Commentary

What City Observatory did this week 1. Finding nuance in the housing supply arguments. A new article from Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce helps resolve some of the tensions in the growing debate about whether and how housing supply is behind the affordability crisis—and the answer hinges on understanding how demand and supply can change at […]

At City Observatory, we’ve long been critical of some seemingly scientific studies and ideas that shape our thinking about the nature of our transportation system, and its performance and operation. We’ve pointed out the limitations of the flawed and out-dated “rules of thumb” that guide our thinking about trip generation, parking demand, road widths and

In a January 2015 paper, the Yale Law professor David Schleicher and Yale Law student Daniel Rauch published a paper on how local governments might regulate “sharing economy” companies, such as Uber, in the future. Among their more startling predictions, perhaps, was that the very cities that have been battling to regulate startups like Uber—which

Last week, the Washington Post published an article repeating an old-refrain in transportation journalism—the horror of long commutes. According to the Post, more and more Americans are commuting longer and longer distances to work each day. There’s growing scientific evidence that long commutes are bad for your physical and mental health, reduce happiness, and even

On the one hand, over the last few years, the growing debate about the root causes of affordable housing crises in high-income, coastal American cities has been robust, passionate, and often nuanced. On the other, there have been precious few “breakthrough” moments, and the rhetoric today often looks pretty similar to what it was a

What City Observatory did this week 1. Muddling income inequality and economic segregation. What does it mean to be a prosperous city? What does it mean to be a city with high economic inequality? These questions can be difficult because they apply statistics we’re used to using at a national level to municipalities or neighborhoods—and

Last week, we published an interactive tool for exploring how commuting has changed by different age groups over the last decade or so. One of the big takeaways was that even among younger people, there’s been only miniscule shifts away from driving, or towards transit and biking, despite the huge surge of youth to more

Everyone interested in state or local economic development should read “Remaking Economic Development: The Markets and Civics of Continuous Growth and Prosperity.” In it, the Brookings Institution’s Amy Liu neatly synthesizes important lessons from the field about how metropolitan centered economic strategies are vitally important not just to revitalizing city economies, but to national economic

Note: Tomorrow, NYU’s Furman Center will hold a seminar with Dartmouth professor William Fischel on his new paper,”The Rise of the Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the Growth Machine.” This post contains some of our reactions to the paper.   There’s increasing recognition that laws preventing the construction of new

The big divides between rich and poor in the US are drawing increased attention, which is a good thing. Income inequality has been steadily growing in the US, and it’s a big problem. As we’ve pointed out, this problem has an important spatial dimension as well. The concentration of poverty, in particular, amplifies all of