Commentary

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities can’t solve all our problems. Like other people who think and work about cities and urban issues, we’re often focused on how ground-level changes can make cities better—things neighborhood groups or local government can do. But though local actors are important, we can’t lose sight of the […]

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report confirms what we’ve known for a long time: our nation’s system of assessing the costs of roads—and paying for their construction and maintenance—is badly broken. Entitled “Approaches to Making Federal Highway Spending More Productive,” the new CBO report is a treasure trove of details about the recent history

This is the first in a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what’s wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what “affordable” means. The second part looks at an alternative measure, and the third examines the particular challenges of understanding “affordability” for owner-occupied homes.

In some ways, the urban renaissance of the last decade or two has been quite dramatic. Downtown or downtown-adjacent neighborhoods in cities around the country have seen rapid investments, demographic change, and growth in amenities and jobs. Even mayors in places with a reputation for car dependence, like Nashville and Indianapolis, are pushing for big investments

As our name implies, we’re very focused on cities. We think cities are the key to solving many of the nation’s most challenging problems, from economic opportunity and social justice, to environmental sustainability. And we’re not alone: more and more, activists are looking to cities to take the lead on critical policy issues. Cities should

What City Observatory did this week 1. Another round on the Washington Post‘s housing roundtable. On Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog on what it would take to solve the housing affordability crises in places like San Francisco. On Monday, we followed up on some of the ideas of

  A breathless feature article at the New York Times describes how the design wizards at IDEO are helping stodgy old Ford Motor Company re-imagine how transportation might work in the future. IDEO conceptualized the design task by sending groups of its employees to a restaurant a few miles away via different transportation modes, so

Like most city lovers of a certain age, I spent many hours as a kid playing SimCity. For readers who are tragically uninitiated, SimCity is one of the iconic computer games of the 1990s, though new versions have been released as recently as 2013. Playing as mayor (or, really, dictator, but more on that later),

By far the most common way to measure transit use is “commute mode share,” or the percentage of workers who use transit to get to their job. For the most part, this is a measure of convenience: it’s the most direct way the Census asks about transportation, which means it’s the easiest way to get

Last Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog on affordable housing. The conversation focused on a long-running debate about how best to address the affordability crisis in cities like San Francisco, and was sparked in particular by the new California Legislative Analyst’s Office report that found neighborhoods in the Bay