Commentary

As recently as the years 2002 to 2007, outlying urban neighborhoods and suburbs experienced much faster job growth than urban cores. But as a February 2015 City Observatory report, “Surging City Center Job Growth,” documented, that pattern reversed from 2007 to 2011, with urban cores overtaking more peripheral areas and maintaining positive job growth through […]

What City Observatory did this week 1. What’s the relationship between urban sprawl, income segregation, and economic opportunity? A recent study by Reid Ewing and colleagues at the University of Utah used an innovative new measure of sprawl to correlate with economic outcomes of low-income children, and found a strong positiveassociation between compactness—that is, un-sprawl—and

The US faces a shortage of cities. More and more Americans, especially talented, young workers with college degrees, are looking to live in great urban locations. As we’ve explored at City Observatory, the demand for urban living has increased faster than the supply of great urban spaces—with the predictable result that the price of land

There’s more evidence that housing market supply is beginning to catch up to demand in a way that is likely to moderate rent increases. Nothing, it seems, is more infuriating to those caught in a market of steady rent hikes that being lectured by some economist that what is needed to resolve the problem is

Every once in a while, someone writes something that makes a murky, complicated, frustrating issue seem crystal clear. This post by Eric Fischer is one of those. Doing yeoman’s work, Fischer transcribed decades’ worth of San Francisco housing prices and other data. Among his findings: Though we talk about the Bay Area’s housing crisis as

What City Observatory did this week 1. A new study from Stanford Business School claims that society reaps the greatest benefits from low-income housing when that housing is built in the lowest-income neighborhoods—as opposed to integrating it within higher-income neighborhoods. But there are a number of caveats and concerns we have with the study. For

WASHINGTON, DC – Citing safety concerns, today Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced he was contemplating the closure of roads to all private vehicles in nearly every city in the country until he could assure the nation’s drivers that they would be safe behind the wheel. The announcement comes on the heels of comments by