There’s little question that housing affordability is a growing problem in many cities around the country. Rents have been rising faster than incomes, especially for low- and moderate-income households. One of the most widely touted policy responses is “inclusionary zoning,” which requires developers who build new housing to set aside at least a portion (typically […]
Achieving scale in affordable housing Read More »
In our first post on the “Sprawl Tax,” we’ve explored the ways that our decisions about how to build American cities have imposed significant costs—in money, time, and quality of life—on all of us. We pay more to drive more, spend more time traveling instead of being at our destinations, and as a result deal
Sprawl Tax: How the US stacks up internationally Read More »
Last week, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a fascinating report detailing neighborhood change in Philadelphia over the past decade and a half. “Philadelphia’s Changing Neighborhoods” combines a careful, region-wide analysis of income trends with detailed profiles of individual neighborhoods. Using tract-level income data, Pew researchers classified Philadelphia neighborhoods according to their median income in 2000
Neighborhood change in Philadelphia Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. In real life, somehow, Google patented sticky cars so that when their autonomous vehicles hit pedestrians, they won’t get thrown into the air, but will rather be pinned to the vehicle’s hood. In the spirit of helpfulness, we have diagrammed some other solutions Google might want to investigate,
The Week Observed: June 3, 2016 Read More »
If you read the news, you’ve probably seen reports about “congestion costs”: how much American commuters pay, in money and time, when they’re stuck in traffic. It’s fair to say that we’ve got some issues with many of these reports—but they’re popular nonetheless, perhaps because they help quantify a frustration that so many people can
Introducing the Sprawl Tax Read More »
There’s a growing body of evidence that economic integration—avoiding the separation of rich and poor into distinct neighborhoods—is an important ingredient in promoting widely shared opportunity. The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues shows that poor kids who grow up in mixed income communities experience far higher rates of economic success than those who
Schools and economic integration Read More »
For many, it’s all but a certainty that our world will soon be full of self-driving cars. While Google’s self-driving vehicles have an impressive safety record in their limited testing, it’s just a matter of time until one is involved in a serious crash that injures someone in a vehicle, or a pedestrian. So, in
Self-driving cars versus pedestrians Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. Last month, we released the Storefront Index, a report that catalogued the nation’s retail clusters and provided a window into the spatial organization of an important part of Jane Jacobs’ famous “sidewalk ballet.” This week, we lifted the curtain a bit to explain how we built the index,
The Week Observed: May 27, 2016 Read More »
At first blush, it’s a bit confusing: Why, in a region that desperately needs more affordable housing, would there be so much opposition to a proposed law that would make it easier to build affordable housing? The proposal in question was offered up last week by California Governor Jerry Brown as part of the state’s
California’s latest affordable housing proposal gives insight into housing politics Read More »
A trio of reports released in the past week provide new data showing the economic strength of the nation’s cities. Whether we look at population growth, new business formation, or job creation, big cities, urban centers and close-in urban neighborhoods are big drivers of national growth. While the data are drawn from different sources and
Cities are adding people, jobs and businesses Read More »
