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 […]
Cities and the returns to education Read More »
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
The Week Observed, May 26, 2017 Read More »
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
Just ahead: Road pricing? Read More »
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
More debate on city revival Read More »
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
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
The Week Observed, May 19, 2017 Read More »
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
Why America can’t make up its mind about housing Read More »
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
Volunteering as a measure of social capital Read More »
“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
Key to prosperity: Talent in the “traded sector” of the economy Read More »
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
My illegal neighborhood Read More »
