Uncategorized

Must Read Denser cities = Less expensive infrastructure.  A new study from New Zealand confirms one of the fundamental intuitions about cities:  Places with higher levels of residential density have lower per capita and per dwelling costs of providing physical infrastructure.  This study looked at the cost of providing roads, water lines and sewers to […]

Must Read The problem with elevators in America.  Market Urbanism’s Stephen Smith has an op-ed in the New York Times opening up a new front in the YIMBY effort  to expand housing supply in the US.  Smith argues that the development of affordable, sustainable multi-family housing in the US is thwarted by two arcane regulatory

What City Observatory Did This Week Unique Local Experiences: The Hidden Value in Urban Economies. An often-overlooked aspect of urban economics: the value of unique, local, and seasonal experiences. We take as an example the case of Hood strawberries in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, we explore how scarcity and locality can enhance economic and cultural value

Perishable, special, and local: The economics of unique and fleeting experiences I pity you, dear reader.  You likely have no idea what a real strawberry tastes like. Unless you spend the three weeks around  the Summer Solstice in the shadow of this mountain, chances are you have never tasted a Hood strawberry. The Hood is

What City Observatory Did This Week Inventing a “commitment” to megaproject cost-overruns.  Oregon’s Department of Transportation is is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to unapproved freeway s and massive cost overruns. They’re using this fiction to argue that the state is somehow obligated to pay for expensive freeway expansions and can’t first fix

How ODOT is trying to re-write history to create a commitment to freeway cost overruns. The 2017 Legislature authorized zero funding for the I-205 Bridge project In 2024, ODOT now falsely claims that the I-205 project was a “commitment” of the 2017 Legislature The original HB 2017 only directed ODOT to produce a “cost to

What City Observatory Did This Week The Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project is facing significant delays of up to 18 months. The culprit? Flawed traffic modeling that overestimates future traffic use. City Observatory and others have long  pointed up flaws in IBR’s traffic modeling, arguing it overestimates traffic growth and

What City Observatory Did This Week We grade the city clean energy scorecard.  A new scorecard tires to measure how cities are promoting energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gases—a laudable goal. But the scorecard has some serious limitations.This scorecard emphasizes policies and process over measurable progress—only 6 of a possible 250 points are tied directly

What City Observatory Did This Week A costly cargo cult in Portland:  A proposal to spend $30 million per year subsidizing the revival of container shipping operations at the Port of Portland is misguided effort based on outdated economic thinking. Portland was never more than a very minor player in containerized shipping, handling less than

Portland’s $30 Million Container Shipping Folly Cargo cults are a well-documented sociological phenomenon:  Cargo cults were religious movements that emerged among indigenous people in Melanesia during the early to mid-20th century. The cults were inspired by  the arrival of European colonizers and the material goods they brought. The islanders observed the seemingly magical ability of outsiders