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 […]
Who’s really rent-burdened? Read More »
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
Contradictory conclusions and disappearing data Read More »
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
Updated: Is traffic worse now? The “congestion report” can’t tell us Read More »
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
Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens Read More »
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
The Week Observed: August 28, 2015 Read More »
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
New Orleans’ missing black middle class Read More »
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:
UPDATED (again): Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute Read More »
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
Growing e-commerce means less urban traffic Read More »
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
Are racial “tipping points” overblown? Read More »
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
The Week Observed, August 21, 2015 Read More »
