, April 13, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Dow of Cities. The most predictable feature of any media business report is a recitation of the daily movements of major stock indices, like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow is meant to use changes in prices to concisely convey the market’s sentiments about the outlook…
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A critical look at suburban triumphalism
The “body count” view of suburban population misses the value people attach to cities Lately, we’ve seen a barrage of comments suggesting that the era of the city is over, and that Americans, including young adults, are ready to decamp to the suburbs. We think this new wave of suburban triumphalism is missing some key…
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The Ben & Jerry’s crash course in transportation economics
They’ll be lined up around the block because the price is too low–just like every day on urban roads 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…
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The Dow of Cities
The Dow Jones Industrial may be down, but the Dow of Cities is rising The daily business news is obsessed with the price of stocks. Widely reported indicators like the Dow Jones Industrial average gauge the overall health of the US economy by how much, on any given day (or hour, or minute) investors are…
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Housing: A shortage of cities
City Observatory’s Joe Cortright is one of the panelists at Chapman University’s April 5 conference “Will California Ever Figure Out How to House Itself“. Here’s a summary of his remarks. The housing crisis in California, as in many other states, manifests itself as a shortage and high price of housing, but is in fact symptomatic…
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The Week Observed, April 20, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Housing reparations for Northeast Portland. The Oregon Department of Transportation is selling its plan to spend half a billion dollars widening a stretch of freeway in Portland by claiming it will help knit together the communities divided when the freeway was built in the 1960s, including the city’s…
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The Week Observed, April 6, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Cappuccino Congestion Index. Media reports regularly regurgitate the largely phony claims about how traffic congestion costs travelers untold billions of dollars in wasted time. To illustrate how misleading these fictitious numbers are, we’ve used the same methodology and actual data to compute the value of time lost…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
The Cappuccino Congestion Index shows how you can show how anything costs Americans billions and billions 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 waiting in lines…
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The Week Observed, March 30, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Gentrification and integration in DC schools and neighborhoods. A recent study looks at changes in school enrollment in the most gentrified neighborhoods in Washington DC over the past 15 years. Historically, DC schools have been hyper-segregated, but that’s started to change; the number of white children enrolled in…
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Gentrification isn’t ending. We must rise to meet that challenge.
We’re pleased to publish another contribution from City Observatory friend and colleague Alex Baca. Alex has written about cities while living in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Cleveland, OH, and earlier this year authored a three-part review of Derek Hyra’s Cappuccino City. She’s back this month with more thoughts on how we talk about, think…
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How segregation limits opportunity
The more segregated an metro area is, the worse the economic prospects of the poor and people of color Our City Observatory 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…
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Gentrification & integration in DC
Gentrification is producing more diverse schools and growing enrollment In Washington DC, gentrification is producing higher levels of integration and increasing the total number of kids–black and white–attending schools in changing neighborhoods. DC’s gentrifying neighborhoods have both more white residents, more total residents, and more kids attending local schools. These facts discredit the folk wisdom…
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Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods Maps
This page contains maps showing the nation’s most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, and those with the highest levels of income mixing. for City Observatory’s Diverse, Inclusive Neighborhood report. These web-based maps that let you zoom in to a particular metropolitan area, and observe racial/ethnic and income patterns, and inspect data for individual census tracts.…
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The Week Observed, March 23, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland’s teachable moment: time for a little housing economics 101. There’s a big debate going on in Portland right now about whether using discretionary land use approvals to block some market rate housing will worsen the city’s affordability problems. Long-time readers of City Observatory will know our position:…
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An Open Letter on Housing Affordability to Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish
Our planning processes and land use decisions have a huge impact on housing affordability. Editor’s Note: Today we’re publishing an open letter from Ethan Seltzer to Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish. Portland is the midst of a serious debate about the economics of housing , and how blocking proposed market rate housing is likely to…
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Parking meters and opportunity costs
What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere? Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient…
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Portland’s brouhaha over housing market economics 101
Understanding how housing markets really work is essential to crafting solutions to our affordability problems Regular followers of City Observatory will know two things about us: We’re keenly focused on the problem of housing affordability, and we like to treat Portland, Oregon (our local backyard) as a kind of laboratory for better understanding urban issues.…
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The Week Observed, March 16, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Portland doesn’t really want to make housing affordable. Portland’s City Council has officially declared a housing crisis, and has passed strong renter protection measured and an ill-advised (and most mostly counter-productive) inclusionary housing ordinance. But despite its statements to the contrary, it showed that it really isn’t all…
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Cloaking a weak argument in big—but phony—numbers
Journalists: Stop repeating phony congestion cost estimates. They’re just weak arguments disguised with big numbers. This month The Economist has an excellent special report exploring the prospects for autonomous vehicles. They seem to be coming faster than many people anticipated, and they pose some big challenges and opportunities for cities. This otherwise very useful contribution to…
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Dallas: Diverse mobility, complete neighborhoods & placemaking
Carol Coletta’s Remarks to Downtown Dallas, Inc. (Our friend and colleague Carol Coletta delivered the keynote address to the annual meeting of Downtown Dallas, Inc. on March 5. While her remarks are focused on Dallas, we think the themes presented (promoting diverse forms of mobility in cities, building complete neighborhoods, and encouraging placemaking) are of…
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Portland doesn’t really want to make housing affordable
Actions speak louder than words; blocking new housing will drive up rents Nominally, at least, the Portland City Council is all about housing affordability. They’ve declared a housing emergency. In the last general election, City voters approved a $258 million bond issue to build more affordable housing. The Council has made permanent a city ordinance…
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The Week Observed, March 9, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. The correlation between bad diets and vote for President. A new research paper has distilled mounds of data on consumer shopping behavior gleaned from supermarket scanners, and combined it with nutritional information to estimate how healthy or unhealthy average dietary patterns are in different parts of the country.…
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City Women
Jane Jacobs was just one of the first of many It’s International Women’s Day, and today, we’d like to acknowledge just a few of the really sharp women urbanists we rely on, every day, at City Observatory, to understand and make sense of the world. We read their research, study their commentaries, and follow them…
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The technological fix for our pedestrian problem
What the obsession with technological fixes says about how we fail to prioritize people in cities In the best traditions of engineering, clever minds are working on new technologies that can prevent or reduce the carnage on our nation’s roadways. A couple of years ago, we note that Google had patented a technology to coat self-driving cars…
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Barack Obama on Gentrification
. . . we want more economic activity in this community, because that’s what creates opportunity and with more economic opportunity it does mean that there’s going to be more demand for all kinds of amenities in the community. So you can’t have one without the other. You can’t say we want more jobs, more…
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Junk food America elected its president
The states with the worst diets voted disproportionately for Donald Trump A powerful new study from uses big data to shine a powerful light on our eating habits. Using data from grocery store scanner records, Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, and Jean-Pierre Dube (researchers from the New York University, Stanford and the University of Chicago, respectively)…
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Road pricing for all vehicles, not just ride-hailed ones
The problem isn’t the ride-hailed vehicles, it’s the under-priced street It really looks like we’re on the cusp of a major change in transportation finance. Cities around the country are actively studying real time road pricing. And no where is the conversation more advanced than in New York, where Governor Cuomo has endorsed the FixNYC…
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Irony Squared: Inclusionary Zoning Edition
Minneapolis is considering inclusionary zoning (IZ), but has qualms based on Portland’s experience. Ironically, a non-existent Minneapolis IZ program was a key part of the argument for adopting Portland’s IZ law in December 2016. Parts of this commentary are going to seem like a major-league distortion in the space-time continuum, so let’s start with a…
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The Week Observed, February 23, 2018
What City Observatory did this week Drinking, Parking, Flying, Peaking, Pricing: The five drivers of ride-hailing demand. The Transportation Research Board has published a dense, 100 page study of ride-hailing demand, drawing on survey and trip-making data from five cities around the country. There’s a lot to digest here, but fear not: City Observatory has…
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The emperor’s new infrastructure plan
Politics and the President’s wheeler-dealer background suggest the infrastructure plan is a mirage If there’s been one shred of hope for bi-partisan progress in this politically polarized time, its been the idea that somehow the “populist” Trump Administration and congressional democrats and republicans might somehow see eye-to-eye on the subject of good, old-fashioned public works…
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What drives ride-hailing: Parking, Drinking, Flying, Peaking, Pricing
Ride-hailing is growing: We distill a new report into 5 key factors that explain its growth A good reporter is always supposed to ask five questions: “who, what, when, where and why?” A new report on ride-hailing provides a range of keen insights about the demand for these services, and has important implications for predicting…
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The Week Observed, February 16, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cappucino City. Our friend and colleague Alex Baca offers the first of her three-part review of Derek Hyra’s book “The Cappucino City.” Baca, a former Washington DC journalist takes a close and critical look at Hyra’s claim that the gentrification of Shaw and other Washington neighborhoods is propelled…
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Challenging the Cappuccino City: Part 3: Cultural Displacement
City Observatory has long challenged the popular narrative about the nature and effects of gentrification. Today, we are pleased to offer the final installment of a three-part commentary by our friend and colleague Alex Baca. (You can read part 1 and part 2 as well). Alex has worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and…
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Challenging the Cappuccino City: Part 2: The limits of ethnography
City Observatory has long challenged the popular narrative about the nature and effects of gentrification. This is the second installment of a three-part commentary by our friend and colleague Alex Baca. You can read parts one and three as well. Alex has worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in D.C., San Francisco,…
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Challenging the Cappuccino City: Part 1: A New Premise?
City Observatory has long challenged the popular narrative about the nature and effects of gentrification. This is the first installment of a three-part commentary by our friend and colleague Alex Baca. Parts two and three are available as well. Alex Baca has worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in D.C., San Francisco,…
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The Week Observed, February 9, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. City Limits: Some qualms about the new localism. The nation is deeply divided along political lines and it’s depressingly unlikely that we’ll generate national consensus on many issues soon. That, coupled with some palpable excitement about the positive steps being taken to pioneer better approaches to some problems…
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Big Bad Data: The Uninformative Inrix Scorecard
Big data should be used for problem solving, not propaganda and promotion Cue the extreme telephoto shots of freeways! Wallow in the pity of commuters stuck in traffic because of all those other people! Wail that congestion is getting worse and worse! It’s that time of year again: The big traffic congestion report is out.…
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Qualms about the new localism: Cities need the national government to do its job well
We like cities, but localism can only flourish with a competent, generous, fair federal government As our name City Observatory suggests, we’re keen on cities. We believe they’re the right frame for tackling many of our most important problems, from concentrated poverty to housing affordability, from economic opportunity to more sustainable living. But enamored as…
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It’s Groundhog’s Day again, Oregon: How’s your climate change strategy working?
A year later, and we’re still stuck with the same hypocrisy on climate change The 1993 movie, Groundhog’s day has been a cultural touchstone for the endless do-loop of futility. Bill Murray finds himself waking up every morning to discover that its still February 2, and that he’s done nothing to change any of the…
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Sprawl, stagnation, and NIMBYism: Animated maps of metro change
A picture of metropolitan growth: Sprawl then, stagnation now. We’re in awe of Issi Romem’s prodigious data skills. Romem is the economist and big data guru BuildZoom, the web-based marketplace for construction professionals. His latest report is a multi-decade look at the growth (and non-growth) of housing at the neighborhood level in the nation’s largest…
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An idea whose time has passed: The VMT Fee
Obsolete before its even tried: A simple mileage fee is a bad way to pay for roads It’s being touted as a replacement for the gas tax, but the VMT fee is a flawed way to pay for roads. We should adopt a pricing system that reflects impacts on the environment, wear and tear on…
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The Week Observed, January 26, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Two thing’s everyone’s missed about Amazon’s HQ2. The urbanist Internet has been all abuzz reading the tea leaves from Amazon’s decision to winnow the list of contenders for its ballyhooed HQ2 to 20 cities. Some cities who didn’t make the list are licking their wounds, while others…
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More evidence of rent declines in Portland
Growing supply is producing growing vacancies and easing rents There’s been a lot of skepticism expressed as to whether supply and demand are actually at work in the housing market. We’ve been strong believers that the economic perspective is fundamentally sound: rent hikes over the past few years have been the product of demand outstripping…
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Two things everyone’s missed about Amazon’s HQ2 decision
What kind of company is Amazon, and how many locations does it want? We’re now into round 2 of the great Amazon HQ2 extravaganza, and as with the initial announcement much digital ink has been spilled to analyze the meaning of the winnowing of the list to a mere 20 cities. The Brookings Institution’s Jenny…
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The Week Observed, January 19, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. We’re losing the battle for Vision Zero. One of the compelling aspects of the Vision Zero road safety campaign is its bold, measurable objective: we want to completely eliminate traffic deaths. That vision gives us a clear metric, but unfortunately, the data show that we’re losing ground. While…
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Are integrated neighborhoods stable?
More American neighborhoods are becoming integrated–and are staying that way It’s 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…
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2017 Year-in-review: More driving, more dying
We’re driving more, and more of us are dying on the roads. Four days before Christmas, on a Wednesday morning just after dawn, Elizabeth Meyers was crossing Sandy Boulevard in Portland, near 78th Avenue, just about a block from her neighborhood library. She was struck and killed, becoming Portland’s 50th traffic fatality of 2017. Vision…
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The Week Observed, January 12, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. How great cities enable you to live longer. We take a close look at some findings from the Equality of Opportunity Project on the connections between community characteristics and life expectancy. It turns out that among people in the lowest income quartile, some of the strongest correlations with…
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Your college degree pays off more if you live in a city
The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city It’s a well-understood fact that education is a critical determinant of earnings. On average, the more education you’ve attained, the higher your level of earnings. This holds both for individuals, and as we’ve shown for metropolitan areas. But the payoffs to…
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How great cities enable you to live longer
Low income people live longer in dense, well-educated, immigrant-friendly cities Some of the most provocative social science research in the past decade has come from the Equality of Opportunity Project, led by Stanford economist Raj Chetty. The project’s major work looks at the factors contributing to intergenerational economic mobility–the extent to which different communities actually…
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The Week Observed, January 5, 2018
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities continue to attract the young and restless. We’ve seen some push-back in the last few months, arguing that city population growth is no longer outpacing suburbs, and that the movement back to cities is threatened by “peak-millennials.” That led us to take a close look at the…
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Nothing about pedestrian safety that more technology won’t fix
In auto-land, pedestrians are just one more patented gimmick away from being safe The dominant approach to automobile safety has, for many years, been the quintessential technical fix. Some combination of new technologies (anti-lock brakes, collapsible steering columns, crush zones, multiple air bags, etc) will make cars safer and safer (well, at least for their…
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Cities continue to attract smart young adults
The young and restless are continuing to move to the nation’s large cities One trend that highlights the growing demand for city living is the increasing tendency of well-educated young adults to live in the close-in urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. At City Observatory, we’ve been tracking this data closely for more…
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Our seven most popular posts of 2017
Affordable housing and sensible transportation were our most-read features #7 – Urban myth busting: How building more high income housing helps affordability. One of the predictable lamentations about the housing market is that developers are always building new structures for middle and upper income households, and nothing for the poor. That observation fuels an argument…
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The Week Observed, December 22, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Should cities be worried about “Peak Millennial?” Time magazine highlighted data from three cities where the count of millennials has declined in the past year, according to the American Community Survey. To some, it seems to be a harbinger that the young are growing disenchanted with city living.…
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How the g-word poisons public discourse on making cities better
We’re pleased to publish this guest post from Akron’s Jason Segedy. It originally appeared on his blog Notes from the Underground. Drawing on his practical experience in a rust-belt city, he offers a compelling new insight on the casual way that “gentrification” is invoked in serious discussions about the future of our cities. By Jason…
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Diverging diamond blues
A key design element of the supposedly pedestrian friendly Rose Quarter freeway cover is a pedestrian hostile diverging diamond interchange One of the main selling points of the plan to spend nearly half a billion dollars widening the Interstate freeway near downtown Portland is the claim that the improvements will somehow make this area safer…
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Are the young leaving cities?
The so-called “peak millennial” conjecture. Is it right? What does it mean? Should I care? Time has published an article, based largely on the research of UCLA demographer Dowell Myers, proclaiming that US cities are hitting “peak millennial.” We’ve been critical of the peak millennial claims in the past. The gist of Myers argument is…
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The Week Observed, December 15, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Is inequality over? There was some good news from the labor market this month. According to an analysis by Jed Kolko, low wage workers saw their earnings increase slightly faster than all other workers over the past year. That’s a welcome change from the trend of growing wage…
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The great freeway cover-up
Concrete covers are just a thinly-veiled gimmick for selling wider freeways As you’ve read at City Observatory, and elsewhere (CityLab, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week), Portland is in the midst of a great freeway war. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to widen a mile-long stretch of Interstate 5 opposite downtown Portland from 4 lanes…
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The Talent Dividend: Updated
Educational attainment explains two-thirds of the variation in economic success among metropolitan areas. Each additional percentage point increase in the four-year college attainment rate increases metro per capita income by $1,250 For a long time, we’ve been exponents of what we call “The Talent Dividend,” the idea that raising a metro area’s educational attainment is…
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The Week Observed, December 8, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The death of Flint Street. In Portland, a $450 million dollar freeway widening project is being sold as a way to “re-connect” a community that was divided by freeway construction half a century ago. But there’s a problem with that claim. Part of the project is eliminating one…
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Is inequality over?
After a long, slow recovery, wages are finally rising for the lowest-paid workers, but we’re no where close to rectifying our inequality problem; in fact, it’s going to get worse. The very smart Jed Kolko, who now writes for labor market website Indeed, offers some keen insights from the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data.…
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A constant state of change: turnover in business establishments
Churn means that lots of businesses, even large ones, aren’t around forever Many of our discussions of the economy are based on simple, and often largely static mental models of the economy. In a good year, a local economy might add 2 or 3 percent to its job total, and the total number of businesses…
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The death of Flint Street
A proposed freeway widening project will tear out one of Portland’s most used bike routes At City Observatory, were putting a local Portland-area proposed freeway widening project under a microscope, in part because we think it reveals some deep-seated biases in the way transportation planning takes place, not just in Portland, but in many cities.…
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The Week Observed, December 1, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Uber and Lyft: A dynamic duo(poly)? The continued growth of the ride-hailing industry has been something we’ve followed closely. New data show that in most major markets across the country, Lyft has been gaining market share at the expense of industry leader Uber. This rivalrous duopoly has important…
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Remember: There’s no such thing as a “Free” way
Congestion pricing is a win-win strategy and the only way to truly reduce traffic congestion The urban transportation problem is a hardy perennial: no matter how many lanes we add to urban freeways, traffic congestion is just as bad, if not worse than ever. In the face of “free” road travel, induced demand means that…
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Where should low-income housing go?
Is it better to build affordable housing in low income neighborhoods, or higher income neighborhoods? A recent study has run the numbers, and argues that social welfare is optimized by putting affordable housing in very poor neighborhoods, rather than wealthier (and especially whiter) ones. Authored by Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade of the Stanford School…
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Uber and Lyft: A dynamic duo(poly)?
Will two firms produce enough effective competition to benefit consumers? The use ride-hailing services continues to grow in the US, and while there are a range competitors in some markets, like New York, in most places, nearly all ride-hailing is dominated by Uber and Lyft. The good news for consumers is that fierce competition for…
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The Week Observed, November 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Renter’s credit scores are rising. What does that mean? New data from RentCafe shows a noticeable increase in the average credit scores of successful applicants for rental housing. In some leading markets like San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston, those who land new apartments have sterling (700+) credit scores.…
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Using Yelp to track economic growth
We review Yelp’s new index for rating local economies: It’s a good start For a long time, the only comprehensive and reliable means we’ve had of tracking and comparing economic activity across state and regional economies has been official government statistics, such as those compiled by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.…
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Renters move up-market
What to make of the high credit scores of new renters in some markets: alarm bell or success signal? RentCafe–one arm of Yardi Matrix, a real estate data and services firm–has a very interesting new data series on the credit scores of successful and unsuccessful apartment seekers in different cities. Rent Cafe runs a tenant…
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The Week Observed, November 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The growing premium for urban living. Three years ago, City Observatory introduced the term “the Dow of cities.” In essence, its the observation that the growth in city home prices relative to suburban ones is a good indicator of the relative value that people attach to urban living.…
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The end of the housing supply debate (maybe)
Slowly, the rhetorical battle is being won, as affordable housing advocates acknowledge more supply matters There’s been a war of words about what kind of housing policies are needed to address the nation’s affordability problems. Economists (from the White House to academe) argue that increasing housing supply is essential. Low income housing advocates of many stripes…
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More evidence of the Dow of cities
The premium that households pay to live in cities relative to suburbs and rural areas continues to increase Three years ago, we introduced the term “Dow of cities.” It’s a riff on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which is a broad-based summary measure of stock market valuation. The idea behind the Dow of cities…
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The Week Observed, November 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Rent control’s impact on the San Francisco housing market. A new study from three Stanford economists dissects the impacts of rent control in San Francisco. Using a late-in-the-game revision of the rent control law (that extended controls to previously exempt 1-4 unit structures), and an impressive pile of…
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Back at the ranch
What the ranch house teaches us about house prices and filtering. Back in the heyday of the post-war housing boom, back when the baby boomers were babies, America was building ranch houses–millions of them. In its prime, the ranch house was the embodiment of the middle-class dream, and newly built suburbs across the nation were…
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Winners and losers from rent control
A new study of San Francisco’s rent control shows it raises rents for some Rent control is a perennially contentious issue. Many housing activists see it as a logical and direct way to make housing more affordable. Economists are almost unanimous that it makes things worse by promoting disinvestment and decreasing supply. Particularly in the…
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Autonomous Vehicles: Does federal preemption shut down the laboratories of democracy?
There are a lot of details to be worked out to integrate autonomous vehicles into cities. Federal preemption could foreclose the opportunity of states and cities to help figure out the best ways forward. It’s a touchstone of federalism that states and localities are the “laboratories of democracy”: pilot testing new concepts before they’re rolled…
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The Week Observed, October 27, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Signs of the times. For most of the past few years, Portland–like other flourishing metro economies–has seen significant increases in apartment rents, as demand for urban living has outstripped local supply. There’s evidence that situation is changing–in the form of a bumper crop of “For Rent” signs in…
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Signs of the times
“For Rent” signs are popping up all over Portland, signaling an easing of the housing crunch and foretelling falling rents A year ago, in the height of the political season in deep blue Portland (in a county which voted 76 percent for Hillary Clinton) only one thing was rarer than Donald Trump lawn signs: For…
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The hamster wheel school of transportation policy
Going faster doesn’t mean your city gets anywhere more quickly, and it doesn’t make you happier One of the key metrics guiding transportation policy is speed: how quickly can you get from point A to point B. But is going faster a good guide to how we ought to build better places? When it comes…
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The Week Observed, October 20, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Now we are 3. This week marks City Observatory’s third birthday. It’s been an exciting time to be engaged with cities. We take a few minutes to review what we’ve done over the past year, and set some goals for what we want to achieve in the next…
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Why is “affordable” housing so expensive to build?
The high price of affordable housing It’s a problem that isn’t going away: the so-called “affordable” housing we’re building in many cities–by which we mean publicly subsidized housing that’s dedicated to low and moderate income households–is so expensive to build that we’ll never be able to build enough of it to make a dent in…
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Now we are three!
Three years 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 issues set in and around urban spaces. So today, we’re taking a few moments to celebrate our birthday, reflect back on the past year, and plot a…
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The Week Observed, October 13, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The constancy of change in neighborhood populations. The canonical story of gentrification focuses on the fact that many of the people living in a neighborhood today are not the same ones who lived there a decade ago. The implication is that, absent gentrification, neighborhood populations change slowly, if…
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The myth of naturally occurring affordable housing
Block that metaphor! There’s nothing “natural” about “naturally occurring affordable housing.” There’s a new term that’s gaining currency in some housing policy circles: “naturally occurring affordable housing.” It even has a catchy acronym: “NOAH.” There’s a recent report from Co-Star (the real estate advisory firm), issued in collaboration with the Urban Land Institute and the…
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The constancy of change in neighborhood populations
Neighborhoods are always changing; half of all renters move every two years. There’s a subtle perceptual bias that underlies many of the stories about gentrification and neighborhood change. The canonical journalistic account of gentrification focuses on the observable fact that different people now live in a neighborhood than used to live there at some previous…
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The Week Observed, October 6, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Subarus and Suburbans: Flat fee unfairness. Proposals to implement some form of road pricing, which would charge cars based on which roads they use, when, and how far they drive, have raised concerns that pricing may be unfair to low income households. But unexamined in such criticisms is…
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Metro economies pulling away nationally
Unemployment rates are down in cities, especially for those with less education One of the trends we’ve been following at City Observatory has been the increasing shift of the driving forces of the nation’s economy to large metro areas, and within these areas to cities. The industries that are flourishing in today’s economy are ones…
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Transportation equity, part 2: the Subaru and the Suburban
Flat per vehicle registration fees charge lower rates to wealthier households with more road damaging vehicles The prospect of shifting from using a combination of vehicle registration fees, fuel taxes and general revenues to pay for roads, to a system of road pricing, which would charge vehicle users only for the amount of time they…
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The Week Observed, September 29, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.Interim report card on Portland’s Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance: An Incomplete. Portland’s inclusionary zoning requirements have been in effect for six months. While the ordinance prompted a land rush of development applications filed under the old rules, private sector apartment applications have almost completely evaporated since then. We take a…
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Transportation equity: Why peak period road pricing is fair
Peak hour car commuters have incomes almost double those who travel by transit, bike and foot The Oregon Legislature has directed the state’s department of transportation to come up with a value pricing system for interstate freeways in the Portland metropolitan area. A key idea behind value pricing is that it would charge those who…
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Portland’s Inclusionary Zoning Law: Waiting for the other shoe to drop
Developers stampeded to get grandfathered before new requirements took hold, will the pipeline run dry? In December, Portland’s City Council adopted one of the nation’s most sweeping inclusionary zoning requirements. Most new multifamily housing projects will have to set aside 20 percent of their units for families earning less than 80 percent of area median…
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The Week Observed, September 22, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. What price autonomous vehicles? It’s easy to obsess about the cool technological details of autonomous vehicles: their sophisticated computers, LIDAR systems, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. But for economists, the big variable determining their impact is likely to hinge on their price. There’s a wide range of speculation now about…
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Racial wealth disparities: How housing widens the gap
The wealth of black families lags far behind whites, and housing markets play a key role There’s a great article from The New York Times’ Emily Badger about a new study that shows just how much Americans (especially white Americans) underestimate the gap in the economic circumstances between black and white families. The study also makes…
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What price for autonomous vehicles?
It’s easy to focus on technology, but pricing will determine autonomous vehicles impact. 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…
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The Week Observed, September 15, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cash prizes for bad corporate citizenship. The urban world is all abuzz, handicapping the city vs. city vs. city race to land Amazon’s HQ2, a rich prize of investment and jobs. Amazon’s request for proposals asks cities to sweeten their bids with an array of tax breaks and…
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Cities lead national income growth, again
Average household income in cities is increasing twice as fast as in their suburbs Earlier this week, the Census Bureau released its latest estimates of national income based on the annual Current Population Survey. The data show some good news: a continued improvement in household incomes and a reduction in poverty. Median household income increased…
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Cash prizes for bad corporate citizenship, Amazon edition
When we strongly incentivize anti-social behavior by big corporations, we get more of it Everyone in the urban space is busy handicapping the Amazon horserace, to see which city will land Amazon’s HQ2, which promises to be the biggest economic development prize of the 21st century. Amazon’s RFP, issued last week, invites metro areas with…
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The Week Observed, September 8, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Is the urban revival over? A provocative (but highly misleading) headline in last week’s New York Times sits atop Richard Florida’s op-ed about the future of cities. Although Florida is really making the case that the urban revival is “fragile,” the headline says the revival is over. Actually,…
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Cognitive dissonance on the Potomac
How can a city be named the first “LEED Platinum” city and be building freeways in its suburbs? Submitted for your approval: Two recent news items from our nation’s capital. In the first, Washington DC proudly announced that has been proclaimed the world’s first LEED Platinum city–based on the number of LEED-certified buildings it’s built in…
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Oh, no! Is the urban revival really over?
Reports of the demise of the city rebound have been greatly exaggerated Richard Florida’s op-ed piece in The New York Times last week had an eye-catching headline: “The Urban Revival is Over.” Here was the apostle of cities, apparently calling and end to the bull market for urban living. First, let it be said that–as…
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The Week Observed, September 1, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Inequality in three charts. New data produced by Thomas Piketty and his colleagues provides a rich, high-definition look at the growth of income inequality in the US. But while the quality of our understanding of the inequality problem has improved, it’s apparent that the growth of inequality in…
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Uber’s Movement: A peek at ride-hailing data
Uber’s lifting the veil–just a little–to provide data on urban transportation performance Uber’s new Movement tool provides valuable new source of data about travel times in urban environments. We’ve gotten an early look at Movement, and think its something that you’ll want to investigate, if you’re interested in urban transportation. Uber likes to bill itself…
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Inequality in three charts: Piketty, the picket fence and Branko’s elephant
Rising inequality in the US isn’t new; Declining inequality globally is. Scratch just beneath the surface of many daily problems, and you’ll find income inequality is a contributing factor, if not the chief culprit. Whether its concentrated poverty, soaring housing costs, disparities in educational attainment and public services, or the nation’s political divide, it all…
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The Week Observed, August 25, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Such a deal. Suppose someone offered you this investment deal: You can get $200,000 in preferred stock, that pays a 5% annual dividend tax free, and when it comes time to sell this investment, all of your capital gains will be tax free, too. Can’t afford $200K? No…
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What Dallas, Houston, Louisville & Rochester can teach us about widening freeways: Don’t!
Portland is thinking about widening freeways; other cities show that doesn’t work Once upon a time, Portland held itself out as a national example of how to build cities that didn’t revolve (so much) around the private automobile. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it recognized that building more freeways just generated more traffic, and…
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Such a deal
How tax policy subsidizes homeownership, mostly for the wealthiest Americans OK. Imagine that someone offers you this investment deal. We want you to buy some stock; in fact, we want you to buy about $150,000 or $200,000 in stock. In a single company. Sounds a bit risky, doesn’t it? But keep listening, we have some…
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The Week Observed, August 18, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Hundred dollar bills on the municipal sidewalk? There’s a lot of interest in tapping the hidden value of municipal assets to address city financial problems. The typical city owns billions of dollars of assets, particularly valuable urban land, and at least in theory, if it could earn even…
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Why we’re talking about Portland’s freeway widening proposal
Portland is a bellwether for transportation policy; is it going to take a giant step backward? Last month, the Oregon Legislature passed a $5.3 billion transportation funding bill. A central piece of this legislation is advancing three projects that would widen Portland area highways. HB 2017A makes initial allocations of funding to start (but not…
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Hundred dollar bills on the municipal sidewalk
The public wealth of cities is substantial, but under-pricing public assets is rampant There’s an old saw among economists. Two economists are walking along, and one of them says, “Look, there’s a hundred dollar bill on the sidewalk.” The second economist says, “It can’t be a hundred dollar bill; if it was, somebody would have…
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The Week Observed, August 11, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How luxury housing becomes affordable. It’s always been the case that developers build new housing for those at the top end of the market. It’s true today, and it was true 50 and 100 years ago. We look back at “luxury” apartments built in Portland in 1910 and…
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Dying to widen highways
Oregon’s DOT seems to be more concerned with making cars go faster than saving lives Yesterday, we took a look at a recent Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) “performance report” on Portland area freeways. One of its main messages–which we found some problems with–deals with congestion. But the report also seems to devote a lot…
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What a congestion report doesn’t tell us about congestion
Congestion is increasing in Portland: But not, apparently, because traffic volumes are increasing Traffic congestion reports are just as formulaic as bodice-ripping romance novels. They have a predictable narrative form: our region is growing; it has more people and more jobs and more cars. And the number of people and jobs and cars is growing…
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Is it a net zero home if it has a three-car garage?
Another model energy-saving project ignores density and location The National Institute of Standards and Technology has built what it calls a model “net-zero” energy home on its Gaithersburg, Maryland campus. The house is festooned with arrays of solar cells that generate more electricity that the house consumes, and its extensively insulated, air-tight and high-efficiency windows.…
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How luxury housing becomes affordable
Build expensive new “luxury” apartments, and wait a few decades One of the most common refrains the the affordable housing discussion is “developers are targeting the high end of the market” and new apartments are just unaffordable. Although we–and others–have pointed out that building more high end housing keeps those with high incomes from moving…
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The Week Observed, July 28, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Housing policy lessons from Vienna, Part II. In the second of his two guest commentaries, Mike Eliason takes a close look at land use laws and development processes in Vienna–a city generally recognized for its success in making affordable housing widely available to its citizens. A key difference…
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The Week Observed, July 21, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How green is my free parking structure? Not very. The National Renewable Energy Lab does cutting edge research on wind, solar and renewable energy. One area where their thinking isn’t cutting edge: their new parking garage. Not only did the federal lab build an 1,800 space garage for…
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In a New York minute
Why are travel speeds in Manhattan dropping? There’s a kind of ominous tidbit in New York City’s most recent mobility report. Travel on streets in Manhattan is getting slower. Here’s the data, computed from the report, showing the average travel speed on streets south of 60th Street in Manhattan: The difference between 9.35 miles per…
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Housing Policy Lessons from Vienna, Part II
Allowing multi-family housing in all residential zones, and aggressively promoting private bidding lowers housing costs We’re pleased to welcome a guest commentary from Mike Eliason of Seattle. Mike is a passivhaus designer with Patano Studio who is interested in baugruppen, mass timber, ultra low energy buildings, and social housing. Vienna is often mentioned as a…
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Housing policy lessons from Vienna: Part I
Is Stadt Wien the model for US urban housing policy? We’re pleased to welcome a guest commentary from Mike Eliason of Seattle. Mike is a passivhaus designer with Patano Studio who is interested in baugruppen, mass timber, ultra low energy buildings, and social housing. Vienna is often mentioned as a model for how American cities…
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How green is my free parking structure? Not very.
Why does the National Renewable Energy Lab give its employees free parking? The researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab are hard at work on a lot of cool ideas for reducing pollution and promoting greater energy efficiency. They’re figuring out ways to improve photovoltaics and increase the efficiency of wind energy generation, and are…
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When it comes to transit use, it’s all about destination density
At City Observatory, we’ve written quite a bit about the phenomenon of city center job growth. We did a whole CityReport about the phenomenon, showing that since the Great Recession, urban cores have been outperforming the rest of their metropolitan areas on employment, reversing earlier trends. And just this week, we covered new job numbers…
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The Week Observed, July 14, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Climate change: the two-cent solution. The City of Chicago charges its residents a fee of 7 cents for each disposable grocery bag. The fee provides revenue and more importantly, creates an incentive for consumers to use their own recyclable bags. The small fee is working; plastic bag use…
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Reality check: Poverty rates are much lower in suburbs
Despite what you may have heard, poverty rates in suburbs are on average half what they are in urban centers There’s a growing chorus about the so-called suburbanization of poverty. A couple of years ago, Alan Ehrenhalt’s Great Inversion argued that the wealthy and well-educated are moving to cities and the poor are being displaced…
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What’s the biggest threat facing cities?
Politico’s survey of experts leaves out the most important challenges, in our humble opinion. A couple of weeks back, Politco, the wonky-insider beltway news source queried a dozen of the nation’s urban thought leaders about the biggest crises facing cities in the years ahead. “What’s the greatest risk that cities face? Mayors, Governors, scholars, think…
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Climate Change: A 2-cent solution
Let’s put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon For almost six months, Chicago has been charging shoppers a 7 cent fee for using disposable plastic grocery bags. Rather than banning the bags outright, the city settled on the fee as a way to preserve consumer choice and yet encourage…
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The Week Observed, July 7, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why median rents are an incomplete and often misleading indicator of housing affordability. Our colleague Daniel Hertz shows how the median rent statistics that are often cited to demonstrate whether a neighborhood or city has a housing affordability problem can be a misleading guide. Medians tell us little…
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Market timing and racial wealth disparities
How buying high and selling low makes housing a bad investment for many disadvantaged groups 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…
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For low-income households, median home prices aren’t always what count
Affordable housing is an issue rife with statistics: median rents, median housing costs, percentage of people who are “housing cost burdened,” and so on. Previously, we’ve written about some of the issues with many of these statistics, including the untrustworthiness of most “median rent” reports and which rent statistics are more trustworthy. But another issue—which…
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Pity the poor Super Commuter
About 2 percent of all car commuters travel 90 minutes to work, same as a decade ago. We’ve always been clear about our views on mega commuters, those traveling an hour and a half or more to work daily. As we said last year, mega commuting is a non-big, non-growing non-problem. But the loneliness of…
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Prices Matter: Parking and Ride Hailing
Pricing parking drives demand for ride hailing services Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft have been highly reluctant to share data about their services with cities. In California, the state Public Utilities Commission has pre-empted municipal access to ride-hail data (and isn’t sharing it with anyone). As Bruce Schaller’s recent study of New York (one…
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Urban myth busting: Congestion, idling, and carbon emissions
Increasing road capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will backfire Time for another episode of City Observatory’s Urban Myth Busters, which itself is an homage to the long-running Discovery Channel series “Mythbusters” that featured co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman using something called “science” to test whether commonly believed tropes were really true. In each episode, they would…
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The Week Observed, June 23, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Downzoning won’t make housing cheaper. Chuck Marohn of StrongTowns notes that land that’s zoned for apartments generally commands higher prices than nearby land zoned for single family homes. Couldn’t we lower the cost of housing, he asks, by downzoning that multi-family land? The short answer is no: Low…
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The Week Observed, June 30, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban Myth Busting: Idling in traffic and carbon pollution. There’s a frequently repeated, just-so story about carbon emissions: if we didn’t spend so much time stuck in stop-and-go traffic and idling, we’d emit less pollution. Highway advocates seize on this idea as an excuse to build more capacity:…
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You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs
The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location At City Observatory, we’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons to believe that a single, fixed percentage of income standard does a poor job of reflecting whether housing is priced…
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Rent inflation is abating
Over the past year, rent inflation has declined in 48 of the top 50 markets For the past several years, rising rents have been at the center of the nation’s housing affordability debate. A combination of former homeowners dispossessed by the collapse of the housing bubble, weak incomes and job prospects for younger workers and…
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More evidence of the growth of concentrated poverty
Since 2000, the number of people living in extremely poor neighborhoods has doubled; neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are still disproportionately in the densest urban places. Last week, the Joint Center on Housing Studies released its annual “State of the Nation’s Housing” report. While most of the report focuses on new housing construction, and the slow…
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Downzoning won’t make housing cheaper
The fallacy of composition leads people to get the connection between density and affordability backwards Our good friend at Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn is utterly right about a great many things. But he’s committed a classic Kotkinesque blunder when it comes to evaluating the connection between density and home prices. His theory is that higher…
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The Week Observed, June 16, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cultural appropriation: Theft or smorgasbord? A recent Internet furor erupted over a Portland burrito stand that copied its recipe from that of street vendors in Mexico. An essential feature of cities and economic development, as Jane Jacobs noted, is that they’re constantly remixing ideas. When is borrowing and…
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Pricing roads for autonomous vehicles
Portland and other cities are considering future policies for a world of autonomous vehicles: We have some advice: Use this opportunity to dynamically price roads. Like many cities, Portland is considering what policies it should adopt to accomodate autonomous vehicles. Mayor Ted Wheeler has expressed his support for opening the city to self-driving cars and…
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Historic Preservation: NIMBYism for the Rich?
Is historic preservation just thinly veiled NIMBYism? There’s a growing recognition that local land use controls that preclude increased density in cities are helping contribute to the shortage of affordable housing. President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers lent considerable credence to that view, and the YIMBY movement is growing. Unsophisticated and bald-faced efforts to block…
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Cultural appropriation: Theft or Smorgasbord?
If it weren’t for cultural appropriation, would America have any culture at all? In Portland, two women opened a food cart business–Kook’s Burritos–selling burritos based on ones that they’d seen and tasted during a trip to Puerto Novo, Mexico. They were frank, telling reporters that they’d hung out watching local vendors prepare tortillas, to see if…
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The Week Observed, June 9, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How green was my city? The Trump administration’s announcement that it would pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords was greeted with dismay by many environmentalists, but governors and mayors around the nation stepped up to say they’d continue to fight climate change. Climate hawks are…
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More evidence on ridesharing’s growth surge
New data shows the diffusion of ride-sharing among US metro areas: Parking prices matter. We know from casual observation and the occasional leaded corporate document that ridesharing (which is more accurately but clumsily labeled ‘transportation network companies’) is growing rapidly. Although Uber and Lyft are pretty stingy with their data, our friends at the Brookings…
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Portland’s Green Dividend
When you build a city that enables people to drive less, they spend less on cars and gas and have more to spend on other things. Here is my 2007 report, published by CEOs for Cities, which describes Portland’s Green Dividend–the additional income that Portland area residents have to spend because they drive fewer miles…
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How green was my City (Hall)
In the wake of Pres. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, many mayors and governors have stepped up their rhetoric on climate change. Will their actions match their words? On June 1, President Trump announced that he would withdraw the United States from the international climate accords agreed to in Paris in 2015. The…
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The Week Observed, June 2, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities and the returns to education. We know that the nation’s best educated people are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Data compiled by the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service shows a big reason why: the more education you have the bigger the urban wage premium. College-educated…
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Integration and social interaction: Evidence from Intermarriage
Reducing segregation does seem to result in much more social interaction, as intermarriage patterns demonstrate Yesterday, we took a close and critical look at Derek Hyra’s claim that mixed-income, mixed-race communities fell short of improving the lot of the disadvantaged because of the persistence of what he called “micro-segregation.” Even though they might live in…
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Integration and the Kumbaya gap
Gentrifying neighborhoods produce more mixing, but don’t automatically generate universal social interaction. What should we make of that? In one idealized view of the world, economically integrated neighborhoods would have widespread and deep social interactions among people from different backgrounds. We’d tend to be color-blind and class-blind, and no more (or less) likely to interact…
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The hidden bias of big data
So-called smart cities have an achilles heel: data is biased by the status quo Streetsblog recently highlighted a new report from Houston’s Kinder Institute, evaluating bike and pedestrian road safety based on user-reported near misses. Kinder got 187 cyclists and pedestrians to record their travel for a week in March, and identify and describe situations…
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Cities and the returns to education
The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city A recent Wall Street Journal article painted the nation’s rural areas as its new inner cities, with high rates of poverty, limited economic opportunity and a range of social problems. While the aggregate data mask enormous variation in the nation’s non-metro…
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The Week Observed, May 26, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Dirt Cheap. A number of tech startups are exploring techniques for high density urban farming. In theory, new methods, like vertical farming in plastic tubes, can greatly reduce the amount of land and water needed to grow certain crops, and offers the advantage of much shorter distances to…
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Just ahead: Road pricing?
Trump’s infrastructure package would let states pursue road pricing A trillion dollars for infrastructure. That’s been the headline talking point for months about the Trump Administration’s policy agenda, but the details have been murky at best. A short white paper prepared for the campaign by now Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross sketched out a plan for…
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More debate on city revival
Is the urban renaissance over? Earlier this week, The New York Times published an op-ed from Jed Kolko–”Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls, The Myth of the Return to Cities”–offering up another iteration of his long running argument that the urban rebound is overstated. His key point: in the aggregate suburbs are growing faster than cities, and…
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Dirt cheap.
Why we’re very skeptical about urban farming. At City Observatory, we don’t tend to have a lot of content about agriculture. Farming is not an urban activity. But every so often, we read techno-optimistic stories about how a new era of hyper-local food grown in your neighborhood or very nearby, is just around the corner…
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The Week Observed, May 19, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Volunteering as a measure of social capital. Thanks to the work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and more recently, Our Kids, there’s a growing understanding of the important role of social capital–the relationships and norms of trust and reciprocity–in making our communities and our economy work…
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Why America can’t make up its mind about housing
Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with: Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or even metropolitan areas. Government policy should protect residential neighborhoods from things that might negatively impact…
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Volunteering as a measure of social capital
Volunteering is one of the hallmarks of community; here are the cities with the highest rates of volunteerism The decline of the civic commons, the extent to which American’s engage with one another in the public realm, especially across class lines, has been much remarked upon. Our report, Less in Common, explores the many dimensions…
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Key to prosperity: Talent in the “traded sector” of the economy
“Traded sector” businesses that employ well-educated workers mark a prosperous region At City Observatory, we regularly stress the importance of education and skills to regional economic success. Statistically, we can explain almost two-thirds of the variation in per capita income among large metropolitan areas just by looking at the educational attainment of the population. The strong…
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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. We first published this post in 2015, but its as timely today as it was then. by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was…