(* with apologies to Donald Shoup) A new report from Tony Dutzik, Gideon Weissman and Phineas Baxandall confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation finance that’s widely disbelieved or ignored: drivers don’t come close to paying the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Groups and U. S. […]
There’s no such thing as a Free-Way* Read More »
Notes from your far flung correspondent, in the shadow of the Acropolis. Though the local economy is still in turmoil, Athens is still awash in the steady tramping of tourists. Compared to your correspondent’s last visit to this city three decades ago, the distinguishing mark of tourism is no longer the long lines of foreigners
City of ideas, and the idea of cities Read More »
Last year, NYU’s Furman Center hosted a roundtable of essays on “The Problem of Integration.” Northwestern sociologist Mary Pattillo kicked it off: I must begin by stating that I am by no means against integration…. My comments are not to promote racial separatism, nor to argue that people of the same “race”–-and we must always signal
How we measure segregation depends on why we care Read More »
Gentrification continues to command an enormous amount of attention in the media, and several prominent publications – from The Economist to The Week – have made provocative arguments on the subject since our previous roundups in December. Here’s our take on what’s being said. We worry too much about gentrification 1. “Bring on the Hipsters,”
Gentrification: The state of the debate in 2015 Read More »
In February, we released our latest CityReport documenting a remarkable turnaround in the pattern of job growth within metropolitan areas. After decades of steady job decentralization, the period 2007-2011 marked the first time that city centers in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas recorded faster job growth than their surrounding peripheries. Much of that rebound seemed
More evidence on city center job growth Read More »
Yet again, a black citizen dies at the hands of the police. This event and the ensuing riots in Baltimore are a painful reminder of the deep divisions that cleave our cities. There’s little we can add to this debate, except perhaps to say that there’s a strong evidence for a point made by Richard
On Baltimore: Concentrated Poverty, Segregation, and Inequality Read More »
In my inaugural post, I claimed that county-level population data is bad at telling us much of anything about cities and housing preferences. Counties just contain too many multitudes – of built environments, of types of neighborhoods, of zoning regimes – and vary too much from place to place to be very useful in cross-metro
Peaks, valleys, and donuts: a great new way to see American cities Read More »
Will somebody teach the Atlantic and Bloomberg how to do long division? In this post, we take down more breathless contrarian reporting about how Millennials are just as suburban and car-obsessed as previous generations. Following several stories drawing questionable inferences from flawed migration data claiming that Millennials are disproportionately choosing the suburbs (they’re not) come
Young People are Buying Fewer Cars Read More »
It’s spring in the city On October 20 of last year, just six months ago, we launched City Observatory, a website and think tank devoted to data-driven analysis of cities and the policies that shape them. We are delighted to have participated in ongoing national discussions about a number of important policy issues facing cities.
Our six month anniversary! Read More »
Nationally, the average black household has an income 42 percent lower than average white household. But that figure masks huge differences from one metropolitan area to another. And though any number of factors may influence the size of a place’s racial income gap, just one of them – residential segregation – allows you to
Want to close the Black/White Income Gap? Work to Reduce Segregation. Read More »
