The nation’s largest city-centered metro areas are powering national economic growth. 2017 will mark a decade since the peak of the last economic cycle (which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research was December 2007. Since then, we’ve experienced the Great Recession (the biggest economic downturn in eight decades), and a long and arduous […]
Big city metros are driving the national economy Read More »
Homes with better transit access command higher prices, especially in cities with good transit. Our friends at Redfin, the real estate data and analytics company, have an interesting new report exploring the connection between transit access and home prices. Redfin computes and freely publishes a Transit Score for all of the nation’s houses. Transit Score
Transit and home values Read More »
Last month, we took exception to critics of Detroit’s economic rebound who argued that it was a failure because the job and population growth that the city has enjoyed has only reached a few neighborhoods, chiefly those in and around the downtown. A key part of our position was that successful development needs to achieve
Getting to critical mass in Detroit Read More »
The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy’s stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other major national retail chains, including The Limited, Gap, Walgreens, Aeropostale and Chico’s, have also announced similarly large closures.
How much could US retail shrink? And where? Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls “cafe urbanism” is at risk if there’s a collapse in the restaurant sector. Apparently, a number of restaurants in
The Week Observed, March 17, 2017 Read More »
Speed doesn’t seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems. Yesterday, we presented some new estimates of the average speed of travel in different metropolitan areas developed by the University of California’s Victor Couture. His data shows that average travel speeds in some metropolitan areas (like Louisville)
Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther Read More »
Which cities move the fastest? Does it matter? The raison d’etre of the highway engineer is making cars go faster. That’s reflected in chronic complaints about traffic congestion, and codified in often misleading studies, like those produced by the Texas Transportation Institute. The latest contribution to the literature on inter-metropolitan differences in transportation system performance
Speed: Fast cities Read More »
Alan Ehrenhalt is alarmed. In his tony suburb of Clarendon, Virginia, several nice restaurants have closed. It seems like an ominous trend. Writing at Governing, he’s warning of “The Limits of Cafe’ Urbanism.” Cafe Urbanism is a “lite” version of the consumer city theory propounded by Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, who noted that one of the
Are restaurants dying, and taking city economies with them? Read More »
For a long time, we’ve been critical of the way we commonly talk about housing affordability. We’ve published a three–part series about why the way we measure housing affordability is all wrong. In particular, we objected to using the 30 percent ratio of housing prices to income as the benchmark of “affordable,” basically because depending on
Affordability beyond the median Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Shrinking offices: What it means for cities. Its not just you’re imagination: offices are becoming less common and smaller, and a variety of space-sharing and space-saving practices are taking hold in businesses around the nation. The number of square feet of office space leased per new office employee
The Week Observed, March 10, 2017 Read More »
