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 […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

    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

“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

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