A new measure purports to gauge city attractiveness by measuring whether local college graduates stick around. But these raw numbers can be a misleading indicator, and we’ll show how it can be adjusted to more accurately measure how good a job a city is doing of producing and retaining talent. There’s powerful evidence that the […]
How brain drain measures can mislead Read More »
There’s a hopeful new sign that how we build our cities, and specifically, how good a job we do of building mixed income neighborhoods that are open to everyone can play a key role in reducing poverty and promoting equity. New research shows that neighborhood effects—the impact of peers, the local environment, neighbors—contribute significantly to
Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter: lifting kids out of poverty Read More »
It’s an eye-catching, convention-tweaking claim: We’ve reached peak Millennial. And, so the argument goes, because Millennials have hit their “peak,” it’s time to junk all these crazy theories about Millennials not wanting to own cars, and not buying homes, especially in the suburbs. Sure, they had a youthful dalliance with city living, and the numbers
Not peak Millennial: the coming wave Read More »
What City Observatory did this week 1. When supply catches up to demand, rents go down. While stories about crazy housing markets tend to focus on big, coastal metropolitan areas, it turns out there’s a lot to learn from looking at Williston, ND. That sleepy town began to boom thanks to oil, and its housing
The Week Observed: March 25, 2016 Read More »
You’re on your couch, streaming the latest episode of Broad City on your Mac laptop, just like a good millennial. But all of a sudden, your wifi connection goes bad, and the screen goes all pixelated. Instead of Abbi and Ilana at an art gallery, all you can see is big blocks of seemingly random
County data is great, but it can’t tell us much about urban living Read More »
Yesterday, TomTom released its annual rankings of the levels of congestion in world and US cities. Predictably, they generated the horrified, self-pitying headlines about how awful congestion is in the top-ranked cities. Cue the telephoto lens shots of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and tales of gridlock. As we’ve long pointed out, there are big problems with the
The beat goes on: More misleading congestion rankings from TomTom Read More »
Even the most casual consumer of urban news can’t avoid reading articles about whether rents in their city are up, or down, and how they compare to other cities around their country. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these rent estimates are completely made up. As we’ve written, the proliferation of these rent stories seems to
Here’s your definitive field guide to median rent statistics Read More »
How much does a one-bedroom apartment cost in Chicago, my hometown? A quick Google search comes up with an article claiming that median rent is $1,970, according to the real estate company Zumper. But wait—according to real estate company Trulia, the median rent in Chicago was just $1,400 in January 2016, and that includes apartments with
A field guide to median rent statistics Read More »
Last year’s hit film The Big Short depicted various investors who, realizing that there was a housing bubble in the years before the 2000s crash, found ways to “short” housing, betting against the market and ultimately making a killing when the crisis hit. Looking forward, there’s a plausible case to be made that this might
It’s time for a “big short” in parking Read More »
Today, we spend a few minutes reviewing the recent history of housing markets in rural North Dakota. In a microcosm, we can see how the interplay of demand and supply drive housing market cycles. The speed and scale of changes in North Dakota dwarf what we usually see, but provide an illustration of the forces
When supply catches up to demand, rents go down Read More »
