There’s a revolution afoot in transportation. Transportation network companies, aka “ridesharing” firms, like Uber and Lyft are disrupting both the markets for urban transportation and labor markets. Their business model–treating drivers as independent contractors, is fueling the so-called “gig economy.” A new report from the Brookings Institution uses federal tax and administrative records to plot […]
Where is ridesharing growing fastest? Read More »
Where are the most interesting streetscapes and popular destinations in your city? Even among your friends and colleagues, there might be some lively disagreement about that question. But recently, search giant Google weighed in on this question when it overhauled Google Maps this summer. Now it has a new feature, an creamsicle orange shading in
The most interesting neighborhood in the world Read More »
As regular readers of City Observatory already know, the use, misuse and abuse of real estate price indices is one of our pet peeves. We’ve repeatedly excoriated Abodo, Zumper and others for mis-representing median values calculated from their apartment listings, as rental inflation gauges, because they work more like random number generators than measures of
More fuzzy math: Vancouver real estate edition Read More »
One trend we’ve tracked at City Observatory has been the movement of jobs back to city centers. While there are an increasing number of examples of prominent firms moving downtown — GE abandoning its suburban campus for a location in Boston’s Seaport district, McDonalds moving from Oak Brook to a site near Chicago’s Loop —
More evidence job growth is shifting to the center Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Bubble Logic. A major and persistent change in the housing market from a decade ago has been the decline in the number of “trade-up” home-buyers. While some fret that recent first-time homebuyers have become locked in to so-called starter homes, we point out that in many ways, trade-up
The Week Observed: October 7, 2016 Read More »
Next Monday, very early, before anyone in North America is out of bed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the name of the 2016 Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. No doubt the decision has already long since been made by the prize committee. But if they’re still undecided, we have a suggestion. Its
Its rare that some obscure terminology from sociology becomes a part of our everyday vernacular, but “tipping point” is one of those terms. Famously, Thomas Schelling used the tipping point metaphor to explain the dynamics of residential segregation in the United States. His thesis was that white residents were willing to live in a mixed
Are integrated neighborhoods stable? Read More »
Every few months, the national prize pool in the multi-state Powerball lottery piles up to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Early this year, three lucky winners split a prize with a total value of $1.6 billion dollars. Bucking odds of about one in 262 million, Marvin and Mae Acosta’s purchase of a
A lottery isn’t the answer to our housing problems Read More »
We shouldn’t expect the return of the trade-up buyer anytime soon. Is the American homebuyer increasingly stuck in a starter home? That’s the premise of a recent commentary from the Urban Institute “Do we have a generation stuck in starter homes?” Looking at data on the share of home mortgages going to first time home
What City Observatory did this week 1. Where are African-American entrepreneurs? A new Census Bureau survey, undertaken in cooperation with the Kauffman Foundation provides a detailed demographic profile of the owners of the nation’s businesses. It reports that there are about 108,000 African-American owned businesses with paid employees (i.e., not counting self-employed entrepreneurs). We look
The Week Observed: September 30, 2016 Read More »
