Category: Commentary
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The Geography of Independent Bookstores
Which cities have the strongest concentrations of independent bookstores? Last week, we explored what we called the “mystery in the bookstore.” There’s a kind of good news/bad news set of narratives about bookselling in the US. After decades of decline in independent bookselling, many cities have seen a rebound by locally run stores. And while…
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The Week Observed, May 5, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Mystery in the Bookstore. In cities around the country, there’s been a noticeable rebound in the local bookstore business. After decades of steady decline, this is a pleasant surprise. One metric, the number of members of the national association of independent bookstores confirms this trend. But broader data…
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What patents tell us about America’s most innovative cities
Patents rates are a useful indicator of innovative activity The US is increasingly becoming a knowledge-based economy, and as a result, the markers of wealth are shifting from the kinds of tangible assets that characterized the old industrial economy (like huge factory complexes) to much more intangible assets (the creativity and innovativeness of workers and…
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The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins
A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer…
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Mystery in the Bookstore
Signs of a rebound in independent bookstores, but not in the statistics Lately, there’ve been a spate of stories pointing to a minor renaissance of the independent American bookstore. After decades of glum news and closings, there are more and more instances of independent bookstores opening or expanding. The American Bookseller’s Association points with pride…
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The Week Observed, April 28, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The latest from the Louisville travel behavior experiment. Just before the New Year, Louisville started charging tolls to cross its newly-widened I-65 bridge. When it did, traffic across the bridge fell by almost half. Part of the reason was that motorists could take a very short detour and…
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What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
Cities are organisms, not machines; So a smart city has to learn and not be engineered The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the Smart City banner. But it seems each observer defines “city” in the image of…
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Hagiometry: Fawning flatterers with an economic model
It’s no longer fashionable to get an unrealistically flattering portrait painted, but you can get an economist to do it with numbers. You’ve no doubt heard the term “hagiography” an unduly flattering biography or other written treatment designed to burnish the public image of some person. The term is derived from the Greek words for…
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The 0.1 percent solution: Inclusionary zoning’s fatal scale problem
Inclusionary zoning programs are too small to make a dent in housing affordability Two of the most respected names in housing research are Lance Freeman and Jenny Schuetz. Freeman is professor urban planning at Columbia University and author of a series of papers examining neighborhood change, and considering whether and when gentrification leads to the…
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The latest from the Louisville traffic experiment
Even with the free alternative closed, traffic is very light on the new I-65 bridges Time for one of our periodic check-ins on our real world transportation pricing experiment in Louisville, Kentucky. As you recall, we’ve been watching Louisville closely, because just at the end of last year, the city started what amounts to a…
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The Week Observed, April 21, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How we measure segregation depends on why we care. Daniel Hertz explores the various ways we measure the geographic separation of different racial and ethnic groups. There’s a widely used dissimilarity index, that looks at differences between two groups, like blacks and whites. There are broader measures that…
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Happy Earth Day, Oregon! Let’s Widen Some Freeways!
Four decades after the city earned national recognition for tearing out a downtown freeway, it gets ready to build more April 22 is Earth Day, and to celebrate, Oregon’s Legislature is on the verge of considering a transportation package that would drop more than a billion dollars into three Portland area freeway widening projects. Back…
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The high, high price of affordable housing
Why is affordable housing so expensive? In many cities, affordable housing has a problem: it’s not affordable. California Governor Jerry Brown made that point again, emphatically, with his new state budget. He’s said that he’s not putting any new state resources into subsidizing affordable housing until state and local governments figure out ways to bring…
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The New Urban Crisis: Cliff Notes version
Your 1,200 word bluffer’s guide to Richard Florida’s new book Richard Florida’s new book “The New Urban Crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class–and what we can do about it,” came out last week. The book touches on many of the issues that are near and dear to…
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How we measure segregation depends on why we care
Segregation is complicated and multi-dimensional, and measuring it isn’t easy In 2014, 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…
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The Week Observed, April 14, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Too soon to write off city revival? The release of the Census county-level population estimates two weeks ago led to a series of quick-reaction analyses of what the data portend for the “back-to-the-city” movement that’s been seen in the past several years. Unfortunately, county level data is a…
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Why might Uber & Lyft support road-pricing?
The real disruptive technology for transportation is road-pricing. There’s been a surge of interest in road pricing in the past few weeks. In a new study of growing traffic congestion in New York City, Bruce Schaller attributed traffic delays to the expanding number of Uber and Lyft vehicles on city streets. Given the economics of…
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Has Portland’s rent fever broken?
More evidence that supply and demand are at work in housing markets In early 2016, Portland experienced some of the highest levels of rent inflation of any market in the US. According to Zillow’s rental price estimates, rents were rising between 15 and 20 percent year over year in late 2015 and early 2016. Portland…
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Too soon to write off city revival
County data can’t tell us much about thriving urban neighborhoods New county-level census population estimates became available last week, and Jed Kolko produced an interesting analysis published by FiveThirtyEight concluding that “America’s Shift to the Suburbs Sped Up last year.” While there’s nothing wrong with Kolko’s math, we think there are several reasons to believe…
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The Week Observed, April 7, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta. Following an arson-caused blaze, a key section on Interstate 85 in Atlanta collapsed, and is likely to be out of service for at least a couple of months. Since the roadway carried about a quarter million cars every day, the media were quick to predict…
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New York City isn’t hollowing out; It’s growing
You can’t leave out births and deaths when you examine population trends The release of the latest census population estimates has produced a number of quick takes that say that cities are declining. The latest is Derek Thompson, writing at The Atlantic and bemoaning the net domestic migration out of the New York metro area,…
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Migration is making counties more diverse
Migration, especially by young adults, is increasing racial and ethnic diversity in US counties As we related last week, a new report from the Urban Institute quantifies the stark economic costs of racial and income segregation in the United States. Places with higher levels of segregation have lower incomes for African-Americans, lower rates of educational…
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The Ben & Jerry’s crash course in transportation economics
What one day of free ice cream teaches us about traffic congestion Today’s that day, folks. Ben and Jerry are giving away free ice cream to everyone who comes by their stores. Whether you’re hankering for Cherry Garcia or Chunky monkey, you can now get it for absolutely zero price. Well, there is that one…
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Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta
Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand It had all the trappings of a great disaster film: A spectacular blaze last week destroyed a several hundred foot-long section of Interstate 85 in Atlanta. In a city that consistently has some of the worst traffic congestion in the country, losing…
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The Week Observed, March 31, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. 13 propositions about autonomous vehicles. Despite occasional setbacks–like last week’s crash of an Uber self-driving car in Phoenix–it looks increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles will play an important role in urban transportation in the not-too-distant future. There’s a lot to ponder about what effects they might have on…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
April First falls on Saturday, and that’s a good reason to revisit an old favorite, the Cappuccino Congestion Index We’re continuing told that congestion is a grievous threat to urban well-being. It’s annoying to queue up for anything, but traffic congestion has spawned a cottage industry of ginning up reports that transform our annoyance with…
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The High Cost of Segregation
A new report from the Urban Institute shows the stark costs of economic and racial segregation Long-form white paper policy research reports are our stock in trade at City Observatory. We see dozens of them every month, and usually read them with great interest, and flagging the best one’s for the “must read” list we…
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Breaking Bad: Why breaking up big cities would hurt America
New York Times columnist Russ Douthat got a lot of attention a few days ago for his Johnathan Swiftian column–”Break up the liberal city“–suggesting that we could solve the problems of lagging economic growth in rural and small town America by whacking big cities into pieces and spreading their assets more widely. Douthat views himself…
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Autonomous vehicles: Peaking, parking, profits & pricing
13 propositions about autonomous vehicles and urban transportation It looks more and more like autonomous vehicles will be a part of our urban transportation future. There’s a lot of speculation about whether their effects will be for good or ill. While there’s a certain “techno-deterministic” character to these speculations, we’re of the view that the…
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The Week Observed, March 24, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The US retail industry is getting marked down in a big way, with hundreds of stores operated by well-established chains including Macy’s, J. C. Penney, and the Gap, as well as others, closing or slated for closing in the next few months. By global standards the U.S. is…
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Big city metros are driving the national economy
The nation’s largest city-centered metro areas are powering national economic growth. 2017 will mark a decade since the peak of the last economic cycle (which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research was December 2007. Since then, we’ve experienced the Great Recession (the biggest economic downturn in eight decades), and a long and arduous…
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Transit and home values
Homes with better transit access command higher prices, especially in cities with good transit. Our friends at Redfin, the real estate data and analytics company, have an interesting new report exploring the connection between transit access and home prices. Redfin computes and freely publishes a Transit Score for all of the nation’s houses. Transit Score…
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Getting to critical mass in Detroit
Last month, we took exception to critics of Detroit’s economic rebound who argued that it was a failure because the job and population growth that the city has enjoyed has only reached a few neighborhoods, chiefly those in and around the downtown. A key part of our position was that successful development needs to achieve…
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How much could US retail shrink? And where?
The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy’s stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other major national retail chains, including The Limited, Gap, Walgreens, Aeropostale and Chico’s, have also announced similarly large closures.…
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The Week Observed, March 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls “cafe urbanism” is at risk if there’s a collapse in the restaurant sector. Apparently, a number of restaurants in…
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Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther
Speed doesn’t seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems. Yesterday, we presented some new estimates of the average speed of travel in different metropolitan areas developed by the University of California’s Victor Couture. His data shows that average travel speeds in some metropolitan areas (like Louisville)…
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Speed: Fast cities
Which cities move the fastest? Does it matter? The raison d’etre of the highway engineer is making cars go faster. That’s reflected in chronic complaints about traffic congestion, and codified in often misleading studies, like those produced by the Texas Transportation Institute. The latest contribution to the literature on inter-metropolitan differences in transportation system performance…
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Are restaurants dying, and taking city economies with them?
Alan Ehrenhalt is alarmed. In his tony suburb of Clarendon, Virginia, several nice restaurants have closed. It seems like an ominous trend. Writing at Governing, he’s warning of “The Limits of Cafe’ Urbanism.” Cafe Urbanism is a “lite” version of the consumer city theory propounded by Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, who noted that one of the…
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Affordability beyond the median
For a long time, we’ve been critical of the way we commonly talk about housing affordability. We’ve published a three–part series about why the way we measure housing affordability is all wrong. In particular, we objected to using the 30 percent ratio of housing prices to income as the benchmark of “affordable,” basically because depending on…
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The Week Observed, March 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Shrinking offices: What it means for cities. Its not just you’re imagination: offices are becoming less common and smaller, and a variety of space-sharing and space-saving practices are taking hold in businesses around the nation. The number of square feet of office space leased per new office employee…
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Twilight of the NIMBYs? LA’s Measure S Fails
La-La Land voters deal a crushing defeat to a “NIMBYism on steroids” The latest returns show Los Angeles’ Measure S–the self-styled “Neighborhood Integrity Initiative”–failing by a 31 percent “Yes” to 69 percent “No” margin. If it had passed, Measure S was predicted to bring new housing development in Los Angeles to a screeching halt for the…
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What we know about rent control
Today, partly as a public service, we’re going to dig into the academic literature on an arcane policy topic: rent control. We also have a parochial interest in the subject: the Oregon Legislature is considering legislation that would lift the state’s ban on cities imposing rent control. The legislation is being proposed by Oregon House…
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The implications of shrinking offices
The amount of office space allotted to each worker is shrinking. What does that mean for cities? Last week a new report from real estate analytics firm REIS caught our eye. Called “The Shrinking Office Footprint” this white paper looks at changes in the demand for office space over the last couple of business cycles.…
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The Week Observed, March 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. More flawed congestion rankings. Traffic analysis firm Inrix released yet another report purporting to estimate the dollar cost of congestion and ranking the world’s cities from most to least traffic burdened. Our review shows that the report suffers from many of the same problems that plagued its predecessors. Chief…
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What Travis Kalanick’s meltdown tells us about Uber
As has been well chronicled in the media, it’s been a tough month for Uber. The company’s CEO, Travis Kalanick was vilified in the press for the company’s tolerance for sexual harassment of its female employees, and derided for his participation in President Trump’s business advisory council (from which he resigned after an estimated 200,000…
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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…
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Houston (Street), we have a problem.
A lesson in the elasticity of demand, prices and urban congestion. It looks like Uber, Lyft and other ride sharing services are swamping the capacity of New York City streets Every day, we’re being told, we’re on the verge of a technological revolution that will remedy our persistent urban transportation problems. Smart cities, replete with…
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Yet another flawed congestion report from Inrix
Big data provides little insight Cue the telephoto lens compressed photo of freeway traffic; it’s time for yet another report painting a picture of the horrors inflicted on modern society by traffic congestion. This latest installment comes from traffic data firm Inrix, which uses cell phone, vehicle tracking and GPS data to estimate the speed…
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The Week Observed, February 24, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.Busting the urban myth about high income housing and affordability. One of the most widespread beliefs about housing is that the construction of new high income housing somehow makes the housing affordability problem worse. Widely believed, but wrong. We marshal the economic evidence for filtering–how as apartments and houses…
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Cursing the candle
How should we view the early signs of a turnaround in Detroit? Better to light a single candle than simply curse the darkness. The past decades have been full of dark days for Detroit, but there are finally signs of a turnaround, a first few glimmers that the city is stemming the downward spiral of…
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Playing Apart
Our City Observatory report, Less in Common, catalogs the ways that we as a nation have been growing increasingly separated from one another. Changes in technology, the economy and society have all coalesced to create more fragmentation and division. As Robert Putnam described this trend in his 2000 book, we are “Bowling Alone.” And while…
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Urban myth busting: Why building more high income housing helps affordability
After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series ended last year. If you didn’t see the show-and it lives on at Youtube, of course–co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman constructed elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, it…
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The Week Observed, February 17, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. Anti-social capital. You’re probably familiar with the term “social capital” which Robert Putnam popularized with his book Bowling Alone. In it Putnam devised a series of indicators that show the extent to which we associate with and trust one another, ranging from membership in clubs and civic organizations…
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Let’s not demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it
At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…
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Postcard from Louisville: Tolls Trump Traffic
Tolls cut traffic levels on I-65 in half; So did we really need 6 more lanes? Last month, we wrote about Louisville’s newly opened toll bridges across the Ohio River. As you may recall, Ohio and Indiana completed a major expansion of highway capacity across the Ohio, doubling the I-65 freeway crossing from six lanes…
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Are young adults moving less?
Conflicting data sources present very different pictures of young adult migration rates The Pew Research Center presented an analysis of census data reporting that today’s young adults are less likely to move in a given year than were their predecessors. A new article from Pew concludes: “Americans are moving at historically low rates, in part…
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Anti-Social Capital?
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…
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The Week Observed, February 10, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The persistence of talent. City Observatory regularly stresses the strong connection between educational attainment and economic success at the metro level. We step back and look at how education attainment has influenced state level economic success over the past 25 years. The data shows that the fraction of…
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Visions of the City Part III: You don’t own me
What kind of future do we want to live in? While that question gets asked by planners and futurists in an abstract and technical way, some of the most powerful and interesting conversations about our future aspirations are reflected in the mass media. Lately, we’ve been struck by the visions embedded in recent television commercials.…
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Visions of the City Part II: A Perfect Day
Yesterday we took a close look at Ford’s vision for the future of cities. Our take: Ford’s preferred narrative of the places we’ll live is all about optimizing city life for vehicles. But is that the narrative that should guide us? Another big global corporation has, perhaps unwittingly, given us a very different vision of…
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Visions of a future city, Part I
What stories do we tell ourselves about the kind of world we want to live in? In his recent presidential address to the American Economics Association, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller talked about “narrative economics.” He argues that economists, like other disciplines need to begin to recognize that human cognition is structured around story-telling. ”…
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The enduring effect of education on regional economies
One of the themes we stress at City Observatory is the large and growing importance of talent (the education and skills of the population) to determining regional and local economic success. As we shift more and more to a knowledge-based economy, the places that will do well, and that are resilient in the face of…
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The Week Observed, February 3, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.What HOT Lanes tell us about the value of travel time. The economic underpinning of claims that traffic congestion costs Americans billions and billions of dollars each year is the assumption that travelers would value time savings at about half their average wage rate, or around $15 per hour.…
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Happy Groundhog’s Day, Oregon
Climate change gets lip service, highways get billions. Like many states and cities, Oregon has been a leader in setting its own local goals for reducing greenhouse gases. In a law adopted in 2007, the state set the goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent from 1990 levels by the year 2020,…
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Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick. What purport…
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Openness to immigration drives economic success
Last Friday, President Trump signed an Executive Order effectively blocking entry to the US for nationals of seven countries—Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. We’ll leave aside the fearful, xenophobic and anti-American aspects of this policy: others have addressed them far more eloquently than we can at City Observatory. And while there’s no…
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What HOT lanes reveal about the value of travel time
Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute, and traffic monitoring firms like Inrix and Tom-Tom trot out scary sounding reports that claim that Americans lose billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of time sitting in traffic. And just as regularly, highway advocates parrot these dire sounding numbers as the justification for spending billions and billions…
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The Week Observed, January 27, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1.How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity. Our colleague Daniel Hertz is back this week with an examination of the way we look at and think about neighborhood identities. He points out that in many urban neighborhoods the amount of land taken up by single family homes creates the impression…
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Constant change and gentrification
A new study of gentrification sheds light on how neighborhoods change. Here are the takeaways: The population of urban neighborhoods is always changing because moving is so common, especially for renters. There’s little evidence that gentrification causes overall rates of moving to increase, either for homeowners or renters. Homeowners don’t seem to be affected at…
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Suburban Renewal: Marietta demolishes affordable housing
Just say the words “urban renewal” and you immediately conjure up images of whole neighborhoods–usually populated by poor families and people of color being dislocated by big new publicly funded development projects. It seems like a relic of the past. But it appears to be getting a new lease on life in the suburbs. For…
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Flood tide–not ebb tide–for young adults in cities
The number of young adults is increasing, not declining, and a larger share of them are living in cities. Yesterday’s New York Times Upshot features a story from Conor Dougherty–”Peak Millennial? Cities Can’t Assume a Continued Boost from the Young.” It questions whether the revival in city living is going to ebb as millennials age,…
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How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity
Does geometry bias our view of how neighborhoods work? Imagine a neighborhood that looks like this: On any given block, there might be a handful of small apartment buildings—three-flats—which are usually clustered near intersections and on major streets. Everything else is modest single-family homes, built on lots the same size as the three-flats. What kind…
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The Week Observed, January 20, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. The long journey toward greater equity in transportation. The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday got us thinking about how far we’ve come–and how far we have yet to go–having a truly equitable society. We reviewed two recent studies that address lingering racial disparities in transportation. The first…
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Louisville’s experiment in transportation economics
As we pointed out yesterday, there’s some initial visual evidence–from peak hour traffic cameras–suggesting that Louisville’s decision to toll its downtown freeway bridges but leave a parallel four-lane bridge un-tolled has produced a significant diversion of traffic away from the freeway. Perhaps without knowing it, Louisville has embarked on an interesting and useful economic experiment. One…
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Has Louisville figured out how to eliminate traffic congestion?
Louisville is in the transportation world spotlight just now. It has formally opened two big new freeway bridges across the Ohio River, and also rebuilt its famous (or infamous) “spaghetti junction” interchange in downtown Louisville. A story at Vox excoriated the decision to rebuild the interchange rather than tear out the riverfront freeway as a…
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Nothing’s worse than funky beer, except funky beer data
You know the feeling: you’re thirsty, you’re primed for a cool, refreshing beverage, and the anticipation has your taste buds tingling. But you pop the cap on the bottle only to find that the beer has turned skunky. It’s very disappointing. Well, we had a small taste of funky beer a couple of week back at…
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Race & transportation: Still a long way to go
January 17 is the day we celebrate the life and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This year is also the first year that we’re observing a national day of racial healing. We thought we’d take a minute to reflect on two recent studies that provide some strong statistical evidence for the unfortunate persistence of…
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The Week Observed, January 13, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in? Data from the newly released 5-year American Community Survey tabulations give us an updated picture of the demographics of urban neighborhoods. A new report from the Brookings Insitutiton’s Bill Frey shows that the typical US metropolitan area is continually…
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Who pays the price of inclusionary zoning?
Requiring inclusionary housing seems free, but could mean less money for schools and local services Last month, the Portland City Council voted 5-0 to adopt a sweeping new inclusionary housing requirement for new apartment buildings. The unanimous decision came with the usual round of self-congratulatory comments about how they were doing something to address the…
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Housing supply is catching up to demand
As Noah Smith observed, economists invariably encounter monumental resistance to the proposition that increasing housing supply will do anything meaningful to address the problem of rising rents–especially because new units are so costly. One of the frustrations that we (and increasingly cost-burdened) renters share is the “temporal mismatch” between supply and demand. Demand can change…
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Pulling it all together
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…
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How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in?
Overall, America is becoming more diverse, but in many places the neighborhoods we live in remain quite segregated. The population of the typical US metropolitan area has a much more ethnically and racially mixed composition than it did just a few decades ago. Overall, measured levels of segregation between racial and ethnic groups are declining.…
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The Week Observed, January 6, 2017
What City Observatory did this week 1. A Toast to 2017: Beer and Cities. Its traditional to begin the New Year with a delicious beverage, and more and more Americans are choosing to celebrate with a locally brewed ale. That’s gotten much easier in the past decade, as microbreweries have flourished around the country. Microbreweries…
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Pollyanna’s ride-sharing breakthrough
A new study says ride-sharing apps cut cut traffic 85 percent. We’re skeptical We’ve developed a calloused disregard for the uncritical techno-optimism that surrounds most media stories about self-driving cars and how fleets of shared-ride vehicles will neatly solve all of our urban transportation problems. But a new story last week re-kindled our annoyance, because…
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Brownstone Brooklyn and the challenges of urban change
In the middle of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn—a book published in 2011, but no less relevant today—Suleiman Osman turns the tables on the people who have long been the heroes of urbanist lore. Speaking of the insurgent middle-class professionals who, starting in the 1950s and 60s, began to organize to stop to the massive…
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Beer and cities: A toast to 2017
Celebrating the new year, city-style, with a local brew Champagne may be the traditional beverage for ringing in the new year, but we suspect that a locally brewed ale may be the drink of choice for many urbanists today. Much has changed about American beer in the past two decades. Most of the post-prohibition era…
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How not to fix housing affordability
Plans to subsidize renters and homebuyers will likely just fuel housing cost inflation Rising rents and home prices are becoming unbearable–or at least politically unpalatable–in cities around North America. Over the past year, two Pacific Northwest cities, Portland and Vancouver, have seen some of the biggest rent and home price increases anywhere. Portland’s reported double…
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The Week Observed, December 30, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The illegal city of Somerville. Just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Somerville is one of the most sought after suburbs in the Boston area. It has a combination of attractive neighborhoods and dense housing, nearly all of it the legacy of the city’s 19th and early 20th century roots.…
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Our ten most popular posts of 2016
As 2016 draws to a close, we look back at our most popular commentaries of the year. Hear they are, in reverse order: #10. Introducing the sprawl tax #9. Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median income households #8. What filtering can and can’t do. #7. What I learned playing Sim City #6. In…
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For whom the bridge tolls
A crazy toll structure that encourages more driving. Kentucky and Indiana have just put the finishing touches on two new bridges crossing the Ohio River. Built at a cost of about $2.6 billion, the bridge project also includes a rebuilding “Spaghetti Junction” an elaborate system of on- and off-ramps in Louisville, where I-65 and I-64…
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Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
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The illegal city of Somerville
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and…
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The Week Observed, December 23, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A rebound in millennial car-buying?. Stories purporting to debunk the tendency of younger adults to move to cities, buy fewer houses and drive less seem to have great appeal to editors everywhere. We look into recent reports claiming that ride-sharing millennials crave car ownership after all. A recent…
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Denver backs away from inclusionary zoning
At the top of most housing activist wish-lists is the idea that cities should adopt inclusionary housing requirements: when developers build new housing, they ought to be required to set-aside some portion of the units–say 10 or 20 percent–for low or moderate income families. Dozens of cities around the country have adopted some variant of…
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Some timely technologies to help pedestrians deal with self-driving cars
City Observatory has its own modest proposals for making “Smart City” streets safer. Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country. While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road carnage, there’ve been good reasons to be…
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A rebound in millennial car-buying?
Except for boomers, we’re all less likely to be buying new cars today One of the favorite “we’re-going-to-debunk-the-claims-about-millenials-being-different” story ideas that editors and reporters seem to love is pointing out that millennials are actually buying cars. Forget what you’ve heard about bike-riding, bus-loving, Uber-using twenty-somethings, we’re told, this younger generation loves its cars, even if…
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The Week Observed, December 16, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban transportation’s camel problem. Naive optimism is the order of the day in speculating about the future of urban transportation. In theory, some combination of autonomous vehicles, fully instrumented city streets, and transportation network companies will help us solve all of our problems, from congestion to traffic fatalities…
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More evidence for peer effects: Help with homework edition
There’s a large a growing body of research that shows the importance of peer effects on lifetime economic success of kids. For example, while the education level your parents is a strong determinant of your level of education, it turns out that the education level of your neighbors is nearly half as strong. Much of…
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You are where you eat.
The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists…
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Copenhagen: More than bike lanes
This month, traffic counters in Copenhagen pointed to an important milestone. According to their data, for the first time, the number of trips taken by bicycle in the city surpassed the number of trips taken by car. The Guardian reports–“Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen.”–that the number of bike trips…
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Urban Transportation’s Camel Problem
There’s a lot of glib talk about how technology–ranging from ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, to instrumented Smart Cities and, ultimately, autonomous vehicles–will fundamentally reshape urban transportation. We’re told, for example, that autonomous vehicles will eliminate traffic fatalities, obviate the need for parking lots, and solve transit’s “last mile” problem. But there are good…
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The Week Observed, December 9, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Pollution and poor neighborhoods. Environmental justice advocates point out–quite correctly–that poor neighborhoods tend to suffer much higher levels of pollution than the typical neighborhood. While this is often due to the callous indifference of public officials to the plight of the poor and people of color (as well as…
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Some thoughts on Portland’s proposed inclusionary housing plan
Why Portland’s proposed inclusionary zoning plan will likely make housing less affordable As we reported in September, Portland Oregon is moving ahead with plans to enact an inclusionary housing requirement. Briefly, the proposal would require all newly constructed apartment buildings with 20 or more units to set aside 20 percent of units for housing affordable…
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A policy that works: Raising the minimum wage
Higher minimum wages result in greater earnings for low wage workers, and no loss of jobs We’re always casting about for effective policies to address poverty. And there’s new evidence that higher minimum wages accomplish just that. In a new review of the literature and data by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers shows that…
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Are the ‘burbs really back?
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal came out with another eye-catching headline story in the city versus suburbs battle of the bands: “Suburbs outstrip cities in population growth, study finds. Big cities may be getting all the attention, but the suburbs are holding their own in the battle for population and young earners. . . .…
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Pollution and poor neighborhoods: A blast from the past
It’s been widely noted that poor neighborhoods tend to bear a disportioncate share of the exposure to environmental disamenities of all kinds. In the highway building era of the 1950s and 1960s, states and cities found it cheaper and politically easier to route new roads through poor neighborhoods, not only dislocating the local populace, but…
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The Week Observed, December 2, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Does Rent Control Work: Evidence from Berlin. Economists are nearly unanimous about rent control: they think it doesn’t work. Berlin’s recent adoption of a new rent control scheme in 2015 provides a new test case to see if they’re right. An early analysis of the Berlin program shows that…
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Why biotech strategies are often 21st century snake oil
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…
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Destined to disappoint: housing lotteries
Affordable housing is in short supply in many US cities, perhaps nowhere more chronically than in New York City. Even though New York has more public housing than any other US city, the demand for subsidized units is far greater than supply. As a result, the city regularly conducts lotteries to allocate available units to…
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Does Cyber-Monday mean delivery gridlock Tuesday?
Yesterday was, famously, cyber-Monday, the day in which the nation’s consumers took to their web-browsers and started clicking for holiday shopping in earnest. Tech Crunch reports that estimated e-commerce sales will yesterday were predicted at $3.36 billion, coming on top of almost $5 billion in on-line sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The steady growth…
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Does rent control work? Evidence from Berlin
As housing affordability becomes an increasingly challenging and widespread problem in many US cities, there are growing calls for the imposition of rent control. While there’s broad agreement among economists that rent control is ineffective and even counterproductive, it still seems like a tempting and direct solution to the problem. In Oregon, State House speaker…
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The Week Observed, November 25, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The rise of global neighborhoods. A new paper published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live in multi-ethnic “global neighborhoods”—places that…
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More evidence on the migration of talent
At City Observatory, we’ve long maintained that the location patterns of talented young workers are an economically important signal. (You can read our report on “The Young and Restless here). Well-educated young adults are the most mobile people in our society, and are flexible, adaptable, and have recent vintage human capital, and generally command lower…
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Your guide to the debate over the Trump Infrastructure Plan
There’s a lot of ink being spilled — or is it pixels rearranged? — over the size, shape, merits and even existence of a Trump Administration infrastructure plan. Infrastructure was one of just a handful of substantive policy talking points in the campaign, and the President-elect reiterated this one on election night. It also appears…
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The growth of global neighborhoods
As the US grows more diverse, so too do its urban neighborhoods. A new paper—“ Global Neighborhoods: Beyond the Multiethnic Metropolis”–published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live…
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The Week Observed, November 18, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Daytime and nighttime segregation. Economic, racial and ethnic segregation are persistent features of the American metropolis. Most studies measure segregation using Census data on place of residence, but that’s at best an incomplete picture of the way different groups interact in urban space. Using data from social media,…
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Supply starting to catch up with demand
Fundamentally, the nation’s housing affordability problems are due to demand outpacing supply: there’s more demand to live in some cities–and especially in great urban neighborhoods–than can be met from the current supply of housing, especially apartments. As demand surges ahead of supply, rents get bid up, which is the most visible manifestation of the affordability…
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Parking: The Price is Wrong
One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem of housing affordability, especially in the more desirable urban neighborhoods of the nation’s largest and most prosperous metropolitna areas. As…
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Daytime and nighttime segregation
In cities, you’ll sometimes hear people talk about a “daytime population”: not how many people live in a place, but how many gather there regularly during their waking hours. So while 1.6 million people may actually live in Manhattan, there are nearly twice that many people on the island during a given workday. Most studies…
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The Week Observed, November 11, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A tax credit for renters. The Terman Center for Housing Innovation at the UC Berkeley has come up with three fleshed-out and cost-estimated models for providing tax credits for low income renters. The FAIR tax credit would help rectify the strong tilt in the tax system toward home…
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Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course! Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…
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An infographic summarizing neighborhood change
One of City Observatory’s major reports is “Lost in Place,” which chronicles the change in high-poverty neighborhoods since 1970. In it, you’ll find a rich array of data at the neighborhood level showing how and where concentrated poverty grew. We know it’s a complex and wonky set of data, so we’ve worked with our colleagues…
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Cities and Elections
It’s election day, 2016. Here’s some of what we know about cities and voting. Well, at last. Today is election day. While we’re all eagerly awaiting the results of the vote, we thought we’d highlight a few things we know about voting, especially as they relate to cities. Its food for thought as we get…
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A tax credit for renters
A new proposal from Berkeley’s Terner Center aims to broaden favorable tax treatment for housing to include the nation’s renters Our tax code is highly skewed towards homeownership. Between the deductions for mortgage interest expenses and property taxes, the exclusion of capital gains on sales of homes, and the non-taxation of the imputed rent of owner-occupied homes,…
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The Week Observed: November 4, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The myth of a revealed preference for suburban living. It’s often argued that most Americans must prefer to live in suburbs because so many persons do so. We take a close look at this thesis, and summarize some key research findings from work of Jonathan Levine, which explore…
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Market timing and racial wealth disparities
One of the enduring features of American inequality is the wide disparity in homeownership rates between white Americans and Latinos and African-Americans. And because homeownership has — or at least was, historically — a principal means by which families built wealth, this disparity in homeownership translated into or amplified racial and ethnic wealth disparities. There…
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Affordable Housing: Not just for a favored few
As we all know, 2016 is the year that reality television made its way to the national political stage. Less well noticed is how another idea from reality television has insinuated its way into our thinking about housing policy. From 2006 to 2011, ABC television featured a popular reality television show called “Extreme Makeover: Home…
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Halloween was yesterday: Let’s stop scaremongering about cities
We love scary stories. That’s what Halloween was all about–dressing up as something terrifying, if only for a day. Being scary one day a year can be fun. But constant scaremongering is one way that attitudes and beliefs become detached from facts, in ways that can have truly negative effects. Lately, the presidential campaign has gotten…
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The myth of revealed preference for suburbs
If so many people live in suburbs, it must be because that’s what they prefer, right? But the evidence is to the contrary. One of the chief arguments in favor of the suburbs is simply that that is where millions and millions of people actually live. If so many Americans live in suburbs, this must…
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The Week Observed: October 28, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1.Measuring Walkability: Non-car modes of transportation have always been at a disadvantage in policy discussions because of a profound lack of widely available quantitative measures of walkability, and because all of the metrics developed to guide transportation focused on moving cars. That’s begun to change with the advent of…
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Lies, damn lies, and (on-line shopping) statistics.
Here’s an eye-catching statistic: “people in the US buying more things online than in brick-and-mortar stores.” This appears in the lead of a story published this week by Next City. There’s one problem with this claim: it’s not remotely close to true. One of the things we pay taxes for is the Census Bureau, which…
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Reversed Polarity: Bay Area venture capital trends
The greater San Francisco Bay area has been a hotbed of economic activity and technological change for decades, bringing us ground-breaking tech companies from Hewlett-Packard and Intel, to Apple and Google, to AirBNB and Uber. Its a great place to spot trends that are likely to spread elsewhere. One such trend is the growing tendency…
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Our infographic for thinking about the civic commons
City Observatory is about cities, and while much of the discussion of urban policy surrounds the physical and built environment, ultimately cities are about people. When cities work well, they bring people together. Conversely, when cities experience problems, its often because we’re separated from one another or driven apart. A critical feature of cities…
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Walk on by: How not to improve walkability measures.
Last week, we noticed a small item on Streetsblog: “Where Walk Score falls short.” Because we’re keenly interested in to walkability, and routinely use Walk Score to benchmark walkable places, we clicked the link. It took us to a blog entry from Mariela Alfonzo asking “Does walk score walk the walk?” Dr. Alfonzo has been…
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The Week Observed: October 21, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities for Everyone: Our Birthday Wish. October 15 marked City Observatory’s second birthday. We reviewed some of the highlights of the past year, focusing on the growing evidence of the economic resurgence building around the nation’s cities. For the coming year, we’re planning on focusing on what it…
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The new mythology of rich cities and poor suburbs
There’s a new narrative going around about place. Like so many narratives, it’s based on a perceptible grain of truth, but then has a degree of exaggeration that the evidence can’t support. Cities, we are told, are becoming playgrounds of the rich. Last week, Quartz headlined Richard Florida’s recent talk about the future of cities…
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Cities and the price of parking
What the price of parking shows us about urban transportation Yesterday, we rolled out our parking price index, showing the variation in parking prices among large US cities. Gleaning data from ParkMe, a web-based directory of parking lots and rates, we showed how much it cost to park on a monthly basis in different cities.…
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The price of parking
How much does it cost to park a car in different cities around the nation? Today, we’re presenting some new data on a surprisingly under-measured aspect of cities and the cost of living: how much it costs to park a car in different cities. There are regular comparisons of rents and housing costs between cities. The…
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Our birthday wish: Cities for everyone
Two years and two days ago–on October 15th, 2014–we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. Since then, we’ve weighed in daily on a whole series of policies issues set in and around urban spaces. So today, we’re taking a few moments to celebrate our birthday, reflect back on the past…
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The Week Observed: October 14, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence job growth is shifting to city centers. A recent paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Daniel Hartley has some interesting data on the pattern of job growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. They find that while suburban area job growth greatly outpaced that of the central…
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Where is ridesharing growing fastest?
There’s a revolution afoot in transportation. Transportation network companies, aka “ridesharing” firms, like Uber and Lyft are disrupting both the markets for urban transportation and labor markets. Their business model–treating drivers as independent contractors, is fueling the so-called “gig economy.” A new report from the Brookings Institution uses federal tax and administrative records to plot…
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The most interesting neighborhood in the world
Where are the most interesting streetscapes and popular destinations in your city? Even among your friends and colleagues, there might be some lively disagreement about that question. But recently, search giant Google weighed in on this question when it overhauled Google Maps this summer. Now it has a new feature, an creamsicle orange shading in…
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More fuzzy math: Vancouver real estate edition
As regular readers of City Observatory already know, the use, misuse and abuse of real estate price indices is one of our pet peeves. We’ve repeatedly excoriated Abodo, Zumper and others for mis-representing median values calculated from their apartment listings, as rental inflation gauges, because they work more like random number generators than measures of…
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More evidence job growth is shifting to the center
One trend we’ve tracked at City Observatory has been the movement of jobs back to city centers. While there are an increasing number of examples of prominent firms moving downtown — GE abandoning its suburban campus for a location in Boston’s Seaport district, McDonalds moving from Oak Brook to a site near Chicago’s Loop —…
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The Week Observed: October 7, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Bubble Logic. A major and persistent change in the housing market from a decade ago has been the decline in the number of “trade-up” home-buyers. While some fret that recent first-time homebuyers have become locked in to so-called starter homes, we point out that in many ways, trade-up…
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Memo to Stockholm
Next Monday, very early, before anyone in North America is out of bed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce the name of the 2016 Nobel Laureate in economic sciences. No doubt the decision has already long since been made by the prize committee. But if they’re still undecided, we have a suggestion. Its…
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Are integrated neighborhoods stable?
Its rare that some obscure terminology from sociology becomes a part of our everyday vernacular, but “tipping point” is one of those terms. Famously, Thomas Schelling used the tipping point metaphor to explain the dynamics of residential segregation in the United States. His thesis was that white residents were willing to live in a mixed…
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A lottery isn’t the answer to our housing problems
Every few months, the national prize pool in the multi-state Powerball lottery piles up to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Early this year, three lucky winners split a prize with a total value of $1.6 billion dollars. Bucking odds of about one in 262 million, Marvin and Mae Acosta’s purchase of a…
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Bubble logic
We shouldn’t expect the return of the trade-up buyer anytime soon. Is the American homebuyer increasingly stuck in a starter home? That’s the premise of a recent commentary from the Urban Institute “Do we have a generation stuck in starter homes?” Looking at data on the share of home mortgages going to first time home…
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The Week Observed: September 30, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Where are African-American entrepreneurs? A new Census Bureau survey, undertaken in cooperation with the Kauffman Foundation provides a detailed demographic profile of the owners of the nation’s businesses. It reports that there are about 108,000 African-American owned businesses with paid employees (i.e., not counting self-employed entrepreneurs). We look…
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The price of autonomous cars: why it matters
If you believe the soothsayers–including the CEO of Lyft–our cities will soon be home to swarms of autonomous vehicles that ferry us quietly, cleanly and safely to all of our urban destinations. The technology is developing–and rolling out–at a breakneck pace. Imagine some combination of Uber, electrically powered cars, and robotic control. You’ll use your…
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How much will autonomous vehicles cost?
Everyone’s trying hard to imagine what a future full of autonomous cars might look like. Sure, there are big questions about whether a technology company or a conventional car company will succeed, whether the critical factor will be manufacturing prowess or software sophistication, and all manner of other technical details. But for economists —…
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Counting People and Cars: Placemeter
We confess: we’re data geeks. We love data that shows how cities work, and that give depth and precision to our understanding of policy problems. But truth be told, most data we — and other analysts — work with is second-hand: its data that somebody else gathered, usually for some other purpose, that uses definitions…
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Where are African-American entrepreneurs?
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. Historically, discrimination and lower levels of wealth and income have been barriers to entrepreneurship by African-Americans, but that’s begun to change. According to newly released data from the Census Bureau, its now estimated that there…
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The Week Observed: September 23, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. America’s most creative metros, ranked by Kickstarter campaigns. One of the most popular ways to raise funds for a new creative project–music, a video, an artistic endeavor, or even a clever new product–is Kickstarter. Website Polygraph.cool has created an impressive visualization of nearly 100,000 kickstarter campaigns. We use…
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Lessons in Supply and Demand: Housing Market Edition
Its apparent to almost everyone that the US has a growing housing affordability problem. And its generating more public attention and public policy discussions. Recent proposals to address housing affordability in California by Governor Jerry Brown and in New York, by Mayor Bill de Blasio have stumbled in the face of local opposition. Its…
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Caught in the prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
The fundamental conundrum underlying many of our key urban problems is the conflict between broadly shared regional interests and impacts in local communities. While we generally all share an interest in housing affordability, and therefore it makes sense that we ought to support an expansion of housing supply in our region, it becomes a different…
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Successful cities and the civic commons
At City Observatory, we’ve been bullish on cities. There’s a strong economic case to be made that successful cities play an essential role in driving national economic prosperity. As we increasingly become a knowledge-driven economy, it turns out that cities are very good at creating the new ideas of all kinds that propel economic…
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Kickstarting your local creative economy
One of the cleverest adaptations of web-technology is the development of crowd-sourced funding for new products and business ideas. The biggest of these crowd-sourced funding platforms is Kickstarter, which since its launch in 2009, has generated funding for ideas like the pebble smartwatch, the “coolest” cooler and a revival of the Mystery Science Theater 3000…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 16, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth. There was great news in this week’s Census report: After years of stagnation, average household income saw its largest one-year gain on record (5.2 percent). But underlying that story was another one: household incomes in central cities surged even faster…
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Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth
Behind the big headlines about an national income rebound: thriving city economies are the driver. As economic headlines go, it was pretty dramatic and upbeat news: The US recorded an 5.2 percent increase in real household incomes, not only the first increase since 2007, but also the biggest one-year increase ever recorded. Its a signal…
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Parking meters and opportunity costs
What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere? Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient…
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Portland considers inclusionary zoning
What should cities do to tackle growing housing affordability problems? Is inclusionary zoning a good way to provide more affordable housing, or will it actually worsen the constrained housing supply that’s a big cause of higher rents? In the next few months, the city of Portland, Oregon will be considering the terms of a new…
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McMansions Fading Away?
Just a few months ago we were being told—erroneously, in our view–that the McMansion was making a big comeback. Then, last week, there were a wave of stories lamenting the declining value of McMansions. Bloomberg published: “McMansions define ugly in a new way: They’re a bad investment –Shoddy construction, ostentatious design—and low resale values.” The…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Counting Women Entrepreneurs. The Census Bureau has just released the results of its new survey of entrepreneurs, and we report its key findings on the extent and geography of women-owned businesses. There are more than 1.1 million women-owned businesses with more than 5 million employees; about one in…
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For low-income households, median home prices aren’t always what count
Affordable housing is an issue rife with statistics: median rents, median housing costs, percentage of people who are “housing cost burdened,” and so on. Previously, we’ve written about some of the issues with many of these statistics, including the untrustworthiness of most “median rent” reports and which rent statistics are more trustworthy. But another issue—which…
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Back to school: Three charts that make the case for cities
Its early September, and most of the the nation’s students are (or shortly will be) back in the classroom. There may be a few key academic insights that are no longer top of mind due to the distractions of summer, so as good teachers know, now is a good time for a quick refresher–something that…
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Counting women entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship is both a key driver of economic activity and an essential path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans. For much of our history, entrepreneurship has been dominated by men. But in recent decades, women have overcome many of the social and other obstacles entrepreneurship and as a result, the number of women active…
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The Week Observed: Sept. 2, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Which cities and metros shop most at small retail firms? A new “big data” set from the JPMorganChase Institute offers some answers. It uses 16 billion transactions from the bank’s customers in 15 metro areas to estimate the share of retail spending that goes to businesses of different sizes…
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Transatlantic advice on city development strategies
We’ve all been paying a lot more attention to developments in Britain since June’s Brexit vote. As we noted at the time, some of the same kinds of political divides that play out in America—between globally-integrated, knowledge driven cities and more rural areas that are older, less-educated—also happen in Britain. (Population density helps explain the…
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The politics of grand housing bargains: NYC
You might not think it, but New York City has a below-market affordable housing infrastructure that most other cities can only dream of. As one of the only major American cities not to tear down large amounts of its legacy public housing, it has nearly 180,000 units. Many more are in other below-market housing programs.…
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The Economic Value of Walkability: New Evidence
One of the hallmarks of great urban spaces is walkability–places with lots of destinations and points of interest in close proximity to one another, buzzing sidewalks, people to watch, interesting public spaces–all these are things that the experts and market surveys are telling us people want to have. Its all well and good to acknowledge walkability in…
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Who patronizes small retailers?
Urban developers regularly wax eloquent over the importance of local small businesses. But ultimately, businesses depend on customer support. So, in what markets do customers routinely support small businesses? Getting data that reflects on this question is often very difficult. A new source of “big data” on consumer spending patterns comes from the JPMorganChase…
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The Week Observed: Aug. 26, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. How economically integrated is your city? It keeps getting clearer: Mixed-income neighborhoods are an important force in helping more kids escape poverty. So has economic integration been getting worse or better? A study this year by Kendra Bischoff and Sean Reardon found that income integration has declined in virtually…
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More Driving, More Dying (2016 First Half Update)
More grim statistics from the National Safety Council: The number of persons fatally injured in traffic crashes in the first half of 2016 grew by 9 percent. That means we’re on track to see more than 38,000 persons die on the road in 2016, an increase of more than 5,000 from levels recorded just two…
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The link between parking and housing
Generally, parking is thought of as a transportation and urban design issue, involving tradeoffs between easing access to a place by car while potentially imposing greater social costs by discouraging other modes and, sometimes, degrading the pedestrian environment and spreading out neighborhoods and entire cities. There’s no shortage of parking craters nominated to compete in…
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Why Talent Matters to Cities
The biggest single factor determining the success of a city’s economy is how well-educated is its population. As the global economy has shifted to knowledge-based industries, the jobs with the best pay have increasingly gone to those with the highest levels of education and skill. For a long time, we’ve been talking about the talent…
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How economically integrated is your city?
Last week, we looked at some of the growing body of academic evidence that shows that mixed income neighborhoods play a key role in helping create an environment where kids from poor families can achieve economic success. One of our key urban problems is that economically, we’ve grown more segregated over time: the poor tend…
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The Week Observed: Aug. 19, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. We’ve hit the peak of summer driving season, and also the 103rd consecutive week of falling year-on-year gas prices. Though the 39 percent drop in gas prices over the last two years has led to only 4 percent more driving per person (so…
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The role of mixed income neighborhoods in lessening poverty
Its a truism that the zip code that you are born in (or grow up in) has a lot to do with your life chances. If you’re born to a poor household, a neighborhood with safe streets, good schools, adequate parks and public services, and especially some healthy and successful peers and neighbors has a…
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How do we know zoning really constrains development?
One of the chief arguments in favor of the suburbs is simply that that is where millions and millions of people actually live. If so many Americans live in suburbs, this must be proof that they actually prefer suburban locations to urban ones. The counterargument, of course, is that people can only choose from among…
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The limits of data-driven approaches to planning
City Observatory believes in using data to understand problems and fashion solutions. But sometimes the quantitative data that’s available is too limited to enable us to see what’s really going on. And incomplete data can lead us to the wrong conclusions. Our use of data is subject to what we call the “drunk under the…
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The Summer Driving Season & The High Price of Cheap Gas
Cheaper gas comes at a high price: More driving, more dying, more pollution. We’re at the peak of the summer driving season, and millions of Americans will be on the road. While gas prices are down from the highs of just a few years ago, there’s still a significant price to be paid. As the…
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The Week Observed: Aug. 12, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The national party platforms on transit. In November, most Americans will be choosing between a party whose platform offers the barest details and seemingly little understanding of urban transportation and a party whose platform is “more or less openly hostile” to it. 2. Marietta’s victory over affordable housing. Last year we…
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Court: Don’t spend billions on outdated travel forecasts
Last week, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered new ridership projections for the proposed Purple Line light rail line, which will connect a series of Maryland suburbs. Like any multi-billion dollar project that serves a densely settled metropolitan area—and this one connects some of its wealthiest suburbs—there’s…
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Patents, place, and profit
Readers of the Aug. 19 Week Observed: here’s the piece you’re looking for. Here’s a puzzle: If 89 percent of Apple’s ideas are invented in the U.S., why is 92 percent of its profit overseas? The link between local economies and tax bases has long been obvious and physical. Companies paid property taxes on their…
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A postcard from Marietta
Last summer, we told here the story of Marietta, Georgia, where local officials used $65 million in taxpayer funds to buy up and begin demolishing some 1,300 apartments along Franklin Road. This is a striking case where the displacement of low income families was an explicit objective of public policy, rather than the side-effect of…
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The party platforms on transit
In the first installment of this two-part series, we investigated what each of the major party platforms had to say about a crucial urban policy issue: housing. This time, we’re taking a look at another major concern for American cities: transportation. (It’s also definitely worthwhile to read what other people have written on the subject,…
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The Week Observed: Aug. 5, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The case for more Ubers. From mobile phones to microchips, it’s clear that even mega-companies must act in consumer interest when competition forces them to. When Uber and Lyft can pull out of Austin in response to new regulations, that’s a sign that they’re not facing enough healthy…
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Five consecutive years of job growth: a clear cause for optimism in Detroit
Back in 2009, in the darkest days of the Great Recession, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke attempted to reverse the economic pessimism that gripped the nation. He pointed to what he called “green shoots,” small bits of good news around the country. To him, the green shoots showed that the economy was turning around, the…
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How Racial Segregation Leads to Income Inequality
Less Segregated Metro Areas Have Lower Black/White Income Disparities Income inequality in the United States has a profoundly racial dimension. As income inequality has increased, one feature of inequality has remained very much unchanged: black incomes remain persistently lower than white incomes. But while that pattern holds for the nation as a whole, its interesting to…
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A To-Do List for Promoting Competitive Ride-Sharing Markets
Making a market for shared mobility services Yesterday, we urged cities to think hard about how they can craft the rules for the transportation network companies that offer “ride sharing” systems to maximize competition, and encourage innovation and low prices. “Let a thousand Ubers bloom,” we said. The rules and regulations that cities set…
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Let a thousand Ubers bloom
Why cities should promote robust competition in ride sharing markets We’re in the midst of an unfolding revolution in transportation technology, thanks to the advent of transportation network companies. By harnessing cheap and ubiquitous communication technology, Uber and other firms organizing what they call “ride sharing” services have not only disrupted the taxi business, but…
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The Week Observed: July 29, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Economist Paul Romer Joins the World Bank. Paul Romer, a leading exponent of the New Growth Theory has been hired as chief economist for the World Bank. We explore how his thinking about the role of knowledge-driven growth and the key role of cities in fostering institutional and…
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The triumph of the City and the twilight of nerdistans
This is a story about the triumph of the City—not “the city” that Ed Glaeser has written about in sweeping global and historic terms—but the triumph of a particular city: San Francisco. For decades, the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy has been a microcosm and a hot house for studying the interplay between innovation, economic…
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How gentrification affects small businesses
When we talk about gentrification, we often focus on housing. But another major concern is the effects of rising prices on retail—both because of what it means about the accessibility of goods and services for local residents, and because of questions of “community character.” The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s recent symposium on gentrification included a…
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The party platforms on housing
Urban policy conversations are largely focused on local policy, though we at City Observatory have occasionally argued that more attention ought to be paid to state and federal policy. We haven’t had much to say about the presidential candidates themselves this year, but one exercise that’s worth paying a bit of attention to is the…
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Housing Cost Calculators
Suddenly, we’re awash in calculators. Housing calculators. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you remember the day you saw your first electronic calculator. It had an electronic display–red or green light-emitting diode segments, usually eight or ten of them that would display numbers, arithmetic operators and a decimal point. They had a few hard-to-press chicklet type…
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Paul Romer to the World Bank
Today we’re getting really wonky. Paul Romer, who’s currently at New York University’s Marron Institute has just been appointed to be the chief economist for the World Bank. Personnel decisions involving technocratic positions at global NGOs is about as wonky as it gets, of course. But this is a genuinely interesting development, especially if you’re…
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The Week Observed: July 22, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Homeownership: A failed wealth creation strategy. Its an article of faith that owning a home is the most reliable route to wealth building in the US. But this hasn’t been true over the past decade, and its especially problematic for low income households and minorities. The housing market…
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A change
Last April, I wrote my first ever post for City Observatory, which unfortunately began with a David Foster Wallace quote. But it was up and up from there. Over the last year-plus here, City Observatory has given me an incredible platform to explore urban issues in public, combining intellectual rigor with a variety of subject…
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Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable
Recently, we made the case that promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal…
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Homeownership can exacerbate inequality
In yesterday’s post, we described why homeownership is such a risky financial proposition for low income households, who tend to be disproportionately people of color. From a wealth-building standpoint, lower income households tend to buy homes at the wrong time, in the wrong place, face higher financing costs, and have less financial resilience to withstand the…
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Homeownership: A failed wealth-creation strategy
It’s an article of faith in some quarters—well, most quarters—that in the United States, owning a home ought to be a surefire way to build wealth. Whether it’s presidents, anti-poverty groups, foundations, or realtors, we’re always being told that that homeownership is the foundation of the American dream, and a key way secure one’s financial…
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The Week Observed: July 15, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. How safe will the autonomous cars of the future be? The first-ever fatal collision involving a Tesla running on autopilot mode has prompted a debate on that subject. On the one hand, hand-wringing over an uncertain threat may seem somewhat out of place given the normalization of the…
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Lessons of Westchester
Westchester County, the mostly wealthy suburbs just north of New York City, is at the epicenter of one of the nation’s leading court battles over housing segregation. Last week, the New York Times reported that seven years since the Justice Department accused many of the county’s municipalities of using exclusionary zoning laws and other policies to…
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Rules of the road
Earlier, we wrote about the first fatal crash of a partly-self-driving car. A Tesla, operating on autopilot mode, failed to detect a semi-trailer crossing in its path, and the resulting collision killed its human driver. The crash has provoked a great deal of discussion in the media about safety data, the potential for future technology,…
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The values of value capture
Late last month, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation allowing what may become one of the largest transit value capture measures in the US. “Value capture” is a transit funding mechanism based on the idea that public transit creates broad social benefits—from more housing demand to swifter commerce in newly accessible shopping districts—and ought to…
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Less than perfect
Last week, sadly, two tragic deaths represented unfortunate, but predictable firsts in transportation. They are also reminders that despite the very real potential benefits of new technology, operating large metal objects at high speeds is an inherently dangerous activity, and public safety is best served by reducing people’s exposure to the risk—which means designing urban…
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The Week Observed: July 8, 2016
The Week Observed recently celebrated its first birthday! At the end of June 2015, we sent our first roundup of the most important urbanist news to about 700 people; since then, we’ve faithfully published a new issue every Friday, and we’re proud that today’s message will reach over 1,600 subscribers in every part of the…
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Londonize!
One of the first “urbanist” blogs I found was Copenhagenize. It’s a brilliantly simple name that carries its argument in a single word: Here is a place, Copenhagen, that does something right, so let’s be more like them. The thing Copenhagenize has in mind is biking. From particular styles of bike lanes, to more general…
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Review: State of the Nation’s Housing 2016
At City Observatory, we love fat reports full of data, especially when they shed light on important urban policy issues. Last week, we got the latest installment in a long-running series of annual reports on housing produced by Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies (JCHS). The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2016—aka SONH2016—presents copious details…
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The fourth virtue of public transit
For most Americans, public transit basically has three virtues. The first two cater to liberal sensibilities: it’s environmentally friendly, and because it’s cheap, it’s effectively a sort of transportation safety net for the poor. On top of those feel-good benefits, there’s a “business” case, which is that public transit is good for economic development. These…
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The Week Observed: July 1, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week’s big news was Brexit: the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. What does that have to do with urban policy on our side of the Atlantic? Well, it turns out that just as urban density predicts voting behavior in America, with denser…
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Three challenges for the civic commons
In Philadelphia last week, the Gehl Institute convened Act Urban—a global group of leaders and practitioners in the field of the civic commons. After three days of fieldwork and observation, expert presentations and intense discussion, I was asked, along with other panelists to sum up what we’d heard and what the challenges are for this…
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More evidence on the “Dow of Cities”
Last summer, we flagged a fascinating study by Fitch Investment Advisers which tracked twenty five years of home price data, stratified by the “urbanness” of housing. Fitch showed that particularly since 2000, home prices in neighborhoods in the center of metropolitan areas increased in value relative to all other metropolitan housing. We termed the price…
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Sprawl and the cost of living
Over the past three weeks, we’ve introduced the “sprawl tax”—showing how much more Americans pay in time and money because of sprawling urban development patterns. We’ve also shown how much higher the sprawl tax is in the US than in other economically prosperous countries, and how sprawl and long commutes impose a psychological, as well…
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Cities and Brexit
Last week’s big news was Britain’s decision, via referendum, to leave the European Union. The results of the vote lead Prime Minister Cameron to resign and sent markets reeling, and it’s still unclear what the ultimate economic and political effects will be. For some keen, if depressing, insight on the ramifications of Brexit, you may…
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The Week Observed: June 24, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban housing is a massive asset. How massive? Well, a comparison to the valuation of our nation’s biggest corporations shows it’s no comparison at all—housing in major cities has them beat, often handily: housing in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas is worth about $22 trillion, versus $8.8 trillion…
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States on the front lines of housing affordability
For advocates of less restrictive building regulations, especially in high-cost cities where more homes might help bring down housing prices and create more equitable, diverse neighborhoods, state governments often seem like the best bet. At a local level, for reasons we’ve explained before, the politics are incredibly difficult—not least because local elected officials represent nearly…
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More on the illegal city of Somerville
We got quite a bit of interest on our post last week about how the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts had written itself a zoning code that would have prevented the construction of virtually the entire city of 80,000 people if it had been adopted at its founding. According to Somerville’s own planning department, just 22…
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21st century snake oil
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…
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The market cap of cities
What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe the current…
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The Week Observed: June 17, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. In previous installments of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we’ve calculated the billions of dollars that longer distances between homes and workplaces cost American commuters, and shown that US workers pay more for transportation, and spend more time getting to and from their jobs, than peers in other rich…
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Why Houston has been special since at least 1999
A little while ago, in a post called “Sprawl beyond zoning,” we argued that even though Houston doesn’t technically have a zoning code, it still regulates the built environment in lots of ways that make it difficult or impossible to safely or conveniently get around without a car. But we also promised to get into…
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The illegal city of Somerville
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and…
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When cities change
This is the text of a speech delivered in Detroit last week at the Congress for New Urbanism conference by Carol Coletta, a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Practice. Could there be a more apt place to observe “The Transforming City” than Detroit? On behalf of Rip Rapson and my colleagues at…
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How sprawl taxes our well-being
In the first installment of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we explained how laws and patterns of development that make our homes, businesses, and schools farther apart cost us time and money—on average, nearly $1,400 a year per commuter in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. In the second installment, we showed how the Sprawl Tax is…
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The Week Observed: June 10, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week, we introduced the “Sprawl Tax”: the time and money American commuters spend just because their cities are more spread out than they might be. This week, we compare American sprawl to that of our international peers, and it’s not pretty. On average, in 17 European countries…
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How many carless workers are there really?
One of the first posts I ever wrote for City Observatory was called “Undercounting the transit constituency,” and it made a simple point: We dramatically undercount the number of people who depend on public transit to get around. While we usually talk about transit use in terms of the number of people who ride a…
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Achieving scale in affordable housing
There’s little question that housing affordability is a growing problem in many cities around the country. Rents have been rising faster than incomes, especially for low- and moderate-income households. One of the most widely touted policy responses is “inclusionary zoning,” which requires developers who build new housing to set aside at least a portion (typically…
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Sprawl Tax: How the US stacks up internationally
In our first post on the “Sprawl Tax,” we’ve explored the ways that our decisions about how to build American cities have imposed significant costs—in money, time, and quality of life—on all of us. We pay more to drive more, spend more time traveling instead of being at our destinations, and as a result deal…
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Neighborhood change in Philadelphia
Last week, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a fascinating report detailing neighborhood change in Philadelphia over the past decade and a half. “Philadelphia’s Changing Neighborhoods” combines a careful, region-wide analysis of income trends with detailed profiles of individual neighborhoods. Using tract-level income data, Pew researchers classified Philadelphia neighborhoods according to their median income in 2000…
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The Week Observed: June 3, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. In real life, somehow, Google patented sticky cars so that when their autonomous vehicles hit pedestrians, they won’t get thrown into the air, but will rather be pinned to the vehicle’s hood. In the spirit of helpfulness, we have diagrammed some other solutions Google might want to investigate,…
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Introducing the Sprawl Tax
If you read the news, you’ve probably seen reports about “congestion costs”: how much American commuters pay, in money and time, when they’re stuck in traffic. It’s fair to say that we’ve got some issues with many of these reports—but they’re popular nonetheless, perhaps because they help quantify a frustration that so many people can…
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Schools and economic integration
There’s a growing body of evidence that economic integration—avoiding the separation of rich and poor into distinct neighborhoods—is an important ingredient in promoting widely shared opportunity. The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues shows that poor kids who grow up in mixed income communities experience far higher rates of economic success than those who…
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Self-driving cars versus pedestrians
For many, it’s all but a certainty that our world will soon be full of self-driving cars. While Google’s self-driving vehicles have an impressive safety record in their limited testing, it’s just a matter of time until one is involved in a serious crash that injures someone in a vehicle, or a pedestrian. So, in…
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The Week Observed: May 27, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Last month, we released the Storefront Index, a report that catalogued the nation’s retail clusters and provided a window into the spatial organization of an important part of Jane Jacobs’ famous “sidewalk ballet.” This week, we lifted the curtain a bit to explain how we built the index,…
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California’s latest affordable housing proposal gives insight into housing politics
At first blush, it’s a bit confusing: Why, in a region that desperately needs more affordable housing, would there be so much opposition to a proposed law that would make it easier to build affordable housing? The proposal in question was offered up last week by California Governor Jerry Brown as part of the state’s…
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Cities are adding people, jobs and businesses
A trio of reports released in the past week provide new data showing the economic strength of the nation’s cities. Whether we look at population growth, new business formation, or job creation, big cities, urban centers and close-in urban neighborhoods are big drivers of national growth. While the data are drawn from different sources and…
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City center job growth continues strength; suburbs rebounding from recession
As recently as the years 2002 to 2007, outlying urban neighborhoods and suburbs experienced much faster job growth than urban cores. But as a February 2015 City Observatory report, “Surging City Center Job Growth,” documented, that pattern reversed from 2007 to 2011, with urban cores overtaking more peripheral areas and maintaining positive job growth through…
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How we did the Storefront Index
We’ve received many questions on how we did the analysis behind our Storefront Index. This post will describe our dataset, our method, and how we created our visualizations. We hope that this will spur future research and new forms of visualizations, similar to the way in which the release of our Lost In Place data…
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The Week Observed: May 20, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. What’s the relationship between urban sprawl, income segregation, and economic opportunity? A recent study by Reid Ewing and colleagues at the University of Utah used an innovative new measure of sprawl to correlate with economic outcomes of low-income children, and found a strong positiveassociation between compactness—that is, un-sprawl—and…
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The demand for city living is behind the urban rent premium
The US faces a shortage of cities. More and more Americans, especially talented, young workers with college degrees, are looking to live in great urban locations. As we’ve explored at City Observatory, the demand for urban living has increased faster than the supply of great urban spaces—with the predictable result that the price of land…
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Nationally, apartment supply may be catching demand
There’s more evidence that housing market supply is beginning to catch up to demand in a way that is likely to moderate rent increases. Nothing, it seems, is more infuriating to those caught in a market of steady rent hikes that being lectured by some economist that what is needed to resolve the problem is…
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The long road to San Francisco
Every once in a while, someone writes something that makes a murky, complicated, frustrating issue seem crystal clear. This post by Eric Fischer is one of those. Doing yeoman’s work, Fischer transcribed decades’ worth of San Francisco housing prices and other data. Among his findings: Though we talk about the Bay Area’s housing crisis as…
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Sprawl, segregation, and mobility
This is the fourth in an ongoing series of posts about income segregation, urban planning, and economic opportunity. In the first, we examined three different ways of looking at income segregation: the proportion of people living in low-income neighborhoods, high-income neighborhoods, or both “extremes.” In the second, we looked at another kind of income segregation,…
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The Week Observed: May 13, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. A new study from Stanford Business School claims that society reaps the greatest benefits from low-income housing when that housing is built in the lowest-income neighborhoods—as opposed to integrating it within higher-income neighborhoods. But there are a number of caveats and concerns we have with the study. For…
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The rising tide of economic segregation
Last week, we argued that the problem called “income segregation” is actually several problems, and broke it down with the help of different measurements designed to capture different aspects of the issue. In particular, we pointed out the need to distinguish between 1) the segregation of poverty, 2) the segregation of affluence, and 3) the…
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USDOT to shut down nation’s roads, citing safety concerns
WASHINGTON, DC – Citing safety concerns, today Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced he was contemplating the closure of roads to all private vehicles in nearly every city in the country until he could assure the nation’s drivers that they would be safe behind the wheel. The announcement comes on the heels of comments by…
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The positive feedback loop of integration
Yesterday, we critiqued a study that claimed to show that the benefits of putting low-income housing in very low-income neighborhoods greatly exceeded the benefits of putting it in higher-income neighborhoods—especially higher-income and predominantly white neighborhoods—where it might have more of a pro-integration effect. Among the several points of our critique was that the study severely…
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Where should low-income housing go?
A new study has run the numbers, and has concluded that social welfare is optimized by putting affordable housing in very poor neighborhoods, rather than wealthier (and especially whiter) ones. Authored by Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade of the Stanford School of Business, the study really has two major conclusions. First, building affordable housing in…
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The Week Observed: May 6, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. At City Observatory, we’re interested in hard numbers—but we’re also interested in the human community and public spaces that cities can create. As we did in April with “Lost in Place,” on Monday we introduced an easy-to-share infographic of our report “Less in Common.” It summarizes many of…
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How people are using the Storefront Index
For us at City Observatory, one of the most interesting (and fun) parts of our work comes after we’ve finished a Commentary or Report, and we get to watch others react and respond to its findings and arguments. “The Storefront Index,” the report on urban customer-facing business clusters that we released last month, is a…
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Income segregation along the whole spectrum
Yesterday, we introduced three kinds of economic segregation, and how you might measure each: the proportion of people in high-income neighborhoods; the proportion of people in low-income neighborhoods; and the proportion of people in either high- or low-income neighborhoods. Each says something important about how people are sorted by income in a metropolitan area. But…
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There’s more than one kind of income segregation
Much of the conversation about urban inequality today—from Raj Chetty’s work on intergenerational economic mobility, to issues of concentrated poverty and gentrification—is framed in terms of economic segregation. But it turns out that “economic segregation” isn’t just one thing, and what we mean by the phrase, and how we choose to measure it, has serious…
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What it means to be in common
When we talk about the costs and consequences of car-dependent urban development, we often talk about hard economics and climate science. Spread-out neighborhoods divided by big, pedestrian-hostile roads force people to spend more on transportation than they would in a place where many trips could be taken by foot or transit. In high-demand cities, relatively…
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The Week Observed: April 29, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. This week, we were proud to release City Observatory’s latest report: The Storefront Index. The Storefront Index maps and tallies every “storefront” business in the 51 largest US metropolitan areas, showing where clusters of customer-facing retailers create vibrant, flourishing neighborhood and regional commercial districts. The analysis highlights the…
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Storefronts and job growth
Earlier this week, we introduced the Storefront Index, a measure of the location and clustering of customer-facing retail and service businesses. A primary use of the index is to identify places that have the concentration of retail activity that we generally associate with a vibrant neighborhood commercial area, and that can support a high level…
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Squaring off with the Storefront Index
Yesterday, we introduced our latest report, The Storefront Index, which aims to quantify and map one aspect of a neighborhood’s vibrant street life—customer-facing businesses—in every neighborhood in the 51 largest metropolitan areas in the country. The Washington Post wrote more about it here. To illustrate one way the Storefront Index can help illuminate urban planning…
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The Storefront Index
As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along the margins of public spaces (streets, sidewalks, parks and squares) and in and out of quasi-private spaces (stores,…
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On the road again?
Hot on the heels of claims that Millennials are buying houses come stories asserting that Millennials are suddenly big car buyers. We pointed out the flaws in the home-buying story earlier this month, and now let’s take a look at the car market. The Chicago Tribune offered up a feature presenting “The Four Reasons Millennials…
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The Week Observed: April 22, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. When we measure segregation, we almost always use Census numbers that reflect where people live—ie, where their homes are. But people don’t spend all day in their homes, so a team of researchers used Twitter data from Louisville, KY to figure out where they spend their days. The…
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A new look at neighborhood change
One of City Observatory’s major reports is “Lost in Place,” which chronicles the change in high-poverty neighborhoods since 1970. In it, you’ll find a rich array of data at the neighborhood level showing how and where concentrated poverty grew. We know it’s a complex and wonky set of data, so we’ve worked with our colleagues…
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Marijuana: its geographical and policy implications
In the last several years, marijuana legalization has gone from a fringe issue treated as a joke or third rail to a mainstream, enacted policy in parts of the country. Broadly, the change seems to be driven by growing recognition of the general failure and costs of the drug war; growing understanding and acceptance of…
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Excessive expectations: A first look at the DOT’s new road performance rules
We’ve just gotten our first look at the new US Department of Transportation performance measurement rule for transportation systems. The rule (nearly three years in gestation, since the passage of the MAP-21 Act) is USDOT’s attempt to establish performance measures to guide investment and operation of the nation’s urban transportation system. One of the criticisms—fair,…
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Daytime and nighttime segregation
In cities, you’ll sometimes hear people talk about a “daytime population”: not how many people live in a place, but how many gather there regularly during their waking hours. So while 1.6 million people may actually live in Manhattan, there are nearly twice that many people on the island during a given workday. Most studies…
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The Week Observed: April 15, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. More than half of commuters to jobs in classically suburban DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to walk, bike, or take transit—but nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? A closer look finds that decades of avowedly auto-centric planning has led to a situation…
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Urbanism isn’t yet a luxury good
For most of the 20th century, cities and their accoutrements were associated with immigrants, people of color, and relative economic deprivation. The very phrase “inner city” became a synonym of “poor,” and in certain contexts “urban” itself became a word that referred to people of color, especially black people. The “great inversion” has challenged that…
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A surprising message about the connection between place and life expectancy
There aren’t many economists whose research findings are routinely reported in the New York Times and Washington Post. But Raj Chetty—and his colleagues around the country—have a justly earned reputation for clearly presented analyses with detailed findings and direct policy relevance. Last year, they released the most detailed study yet on how place affects intergenerational…
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Note to journalists: Stop quoting bogus rent numbers
Hey reporters! We know you love rankings, especially ones that show some measure of widely shared pain, like traffic congestion or rent increases. And some people, armed with a database and an infographic are more than happy to feed your hunger for this type of analysis. But please: Stop using Abodo’s rent numbers. They’re wrong.…
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A mystery in the suburbs
More than half of workers in DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to get to work without a car. But nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? First, a little context. Your city probably has a DuPage County—if not by name, by profile. Beginning about 15 miles due west of Chicago’s…
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The Week Observed: April 8, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Even in a relatively dense city like Chicago, large amounts of off-street parking goes unused daily. A new report from the Center for Neighborhood Technology documents the over-supply of residential parking, and lays the blame on municipal parking requirements that force developers to build parking lots or garages…
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The limits of technology: Let’s hack an app
A Hollywood staple of the 1930s and 1940s was the story of a plucky band of young kids—usually led by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland—who, their dreams of making it on Broadway dashed by some plot twist, decide to stage a show of their own. They would find a barn or a warehouse, sing and…
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What lifecycle and generational effects tell us about young people’s homebuying
It’s been debunked, right? Though we’ve long been told that millennials want to live in cities, renting rather than owning, and biking instead of driving, a new round of articles are here to tell us that all of that is a myth: as soon as they find their financial footing, young people are buying homes…
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Sprawl beyond zoning
Another column from Paul Krugman today on the ways that US-style zoning laws are detrimental to economic opportunity is a pleasant reminder that the role of building regulations in broader questions of inequality is no longer such a fringe issue. Particularly in places with the greatest “shortage of cities”—where the gap between available housing and…
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The high and hidden costs of parking requirements
There’s not enough parking in Chicago: it’s an article of faith among many drivers, and has been a key assumption in many of the city’s planning efforts. But a new report from the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology finds that one of those efforts, mandatory off-street parking requirements for residential buildings, is causing an over-supply…
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The Week Observed: April 1, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Have we reached “peak Millennial”? One researchers argues that because new births peaked in 1990, today’s 26-year-olds represent the high water mark of a youth-led urban renaissance. But a closer look shows that’s not the case: the US Census predicts that we have a number of years until…
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Introducing the Pedestrian Pain Index
America’s pedestrians are in pain. Every day, tens of millions of Americans waste tens of thousands of hours stuck waiting on the side of streets for car traffic to get out of their way. We estimate that the annual value of time lost waiting to walk totals $25 billion annually. Today, City Observatory announces the…
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What works, and what doesn’t, with housing vouchers
Earlier this month, a report in Chicago pointed to some of the tensions implicit in a desegregation-oriented federal affordable housing program. The Sun-Times, with that city’s Better Government Association, published a “watchdogs” feature on housing choice vouchers. The big news: while some voucher holders pay relatively large proportions of their rents, others pay much less, or nothing,…
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How brain drain measures can mislead
A new measure purports to gauge city attractiveness by measuring whether local college graduates stick around. But these raw numbers can be a misleading indicator, and we’ll show how it can be adjusted to more accurately measure how good a job a city is doing of producing and retaining talent. There’s powerful evidence that the…
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Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter: lifting kids out of poverty
There’s a hopeful new sign that how we build our cities, and specifically, how good a job we do of building mixed income neighborhoods that are open to everyone can play a key role in reducing poverty and promoting equity. New research shows that neighborhood effects—the impact of peers, the local environment, neighbors—contribute significantly to…
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Not peak Millennial: the coming wave
It’s an eye-catching, convention-tweaking claim: We’ve reached peak Millennial. And, so the argument goes, because Millennials have hit their “peak,” it’s time to junk all these crazy theories about Millennials not wanting to own cars, and not buying homes, especially in the suburbs. Sure, they had a youthful dalliance with city living, and the numbers…
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The Week Observed: March 25, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. When supply catches up to demand, rents go down. While stories about crazy housing markets tend to focus on big, coastal metropolitan areas, it turns out there’s a lot to learn from looking at Williston, ND. That sleepy town began to boom thanks to oil, and its housing…
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County data is great, but it can’t tell us much about urban living
You’re on your couch, streaming the latest episode of Broad City on your Mac laptop, just like a good millennial. But all of a sudden, your wifi connection goes bad, and the screen goes all pixelated. Instead of Abbi and Ilana at an art gallery, all you can see is big blocks of seemingly random…
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The beat goes on: More misleading congestion rankings from TomTom
Yesterday, TomTom released its annual rankings of the levels of congestion in world and US cities. Predictably, they generated the horrified, self-pitying headlines about how awful congestion is in the top-ranked cities. Cue the telephoto lens shots of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and tales of gridlock. As we’ve long pointed out, there are big problems with the…
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Here’s your definitive field guide to median rent statistics
Even the most casual consumer of urban news can’t avoid reading articles about whether rents in their city are up, or down, and how they compare to other cities around their country. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these rent estimates are completely made up. As we’ve written, the proliferation of these rent stories seems to…
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A field guide to median rent statistics
How much does a one-bedroom apartment cost in Chicago, my hometown? A quick Google search comes up with an article claiming that median rent is $1,970, according to the real estate company Zumper. But wait—according to real estate company Trulia, the median rent in Chicago was just $1,400 in January 2016, and that includes apartments with…
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It’s time for a “big short” in parking
Last year’s hit film The Big Short depicted various investors who, realizing that there was a housing bubble in the years before the 2000s crash, found ways to “short” housing, betting against the market and ultimately making a killing when the crisis hit. Looking forward, there’s a plausible case to be made that this might…
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When supply catches up to demand, rents go down
Today, we spend a few minutes reviewing the recent history of housing markets in rural North Dakota. In a microcosm, we can see how the interplay of demand and supply drive housing market cycles. The speed and scale of changes in North Dakota dwarf what we usually see, but provide an illustration of the forces…
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The Week Observed: March 18, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Finding nuance in the housing supply arguments. A new article from Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce helps resolve some of the tensions in the growing debate about whether and how housing supply is behind the affordability crisis—and the answer hinges on understanding how demand and supply can change at…
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Why the new Inrix Traffic Scorecard deserves a “D”
At City Observatory, we’ve long been critical of some seemingly scientific studies and ideas that shape our thinking about the nature of our transportation system, and its performance and operation. We’ve pointed out the limitations of the flawed and out-dated “rules of thumb” that guide our thinking about trip generation, parking demand, road widths and…
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Like Uber, but for redistribution
In a January 2015 paper, the Yale Law professor David Schleicher and Yale Law student Daniel Rauch published a paper on how local governments might regulate “sharing economy” companies, such as Uber, in the future. Among their more startling predictions, perhaps, was that the very cities that have been battling to regulate startups like Uber—which…
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Super long commutes: a non-big, non-growing, non-problem
Last week, the Washington Post published an article repeating an old-refrain in transportation journalism—the horror of long commutes. According to the Post, more and more Americans are commuting longer and longer distances to work each day. There’s growing scientific evidence that long commutes are bad for your physical and mental health, reduce happiness, and even…
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Finding nuance in the housing supply arguments
On the one hand, over the last few years, the growing debate about the root causes of affordable housing crises in high-income, coastal American cities has been robust, passionate, and often nuanced. On the other, there have been precious few “breakthrough” moments, and the rhetoric today often looks pretty similar to what it was a…
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The Week Observed: March 11, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Muddling income inequality and economic segregation. What does it mean to be a prosperous city? What does it mean to be a city with high economic inequality? These questions can be difficult because they apply statistics we’re used to using at a national level to municipalities or neighborhoods—and…
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How is driving mode share changing in your city?
Last week, we published an interactive tool for exploring how commuting has changed by different age groups over the last decade or so. One of the big takeaways was that even among younger people, there’s been only miniscule shifts away from driving, or towards transit and biking, despite the huge surge of youth to more…
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How should cities approach economic development?
Everyone interested in state or local economic development should read “Remaking Economic Development: The Markets and Civics of Continuous Growth and Prosperity.” In it, the Brookings Institution’s Amy Liu neatly synthesizes important lessons from the field about how metropolitan centered economic strategies are vitally important not just to revitalizing city economies, but to national economic…
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How we shut the door on housing
Note: Tomorrow, NYU’s Furman Center will hold a seminar with Dartmouth professor William Fischel on his new paper,”The Rise of the Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the Growth Machine.” This post contains some of our reactions to the paper. There’s increasing recognition that laws preventing the construction of new…
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Muddling income inequality and economic segregation
The big divides between rich and poor in the US are drawing increased attention, which is a good thing. Income inequality has been steadily growing in the US, and it’s a big problem. As we’ve pointed out, this problem has an important spatial dimension as well. The concentration of poverty, in particular, amplifies all of…
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The Week Observed: March 4, 2016
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…
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CBO on highway finance: The price is wrong
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…
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The problem with how we measure housing affordability
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.…
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Explore national transportation change trends by age group
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…
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Cities can’t solve all our problems
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…
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The Week Observed: February 26, 2016
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…
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Designed to fail
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…
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What I learned playing SimCity
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),…
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Undercounting the transit constituency
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…
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Another round on the Washington Post’s housing roundtable
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…
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The Week Observed: February 19, 2016
Next week, we’ll be releasing our latest City Report, which maps the location of consumer-facing businesses around the nation to provide a new, quantitative measure of a city’s street-level vitality—one facet of Jane Jacobs’ famed “sidewalk ballet.” Look for the full report, as well as detailed maps and breakdowns for each of the 51 largest…
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Costly misses on convention centers
Today’s guest post comes from our colleague Heywood Sanders, Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, and author of Convention Center Follies. Lots of people make guesses about the future. So do cities. And cities often employ “expert” consultants, who presumably have a wealth of knowledge and expertise to inform their guesses, and provide…
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Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households
After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series is coming to an end later this year. If you haven’t seen the show, co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman construct elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, you can’t…
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With highway expansion, be careful what you wish for
I live in Chicago. In Chicago, like pretty much everywhere, people complain about traffic. Almost every day, our roads and highways get congested at rush hour, leaving people crawling along supposedly high-speed corridors, wasting time, money, and gas. This is what it looks like on a typical Monday at 5:35 pm: Obviously, no one is…
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More driving means more dying
New data from the national traffic safety administration shows an ominous trend: traffic related deaths are up 11.3 percent for the first nine months of 2015, as compared to the same period a year earlier. Although the NHTSA warns that the data are subject to revision, and cautions that it’s too early to discern the…
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The Week Observed: February 12, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence on the “Dow of cities.” We’ve argued before that evidence of shifting demand for urban real estate can be read as a sort of “stock” in cities—and that cities’ stock has been rising. A new report from Zillow underscores this trend. It finds that for the first…
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Inclusionary zoning has a scale problem
Over the last few months, we’ve outlined a number of policy ideas that address the problem of housing affordability by dramatically expanding the number of people receiving some sort of housing assistance. (Low-income people, that is. We think the number of affluent people receiving housing assistance is already pretty high.) We suggested taxing the growth…
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Report: Market-rate housing construction is a weapon against displacement
We’ve known for a long time that housing shortages are a major driver of high housing prices—and that, as a result, places that prevent new construction also tend to have big affordability problems. But now, for the first time that we’re aware of, researchers have taken the next step to showing directly that places like…
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Why the first-time homebuyer is an endangered species
First-time home buyers play a critical role in the housing market. The influx of new households into the owner-occupied market is a key source of sales, and provides impetus for existing homeowners to move, liquidate their investment, or trade up to a bigger or better house. They’re the bottom of the home-buying pyramid. The number…
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More evidence on the “Dow of cities”
Last year, we described the widening gap between typical housing values in cities and suburbs as the “Dow of cities”: Just as differences in stock prices signal the performance of companies, variations in average home prices are a market signal of the performance of cities. High and rising prices, relative to the overall market, are…
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The Week Observed: February 5, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it. City Observatory likes to make data-driven arguments—but the rhetorical frameworks we use to explain the data matter, too. Here, we take a minute to try to reframe the urbanist argument about the role of cars in a “good” city. While advocates’ rhetoric…
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More support for a real estate capital gains tax
A few months ago, we offered a proposal to dramatically increase funding for affordable housing and put a damper on real estate speculation: tax housing capital gains. While San Francisco’s voter-approved Proposition A will produce a one-time infusion of $310 million for below-market housing, and that city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance has produced just about $30…
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Bursting Portland’s urban growth boundary won’t make housing more affordable
Like many cities in the US, Portland has been experiencing an affordable housing crisis as rents have risen substantially over the last several years. One proposed solution to this problem is inclusionary zoning—requiring people who build new apartments to hold some units’ rent at below-market rates. In the coming month or so, the Oregon Legislature…
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Who’s afraid of affordable housing?
Update: As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF Board of Supervisors has passed the ordinance in question. As bitter as the housing debate in the San Francisco Bay Area gets sometimes, no one disagrees that the region is facing a crisis of high costs. It’s just that some people believe the crisis can’t be resolved…
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Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it
At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…
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The Week Observed: January 29, 2016
What City Observatory did this week 1. The market cap of cities. What’s the value of a city? We’ve taken a stab at answering that question—at least, the value of a city’s housing. Using a measure called market capitalization, or “market cap” in financial parlance, we can compare the economic weight of cities with major…
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In some cities, the housing construction boom is starting to pay off
To some observers, planners’ promises that more housing supply will push down prices don’t seem to be working. In recent years, rents have jumped substantially, and it doesn’t seem like market forces are working to ameliorate this trend. Although the historical evidence linking faster housing construction growth and slower housing price growth is quite strong,…
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Land use and transportation infrastructure: Two sides of a coin
In the wake of our posts on the Katy Freeway in Houston, and US PIRG’s report on the country’s biggest highway construction boondoggles, we’ve heard one kind of pushback over and over. Sure, defenders of highway expansion admit, things are just as congested after reconstruction as before. But, hey, that’s a sign of success, because…
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What is an “unequal” city?
Why does economic inequality—as opposed to just poverty—matter? There are a lot of reasons, but a big one is that higher levels of inequality make it harder to improve your economic position. As Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has argued, the bigger the gap between rich and poor, the harder it is for the children…
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The market cap of cities
What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe the current…
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The Week Observed: January 22, 2016
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…
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Why not make housing assistance to the low-income as easy as assistance to the high-income?
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…
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Are jobs really returning to the city?
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…
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For highway advocates, it’s about the journey, not the destination
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…
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Which federal agency has a big role to play in housing affordability? The answer might surprise you
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…
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The Week Observed: January 15, 2016
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…
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The many faces of exclusionary zoning
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,…
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Why can’t cheaply-built houses be an affordability solution in expensive cities?
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…
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Pulling it all together
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…
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Bending the carbon curve in the wrong direction
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…
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The Week Observed: January 8, 2016
This week, Planetizen named City Observatory one of its 10 best urban websites of 2015, adding that “every single post is essential reading.” We’re extremely grateful for the recognition, and are excited about continuing our work into 2016! (Check out the other great websites Planetizen highlighted at the link, too!) What City Observatory did this…
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The economic strength of American cities in four charts
Cities are becoming more important to the economic health of the country. How do we know? We can boil the answer down to four charts, each of which plots a key indicator of urban economic strength. 1. The Dow of Cities The market value of housing in urban centers is increasing much more rapidly than…
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Houston has something to teach you about public transit
Houston doesn’t have much of a reputation for public transit, although about 300,000 rides are taken on trains and buses in the region every weekday. Recently, though, the local transit agency, Metro, has been making some big moves. First, the agency worked with transit consultant Jarrett Walker and a local team led by TEI to…
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Make housing vouchers an entitlement—we can afford it
We could extend housing vouchers to every very-low-income household—and expand housing support to the middle class, too — if we were willing to take away just one of the big housing subsidies to people making over $100,000 a year. But let’s back up. Previously, we’ve made the case that the SNAP program, or food stamps,…
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Our favorites from 2015, part 2
Here are Daniel Kay Hertz’s five favorite posts of 2015: 5. Undercounting the transit constituency When we only look at the number of people who commute on transit, we’re missing others—especially students and the retired—who rely on transit for other reasons. 4. A modest proposal: treat affordable housing more like food stamps Comparing two well-known…
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Our favorites from 2015, part 1
Over the last two days, we’ve give you readers’ favorite posts from 2015. Now we’re choosing our own. Here are Joe Cortright’s five favorite: 5. Want to close the black/white income gap? Work to reduce segregation The income gap between black and white households is one of the major racial inequalities in American society. It’s also…
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The Year Observed: Your 12 favorite posts from 2015, part 2
6. Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia? While stories about displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods abound, more direct, egregious examples of displacement in suburban areas are often left behind. We focused on one particularly galling example of an Atlanta suburb using eminent domain to demolish an apartment complex predominantly occupied by lower-income people of color, to…
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The Year Observed: Your 12 favorite posts from 2015, part 1
12. Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma In the last year or two, there has been a resurgence of awareness and debate about the big, structural issues facing America’s persistently poor neighborhoods. But one part of the equation has largely been left out: stigma. A large body of research has shown that stigma and reputation, above and…
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The Week Observed: December 24, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup. When the Texas Department of Transportation tried to sell the public on its Katy Freeway expansion project, part of the story was that it would ease congestion. We covered how that worked out last week. (Not well, is the answer.) Another…
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Who’s really rent-burdened?
Back in July, we published a three–part series about what exactly it means for housing to be affordable. Our basic argument was that the most standard measurement—whether your housing costs are more or less than 30 percent of your income—is inadequate to the task, for several reasons: First, it doesn’t allow for lower-income people to…
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About that “consensus” on zoning
Is there a “cross-ideological consensus” on zoning reform? Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, economist Ilya Somin made such a claim. Libertarians, he wrote, have opposed the strict laws that prescribe expensive, exclusionary, low-density homes in most neighborhoods across the country for some time; but now, as noted lefty economist Paul Krugman’s recent…
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The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup
When it comes to selling huge new road projects to the public, the highway lobby and their allies in government have many tools. Last week, we wrote about one of them: touting initial declines in congestion as success, without bothering to follow up as induced demand eliminates those gains in just a matter of years.…
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The Week Observed: December 18, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t bank on it. Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for President, has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank to help local governments pay for crucial infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. But it’s not so clear that such a bank is the answer to America’s infrastructure problems. Rather, the…
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Where did all the small apartment buildings go?
Back in August, we wrote about the phenomenon of the “missing middle”: the fact that today’s urban (and suburban) development tends to take the form of either single-family homes or very large apartment buildings, but not so much in the middle. And that’s a problem! Small apartment buildings perform a vital function in classic “illegal…
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Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…
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Homevoters v. the growth machine
There are two big theories about who controls the pace of development in American cities and suburbs. One is the “growth machine.” In this telling, developed by academics like Harvey Molotch in the 1970s, urban elected officials and zoning boards are highly influenced by coalitions of business and civic leaders interested mainly in economic growth…
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Don’t bank on it
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton laid out the broad outlines of her plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would make low interest loans to help fund all kinds of public and private infrastructure. In an explainer for Vox, Matt Yglesias lays out the case for an infrastructure bank, and sets out some of the…
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The Week Observed: December 11, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. A $1.6 billion proposal. A film school teacher in San Francisco had some people talking about “ethical landlording” as a solution to the problem of too-high real estate prices. But substituting the private whims of land owners for prices as a way to determine who wins access to…
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Cities have reason to be wary of Fed moves
Later this month, the Federal Reserve Board (or “the Fed,” as it’s often referred to) will raise interest rates. After seven years of very loose monetary policy designed to facilitate economic recovery from the Great Recession, the Fed now apparently thinks that the economy is healthy enough to stand higher interest rates. Clearly, the financial…
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Climate concerns steamrolled by FAST Act and cheap gas
There’s plenty of high-minded rhetoric at the UN climate change conference in Paris about getting serious about the threat of climate change. According to the Los Angeles Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic that, “even without a specific temperature-change limit and legally binding structure, a climate change agreement that negotiators in Paris are…
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Pulling a FAST one
Whatever remained of the fig leaf claim that the US has a “user pays” system of road finance disappeared completely with the passage of the so-called FAST Act. It would be better to call the new transportation bill the “Free Ride” Act, because that’s exactly what it does: gives auto users something for nothing. It’s…
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A $1.6 billion proposal
Last week, San Francisco Magazine reported on what, at first glance, just looks like another those-crazy-San-Franciscans-and-their-crazy-housing-market story. It begins with a film school teacher who had bought a home in the Mission neighborhood twenty years ago for just $90,000, recently decided to move, and put her home on the market—sort of. While similar homes in…
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The Week Observed: December 4, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy. A guest post from the Knight Foundation’s Carol Coletta begins by noting some dismal numbers on voting in American cities—especially by younger people. But civic engagement can’t just be about once-in-a-while actions; it has to be a daily practice. Carol gives an…
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You need more than one number to understand housing affordability
Back in October, we wrote a post called “Affordability beyond the median.” While most discussions of housing costs measure based on a city’s or neighborhood’s median price, that’s not all that matters. After all, the median is simply the home for which equal numbers of other homes are more and less expensive. That may be…
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Is foreign capital destroying our cities?
Be afraid: Big foreign corporations are buying up our cities and stamping out our individuality. Or so warns Saskia Sassen in a piece ominously entitled, “Who owns our cities—and why this urban takeover should concern us all,” published in the Guardian Cities. The harbinger of our doom, according to Sassen: large corporations are buying up…
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Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy
Today we’re publishing an edited version of a speech given by Carol Coletta, VP of Community and National Initiatives at the Knight Foundation, last month in Portland, OR. Informed and engaged communities are fundamental to a strong democracy. But many of the signs of those communities are not encouraging: Newspaper readership has plummeted in recent…
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The Week Observed: November 27, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Ways forward to more equitable land use law. Following up on last week’s posts about William Fischel’s new book, Zoning Rules!, and its arguments about how America got into its current housing crisis, we look at what Fischel, one of the country’s foremost scholars on land use law,…
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Happy Thanksgiving!
Even we at City Observatory believe in taking a break from all things urban on Thanksgiving. But in the spirit of the holidays, we wanted to take just a minute to share some of the things we’re thankful for. To begin with, we’re thankful for cities themselves: the places we live in and explore, that…
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Zoning and cities on the national economic stage
It’s hard to think of an issue that is more quintessentially local than zoning. It’s all about what happens on the ground on a specific piece of property in a particular neighborhood. It’s the bread and butter of local governments and neighborhood groups. Zoning and land use seem about as far removed from national economic…
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It’s a good time for buyers to beware
It’s the hardiest perennial in the real estate business: “Now,” your realtor will tell you, “is a great time to buy a home.” Back in 2006, just as the housing market was faltering, that’s exactly what the National Association of Realtors (NAR) was telling us. In fact, in November of that year, the NAR launched…
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Ways forward to more equitable land use law
Last week, going off a recent book by William Fischel, we published a parable that explained the evolution of American zoning over the 20th century, from non-zoning land use in the early years to the introduction of true zoning in the 1910s and 20s, and the “land use revolution” of the 1970s that helped create…
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The Week Observed: November 20, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. While many economists emphasize the positive effects of low gas prices—more disposable income in consumers’ pockets, which can act as a stimulus—it’s also important to acknowledge the costs. Reducing the price of driving, shockingly enough, makes people drive more—leading to more traffic…
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The origins of the housing crisis
Yesterday, we published a “zoning parable,” based on William Fischel’s arguments for why and how zoning regulations developed in American cities over the 20th century. Today, we’ll expand a bit on one of the book’s major arguments in non-parable form. The 70s: What happened? For people who care a lot about housing but aren’t ready…
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The shopkeeper: A zoning parable
This year, William Fischel, a professor at Dartmouth and one of the country’s leading scholars of land use policy, published a new opus on zoning: Zoning Rules! There’s far too much in the book to do a comprehensive review, but we’re going to pick out some of the most interesting and important arguments for posts…
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The high price of cheap gas
At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion.…
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The Week Observed: November 13, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. What filtering can and can’t do. In most cities, the majority of homes that are affordable to people of modest or low incomes don’t receive special affordability subsidies—they’re just cheap market-rate housing. But since very little housing is built for people of below-average income, how does it get…
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Journalists should be wary of “median rent” reports
Trying to measure average housing costs for neighborhoods across an entire city—let alone the whole country—is an incredibly ambitious task. Not only does it require a massive database of real estate listings, it requires making those listings somehow representative at the level of each neighborhood and city. For a number of reasons, just taking the…
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A “helicopter drop” for the asphalt socialists
The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees paid by member banks—to bail out the Highway Trust Fund. For years, many macro economists…
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What filtering can and can’t do
“Affordable housing” can seem like a hopelessly vague term. First of all, affordable to whom? (Follow the link to a description of an “affordable” program targeting people making 40 percent more than the median income in San Francisco.) And even assuming we know who’s paying, what is a reasonable amount for them to pay? But…
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The Week Observed: November 6, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. More doubt cast on food deserts. The concept of a “food desert”—typically low-income urban neighborhoods where a lack of nearby grocery stores leads to poor nutrition—is widely accepted. But a new study adds to the evidence that in most cases, poor nutrition isn’t a result of food deserts;…
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Election results for urbanists
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…
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Do the rich (neighborhoods) get richer?
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…
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City Observatory on the Knight Cities podcast
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…
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More doubt cast on food deserts
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…
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The Week Observed: October 30, 2015
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,…
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Truthiness in gentrification reporting
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…
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What’s really going on in gentrifying neighborhoods?
Yesterday, we wrote about the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan, which is in the unique position of being one of the wealthiest urban communities in the nation, and also having almost a third of its housing be public or otherwise subsidized. The question was, what happens to the residents of public housing in a place like…
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Higher-inequality neighborhoods reduce inequality
A few weeks ago, in a post about what income inequality means in an urban (rather than national) context, we contrasted images of a lower Manhattan neighborhood with a Dallas suburb. The Manhattan street had subsidized housing on one side and very expensive homes on the other; the Dallas suburb just had the expensive homes.…
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Introducing City Observatory policy memos
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,…
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The Week Observed: October 23, 2015
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.…
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Beyond gas: The price (of driving) is wrong
Our recent conversation about the future of American driving habits, and the role of the price of gas in changing them, is a good reminder of a broader truth about transportation policy: prices are important, and getting prices right (or wrong) is crucial. And when it comes to driving, prices are frequently wrong. That’s because driving is extremely costly:…
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Why creating meaningful transportation change is so hard
At his blog, The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark pushed back this week on the idea that we’re seeing a revolution in the way people get around cities and suburbs, largely thanks to new transit-and-bike-friendly Millennials. In fact, he cites one of our posts as an example of a narrative he doesn’t think is quite right:…
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Eleven things you’d know if you read City Observatory
Last week, City Observatory celebrated its first birthday. This week, we’re taking some time to look back at all the reports and commentaries we researched and wrote in the last year, and picking out some of what we think are the most important facts and insights. We put eleven of them into a one-pager with links to…
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Affordability beyond the median
A few months ago, we published a three–part series about why the way we measure housing affordability is all wrong. In particular, we objected to using the 30 percent ratio of housing prices to income as the benchmark of “affordable,” basically because depending on income and other necessary expenses, a given household might actually be able…
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The Week Observed: October 16, 2015
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. Why America can’t make…
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Happy birthday to us!
A year ago today, October 15th, 2014, we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities. The past year has been a whirlwind: We’ve released four major reports—Young and Restless, Lost in Place, Surging City Center Job Growth, and Less in Common—each of which use data to examine some of the…
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A modest proposal: treat affordable housing more like food stamps
Two of the most fundamental human needs are food and housing. As a result, we have government programs to help people who might not be able to afford them. But the way those programs work is wildly different. So let’s imagine for a moment that we treated SNAP—the federal program, formerly known as food stamps,…
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Why America can’t make up its mind about housing
Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with: 1. Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or even metropolitan areas. 2. Government policy should protect residential neighborhoods from things that might…
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The Week Observed: October 9, 2015
Last week, our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation 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. What’s behind…
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The danger of taking policy lessons from extreme cases
Two recent press features have suggested that one Utah city has worked out the recipe for equitable development. The cover story from Newsweek’s October 2, issue offers “Lessons from America’s most egalitarian zip code.” It proposes that Ogden, Utah is a model for how the US can address income inequality. The article is at…
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Talent, opportunity, and engagement are essential to successful cities
We’re very excited to spread the news that this fall, our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation are reprising their wildly successful “Knight Cities Challenge.” Last year, Knight chose 32 winners out of more than 7,200 project proposals from people in cities all over the country, awarding them the resources and support they needed to…
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The end of peak driving?
A little over a year ago, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.70. Since then, that price has plummeted, and remains more than a dollar cheaper than it was through most of 2014. Over the same period, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick in driving in the US. After nearly a decade of steady…
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What’s behind the debate over American streets
What are roads for? For that matter, what’s transportation policy for? Much of the urban reform movement of the last few decades has been about re-asking, and re-answering, these questions. Most people who follow trends in urban policy could outline at least a rough sketch of the debates: high-speed car traffic versus “complete streets” for…
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The Week Observed: October 2, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy. New data from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis builds on our “Dow of Cities” post and Surging City Center Job Growth report to show that urban centers are at the heart of the country’s recovery. Large metropolitan areas—those with over a…
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One of the biggest myths about cities: Crime is rising
There’s a lot happening in American cities these days, which means that there’s a lot to read about! Even for those of us at City Observatory, sometimes good, important articles slip through the cracks. In recognition of that, periodically, we’ll dig back into our archives to republish a piece that we think deserves another go-around.…
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When it comes to transit use, destination density matters more than where you live
At City Observatory, we’ve written quite a bit about the phenomenon of city center job growth. We did a whole CityReport about the phenomenon, showing that since the Great Recession, urban cores have been outperforming the rest of their metropolitan areas on employment, reversing earlier trends. And just this week, we covered new job numbers…
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The high cost of affordable housing and the shortage of cities: notes from a panel
Averting a housing crisis: Panel Discussion from oregonmetro on Vimeo. Last week, City Observatory’s own Joe Cortright took part in a panel hosted by the Portland regional planning agency, Metro, where a standing-room-only crowd heard him, TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler, Elissa Harrigan of the Meyer Memorial Trust, and developer Eli Spevak talk about whether Oregon’s largest…
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Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy
Cities have always played a vital role in the national economy, but in the past few years their importance has increased. Last month, we highlighted the “Dow of Cities”—how the rising value of housing in the most central portions of the nation’s metropolitan areas signals the market’s verdict about the growing demand for urban living.…
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The Week Observed: September 25, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Zoning in everything—even the education gap. By now, thanks to renewed attention in major media outlets from writers like the New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones, many observers of housing policy debates are aware of the role of exclusionary zoning in promoting residential segregation. We look at a paper…
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The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins
Last week, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer a…
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What else does the new “severely rent-burdened” report tell us?
This week, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and the affordable housing organization Enterprise Community Partners released a report sketching out various scenarios of rental cost and income growth for the next ten years. The headlines are fairly bleak: JCHS and Enterprise project the number of “severely rent-burdened” households to grow under almost any scenario.…
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Why are metropolitan areas more “equal” than their central cities?
To butcher Orwell, all cities are unequal, but some cities are more unequal than others. While working with some of the Census-calculated income inequality numbers—in particular, the Gini index—we noticed an interesting pattern: the central city of a metropolitan area is almost always more unequal than its metropolitan area as a whole. What’s going on?…
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Zoning in everything—even the education gap
A few weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones produced a tour de force report on school segregation in America, which became a two-part episode on the public radio show This American Life. In the first part, she dove into the complex legal and racial geography of the St. Louis metro area, explaining how the imaginary lines of…
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The Week Observed: September 18, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere. Daniel Kay Hertz follows up on our earlier piece about illegal neighborhoodsto point out that most other wealthy countries allow the kinds of mixes of density and uses that most American cities have outlawed. Based on Sonia Hirt’s great…
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What does it mean to be a “smart city”?
In light of Smart Cities Week, we’re updating this post from March about the role of smart technology, people, and successful cities. The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the “smart city” banner. But what does that mean?…
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Is WMATA’s transit cost problem a national issue?
A recent post from the excellent DC blog Greater Greater Washington has made a few ripples among transit advocates. In it, David Alpert takes the growth rate of WMATA’s operating costs (about 6% annually) and its operating revenue (about 1% annually) and makes the straightforward point that this isn’t really sustainable. After all, these…
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The prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
One of the most broadly popular ideas about urban planning today is that decisions should be made locally. After all, who knows better what a neighborhood needs than the people who live there? And what better way to squash any would-be Robert Moses than by empowering the people whose homes he would claim for some…
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Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course! Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…
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The Week Observed: September 11, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. My illegal neighborhood. Guest Commentary writer Robert Liberty describes all the things he loves about his neighborhood in Northwest Portland—and then explains why all of them would be illegal to build in a new development today. The mix of apartments and single-family homes doesn’t fit modern ideas about…
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The top ten reasons to ignore TTI’s Urban Mobility Report
Since the Texas Transportation Institute released its 2015 “Urban Mobility Report,” urban transportation experts and advocates have unleashed thousands and thousands of words poking holes at its methodology, assumptions, and political agenda. (We’ve pitched in our fair share of those words, and perhaps more.) As one last entry to this conversation, we wanted to…
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What do we know about neighborhood change, gentrification, and displacement?
In last Friday’s The Week Observed, we flagged an exhaustive literature review from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, summarizing what we know about gentrification and neighborhood change over about 40 pages. We focused on one of the takeaways Richard Florida picked out in his article about the study in CityLab, on the connection…
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My illegal neighborhood
Editor’s note: City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities. by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really…
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The Week Observed: September 4, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens. A new research project on Bay Area neighborhood change defines “displacement” as any reduction in the number of low-income people in a given community. Daniel Kay Hertz argues that this way of thinking leads us down the wrong path in…
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Who’s really rent-burdened?
Back in July, we published a three–part series about what exactly it means for housing to be affordable. Our basic argument was that the most standard measurement—whether your housing costs are more or less than 30 percent of your income—is inadequate to the task, for several reasons: First, it doesn’t allow for lower-income people to…
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Contradictory conclusions and disappearing data
Part 2: A curious discrepancy between two major congestion reports using the same data Yesterday, we explained why one of the most common takes on the Texas Transportation Institute’s “Urban Mobility Report” is actually totally unjustified: Though many media outlets repeat the UMR’s claim that traffic delays are worse today than it has been since…
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Updated: Is traffic worse now? The “congestion report” can’t tell us
Part 1: Resurrecting discredited data to paint a false history The Texas Transportation Institute claims that traffic congestion is steadily getting worse. But its claims are based on resurrecting and repeating traffic congestion estimates from 1982 through 2009 that were based on a deeply flawed and biased model. Since 2009, TTI has used different data…
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Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens
What does it mean for someone to be displaced by gentrification? And in a just world, what do our cities’ neighborhoods look like? As reported by Next City, a team of researchers at the University of California-Berkeley has put together a an analysis that probes just those questions. But the stilted answers they come up…
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The Week Observed: August 28, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute. This week, TTI released another episode of its “Urban Mobility Report,” claiming to measure the cost of congestion and track the continued worsening of traffic in American cities. The problem, as Joe Cortright explains, is that these reports are riddled…
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New Orleans’ missing black middle class
Washed away? Or moved to the suburbs? At FiveThirtyEight, Ben Casselman writes: “Katrina Washed Away New Orleans’s Black Middle Class.” It’s a provocative piece showing the sharp decline in the black population of the city of New Orleans, particularly the city’s black middle class. While the city has rebounded in many ways since Katrina, the…
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UPDATED (again): Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute
UPDATE: A chorus of congestion cost critiques By this point, researchers and practitioners from around the country (and beyond!) have laid out their problems with TTI’s congestion reports. Here’s a roundup of some of the best: Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute comprehensively debunks the TTI methodology: “The UMR ignores basic research principles:…
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Growing e-commerce means less urban traffic
The takeaway: Urban truck traffic is flat to declining, even as Internet commerce has exploded. More e-commerce will result in greater efficiency and less urban traffic as delivery density increases We likely are overbuilt for freight infrastructure in an e-commerce era Time-series data on urban freight movements suffer from series breaks that make long term…
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Are racial “tipping points” overblown?
Why are America’s neighborhoods so segregated? For a lot of people, the answer requires reaching deep into history: explaining the rise of the subsidized mortgage market and redlining; racial violence in towns from Cicero, Illinois to Charleston, South Carolina; restrictive racial covenants; blockbusting; and on and on. But back in 1971, a professor named Thomas…
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The Week Observed, August 21, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. The suburbs: where the rich ride transit. In many cities, transit ridership is dominated by a transit dependent population: people who can afford to own private cars don’t use the transit system. But in some places transit is a mode of choice for higher income commuters. Daniel Kay…
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The Dow of Cities
OK, we admit it. We’re data geeks. To us, sometimes — well, often — a single number or data set is compelling proof of an important proposition: bare-naked, and with no verbal embellishment or deeply personal anecdote or cutesy infographic. Here’s the simple number: since 2000, home prices in city centers have outperformed those in…
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The war of words: rhetoric and the city
Over at Belt Magazine, editor Anne Trubek is fed up with the overuse of planning cliches in writing about cities. She’s asking, nay demanding, that everyone stop using ten words: walkability liveability placemaking civic engagement sustainability smart growth mixed-use accessibility adaptive reuse gentrification She’s put her finger on something. These words are used, and over-used…
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The edifice complex and our infrastructure problems
As Robert Caro chronicled in his riveting biography “The Power Broker,” the great builder Robert Moses had a foolproof strategy for getting new highways approved. He’d take a little bit of money and get the project started, driving stakes in the ground and manufacturing expectations about future development opportunities. Then he’d dare the Legislature not…
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The suburbs: where the rich ride transit
This isn’t actually a post about transit. It’s about land use. But we’ll get there in a second. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, is responsible for one of the most widely-shared quotes in the urbanist world: “An advanced city,” he said, “is not one where the poor use cars, but rather one…
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The suburbs: where the rich ride transit
This isn’t actually a post about transit. It’s about land use. But we’ll get there in a second. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, is responsible for one of the most widely-shared quotes in the urbanist world: “An advanced city,” he said, “is not one where the poor use cars, but rather one…
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The Week Observed: August 14, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. City home prices outpacing suburbs by 50 percent. Joe Cortright examines a new study prepared by investment firm Fitch looking at the growing value premium in central cities. Since 2000, home prices have grown 50 percent faster in urban centers than in their surrounding metro areas. For hard…
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City home prices outpacing metro by 50%
Since 2000, home prices have grown 50 percent faster in urban centers than in their surrounding metro areas. If your are an urban data geek, like we are, this is big news. A dramatic shift in city-suburb price differentials strongly signals a deep and enduring market demand for cities. A new research report from investment…
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Between highrises and single-family homes
One of the most controversial recommendations from Seattle’s affordable housing task force, or HALA, was to reform zoning laws that only allow single-family homes in certain neighborhoods. That was always going to be a challenge—as Sonia Hirt argues in her history of American zoning, Zoned in the USA, prioritizing and protecting single-family-home-only neighborhoods…
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The next road safety revolution
“The automobile tragedy is one of the most serious…man-made assaults on the human body,” wrote Ralph Nader in 1965. “It is a lag of almost paralytic proportions that these values of safety…have not found their way into legislative policy-making for safer automobiles.” Those words come from the preface of Unsafe at Any Speed, an expose…
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The Week Observed: August 7, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma. Daniel Kay Hertz reviews some of the literature on the interplay between a neighborhood’s reputation and its disadvantage—and finds a surprising reversal in the conventional understanding of the issue. Rather than problems like greater crime or vandalism leading to bad reputations, researchers like…
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The McMansion mirage reappears
OK, we admit we might be a bit obsessed with this story. But if you can, bear with us one more time. Here’s the most basic fact: The number of newly-built McMansions—single family homes of 4,000 square feet or larger—is down 43 percent since 2007. By any standard that’s a stunning decline. But because the market…
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Revisiting Marietta
Last month, we questioned why people weren’t paying more attention to Marietta, the Atlanta suburb that is tearing down 1,300 apartments and permanently displacing their low-income residents. We wondered why this large-scale displacement of poor households—most of whom are black or Latino—didn’t generate the same kind of outcry as much more ambiguous situations in urban…
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Urban buses are slowing down
Back in June, we catalogued how riders weren’t really abandoning buses—buses were abandoning their riders, with significant cuts to service in many metropolitan areas that appeared to be driving declines in ridership. Further analysis of transit data since 2000 suggests that bus riders may have another problem: not only are there fewer buses on their…
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Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma
My hometown, Chicago, is having a fight over words: in particular, “Chiraq.” That’s a portmanteau of “Chicago” and “Iraq,” which is meant to analogize the city not to that country’s rich cultural heritage, or extreme weather, but to its war. The name seems to have come from a South Side rapper, but has since been…
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The Week Observed: July 31, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs.” Joe Cortright argues that many of the heuristics that have guided urban planning for decades, such as “wider streets are safer streets,” and “faster traffic flow is always better,” have long outlived their usefulness. We offer five of these outdated…
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The difficulty of applying inequality measurements to cities
Earlier this year, our friends at the Brookings Institution released a new tabulation of Census data on levels of inequality in the nation’s largest cities. Inequality, in this case, is measured by dividing the income of a household at the 95th percentile of the population by the income of a household at the 20th percentile.…
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Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick. What purport…
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How cutting back on driving helps the economy
There are two kinds of economics: macroeconomics, which deals in big national and global quantities, like gross domestic product, and microeconomics, which focuses on a smaller scale, like how the prices of specific products change. Macroeconomics gets all the attention in the news cycle, as people talk about the unemployment rate, the money supply, inflation,…
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The Week Observed: July 24, 2015
What City Observatory did this week This week, we ran a three-part series on what we mean by “housing affordability.” 1. In The way we measure housing affordability is broken, Daniel Kay Hertz writes about the problems with the most common way “affordable housing” is interpreted: as housing costs that make up no more than…
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Measuring housing affordability: What about homeowners?
Over the past two posts, we’ve argued that the most common measure of housing affordability – whether someone is paying more than 30% of their income – has a lot of serious problems. For one, housing costs are only one facet of overall location costs: if you move from the city to the suburbs for…
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Residual income: a better way of measuring affordability
This week, we’re running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. Yesterday, we looked at exactly what’s wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what “affordable” means. Today, we’re looking at an alternative measure, “residual income.” In the final part, we’ll examine the particular challenges of understanding “affordability”…
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The way we measure housing affordability is broken
This week, we’re running 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. Tomorrow, we’ll look at an alternative measure, and on Wednesday, we’ll examine the particular challenges of understanding “affordability” for owner-occupied homes. Given…
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The Week Observed: July 17, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia? Joe Cortright covers a Robert Moses-style case of “slum clearance” in suburban Atlanta. The city of Marietta is demolishing a complex of apartments that, over the last few generations, have transitioned from upper-income and homogeneously white to relatively high-poverty and mostly people…
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The value of walkability across the US
One of the factors that seems to be propelling the resurgence of cities around the nation is the growing demand for housing in walkable locations. One of the best sources of evidence of the value of walkability is home values, and some new evidence confirms that walkability adds to home values, and also shows that…
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What can conservatives do for cities?
Imagine an urban policy agenda defined by simplifying business regulations and promoting entrepreneurship as the key to prosperity. Add to that an attack on overly restrictive zoning laws that hold back housing construction, inflate real estate prices, and keep high-opportunity cities closed to low-income people looking to improve their lives. Round out the party platform…
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Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia?
Imagine this: A city government takes $65 million in public money and buys up more 1,300 units of aging but affordable housing, which is home mainly to low income and minority residents. It demolishes the housing, and plans to sell the land to private developers for office and retail development. A pretty cut-and-dried case of…
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The Week Observed: July 10, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. In More evidence on the changing demographics of American downtowns, Daniel Kay Hertz looks at a recent study from the Cleveland Fed on growing high-income neighborhoods in city cores. While there has been dramatic growth in “upper-third” areas near American downtowns – with New York, Chicago, and Portland…
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The devilish details of getting a VMT fee right
At City Observatory, we’re big believers that many of our transportation problems come from the fact that our prices are wrong – and solving those problems will require us to get prices right. While we desperately need a way to pay for roads that better reflects the value of the space we use, just moving…
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More evidence on the changing demographics of American downtowns
Earlier this year, Daniel Hartley of the Cleveland Fed and Nathan Baum-Snow of Brown University published a novel analysis of what has been called the “Great Inversion”: the shift of higher-income people from the periphery of American metropolitan areas towards the center. (Previously, we covered another excellent visualization of this phenomenon from the University of…
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The Week Observed: July 3, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. Three more takeaways from Harvard’s “The State of the Nation’s Housing” report. Daniel Kay Hertz picks out three important but overlooked findings from the massive study released last week: a nationwide shortage of rental housing is pushing up prices for many black and brown homeowners, home prices are too…
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Paving Paradise
Vancouver and Seattle are regularly rated among the most environmentally conscious cities in North America. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked them among the top five greenest cities in 2012. The State of Washington has enacted a law setting a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2035 (RCW 70.235.20); British Columbia’s…
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Climate concerns crush Oregon highway funding bill
While headlines focus on the nearly-bankrupt federal Highway Trust Fund, state and local departments of transportation across the country are facing declining revenues, maintenance backlogs, and an insatiable desire for funding new projects. As a result, this summer, a number of states are working on new highway funding packages. So far in 2015, eight states…
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Three more takeaways from Harvard’s “State of the Nation’s Housing” report
“The State of the Nation’s Housing 2015,” the report published last week by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, has already garnered a lot of attention. We wrote about how it points to a new “gerontrification” of homeownership, with all the growth in non-renter households predicted to come from the 65+ age range; Emily Badger focused…
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The Week Observed: June 26, 2015
Below is the inaugural issue of The Week Observed, City Observatory’s weekly newsletter. Every Friday, we’ll give you a quick review of the most important articles, blog posts, and scholarly research on American cities. Our goal is to help you keep up with—and participate in—the ongoing debate about how to create prosperous, equitable, and livable cities,…
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The new trend in homeownership: Gerontrification
Two major reports in the last week have painted a stark picture of the future of the US housing market. Last week’s report from the Urban Institute predicted that the decline in homeownership over the past seven years will be “the new normal.” Then, on June 24, Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies released its…
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Portland, the Mission, and the housing affordability debate
It would be tempting to call the eight hours of testimony over a proposed moratorium on housing construction in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and the SF Board of Supervisor’s subsequent failure to approve that moratorium earlier this month, a climactic moment in the battle of two very different perspectives about affordable housing. Tempting, but almost certainly…
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Playing together is getting harder to do
In our CityReport, Less in Common, we explored a key symptom of the decline in social capital: Americans seem to be spending less time playing together. One major driver of this trend is a dramatic privatization of leisure space. Instead of getting together in public parks and pools (or just playing in the street),…
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The Civic Commons & City Success
Why we wrote “Less in Common,” our latest CityReport. We’ve come increasingly to understand the role of social capital in the effective function of cities and urban economies. The success of both local and national economies hinges not just on machines and equipment, skilled workers, a financial system and the rule of law, but also…
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Is gentrification a rare big city malady?
Gentrification is a big issue in a few places, and not an issue at all elsewhere. Big cities with expensive housing are the flashpoint for gentrification. The city-policy-sphere is rife with debate on gentrification. Just in the past weeks, we have a French sociologist’s indictment of bourgeois movement to the central city, the Mayor of…
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The Convention Center Business Turns Ugly
There’s probably no better example of the faddish, “me too” approach to urban economic development than the pursuit by cities of every size for a slice of the convention and trade show business. Cities have built and expanded convention centers for decades, and in the past few years it’s become increasingly popular to publicly subsidize…
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Show Your Work: Getting DOT Traffic Forecasts Out of the Black Box
Traffic projections used to justify highway expansions are often wildly wrong The recent Wisconsin court case doesn’t substitute better models, but it does require DOTs to show their data and assumptions instead of hiding them The road less traveled: Wisconsin Highway 23 There’s a lot of high-fiving in the progressive transportation community about last month’s…
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The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…
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Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them
“Pity the poor city bus,” writes Jacob Anbinder in an interesting essay at The Century Foundation’s website. Anbinder brings some of his own data to a finding that’s been bouncing around the web for a while: that even as American subways and light rail systems experience a renaissance across the country, bus ridership has been…
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Fake city, flawed thinking
There’s little question that technology is important to cities. Without elevators and electricity, for example, it would be almost inconceivable that we could have dense urban centers. So thinking about how advances in technology are likely to affect city success is critically important. And while technology captures our imagination, sometimes we become so fixated on…
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New evidence on integration and economic mobility
It’s unusual to flag an economics article as a “must-read” for general audiences: but if you care about cities and place, and about the prospects for the American Dream in the 21st Century, you owe it to yourself to read this new article by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility:…
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Undercounting the transit constituency
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…
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Baltimore’s problems belong to 2015, not 1968
Think riots destroyed #Baltimore? Entire blocks boarded up. pic.twitter.com/OKSnHXMb9f — Michael Kaplan (@MichaelD_Kaplan) May 1, 2015 Look what the riots did to Baltimore! Oh wait no…These were taken before the riots. Oops. @MayorSRB pic.twitter.com/2iTsnVDf6G — Chels (@BEautifully_C) April 30, 2015 In the wake of violent protests against yet another apparent police killing in Baltimore, variations…
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There’s no such thing as a Free-Way*
(* 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.…
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City of ideas, and the idea of cities
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…
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How we measure segregation depends on why we care
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…
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Gentrification: The state of the debate in 2015
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,”…
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More evidence on city center job growth
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…
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On Baltimore: Concentrated Poverty, Segregation, and Inequality
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…
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Peaks, valleys, and donuts: a great new way to see American cities
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…
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Young People are Buying Fewer Cars
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…
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Our six month anniversary!
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.…
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Want to close the Black/White Income Gap? Work to Reduce Segregation.
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…
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Travis County, TX is booming. Cook County, IL is shrinking. What does that tell us about cities? Not much.
For the last few years, counties at the center of their metropolitan areas have been growing faster than those at the edge. But late last month, the Washington Post‘s Emily Badger – citing analysis by demographer William Frey at the Brookings Institution – reported that the Census’ latest population estimates show that in 2014, the…
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City Observatory Welcomes Daniel Kay Hertz
We’re delighted to announce that Daniel Kay Hertz is joining City Observatory as our new Senior Fellow. Its likely that if you’ve been following the discussions on a wide range of urban issues in the past year or so, you’ve become familiar with his views on his own blog City Notes, and in a range…
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Walkability rankings: One step forward, one step back
To begin, let’s be clear about one thing: we’re huge fans of Walk Score–the free Internet based service that rates every residential address in the United States (and a growing list of other countries) of a scale of 0 to 100, based on their proximity to a series of common destinations. The concept and implementation…
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Should your city build a headquarters hotel?
Around the nation, tourism officials are pushing the construction of publicly subsidized “headquarters” hotels to help fill publicly subsidized convention centers. One person who has tracked this industry carefully is University of Texas at San Antonio professor Heywood Sanders, author of the recent book, Convention Center Follies. In this commentary for City Observatory, Woody shares…
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More evidence of surging city job growth
In February, we released our latest CityReport Surging City Center Job Growth, presenting evidence showing employment growing faster in the city centers of the nation’s largest metros since 2007. Another set of analysts has, independent of our work, produced findings that point to renewed job growth in the nation’s inner city neighborhoods. A new report…
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The Cappuccino Congestion Index
City Observatory, April 1. 2015 A new City Observatory analysis reveals a new and dangerous threat to the nation’s economic productivity: costly and growing coffee congestion. Yes, there’s another black fluid that’s even more important than oil to the functioning of the U.S. economy: coffee. Because an estimated 100 million of us American workers can’t…
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How important is proximity to jobs for the poor?
More jobs are close at hand in cities. And on average the poor live closer to jobs than the non-poor. One of the most enduring explanations for urban poverty is the “spatial mismatch hypothesis” promulgated by John Kain in the 1960s. Briefly, the hypothesis holds that as jobs have increasingly suburbanized, job opportunities are moving…
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Twenty-somethings are choosing cities. Really.
Over at 538, Ben Casselman offers up a provocative, contrarian article “Think Millennials prefer cities? Think Again.” He claims that newly released census data show that, contrary to the “all the hipsters are moving to cities” meme, millennials–like previous generations–are actually migrating towards the suburbs. This is a case where we think the usually reliable…
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On the Road Again
The last few months have witnessed a notable rebound in vehicle miles traveled. The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that for the year ended December, 2014, American’s drove 3.015 trillion miles, up about 1.7 percent from the previous year–the first noticeable increase in driving in more than a decade. The upward trend has led the…
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Who’s Vulnerable to Retail Retrenchment?
This week comes news that Target is laying off 1,700 workers at its Minneapolis headquarters, looking to become leaner and more efficient. It’s just the latest move in a shifting retail landscape in the United States. Target is not just downsizing its headquarters, it’s shifting to smaller urban stores–Target Express. Other retailers like Walmart and…
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Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage
A story published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog last week made the headline claim that “The McMansion is back, and bigger than ever.” The article says that new homes are an average of 1,000 feet larger than in 1982, and that the “death of the McMansion” has been highly exaggerated, as have claims that development…
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Has the Tide Turned?
Last month, City Observatory released a new report—Surging City Center Job Growth—chronicling a widespread rebound in city center jobs. For the first time in decades, job growth in city centers around the country has surpassed the rate of job growth in peripheral areas. In an article called “Fool for the City,” Jacob Anbinder of The…
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Florida’s Biotech Bet
For more than a decade, one of the hottest trends in economic development has been pursuing biotechnology. Cities and states around the nation have made considerable investments in biotech research, ranging from California’s voter-approved $3 billion research program, to smaller efforts in cities around the country, including Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Phoenix. One of the…
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What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”
The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the Smart City banner. But it seems each observer defines “city” in the image of their own profession. CEOs of IT firms say that cities are “a system of systems” and…
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Any Port in a Storm?
Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of media furor over the slowdown in container traffic handling on the West Coast as dockworkers and shipping companies negotiated the new terms of a labor deal. You no doubt heard a fair amount of hyper-ventilation about the economic consequences of disruptions to this international…
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Urban Employment: How does your city compare?
As chronicled in our report here and commentary here, we are seeing evidence of a shift in employment back to city centers. We believe that this is driven by a number of forces, including the increasing preference of young, talented workers for urban living; some of this shift is cyclical and coincides with the fact that more…
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Jobs Return to City Centers
(This post coincides with the newly released report, Surging City Center Job Growth. The report and more details are found here.) For decades, urban economists have chronicled the steady decentralization of employment in our metropolitan areas. First people moved to the suburbs for low density housing, and then businesses followed—especially retail and service businesses that catered…
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The Perils of Conflating Gentrification and Displacement: A Longer and Wonkier Critique of Governing’s Gentrification Issue
It’s telling that Governing calls gentrification the “g-word”—it’s become almost impossible to talk about neighborhood revitalization without objections being raised almost any change amounts to gentrification. While we applaud the attempt to inject some rigor and precision into a debate that has been too often fueled by emotion and anecdote, Governing’s analysis serves only to…
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Best Bar Cities
Great public spaces make great cities. But so do great private spaces. They provide opportunities for people to socialize, and provide the character that make a city more livable and unique. We have already talked about how restaurants add value to a city– but thought we’d look at bars in the same way. Now, what…
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How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 2: Small Business)
We recently featured a post regarding how venture capital is associated with economic mobility. We know that these are strongly correlated—and that, if we are concerned with the ability of children today to obtain ‘The American Dream,’ we should be concerned with how to increase economic mobility. To understand more about how cities can increase…
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How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)
The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues at the Equality of Opportunity project has spurred intense interest in the extent of economic mobility, measured by the likelihood that children born to low-income parents achieve higher economic status when they are adults. Their work shows a remarkable degree of geographic variation in intergenerational economic mobility.…
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How Governing got it wrong: The problem with confusing gentrification and displacement
Here’s a quick quiz: Which of the following statements is true? a) Gentrification can be harmful because it causes displacement b) Gentrification is the same thing as displacement c) Gentrification is a totally different thing than displacement d) All of the above If the only studying you did was a reading of the latest series…
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New Findings on Economic Opportunity (that you should know)
Our recent report, Lost in Place, closely tracks the growth of concentrated poverty in the nation’s cities; this is particularly important because of the widespread evidence of the permanent damage high-poverty neighborhoods do to children of poor families. Two new studies shed additional light on the importance of economic and racial integration to the life…
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Keeping it Weird: The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success
Note: This article appeared originally in the February 13, 2010, edition of The Oregonian. Forgive any anachronistic references. These are tough economic times. Although economists tell us the recession is officially over, a double-digit unemployment rate tells us something different. The bruising battle over the economic consequences of tax Measures 66 and 67 underscored deep disagreement…
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How productive is your city?
Which metropolitan economies are the most productive? Our broadest measure of economic output is gross domestic product — the total value of goods and services produced by our economy. Economists usually compare the productivity of national economies by looking at GDP per worker or per employee. At the sub-national level, the Bureau of Economic Analysis…
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One tip for a prosperous city economy
Local media over the course of the last several months have asked us variations on one question repeatedly: if our city wants to do better – be more productive, retain more young people, reduce poverty—how can it do that? That’s a very complicated question of course, and each metro area and urban core has its…
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You are where you eat.
The Big Idea: Many metro areas vie for the title of “best food city.” But what cities have the most options for grabbing a bite to eat — and what does that say about where you live? There are plenty of competing rankings for best food cities floating around the internet. You can find lists…
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Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place”
In this post, we’ll go over the data and mapping steps that were used to create our Lost In Place report on the concentration of poverty and the interactive web map. This post is one of several commentary posts that accompany the report, including an examination of how poverty has deepened. Data for our report…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 2)
Recently, we discussed the growth in the number of urban high-poverty neighborhoods, which we illustrated by examining the distribution of poverty rates among census tracts. This analysis showed that high poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in urban areas. Today we will use this distribution to discuss what few of us have directly experienced: extremely…
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Is life really better in Red States (and cities)?
The red state/blue state divide is a persistent feature of American politics. Political differences among states are also associated with important economic differences, and a similar patterns hold across and within metro areas. Big cities are more likely to be blue, and smaller towns and rural areas are red. The more densely populated portions of…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1)
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…
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How Should Portland Pay for Streets?
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,…
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Where are the food deserts?
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…
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Happy New Year from City Observatory
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…
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Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data
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…
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How we build our cities: What’s at stake
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…
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Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago?
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…
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Anti-Social Capital?
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…
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How distinct is your city?
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…
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Ten More you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
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…
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Gender Differences in Unemployment
To celebrate the Census Bureau’s release of the 5-year American Community Survey estimate, we decided to do a quick analysis of some of its information. So for some light Friday afternoon reading, we present you with an analysis of unemployment rates by gender throughout the country. The 2009-2013 data spans the Great Recession and its…
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Ten things you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
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 a baker’s dozen of some of the more interesting arguments that have been put forward. Daniel Kay Hertz explores the contradictions that emerge…
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City Report: Lost in Place
Here’s a summary of our latest CityReport: Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. Lost in Place traces the history of high poverty neighborhoods in large US cities, and constructs a new view of the process of neighborhood change. This article summarizes some of our key…
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Metro’s “Why Bother” Climate Change Strategy
If you’ve hung around enough espresso joints, you’ve probably heard someone order a “tall, non-fat decaf latte.” This is what baristas often call a “why bother?” That would also be a good alternate description for the Metro Climate Smart Communities Plan. Framed in glowing rhetoric, the plan purports to be a two-decade long region-wide strategy…
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Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It
If you’ve ever contemplated getting up at 3, 4, or 5 am only to brave large crowds to fight over scarce merchandise, well, think again. Instead of looking into census data this Thanksgiving, we thought we’d look at more “fun” data, specifically, Black Friday shopping habits– and whether or not they make sense. Recently, several…
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Are suburbs really happier?
A few months back our friends at CityLab published the results of a survey looking at differences in attitudes about cities and suburbs under the provocative headline, “Overall, Americans in the suburbs are still the happiest.” Their claim is buttressed with a reported finding that 84 percent of all the respondents in suburbs said that…
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Focus: Detroit’s Young and Restless
Last month, we released our Young and Restless report, tracing the growth of well-educated young adults in in the nation’s largest metro areas. We found that across the nation, college-educated 25 to 34 year olds were much more likely than other metro area residents to choose to live in close-in urban neighborhoods. While the trend…
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Our Shortage of Cities: Portland Housing Market Edition
The big idea: housing in desirable city neighborhoods in getting more expensive because the demand for urban living is growing. The solution? Build more great neighborhoods. To an economist, prices are an important signal about value: rising prices for an object or class of objects signal increasing value relative to other objects. In our conventional supply…
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Parking: The Price is Wrong
There is a central and unacknowledged problem in urban transportation: The price is wrong. Underlying traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, and the shortage of great urban places is the key fact that we charge the wrong price for using roads. Nowhere are the effects of mispriced roads more apparent than on-street parking. Only for car storage…
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The four biggest myths about cities – #4: Traffic is getting worse
The Myth: Traffic congestion is getting worse The Reality: Congestion has declined almost everywhere It’s a common movie trope – a busy commuter rushes out of his downtown office at 5pm, hoping to get only to enter a citywide traffic jam. In reality, traffic congestion across the country has been in steady decline thanks to…
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The four biggest myths about cities – #3: Crime is rising in cities
The Myth: Crime in cities is on the rise The Reality: Cities are getting safer For decades, the common perception about cities is that they were dangerous, dirty, and crowded. A look at the facts tells a different story: our cities are cleaner, safer, quicker, and healthier than ever. Today I’ll take a look at…
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And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . .
Akron, Ohio! With a 20.2 percent increase in post-secondary degrees awarded over the past three years, Akron outpaced the 56 other metro areas entered in the Talent Dividend Prize contest. As the winner of the Talent Dividend Prize, Akron will receive one million dollars to promote further efforts to raise college attainment in Northeast Ohio. …
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The four biggest myths about cities – #2: Cities are dirty
The Myth: Cities are polluted and have dirty air The Reality: Urban air quality has improved dramatically since 1990 For decades, the common perception about cities is that they were dangerous, dirty, and crowded. A look at the facts tells a different story: our cities are cleaner, safer, quicker, and healthier than ever. Today I’ll…
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The four biggest myths about cities – #1 Cities aren’t safe for children
If your impression of cities came entirely from watching the evening news, you might think that cities are saddled with ever-increasing traffic congestion and rising crime rates. From talking to your Great Aunt Ida at Thanksgiving, you’d think that New York was more dangerous for children than the suburbs and that Los Angeles was still…
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Young and Restless: How is your city doing?
We just released our first CityReport looking at the “Young and Restless,” detailing where young talent is going in the U.S.- and why it matters. (Download the report here.) Here we show how the nation’s largest cities do with this important demographic. The Young and Restless–25 to 34 year-olds with a 4-year degree or higher–play…
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Boo! The annual Carmaggedon scare is upon us.
A new report detailing the “costs” of congestion twists the data to become little more than talking points for the highway lobby. For transportation geeks, Halloween came early this year. A new report claims that traffic congestion is costing us $124 billion a year and is “draining” our economy. But just as those ghoul and…
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Welcome to City Observatory!
Welcome to what matters for city success. Our original analysis and in-depth research on cities and urban issues is designed to inform community leaders, policy makers, policy wonks and the rest of us.
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Finding your way around City Observatory
The City Observatory homepage is designed to provide you with access to the latest in urban policy analysis and research, and the background to make sense of it all. At the top of the site, you will find navigation links that will take you to the all of the content that we post on City…
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Is Portland really where young people go to retire?
Forget the quirky, slacker stereotype, the data show people are coming to Portland to start businesses. A recent New York Times magazine article “Keep Portland Broke,” echoed a meme made popular by the satirical television show “Portlandia” asking whether the city will always be a retirement community for the young. Far from being a retirement…
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Our Shortage of Cities
The Big Idea: High housing prices in American cities are a symptom of our shortage of great urban neighborhoods. The tried-and-true solution to a shortage is to supply by building new neighborhoods—places where people want to live.