OK, we admit we might be a bit obsessed with this story. But if you can, bear with us one more time. Here’s the most basic fact: The number of newly-built McMansions—single family homes of 4,000 square feet or larger—is down 43 percent since 2007. By any standard that’s a stunning decline. But because the market […]

Last month, we questioned why people weren’t paying more attention to Marietta, the Atlanta suburb that is tearing down 1,300 apartments and permanently displacing their low-income residents. We wondered why this large-scale displacement of poor households—most of whom are black or Latino—didn’t generate the same kind of outcry as much more ambiguous situations in urban

Back in June, we catalogued how riders weren’t really abandoning buses—buses were abandoning their riders, with significant cuts to service in many metropolitan areas that appeared to be driving declines in ridership. Further analysis of transit data since 2000 suggests that bus riders may have another problem: not only are there fewer buses on their

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 weather, but to its war. The name seems to have come from a South Side rapper, but has since been

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 safer streets,” and “faster traffic flow is always better,” have long outlived their usefulness. We offer five of these outdated

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 time saves nine, and that we should allow a little extra following distance when the roads are slick. What purport

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. Macroeconomics gets all the attention in the news cycle, as people talk about the unemployment rate, the money supply, inflation,

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 problems with the most common way “affordable housing” is interpreted: as housing costs that make up no more than

Over the past two posts, we’ve argued that the most common measure of housing affordability – whether someone is paying more than 30% of their income – has a lot of serious problems. For one, housing costs are only one facet of overall location costs: if you move from the city to the suburbs for