Behind the big headlines about an national income rebound: thriving city economies are the driver. As economic headlines go, it was pretty dramatic and upbeat news: The US recorded an 5.2 percent increase in real household incomes, not only the first increase since 2007, but also the biggest one-year increase ever recorded. Its a signal […]
Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth Read More »
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
Parking meters and opportunity costs Read More »
What should cities do to tackle growing housing affordability problems? Is inclusionary zoning a good way to provide more affordable housing, or will it actually worsen the constrained housing supply that’s a big cause of higher rents? In the next few months, the city of Portland, Oregon will be considering the terms of a new
Portland considers inclusionary zoning Read More »
Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.” The
McMansions Fading Away? Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Counting Women Entrepreneurs. The Census Bureau has just released the results of its new survey of entrepreneurs, and we report its key findings on the extent and geography of women-owned businesses. There are more than 1.1 million women-owned businesses with more than 5 million employees; about one in
The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016 Read More »
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
For low-income households, median home prices aren’t always what count Read More »
Its early September, and most of the the nation’s students are (or shortly will be) back in the classroom. There may be a few key academic insights that are no longer top of mind due to the distractions of summer, so as good teachers know, now is a good time for a quick refresher–something that
Back to school: Three charts that make the case for cities Read More »
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. For much of our history, entrepreneurship has been dominated by men. But in recent decades, women have overcome many of the social and other obstacles entrepreneurship and as a result, the number of women active
Counting women entrepreneurs Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Which cities and metros shop most at small retail firms? A new “big data” set from the JPMorganChase Institute offers some answers. It uses 16 billion transactions from the bank’s customers in 15 metro areas to estimate the share of retail spending that goes to businesses of different sizes
The Week Observed: Sept. 2, 2016 Read More »
We’ve all been paying a lot more attention to developments in Britain since June’s Brexit vote. As we noted at the time, some of the same kinds of political divides that play out in America—between globally-integrated, knowledge driven cities and more rural areas that are older, less-educated—also happen in Britain. (Population density helps explain the
Transatlantic advice on city development strategies Read More »
