As housing affordability becomes an increasingly challenging and widespread problem in many US cities, there are growing calls for the imposition of rent control. While there’s broad agreement among economists that rent control is ineffective and even counterproductive, it still seems like a tempting and direct solution to the problem. In Oregon, State House speaker […]
Does rent control work? Evidence from Berlin Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. The rise of global neighborhoods. A new paper published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live in multi-ethnic “global neighborhoods”—places that
The Week Observed, November 25, 2016 Read More »
At City Observatory, we’ve long maintained that the location patterns of talented young workers are an economically important signal. (You can read our report on “The Young and Restless here). Well-educated young adults are the most mobile people in our society, and are flexible, adaptable, and have recent vintage human capital, and generally command lower
More evidence on the migration of talent Read More »
There’s a lot of ink being spilled — or is it pixels rearranged? — over the size, shape, merits and even existence of a Trump Administration infrastructure plan. Infrastructure was one of just a handful of substantive policy talking points in the campaign, and the President-elect reiterated this one on election night. It also appears
Your guide to the debate over the Trump Infrastructure Plan Read More »
As the US grows more diverse, so too do its urban neighborhoods. A new paper—“ Global Neighborhoods: Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis”–published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live
The growth of global neighborhoods Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Daytime and nighttime segregation. Economic, racial and ethnic segregation are persistent features of the American metropolis. Most studies measure segregation using Census data on place of residence, but that’s at best an incomplete picture of the way different groups interact in urban space. Using data from social media,
The Week Observed, November 18, 2016 Read More »
Fundamentally, the nation’s housing affordability problems are due to demand outpacing supply: there’s more demand to live in some cities–and especially in great urban neighborhoods–than can be met from the current supply of housing, especially apartments. As demand surges ahead of supply, rents get bid up, which is the most visible manifestation of the affordability
Supply starting to catch up with demand Read More »
One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordability, especially in the more desirable urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest and most prosperous metropolitna areas. As
Parking: The Price is Wrong Read More »
In cities, you’ll sometimes hear people talk about a “daytime population”: not how many people live in a place, but how many gather there regularly during their waking hours. So while 1.6 million people may actually live in Manhattan, there are nearly twice that many people on the island during a given workday. Most studies
Daytime and nighttime segregation Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. A tax credit for renters. The Terman Center for Housing Innovation at the UC Berkeley has come up with three fleshed-out and cost-estimated models for providing tax credits for low income renters. The FAIR tax credit would help rectify the strong tilt in the tax system toward home
The Week Observed, November 11, 2016 Read More »
