Commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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