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
Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma Read Post »
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
The Week Observed: July 31, 2015 Read Post »
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
The difficulty of applying inequality measurements to cities Read Post »
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
Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs” Read Post »
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.
How cutting back on driving helps the economy Read Post »
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 Week Observed: July 24, 2015 Read Post »
