Many talk about poverty—its causes, its effects, and its possible remedies. There is literature on this issue from almost every social science, and no one can summarize it all in one blog post. However, there’s one aspect of our most recent report that I wanted to highlight: the deepening of poverty. Not only are we […]
How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1) Read More »
For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fees on households and businesses, a progressive income tax, and a kind of Rube Goldberg income tax pro-rated to average gasoline consumption,
How Should Portland Pay for Streets? Read More »
One of the nation’s biggest health problems is the challenge of obesity: since the early 1960s the number of American’s who are obese has increased from about 13 percent to 35 percent. The problem is a complex, deep-seated one, and everything from our diet, to our inactive life-styles, to the built environment have been implicated
Where are the food deserts? Read More »
Those of us at City Observatory wish you all a Happy New Year. Its been just three months since we launched in October, and its been a busy period for us. We’ve released two major reports–Young and Restless and Lost in Place. We’ve been gratified at the reception that this research has received with media
Happy New Year from City Observatory Read More »
At City Observatory, we’ve come the conclusion that every city has its own unique characteristics that both define its identity and which play a key role in shaping its economic opportunities. These distinctive traits don’t always shine through in conventional economic data, which leads us to look for the rare statistics that convey more nuance
Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data Read More »
Guest Commentary by Carol Coletta It’s a glorious moment to be in the business of promoting the built environment. I use “built environment” to encompass the way we build our buildings, arrange our neighborhoods and public spaces, and interact with one another in place. We’re all consumers of place as individuals, and we are constantly
How we build our cities: What’s at stake Read More »
We recently released our latest report, Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. It speaks to a national trend that’s been largely ignored– that urban poor are being concentrated into poorer neighborhoods, and that those neighborhoods are increasing in number. We speak here about some of
Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago? Read More »
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital. He looked at survey data about interpersonal trust (can most people be trusted?) as well as behavioral data (do people regularly visit neighbors, attend public meetings, belong to civic organizations?). Putnam’s
Anti-Social Capital? Read More »
Every city has its own unique characteristics. We know that industrial and occupational specializations can be measured using standard economic tools like location quotients. But some of the more intangible characteristics of cities are harder to measure. We’re always on the look out for new and interesting ways of discerning city distinctiveness. The Internet search
How distinct is your city? Read More »
Gentrification and neighborhood changes are hotly contested subjects. In the past few years some very thoughtful and provocative work has been done that helps shed light on these issues. Here we offer ten more of the more interesting arguments that have been put forward as a follow up to our previous post, as well as
Ten More you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty Read More »
