Commentary

Hey reporters! We know you love rankings, especially ones that show some measure of widely shared pain, like traffic congestion or rent increases. And some people, armed with a database and an infographic are more than happy to feed your hunger for this type of analysis. But please: Stop using Abodo’s rent numbers. They’re wrong. […]

More than half of workers in DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to get to work without a car. But nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? First, a little context. Your city probably has a DuPage County—if not by name, by profile. Beginning about 15 miles due west of Chicago’s

What City Observatory did this week 1. Even in a relatively dense city like Chicago, large amounts of off-street parking goes unused daily. A new report from the Center for Neighborhood Technology documents the over-supply of residential parking, and lays the blame on municipal parking requirements that force developers to build parking lots or garages

A Hollywood staple of the 1930s and 1940s was the story of a plucky band of young kids—usually led by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland—who, their dreams of making it on Broadway dashed by some plot twist, decide to stage a show of their own. They would find a barn or a warehouse, sing and

It’s been debunked, right? Though we’ve long been told that millennials want to live in cities, renting rather than owning, and biking instead of driving, a new round of articles are here to tell us that all of that is a myth: as soon as they find their financial footing, young people are buying homes

Another column from Paul Krugman today on the ways that US-style zoning laws are detrimental to economic opportunity is a pleasant reminder that the role of building regulations in broader questions of inequality is no longer such a fringe issue. Particularly in places with the greatest “shortage of cities”—where the gap between available housing and

There’s not enough parking in Chicago: it’s an article of faith among many drivers, and has been a key assumption in many of the city’s planning efforts. But a new report from the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology finds that one of those efforts, mandatory off-street parking requirements for residential buildings, is causing an over-supply

What City Observatory did this week 1. Have we reached “peak Millennial”? One researchers argues that because new births peaked in 1990, today’s 26-year-olds represent the high water mark of a youth-led urban renaissance. But a closer look shows that’s not the case: the US Census predicts that we have a number of years until

America’s pedestrians are in pain. Every day, tens of millions of Americans waste tens of thousands of hours stuck waiting on the side of streets for car traffic to get out of their way. We estimate that the annual value of time lost waiting to walk totals $25 billion annually. Today, City Observatory announces the

Earlier this month, a report in Chicago pointed to some of the tensions implicit in a desegregation-oriented federal affordable housing program. The Sun-Times, with that city’s Better Government Association, published a “watchdogs” feature on housing choice vouchers. The big news: while some voucher holders pay relatively large proportions of their rents, others pay much less, or nothing,