Commentary

On Tuesday, voters in Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder, and elsewhere went to the polls to vote on referenda and other local elections with important consequences for urban planning and policy. Here’s an overview: Seattle: There are very good rundowns of the Seattle results from an urban policy perspective at Erica C. Barnett’s blog and The Urbanist […]

Many studies of gentrification (for example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study we wrote about last week) begin by dividing neighborhoods into one of two categories: gentrifiable and non-gentrifiable. Usually, to qualify as “gentrifiable,” a neighborhood must rank relatively low on the socioeconomic ladder: one standard used by at least a few different reports

This week, City Observatory’s founder Joe Cortright sat down with the Knight Foundation’s Carol Coletta for the Knight Cities podcast. Their conversation reflected on the work City Observatory has undertaken over the past year, and dug more deeply into some of the topics, like neighborhood change and inequality, that have been a focus of our

It’s a plausible and widely-believed hypothesis: Poor people in the United States suffer from measurably worse nutrition because they have such limited access to good food. Confronted with a high concentration of poor diet choices (like fast food, and processed food in convenience stores) and with few markets offering fresh fruit and vegetables, the poor

What City Observatory did this week 1. Introducing City Observatory policy memos. At City Observatory, one of our goals is to translate the best and latest urban policy research for advocates, organizers, and practitioners so it can inform their work. To better do that, we’re introducing the first of a series of policy memos: short,

Recently, we’ve received three new pieces of evidence on how gentrification affects the lives of poor people in changing neighborhoods. First, a study from NYU’s Furman Center suggests that residents of public housing in wealthier and gentrifying neighborhoods make more money, suffer from less violence, and have better educational options for their children, despite also

One role we hope to play at City Observatory is translator: taking some of the best, most rigorous research on American cities and urban policy and turning it into smart, sophisticated, and readable pieces that can inform people actually working on the ground, from community organizations to policymakers. So far, we’ve done that with blog-style commentaries and longer,

Our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation have announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities more livable. The deadline to apply is October 27—check it out! What City Observatory did this week 1. Affordability beyond the median.