Commentary

What City Observatory did this week 1. Which federal agency has a big role to play in housing affordability? The answer might surprise you. The Federal Reserve has announced a plan to increase the interest rates it charges banks, putting the brakes on the economy in an attempt to hold back inflation. But it turns […]

Earlier this month, we argued that Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8 vouchers, ought to be provided to every household with a qualifying income. The limited funding for vouchers today leaves millions of people—over three-quarters of those who qualify—without help when official public policy has declared that they need it. We also pointed

At City Observatory, we’ve cataloged a series of indicators that point to the the growing economic strength of city centers—including on the metric of job growth. But in a new blog post, Jed Kolko looks at county-level data for the past 15 years, and declares that city jobs aren’t really back, concluding: “It’s hard to

Last month, we called out the American Highway User’s Alliance (AHUA) for trumpeting the Katy Freeway as a congestion-fighting success story. The Katy, as you will recall, is Houston’s 23-lane freeway, which was recently expanded at a cost of $2.8 billion. Although the AHUA hailed that expansion in a report as the kind of project

The big economic news of the past month was the Federal Reserve Board’s decision to begin raising interest rates after years of leaving them at near-zero levels. The first increase in the short-term interest rate the Fed charges banks will be one-quarter of one percent, but there’s an expectation that the Fed will continue to

What City Observatory did this week 1. Bending the carbon curve in the wrong direction. After years in which Americans were driving less, cheap gas is helping to push those numbers back up—erasing a full sixth of the progress we had made against transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, we can’t expect that this backsliding will

What exactly is the relationship between land use regulations and economic segregation? Previous research has shown that places with more restrictive land use regulations have higher housing costs and are more segregated by race, but now a new study from UCLA aims to give more detailed answers. The paper, by Michael Lens and Paavo Monkkonen,

You may be surprised to hear that condos, all else equal, are more expensive than houses. You should be, because it’s not true. But that didn’t deter Joel Kotkin, the one-man cottage industry of curious urban criticism, from claiming so from his perch at Chapman University. As SF Weekly dutifully reported, Kotkin and his colleagues

At City Observatory, we post several new commentaries each week on a variety of urban themes, and aim to provide discrete, coherent analyses of specific questions, and contributing to the policy dialog about cities. At the start of a new year, we’d like to pull back a bit, and reflect on what we think we’ve

Gas prices are down, driving is up, and so, too, is carbon pollution. In a little over a year, the US has given up about one-sixth of the progress it made in reducing transportation’s carbon footprint. For more than a decade, America was making real progress in reducing is car dependence. The growth of driving