What City Observatory did this week 1. Volunteering as a measure of social capital. Thanks to the work of Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and more recently, Our Kids, there’s a growing understanding of the important role of social capital–the relationships and norms of trust and reciprocity–in making our communities and our economy work…

Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with: Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or even metropolitan areas. Government policy should protect residential neighborhoods from things that might negatively impact…

Editor’s note:  City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities.  We first published this post in 2015, but its as timely today as it was then.   by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Mystery in the Bookstore. In cities around the country, there’s been a noticeable rebound in the local bookstore business. After decades of steady decline, this is a pleasant surprise. One metric, the number of members of the national association of independent bookstores confirms this trend. But broader data…

A while back, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The latest from the Louisville travel behavior experiment. Just before the New Year, Louisville started charging tolls to cross its newly-widened I-65 bridge. When it did, traffic across the bridge fell by almost half. Part of the reason was that motorists could take a very short detour and…

Inclusionary zoning programs are too small to make a dent in housing affordability Two of the most respected names in housing research are Lance Freeman and Jenny Schuetz.  Freeman is professor urban planning at Columbia University and author of a series of papers examining neighborhood change, and considering whether and when gentrification leads to the…

What City Observatory did this week 1. How we measure segregation depends on why we care. Daniel Hertz explores the various ways we measure the geographic separation of different racial and ethnic groups. There’s a widely used dissimilarity index, that looks at differences between two groups, like blacks and whites. There are broader measures that…

Why is affordable housing so expensive? In many cities, affordable housing has a problem:  it’s not affordable. California Governor Jerry Brown made that point again, emphatically, with his new state budget. He’s said that he’s not putting any new state resources into subsidizing affordable housing until state and local governments figure out ways to bring…

Your 1,200 word bluffer’s guide to Richard Florida’s new book Richard Florida’s new book “The New Urban Crisis: How our cities are increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and failing the middle class–and what we can do about it,” came out last week. The book touches on many of the issues that are near and dear to…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Too soon to write off city revival? The release of the Census county-level population estimates two weeks ago led to a series of quick-reaction analyses of what the data portend for the “back-to-the-city” movement that’s been seen in the past several years. Unfortunately, county level data is a…

The real disruptive technology for transportation is road-pricing. There’s been a surge of interest in road pricing in the past few weeks. In a new study of growing traffic congestion in New York City, Bruce Schaller attributed traffic delays to the expanding number of Uber and Lyft vehicles on city streets. Given the economics of…

County data can’t tell us much about thriving urban neighborhoods New county-level census population estimates became available last week, and Jed Kolko produced an interesting analysis published by FiveThirtyEight concluding that “America’s Shift to the Suburbs Sped Up last year.”  While there’s nothing wrong with Kolko’s math, we think there are several reasons to believe…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Carmaggedon stalks Atlanta. Following an arson-caused blaze, a key section on Interstate 85 in Atlanta collapsed, and is likely to be out of service for at least a couple of months. Since the roadway carried about a quarter million cars every day, the media were quick to predict…

What City Observatory did this week 1. 13 propositions about autonomous vehicles. Despite occasional setbacks–like last week’s crash of an Uber self-driving car in Phoenix–it looks increasingly likely that autonomous vehicles will play an important role in urban transportation in the not-too-distant future.  There’s a lot to ponder about what effects they might have on…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The US retail industry is getting marked down in a big way, with hundreds of stores operated by well-established chains including Macy’s, J. C. Penney, and the Gap, as well as others, closing or slated for closing in the next few months. By global standards the U.S. is…

The nation’s largest city-centered metro areas are powering national economic growth. 2017 will mark a decade since the peak of the last economic cycle (which according to the National Bureau of Economic Research was December 2007.  Since then, we’ve experienced the Great Recession (the biggest economic downturn in eight decades), and a long and arduous…

Homes with better transit access command higher prices, especially in cities with good transit. Our friends at Redfin, the real estate data and analytics company, have an interesting new report exploring the connection between transit access and home prices. Redfin computes and freely publishes a Transit Score for all of the nation’s houses. Transit Score…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls “cafe urbanism” is at risk if there’s a collapse in the restaurant sector. Apparently, a number of restaurants in…

Which cities move the fastest? Does it matter? The raison d’etre of the highway engineer is making cars go faster. That’s reflected in chronic complaints about traffic congestion, and codified in often misleading studies, like those produced by the Texas Transportation Institute. The latest contribution to the literature on inter-metropolitan differences in transportation system performance…

For a long time, we’ve been critical of the way we commonly talk about housing affordability.  We’ve published a three–part series about why the way we measure housing affordability is all wrong. In particular, we objected to using the 30 percent ratio of housing prices to income as the benchmark of “affordable,” basically because depending on…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Shrinking offices: What it means for cities. Its not just you’re imagination: offices are becoming less common and smaller, and a variety of space-sharing and space-saving practices are taking hold in businesses around the nation. The number of square feet of office space leased per new office employee…

La-La Land voters deal a crushing defeat to a “NIMBYism on steroids”  The latest returns show Los Angeles’ Measure S–the self-styled “Neighborhood Integrity Initiative”–failing by a 31 percent “Yes” to 69 percent “No” margin. If it had passed, Measure S was predicted  to bring new housing development in Los Angeles to a screeching halt for the…

What City Observatory did this week 1. More flawed congestion rankings. Traffic analysis firm Inrix released yet another report purporting to estimate the dollar cost of congestion and ranking the world’s cities from most to least traffic burdened. Our review shows that the report suffers from many of the same problems that plagued its predecessors. Chief…

Truck freight movement gets a subsidy of between $57 and $128 billion annually in the form of uncompensated social costs, over and above what trucks pay in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. If trucking companies paid the full costs associated with moving truck freight, we’d have less road damage and congestion, fewer crashes,…

Big data provides little insight Cue the telephoto lens compressed photo of freeway traffic; it’s time for yet another report painting a picture of the horrors inflicted on modern society by traffic congestion. This latest installment comes from traffic data firm Inrix, which uses cell phone, vehicle tracking and GPS data to estimate the speed…

What City Observatory did this week 1.Busting the urban myth about high income housing and affordability. One of the most widespread beliefs about housing is that the construction of new high income housing somehow makes the housing affordability problem worse. Widely believed, but wrong. We marshal the economic evidence for filtering–how as apartments and houses…

After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series ended last year. If you didn’t see the show-and it lives on at Youtube, of course–co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman constructed elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, it…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Anti-social capital. You’re probably familiar with the term “social capital” which Robert Putnam popularized with his book Bowling Alone. In it Putnam devised a series of indicators that show the extent to which we associate with and trust one another, ranging from membership in clubs and civic organizations…

At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…

Conflicting data sources present very different pictures of young adult migration rates The Pew Research Center presented an analysis of census data reporting that today’s young adults are less likely to move in a given year than were their predecessors. A new article from Pew concludes: “Americans are moving at historically low rates, in part…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The persistence of talent. City Observatory regularly stresses the strong connection between educational attainment and economic success at the metro level. We step back and look at how education attainment has influenced state level economic success over the past 25 years. The data shows that the fraction of…

What stories do we tell ourselves about the kind of world we want to live in? In his recent presidential address to the American Economics Association, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller talked about “narrative economics.”   He argues that economists, like other disciplines need to begin to recognize that human cognition is structured around story-telling. ”…

What City Observatory did this week 1.What HOT Lanes tell us about the value of travel time. The economic underpinning of claims that traffic congestion costs Americans billions and billions of dollars each year is the assumption that travelers would value time savings at about half their average wage rate, or around $15 per hour.…

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…

Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute, and traffic monitoring firms like Inrix and Tom-Tom trot out scary sounding reports that claim that Americans lose billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of time sitting in traffic. And just as regularly, highway advocates parrot these dire sounding numbers as the justification for spending billions and billions…

What City Observatory did this week 1.How urban geometry creates neighborhood identity. Our colleague Daniel Hertz is back this week with an examination of the way we look at and think about neighborhood identities. He points out that in many urban neighborhoods the amount of land taken up by single family homes creates the impression…

Just say the words “urban renewal” and you immediately conjure up images of whole neighborhoods–usually populated by poor families and people of color being dislocated by big new publicly funded development projects. It seems like a relic of the past.  But it appears to be getting a new lease on life in the suburbs. For…

The number of young adults is increasing, not declining, and a larger share of them are living in cities. Yesterday’s New York Times Upshot features a story from Conor Dougherty–”Peak Millennial? Cities Can’t Assume a Continued Boost from the Young.” It questions whether the revival in city living is going to ebb as millennials age,…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The long journey toward greater equity in transportation. The observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday got us thinking about how far we’ve come–and how far we have yet to go–having a truly equitable society. We reviewed two recent studies that address lingering racial disparities in transportation. The first…

You know the feeling: you’re thirsty, you’re primed for a cool, refreshing beverage, and the anticipation has your taste buds tingling. But you pop the cap on the bottle only to find that the beer has turned skunky.  It’s very disappointing.  Well, we had a small taste of funky beer a couple of week back at…

January 17 is the day we celebrate the life and dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  This year is also the first year that we’re observing a national day of racial healing. We thought we’d take a minute to reflect on two recent studies that provide some strong statistical evidence for the unfortunate persistence of…

What City Observatory did this week 1. How diverse are the neighborhoods white people live in? Data from the newly released 5-year American Community Survey tabulations give us an updated picture of the demographics of urban neighborhoods. A new report from the Brookings Insitutiton’s Bill Frey shows that the typical US metropolitan area is continually…

At City Observatory, we post several new commentaries each week on a variety of urban themes, and aim to provide discrete, coherent analyses of specific questions, and contributing to the policy dialog about cities. At the start of a new year, we’d like to pull back a bit, and reflect on what we think we’ve…

What City Observatory did this week 1. A Toast to 2017:  Beer and Cities. Its traditional to begin the New Year with a delicious beverage, and more and more Americans are choosing to celebrate with a locally brewed ale. That’s gotten much easier in the past decade, as microbreweries have flourished around the country. Microbreweries…

In the middle of The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn—a book published in 2011, but no less relevant today—Suleiman Osman turns the tables on the people who have long been the heroes of urbanist lore. Speaking of the insurgent middle-class professionals who, starting in the 1950s and 60s, began to organize to stop to the massive…

Plans to subsidize renters and homebuyers will likely just fuel housing cost inflation Rising rents and home prices are becoming unbearable–or at least politically unpalatable–in cities around North America.  Over the past year, two Pacific Northwest cities, Portland and Vancouver, have seen some of the biggest rent and home price increases anywhere. Portland’s reported double…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The illegal city of Somerville. Just outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Somerville is one of the most sought after suburbs in the Boston area. It has a combination of attractive neighborhoods and dense housing, nearly all of it the legacy of the city’s 19th and early 20th century roots.…

A crazy toll structure that encourages more driving. Kentucky and Indiana have just put the finishing touches on two new bridges crossing the Ohio River.  Built at a cost of about $2.6 billion, the bridge project also includes a rebuilding “Spaghetti Junction” an elaborate system of on- and off-ramps in Louisville, where I-65 and I-64…

Here’s a highway success story, as told by the folks who build highways. Several years ago, the Katy Freeway in Houston was a major traffic bottleneck. It was so bad that in 2004 the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) called one of its interchanges the second worst bottleneck in the nation wasting 25 million hours…

Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and…

What City Observatory did this week 1. A rebound in millennial car-buying?. Stories purporting to debunk the tendency of younger adults to move to cities, buy fewer houses and drive less seem to have great appeal to editors everywhere. We look into recent reports claiming that ride-sharing millennials crave car ownership after all.  A recent…

City Observatory has its own modest proposals for making “Smart City” streets safer. Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country.  While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road carnage, there’ve been good reasons to be…

Except for boomers, we’re all less likely to be buying new cars today One of the favorite “we’re-going-to-debunk-the-claims-about-millenials-being-different” story ideas that editors and reporters seem to love is pointing out that millennials are actually buying cars.  Forget what you’ve heard about bike-riding, bus-loving, Uber-using twenty-somethings, we’re told, this younger generation loves its cars, even if…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban transportation’s camel problem.   Naive optimism is the order of the day in speculating about the future of urban transportation.  In theory, some combination of autonomous vehicles, fully instrumented city streets, and transportation network companies will help us solve all of our problems, from congestion to traffic fatalities…

This month, traffic counters in Copenhagen pointed to an important milestone. According to their data, for the first time, the number of trips taken by bicycle in the city surpassed the number of trips taken by car.  The Guardian reports–“Two-wheel takeover: bikes outnumber cars for the first time in Copenhagen.”–that the number of bike trips…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Pollution and poor neighborhoods. Environmental justice advocates point out–quite correctly–that poor neighborhoods tend to suffer much higher levels of pollution than the typical neighborhood. While this is often due to the callous indifference of public officials to the plight of the poor and people of color (as well as…

Why Portland’s proposed inclusionary zoning plan will likely make housing less affordable As we reported in September, Portland Oregon is moving ahead with plans to enact an inclusionary housing requirement. Briefly, the proposal would require all newly constructed apartment buildings with 20 or more units to set aside 20 percent of units for housing affordable…

Higher minimum wages result in greater earnings for low wage workers, and no loss of jobs We’re always casting about for effective policies to address poverty. And there’s new evidence that higher minimum wages accomplish just that.  In a new review of the literature and data by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers shows that…

Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal came out with another eye-catching headline story in the city versus suburbs battle of the bands:  “Suburbs outstrip cities in population growth, study finds. Big cities may be getting all the attention, but the suburbs are holding their own in the battle for population and young earners.  . . .…

It’s been widely noted that poor neighborhoods tend to bear a disportioncate share of the exposure to environmental disamenities of all kinds. In the highway building era of the 1950s and 1960s, states and cities found it cheaper and politically easier to route new roads through poor neighborhoods, not only dislocating the local populace, but…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Does Rent Control Work: Evidence from Berlin.  Economists are nearly unanimous about rent control:  they think it doesn’t work. Berlin’s recent adoption of a new rent control scheme in 2015 provides a new test case to see if they’re right.  An early analysis of the Berlin program shows that…

Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…

Affordable housing is in short supply in many US cities, perhaps nowhere more chronically than in New York City.  Even though New York has more public housing than any other US city, the demand for subsidized units is far greater than supply. As a result, the city regularly conducts lotteries to allocate available units to…

Yesterday was, famously, cyber-Monday, the day in which the nation’s consumers took to their web-browsers and started clicking for holiday shopping in earnest. Tech Crunch reports that estimated e-commerce sales will yesterday were predicted at $3.36 billion, coming on top of almost $5 billion in on-line sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. The steady growth…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  The rise of global neighborhoods.  A new paper published in Demography by Wenquan Zhang and John Logan traces out the changes in the racial and ethnic composition of US neighborhoods over the past three decades. Their chief finding: more and more American’s live in multi-ethnic “global neighborhoods”—places that…

At City Observatory, we’ve long maintained that the location patterns of talented young workers are an economically important signal.  (You can read our report on “The Young and Restless here).  Well-educated young adults are the most mobile people in our society, and are flexible, adaptable, and have recent vintage human capital, and generally command lower…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Daytime and nighttime segregation. Economic, racial and ethnic segregation are persistent features of the American metropolis. Most studies measure segregation using Census data on place of residence, but that’s at best an incomplete picture of the way different groups interact in urban space. Using data from social media,…

Fundamentally, the nation’s housing affordability problems are due to demand outpacing supply:  there’s more demand to live in some cities–and especially in great urban neighborhoods–than can be met from the current supply of housing, especially apartments. As demand surges ahead of supply, rents get bid up, which is the most visible manifestation of the affordability…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  A tax credit for renters.  The Terman Center for Housing Innovation at the UC Berkeley has come up with three fleshed-out and cost-estimated models for providing tax credits for low income renters.  The FAIR tax credit would help rectify the strong tilt in the tax system toward home…

Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course!   Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…

A new proposal from Berkeley’s Terner Center aims to broaden favorable tax treatment for housing to include the nation’s renters Our tax code is highly skewed towards homeownership.  Between the deductions for mortgage interest expenses and property taxes, the exclusion of capital gains on sales of homes, and the non-taxation of the imputed rent of owner-occupied homes,…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  The myth of a revealed preference for suburban living. It’s often argued that most Americans must prefer to live in suburbs because so many persons do so. We take a close look at this thesis, and summarize some key research findings from work of Jonathan Levine, which explore…

We love scary stories. That’s what Halloween was all about–dressing up as something terrifying, if only for a day. Being scary one day a year can be fun. But constant scaremongering is one way that attitudes and beliefs become detached from facts, in ways that can have truly negative effects. Lately, the presidential campaign has gotten…

If so many people live in suburbs, it must be because that’s what they prefer, right? But the evidence is to the contrary. One of the chief arguments in favor of the suburbs is simply that that is where millions and millions of people actually live. If so many Americans live in suburbs, this must…

What City Observatory did this week 1.Measuring Walkability:  Non-car modes of transportation have always been at a disadvantage in policy discussions because of a profound lack of widely available quantitative measures of walkability, and because all of the metrics developed to guide transportation focused on moving cars. That’s begun to change with the advent of…

Last week, we noticed a small item on Streetsblog: “Where Walk Score falls short.” Because we’re keenly interested in to walkability, and routinely use Walk Score to benchmark walkable places, we clicked the link. It took us to a blog entry from Mariela Alfonzo asking “Does walk score walk the walk?” Dr. Alfonzo has been…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Cities for Everyone:  Our Birthday Wish.  October 15 marked City Observatory’s second birthday. We reviewed some of the highlights of the past year, focusing on the growing evidence of the economic resurgence building around the nation’s cities. For the coming year, we’re planning on focusing on what it…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  More evidence job growth is shifting to city centers.  A recent paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Daniel Hartley has some interesting data on the pattern of job growth in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. They find that while suburban area job growth greatly outpaced that of the central…

There’s a revolution afoot in transportation.  Transportation network companies, aka “ridesharing” firms, like Uber and Lyft are disrupting both the markets for urban transportation and labor markets.  Their business model–treating drivers as independent contractors, is fueling the so-called “gig economy.”  A new report from the Brookings Institution uses federal tax and administrative records to plot…

As regular readers of City Observatory already know, the use, misuse and abuse of real estate price indices is one of our pet peeves. We’ve repeatedly excoriated Abodo, Zumper and others for mis-representing median values calculated from their apartment listings, as rental inflation gauges, because they work more like random number generators than measures of…

One trend we’ve tracked at City Observatory has been the movement of jobs back to city centers. While there are an increasing number of examples of prominent firms moving downtown — GE abandoning its suburban campus for a location in Boston’s Seaport district, McDonalds moving from Oak Brook to a site near Chicago’s Loop —…

What City Observatory did this week 1.  Bubble Logic.  A major and persistent change in the housing market from a decade ago has been the decline in the number of “trade-up” home-buyers. While some fret that recent first-time homebuyers have become locked in to so-called starter homes, we point out that in many ways, trade-up…

Every few months, the national prize pool in the multi-state Powerball lottery piles up to tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Early this year, three lucky winners split a prize with a total value of $1.6 billion dollars. Bucking odds of about one in 262 million, Marvin and Mae Acosta’s purchase of a…

We shouldn’t expect the return of the trade-up buyer anytime soon. Is the American homebuyer increasingly stuck in a starter home? That’s the premise of a recent commentary from the Urban Institute “Do we have a generation stuck in starter homes?” Looking at data on the share of home mortgages going to first time home…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Where are African-American entrepreneurs?  A new Census Bureau survey, undertaken in cooperation with the Kauffman Foundation provides a detailed demographic profile of the owners of the nation’s businesses. It reports that there are about 108,000 African-American owned businesses with paid employees (i.e., not counting self-employed entrepreneurs). We look…

We confess:  we’re data geeks.  We love data that shows how cities work, and that give depth and precision to our understanding of policy problems.  But truth be told, most data we — and other analysts — work with is second-hand:  its data that somebody else gathered, usually for some other purpose,  that uses definitions…

What City Observatory did this week 1. America’s most creative metros, ranked by Kickstarter campaigns. One of the most popular ways to raise funds for a new creative project–music, a video, an artistic endeavor, or even a clever new product–is Kickstarter. Website Polygraph.cool has created an impressive visualization of nearly 100,000 kickstarter campaigns. We use…

  Its apparent to almost everyone that the US has a growing housing affordability problem. And its generating more public attention and public policy discussions. Recent proposals to address housing affordability in California by Governor Jerry Brown and in New York, by Mayor Bill de Blasio have stumbled in the face of local opposition. Its…

The fundamental conundrum underlying many of our key urban problems is the conflict between broadly shared regional interests and impacts in local communities. While we generally all share an interest in housing affordability, and therefore it makes sense that we ought to support an expansion of housing supply in our region, it becomes a different…

One of the cleverest adaptations of web-technology is the development of crowd-sourced funding for new products and business ideas.  The biggest of these crowd-sourced funding platforms is Kickstarter, which since its launch in 2009, has generated funding for ideas like the pebble smartwatch, the “coolest” cooler and a revival of the Mystery Science Theater 3000…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth. There was great news in this week’s Census report: After years of stagnation, average household income saw its largest one-year gain on record (5.2 percent). But underlying that story was another one: household incomes in central cities surged even faster…

What if we could make parking spaces in high-demand areas more widely available, while also making better use of under-used parking spaces elsewhere? Think of it as Uber’s “surge pricing,” but for parking. (Though it elicits some grumbles from a consumer perspective, we think surge pricing can make lots of sense: it encourages more efficient…

What should cities do to tackle growing housing affordability problems? Is inclusionary zoning a good way to provide more affordable housing, or will it actually worsen the constrained housing supply that’s a big cause of higher rents?     In the next few months, the city of Portland, Oregon will be considering the terms of a new…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Counting Women Entrepreneurs.  The Census Bureau has just released the results of its new survey of entrepreneurs, and we report its key findings on the extent and geography of women-owned businesses.  There are more than 1.1 million women-owned businesses with more than 5 million employees; about one in…

Affordable housing is an issue rife with statistics: median rents, median housing costs, percentage of people who are “housing cost burdened,” and so on. Previously, we’ve written about some of the issues with many of these statistics, including the untrustworthiness of most “median rent” reports and which rent statistics are more trustworthy. But another issue—which…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Which cities and metros shop most at small retail firms? A new “big data” set from the JPMorganChase Institute offers some answers. It uses 16 billion transactions from the bank’s customers in 15 metro areas to estimate the share of retail spending that goes to businesses of different sizes…

We’ve all been paying a lot more attention to developments in Britain since June’s Brexit vote. As we noted at the time, some of the same kinds of political divides that play out in America—between globally-integrated, knowledge driven cities and more rural areas that are older, less-educated—also happen in Britain. (Population density helps explain the…

You might not think it, but New York City has a below-market affordable housing infrastructure that most other cities can only dream of. As one of the only major American cities not to tear down large amounts of its legacy public housing, it has nearly 180,000 units. Many more are in other below-market housing programs.…

What City Observatory did this week 1. How economically integrated is your city? It keeps getting clearer: Mixed-income neighborhoods are an important force in helping more kids escape poverty. So has economic integration been getting worse or better? A study this year by Kendra Bischoff and Sean Reardon found that income integration has declined in virtually…

Generally, parking is thought of as a transportation and urban design issue, involving tradeoffs between easing access to a place by car while potentially imposing greater social costs by discouraging other modes and, sometimes, degrading the pedestrian environment and spreading out neighborhoods and entire cities. There’s no shortage of parking craters nominated to compete in…

The biggest single factor determining the success of a city’s economy is how well-educated is its population. As the global economy has shifted to knowledge-based industries, the jobs with the best pay have increasingly gone to those with the highest levels of education and skill. For a long time, we’ve been talking about the talent…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. We’ve hit the peak of summer driving season, and also the 103rd consecutive week of falling year-on-year gas prices. Though the 39 percent drop in gas prices over the last two years has led to only 4 percent more driving per person (so…

Its a truism that the zip code that you are born in (or grow up in) has a lot to do with your life chances. If you’re born to a poor household, a neighborhood with safe streets, good schools, adequate parks and public services, and especially some healthy and successful peers and neighbors has a…

One of the chief arguments in favor of the suburbs is simply that that is where millions and millions of people actually live. If so many Americans live in suburbs, this must be proof that they actually prefer suburban locations to urban ones. The counterargument, of course, is that people can only choose from among…

City Observatory believes in using data to understand problems and fashion solutions. But sometimes the quantitative data that’s available is too limited to enable us to see what’s really going on. And incomplete data can lead us to the wrong conclusions. Our use of data is subject to what we call the “drunk under the…

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., has ordered new ridership projections for the proposed Purple Line light rail line, which will connect a series of Maryland suburbs. Like any multi-billion dollar project that serves a densely settled metropolitan area—and this one connects some of its wealthiest suburbs—there’s…

Readers of the Aug. 19 Week Observed: here’s the piece you’re looking for. Here’s a puzzle: If 89 percent of Apple’s ideas are invented in the U.S., why is 92 percent of its profit overseas? The link between local economies and tax bases has long been obvious and physical. Companies paid property taxes on their…

Last summer, we told here the story of Marietta, Georgia, where local officials used $65 million in taxpayer funds to buy up and begin demolishing some 1,300 apartments along Franklin Road. This is a striking case where the displacement of low income families was an explicit objective of public policy, rather than the side-effect of…

In the first installment of this two-part series, we investigated what each of the major party platforms had to say about a crucial urban policy issue: housing. This time, we’re taking a look at another major concern for American cities: transportation. (It’s also definitely worthwhile to read what other people have written on the subject,…

Back in 2009, in the darkest days of the Great Recession, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke attempted to reverse the economic pessimism that gripped the nation. He pointed to what he called “green shoots,” small bits of good news around the country. To him, the green shoots showed that the economy was turning around, the…

Making a market for shared mobility services Yesterday, we urged cities to think hard about how they can craft the rules for the transportation network companies that offer “ride sharing” systems to maximize competition, and encourage innovation and low prices.  “Let a thousand Ubers bloom,” we said.   The rules and regulations that cities set…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Economist Paul Romer Joins the World Bank.  Paul Romer, a leading exponent of the New Growth Theory has been hired as chief economist for the World Bank. We explore how his thinking about the role of knowledge-driven growth and the key role of cities in fostering institutional and…

When we talk about gentrification, we often focus on housing. But another major concern is the effects of rising prices on retail—both because of what it means about the accessibility of goods and services for local residents, and because of questions of “community character.” The Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank’s recent symposium on gentrification included a…

Urban policy conversations are largely focused on local policy, though we at City Observatory have occasionally argued that more attention ought to be paid to state and federal policy. We haven’t had much to say about the presidential candidates themselves this year, but one exercise that’s worth paying a bit of attention to is the…

Suddenly, we’re awash in calculators. Housing calculators. If you’re a Baby Boomer, you remember the day you saw your first electronic calculator. It had an electronic display–red or green light-emitting diode segments, usually eight or ten of them that would display numbers, arithmetic operators and a decimal point. They had a few hard-to-press chicklet type…

Today we’re getting really wonky. Paul Romer, who’s currently at New York University’s Marron Institute has just been appointed to be the chief economist for the World Bank. Personnel decisions involving technocratic positions at global NGOs is about as wonky as it gets, of course. But this is a genuinely interesting development, especially if you’re…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Homeownership:  A failed wealth creation strategy.  Its an article of faith that owning a home is the most reliable route to wealth building in the US.  But this hasn’t been true over the past decade, and its especially problematic for low income households and minorities. The housing market…

Last April, I wrote my first ever post for City Observatory, which unfortunately began with a David Foster Wallace quote. But it was up and up from there. Over the last year-plus here, City Observatory has given me an incredible platform to explore urban issues in public, combining intellectual rigor with a variety of subject…

Recently, we made the case that promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal…

It’s an article of faith in some quarters—well, most quarters—that in the United States, owning a home ought to be a surefire way to build wealth. Whether it’s presidents, anti-poverty groups, foundations, or realtors, we’re always being told that that homeownership is the foundation of the American dream, and a key way secure one’s financial…

What City Observatory did this week 1. How safe will the autonomous cars of the future be? The first-ever fatal collision involving a Tesla running on autopilot mode has prompted a debate on that subject. On the one hand, hand-wringing over an uncertain threat may seem somewhat out of place given the normalization of the…

Westchester County, the mostly wealthy suburbs just north of New York City, is at the epicenter of one of the nation’s leading court battles over housing segregation. Last week, the New York Times reported that seven years since the Justice Department accused many of the county’s municipalities of using exclusionary zoning laws and other policies to…

Earlier, we wrote about the first fatal crash of a partly-self-driving car. A Tesla, operating on autopilot mode, failed to detect a semi-trailer crossing in its path, and the resulting collision killed its human driver. The crash has provoked a great deal of discussion in the media about safety data, the potential for future technology,…

Late last month, the Illinois General Assembly passed legislation allowing what may become one of the largest transit value capture measures in the US. “Value capture” is a transit funding mechanism based on the idea that public transit creates broad social benefits—from more housing demand to swifter commerce in newly accessible shopping districts—and ought to…

Last week, sadly, two tragic deaths represented unfortunate, but predictable firsts in transportation. They are also reminders that despite the very real potential benefits of new technology, operating large metal objects at high speeds is an inherently dangerous activity, and public safety is best served by reducing people’s exposure to the risk—which means designing urban…

The Week Observed recently celebrated its first birthday! At the end of June 2015, we sent our first roundup of the most important urbanist news to about 700 people; since then, we’ve faithfully published a new issue every Friday, and we’re proud that today’s message will reach over 1,600 subscribers in every part of the…

One of the first “urbanist” blogs I found was Copenhagenize. It’s a brilliantly simple name that carries its argument in a single word: Here is a place, Copenhagen, that does something right, so let’s be more like them. The thing Copenhagenize has in mind is biking. From particular styles of bike lanes, to more general…

At City Observatory, we love fat reports full of data, especially when they shed light on important urban policy issues. Last week, we got the latest installment in a long-running series of annual reports on housing produced by Harvard’s Joint Center on Housing Studies (JCHS). The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2016—aka SONH2016—presents copious details…

For most Americans, public transit basically has three virtues. The first two cater to liberal sensibilities: it’s environmentally friendly, and because it’s cheap, it’s effectively a sort of transportation safety net for the poor. On top of those feel-good benefits, there’s a “business” case, which is that public transit is good for economic development. These…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week’s big news was Brexit: the vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. What does that have to do with urban policy on our side of the Atlantic? Well, it turns out that just as urban density predicts voting behavior in America, with denser…

Last summer, we flagged a fascinating study by Fitch Investment Advisers which tracked twenty five years of home price data, stratified by the “urbanness” of housing. Fitch showed that particularly since 2000, home prices in neighborhoods in the center of metropolitan areas increased in value relative to all other metropolitan housing. We termed the price…

Over the past three weeks, we’ve introduced the “sprawl tax”—showing how much more Americans pay in time and money because of sprawling urban development patterns. We’ve also shown how much higher the sprawl tax is in the US than in other economically prosperous countries, and how sprawl and long commutes impose a psychological, as well…

Last week’s big news was Britain’s decision, via referendum, to leave the European Union. The results of the vote lead Prime Minister Cameron to resign and sent markets reeling, and it’s still unclear what the ultimate economic and political effects will be. For some keen, if depressing, insight on the ramifications of Brexit, you may…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban housing is a massive asset. How massive? Well, a comparison to the valuation of our nation’s biggest corporations shows it’s no comparison at all—housing in major cities has them beat, often handily: housing in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas is worth about $22 trillion, versus $8.8 trillion…

For advocates of less restrictive building regulations, especially in high-cost cities where more homes might help bring down housing prices and create more equitable, diverse neighborhoods, state governments often seem like the best bet. At a local level, for reasons we’ve explained before, the politics are incredibly difficult—not least because local elected officials represent nearly…

We got quite a bit of interest on our post last week about how the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts had written itself a zoning code that would have prevented the construction of virtually the entire city of 80,000 people if it had been adopted at its founding. According to Somerville’s own planning department, just 22…

Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on how we fuel the process of innovation. At City Observatory, we think this matters to…

What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe the current…

What City Observatory did this week 1. In previous installments of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we’ve calculated the billions of dollars that longer distances between homes and workplaces cost American commuters, and shown that US workers pay more for transportation, and spend more time getting to and from their jobs, than peers in other rich…

A little while ago, in a post called “Sprawl beyond zoning,” we argued that even though Houston doesn’t technically have a zoning code, it still regulates the built environment in lots of ways that make it difficult or impossible to safely or conveniently get around without a car. But we also promised to get into…

Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and macro effects of growth rates and…

This is the text of a speech delivered in Detroit last week at the Congress for New Urbanism conference by Carol Coletta, a senior fellow at the Kresge Foundation’s American Cities Practice. Could there be a more apt place to observe “The Transforming City” than Detroit? On behalf of Rip Rapson and my colleagues at…

In the first installment of our “Sprawl Tax” series, we explained how laws and patterns of development that make our homes, businesses, and schools farther apart cost us time and money—on average, nearly $1,400 a year per commuter in America’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. In the second installment, we showed how the Sprawl Tax is…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last week, we introduced the “Sprawl Tax”: the time and money American commuters spend just because their cities are more spread out than they might be. This week, we compare American sprawl to that of our international peers, and it’s not pretty. On average, in 17 European countries…

One of the first posts I ever wrote for City Observatory was called “Undercounting the transit constituency,” and it made a simple point: We dramatically undercount the number of people who depend on public transit to get around. While we usually talk about transit use in terms of the number of people who ride a…

There’s little question that housing affordability is a growing problem in many cities around the country. Rents have been rising faster than incomes, especially for low- and moderate-income households. One of the most widely touted policy responses is “inclusionary zoning,” which requires developers who build new housing to set aside at least a portion (typically…

In our first post on the “Sprawl Tax,” we’ve explored the ways that our decisions about how to build American cities have imposed significant costs—in money, time, and quality of life—on all of us. We pay more to drive more, spend more time traveling instead of being at our destinations, and as a result deal…

What City Observatory did this week 1. In real life, somehow, Google patented sticky cars so that when their autonomous vehicles hit pedestrians, they won’t get thrown into the air, but will rather be pinned to the vehicle’s hood. In the spirit of helpfulness, we have diagrammed some other solutions Google might want to investigate,…

If you read the news, you’ve probably seen reports about “congestion costs”: how much American commuters pay, in money and time, when they’re stuck in traffic. It’s fair to say that we’ve got some issues with many of these reports—but they’re popular nonetheless, perhaps because they help quantify a frustration that so many people can…

For many, it’s all but a certainty that our world will soon be full of self-driving cars. While Google’s self-driving vehicles have an impressive safety record in their limited testing, it’s just a matter of time until one is involved in a serious crash that injures someone in a vehicle, or a pedestrian. So, in…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Last month, we released the Storefront Index, a report that catalogued the nation’s retail clusters and provided a window into the spatial organization of an important part of Jane Jacobs’ famous “sidewalk ballet.” This week, we lifted the curtain a bit to explain how we built the index,…

At first blush, it’s a bit confusing: Why, in a region that desperately needs more affordable housing, would there be so much opposition to a proposed law that would make it easier to build affordable housing? The proposal in question was offered up last week by California Governor Jerry Brown as part of the state’s…

A trio of reports released in the past week provide new data showing the economic strength of the nation’s cities. Whether we look at population growth, new business formation, or job creation, big cities, urban centers and close-in urban neighborhoods are big drivers of national growth. While the data are drawn from different sources and…

As recently as the years 2002 to 2007, outlying urban neighborhoods and suburbs experienced much faster job growth than urban cores. But as a February 2015 City Observatory report, “Surging City Center Job Growth,” documented, that pattern reversed from 2007 to 2011, with urban cores overtaking more peripheral areas and maintaining positive job growth through…

What City Observatory did this week 1. What’s the relationship between urban sprawl, income segregation, and economic opportunity? A recent study by Reid Ewing and colleagues at the University of Utah used an innovative new measure of sprawl to correlate with economic outcomes of low-income children, and found a strong positiveassociation between compactness—that is, un-sprawl—and…

The US faces a shortage of cities. More and more Americans, especially talented, young workers with college degrees, are looking to live in great urban locations. As we’ve explored at City Observatory, the demand for urban living has increased faster than the supply of great urban spaces—with the predictable result that the price of land…

There’s more evidence that housing market supply is beginning to catch up to demand in a way that is likely to moderate rent increases. Nothing, it seems, is more infuriating to those caught in a market of steady rent hikes that being lectured by some economist that what is needed to resolve the problem is…

Every once in a while, someone writes something that makes a murky, complicated, frustrating issue seem crystal clear. This post by Eric Fischer is one of those. Doing yeoman’s work, Fischer transcribed decades’ worth of San Francisco housing prices and other data. Among his findings: Though we talk about the Bay Area’s housing crisis as…

What City Observatory did this week 1. A new study from Stanford Business School claims that society reaps the greatest benefits from low-income housing when that housing is built in the lowest-income neighborhoods—as opposed to integrating it within higher-income neighborhoods. But there are a number of caveats and concerns we have with the study. For…

WASHINGTON, DC – Citing safety concerns, today Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx announced he was contemplating the closure of roads to all private vehicles in nearly every city in the country until he could assure the nation’s drivers that they would be safe behind the wheel. The announcement comes on the heels of comments by…

A new study has run the numbers, and has concluded that social welfare is optimized by putting affordable housing in very poor neighborhoods, rather than wealthier (and especially whiter) ones. Authored by Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade of the Stanford School of Business, the study really has two major conclusions. First, building affordable housing in…

What City Observatory did this week 1. At City Observatory, we’re interested in hard numbers—but we’re also interested in the human community and public spaces that cities can create. As we did in April with “Lost in Place,” on Monday we introduced an easy-to-share infographic of our report “Less in Common.” It summarizes many of…

For us at City Observatory, one of the most interesting (and fun) parts of our work comes after we’ve finished a Commentary or Report, and we get to watch others react and respond to its findings and arguments. “The Storefront Index,” the report on urban customer-facing business clusters that we released last month, is a…

What City Observatory did this week 1. This week, we were proud to release City Observatory’s latest report: The Storefront Index. The Storefront Index maps and tallies every “storefront” business in the 51 largest US metropolitan areas, showing where clusters of customer-facing retailers create vibrant, flourishing neighborhood and regional commercial districts. The analysis highlights the…

Earlier this week, we introduced the Storefront Index, a measure of the location and clustering of customer-facing retail and service businesses. A primary use of the index is to identify places that have the concentration of retail activity that we generally associate with a vibrant neighborhood commercial area, and that can support a high level…

Yesterday, we introduced our latest report, The Storefront Index, which aims to quantify and map one aspect of a neighborhood’s vibrant street life—customer-facing businesses—in every neighborhood in the 51 largest metropolitan areas in the country. The Washington Post wrote more about it here. To illustrate one way the Storefront Index can help illuminate urban planning…

As Jane Jacobs so eloquently described it in The Death and Life of American Cities, much of the essence of urban living is reflected in the “sidewalk ballet” of people going about their daily errands, wandering along the margins of public spaces (streets, sidewalks, parks and squares) and in and out of quasi-private spaces (stores,…

Hot on the heels of claims that Millennials are buying houses come stories asserting that Millennials are suddenly big car buyers. We pointed out the flaws in the home-buying story earlier this month, and now let’s take a look at the car market. The Chicago Tribune offered up a feature presenting “The Four Reasons Millennials…

What City Observatory did this week 1. When we measure segregation, we almost always use Census numbers that reflect where people live—ie, where their homes are. But people don’t spend all day in their homes, so a team of researchers used Twitter data from Louisville, KY to figure out where they spend their days. The…

In the last several years, marijuana legalization has gone from a fringe issue treated as a joke or third rail to a mainstream, enacted policy in parts of the country. Broadly, the change seems to be driven by growing recognition of the general failure and costs of the drug war; growing understanding and acceptance of…

We’ve just gotten our first look at the new US Department of Transportation performance measurement rule for transportation systems. The rule (nearly three years in gestation, since the passage of the MAP-21 Act) is USDOT’s attempt to establish performance measures to guide investment and operation of the nation’s urban transportation system. One of the criticisms—fair,…

In cities, you’ll sometimes hear people talk about a “daytime population”: not how many people live in a place, but how many gather there regularly during their waking hours. So while 1.6 million people may actually live in Manhattan, there are nearly twice that many people on the island during a given workday. Most studies…

What City Observatory did this week 1. More than half of commuters to jobs in classically suburban DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to walk, bike, or take transit—but nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? A closer look finds that decades of avowedly auto-centric planning has led to a situation…

For most of the 20th century, cities and their accoutrements were associated with immigrants, people of color, and relative economic deprivation. The very phrase “inner city” became a synonym of “poor,” and in certain contexts “urban” itself became a word that referred to people of color, especially black people. The “great inversion” has challenged that…

Hey reporters! We know you love rankings, especially ones that show some measure of widely shared pain, like traffic congestion or rent increases. And some people, armed with a database and an infographic are more than happy to feed your hunger for this type of analysis. But please: Stop using Abodo’s rent numbers. They’re wrong.…

More than half of workers in DuPage County, outside Chicago, say they’d like to get to work without a car. But nearly 90 percent of them drive anyway. What’s going on? First, a little context. Your city probably has a DuPage County—if not by name, by profile. Beginning about 15 miles due west of Chicago’s…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Even in a relatively dense city like Chicago, large amounts of off-street parking goes unused daily. A new report from the Center for Neighborhood Technology documents the over-supply of residential parking, and lays the blame on municipal parking requirements that force developers to build parking lots or garages…

A Hollywood staple of the 1930s and 1940s was the story of a plucky band of young kids—usually led by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland—who, their dreams of making it on Broadway dashed by some plot twist, decide to stage a show of their own. They would find a barn or a warehouse, sing and…

It’s been debunked, right? Though we’ve long been told that millennials want to live in cities, renting rather than owning, and biking instead of driving, a new round of articles are here to tell us that all of that is a myth: as soon as they find their financial footing, young people are buying homes…

Another column from Paul Krugman today on the ways that US-style zoning laws are detrimental to economic opportunity is a pleasant reminder that the role of building regulations in broader questions of inequality is no longer such a fringe issue. Particularly in places with the greatest “shortage of cities”—where the gap between available housing and…

There’s not enough parking in Chicago: it’s an article of faith among many drivers, and has been a key assumption in many of the city’s planning efforts. But a new report from the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology finds that one of those efforts, mandatory off-street parking requirements for residential buildings, is causing an over-supply…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Have we reached “peak Millennial”? One researchers argues that because new births peaked in 1990, today’s 26-year-olds represent the high water mark of a youth-led urban renaissance. But a closer look shows that’s not the case: the US Census predicts that we have a number of years until…

America’s pedestrians are in pain. Every day, tens of millions of Americans waste tens of thousands of hours stuck waiting on the side of streets for car traffic to get out of their way. We estimate that the annual value of time lost waiting to walk totals $25 billion annually. Today, City Observatory announces the…

Earlier this month, a report in Chicago pointed to some of the tensions implicit in a desegregation-oriented federal affordable housing program. The Sun-Times, with that city’s Better Government Association, published a “watchdogs” feature on housing choice vouchers. The big news: while some voucher holders pay relatively large proportions of their rents, others pay much less, or nothing,…

A new measure purports to gauge city attractiveness by measuring whether local college graduates stick around. But these raw numbers can be a misleading indicator, and we’ll show how it can be adjusted to more accurately measure how good a job a city is doing of producing and retaining talent. There’s powerful evidence that the…

It’s an eye-catching, convention-tweaking claim: We’ve reached peak Millennial. And, so the argument goes, because Millennials have hit their “peak,” it’s time to junk all these crazy theories about Millennials not wanting to own cars, and not buying homes, especially in the suburbs. Sure, they had a youthful dalliance with city living, and the numbers…

What City Observatory did this week 1. When supply catches up to demand, rents go down. While stories about crazy housing markets tend to focus on big, coastal metropolitan areas, it turns out there’s a lot to learn from looking at Williston, ND. That sleepy town began to boom thanks to oil, and its housing…

You’re on your couch, streaming the latest episode of Broad City on your Mac laptop, just like a good millennial. But all of a sudden, your wifi connection goes bad, and the screen goes all pixelated. Instead of Abbi and Ilana at an art gallery, all you can see is big blocks of seemingly random…

Yesterday, TomTom released its annual rankings of the levels of congestion in world and US cities. Predictably, they generated the horrified, self-pitying headlines about how awful congestion is in the top-ranked cities. Cue the telephoto lens shots of bumper-to-bumper traffic, and tales of gridlock. As we’ve long pointed out, there are big problems with the…

Even the most casual consumer of urban news can’t avoid reading articles about whether rents in their city are up, or down, and how they compare to other cities around their country. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these rent estimates are completely made up. As we’ve written, the proliferation of these rent stories seems to…

How much does a one-bedroom apartment cost in Chicago, my hometown? A quick Google search comes up with an article claiming that median rent is $1,970, according to the real estate company Zumper. But wait—according to real estate company Trulia, the median rent in Chicago was just $1,400 in January 2016, and that includes apartments with…

Last year’s hit film The Big Short depicted various investors who, realizing that there was a housing bubble in the years before the 2000s crash, found ways to “short” housing, betting against the market and ultimately making a killing when the crisis hit. Looking forward, there’s a plausible case to be made that this might…

Today, we spend a few minutes reviewing the recent history of housing markets in rural North Dakota. In a microcosm, we can see how the interplay of demand and supply drive housing market cycles. The speed and scale of changes in North Dakota dwarf what we usually see, but provide an illustration of the forces…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Finding nuance in the housing supply arguments. A new article from Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce helps resolve some of the tensions in the growing debate about whether and how housing supply is behind the affordability crisis—and the answer hinges on understanding how demand and supply can change at…

At City Observatory, we’ve long been critical of some seemingly scientific studies and ideas that shape our thinking about the nature of our transportation system, and its performance and operation. We’ve pointed out the limitations of the flawed and out-dated “rules of thumb” that guide our thinking about trip generation, parking demand, road widths and…

In a January 2015 paper, the Yale Law professor David Schleicher and Yale Law student Daniel Rauch published a paper on how local governments might regulate “sharing economy” companies, such as Uber, in the future. Among their more startling predictions, perhaps, was that the very cities that have been battling to regulate startups like Uber—which…

Last week, the Washington Post published an article repeating an old-refrain in transportation journalism—the horror of long commutes. According to the Post, more and more Americans are commuting longer and longer distances to work each day. There’s growing scientific evidence that long commutes are bad for your physical and mental health, reduce happiness, and even…

On the one hand, over the last few years, the growing debate about the root causes of affordable housing crises in high-income, coastal American cities has been robust, passionate, and often nuanced. On the other, there have been precious few “breakthrough” moments, and the rhetoric today often looks pretty similar to what it was a…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Muddling income inequality and economic segregation. What does it mean to be a prosperous city? What does it mean to be a city with high economic inequality? These questions can be difficult because they apply statistics we’re used to using at a national level to municipalities or neighborhoods—and…

Last week, we published an interactive tool for exploring how commuting has changed by different age groups over the last decade or so. One of the big takeaways was that even among younger people, there’s been only miniscule shifts away from driving, or towards transit and biking, despite the huge surge of youth to more…

Everyone interested in state or local economic development should read “Remaking Economic Development: The Markets and Civics of Continuous Growth and Prosperity.” In it, the Brookings Institution’s Amy Liu neatly synthesizes important lessons from the field about how metropolitan centered economic strategies are vitally important not just to revitalizing city economies, but to national economic…

Note: Tomorrow, NYU’s Furman Center will hold a seminar with Dartmouth professor William Fischel on his new paper,”The Rise of the Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the Growth Machine.” This post contains some of our reactions to the paper.   There’s increasing recognition that laws preventing the construction of new…

The big divides between rich and poor in the US are drawing increased attention, which is a good thing. Income inequality has been steadily growing in the US, and it’s a big problem. As we’ve pointed out, this problem has an important spatial dimension as well. The concentration of poverty, in particular, amplifies all of…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities can’t solve all our problems. Like other people who think and work about cities and urban issues, we’re often focused on how ground-level changes can make cities better—things neighborhood groups or local government can do. But though local actors are important, we can’t lose sight of the…

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report confirms what we’ve known for a long time: our nation’s system of assessing the costs of roads—and paying for their construction and maintenance—is badly broken. Entitled “Approaches to Making Federal Highway Spending More Productive,” the new CBO report is a treasure trove of details about the recent history…

This is the first in a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what’s wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what “affordable” means. The second part looks at an alternative measure, and the third examines the particular challenges of understanding “affordability” for owner-occupied homes.…

In some ways, the urban renaissance of the last decade or two has been quite dramatic. Downtown or downtown-adjacent neighborhoods in cities around the country have seen rapid investments, demographic change, and growth in amenities and jobs. Even mayors in places with a reputation for car dependence, like Nashville and Indianapolis, are pushing for big investments…

As our name implies, we’re very focused on cities. We think cities are the key to solving many of the nation’s most challenging problems, from economic opportunity and social justice, to environmental sustainability. And we’re not alone: more and more, activists are looking to cities to take the lead on critical policy issues. Cities should…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Another round on the Washington Post‘s housing roundtable. On Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog on what it would take to solve the housing affordability crises in places like San Francisco. On Monday, we followed up on some of the ideas of…

  A breathless feature article at the New York Times describes how the design wizards at IDEO are helping stodgy old Ford Motor Company re-imagine how transportation might work in the future. IDEO conceptualized the design task by sending groups of its employees to a restaurant a few miles away via different transportation modes, so…

Like most city lovers of a certain age, I spent many hours as a kid playing SimCity. For readers who are tragically uninitiated, SimCity is one of the iconic computer games of the 1990s, though new versions have been released as recently as 2013. Playing as mayor (or, really, dictator, but more on that later),…

By far the most common way to measure transit use is “commute mode share,” or the percentage of workers who use transit to get to their job. For the most part, this is a measure of convenience: it’s the most direct way the Census asks about transportation, which means it’s the easiest way to get…

Last Friday, we took part in a roundtable at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog on affordable housing. The conversation focused on a long-running debate about how best to address the affordability crisis in cities like San Francisco, and was sparked in particular by the new California Legislative Analyst’s Office report that found neighborhoods in the Bay…

Next week, we’ll be releasing our latest City Report, which maps the location of consumer-facing businesses around the nation to provide a new, quantitative measure of a city’s street-level vitality—one facet of Jane Jacobs’ famed “sidewalk ballet.” Look for the full report, as well as detailed maps and breakdowns for each of the 51 largest…

Today’s guest post comes from our colleague Heywood Sanders, Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, and author of Convention Center Follies. Lots of people make guesses about the future. So do cities. And cities often employ “expert” consultants, who presumably have a wealth of knowledge and expertise to inform their guesses, and provide…

After fourteen seasons, Discovery Channel’s always entertaining “Mythbusters” series is coming to an end later this year. If you haven’t seen the show, co-hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman construct elaborate (often explosive) experiments to test whether something you see on television or in the movies could actually happen in real life. (Sadly, you can’t…

I live in Chicago. In Chicago, like pretty much everywhere, people complain about traffic. Almost every day, our roads and highways get congested at rush hour, leaving people crawling along supposedly high-speed corridors, wasting time, money, and gas. This is what it looks like on a typical Monday at 5:35 pm:   Obviously, no one is…

New data from the national traffic safety administration shows an ominous trend: traffic related deaths are up 11.3 percent for the first nine months of 2015, as compared to the same period a year earlier. Although the NHTSA warns that the data are subject to revision, and cautions that it’s too early to discern the…

What City Observatory did this week 1. More evidence on the “Dow of cities.” We’ve argued before that evidence of shifting demand for urban real estate can be read as a sort of “stock” in cities—and that cities’ stock has been rising. A new report from Zillow underscores this trend. It finds that for the first…

Over the last few months, we’ve outlined a number of policy ideas that address the problem of housing affordability by dramatically expanding the number of people receiving some sort of housing assistance. (Low-income people, that is. We think the number of affluent people receiving housing assistance is already pretty high.) We suggested taxing the growth…

We’ve known for a long time that housing shortages are a major driver of high housing prices—and that, as a result, places that prevent new construction also tend to have big affordability problems. But now, for the first time that we’re aware of, researchers have taken the next step to showing directly that places like…

First-time home buyers play a critical role in the housing market. The influx of new households into the owner-occupied market is a key source of sales, and provides impetus for existing homeowners to move, liquidate their investment, or trade up to a bigger or better house. They’re the bottom of the home-buying pyramid. The number…

Last year, we described the widening gap between typical housing values in cities and suburbs as the “Dow of cities”: Just as differences in stock prices signal the performance of companies, variations in average home prices are a market signal of the performance of cities. High and rising prices, relative to the overall market, are…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it. City Observatory likes to make data-driven arguments—but the rhetorical frameworks we use to explain the data matter, too. Here, we take a minute to try to reframe the urbanist argument about the role of cars in a “good” city. While advocates’ rhetoric…

A few months ago, we offered a proposal to dramatically increase funding for affordable housing and put a damper on real estate speculation: tax housing capital gains. While San Francisco’s voter-approved Proposition A will produce a one-time infusion of $310 million for below-market housing, and that city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance has produced just about $30…

Like many cities in the US, Portland has been experiencing an affordable housing crisis as rents have risen substantially over the last several years. One proposed solution to this problem is inclusionary zoning—requiring people who build new apartments to hold some units’ rent at below-market rates. In the coming month or so, the Oregon Legislature…

Update: As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF Board of Supervisors has passed the ordinance in question. As bitter as the housing debate in the San Francisco Bay Area gets sometimes, no one disagrees that the region is facing a crisis of high costs. It’s just that some people believe the crisis can’t be resolved…

At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving. Our wonky perspective tells us that there are…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The market cap of cities. What’s the value of a city? We’ve taken a stab at answering that question—at least, the value of a city’s housing. Using a measure called market capitalization, or “market cap” in financial parlance, we can compare the economic weight of cities with major…

To some observers, planners’ promises that more housing supply will push down prices don’t seem to be working. In recent years, rents have jumped substantially, and it doesn’t seem like market forces are working to ameliorate this trend. Although the historical evidence linking faster housing construction growth and slower housing price growth is quite strong,…

In the wake of our posts on the Katy Freeway in Houston, and US PIRG’s report on the country’s biggest highway construction boondoggles, we’ve heard one kind of pushback over and over. Sure, defenders of highway expansion admit, things are just as congested after reconstruction as before. But, hey, that’s a sign of success, because…

What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest corporations ($8.8 trillion). Market capitalization is a financial analysis term used to describe the current…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Which federal agency has a big role to play in housing affordability? The answer might surprise you. The Federal Reserve has announced a plan to increase the interest rates it charges banks, putting the brakes on the economy in an attempt to hold back inflation. But it turns…

Earlier this month, we argued that Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8 vouchers, ought to be provided to every household with a qualifying income. The limited funding for vouchers today leaves millions of people—over three-quarters of those who qualify—without help when official public policy has declared that they need it. We also pointed…

At City Observatory, we’ve cataloged a series of indicators that point to the the growing economic strength of city centers—including on the metric of job growth. But in a new blog post, Jed Kolko looks at county-level data for the past 15 years, and declares that city jobs aren’t really back, concluding: “It’s hard to…

Last month, we called out the American Highway User’s Alliance (AHUA) for trumpeting the Katy Freeway as a congestion-fighting success story. The Katy, as you will recall, is Houston’s 23-lane freeway, which was recently expanded at a cost of $2.8 billion. Although the AHUA hailed that expansion in a report as the kind of project…

The big economic news of the past month was the Federal Reserve Board’s decision to begin raising interest rates after years of leaving them at near-zero levels. The first increase in the short-term interest rate the Fed charges banks will be one-quarter of one percent, but there’s an expectation that the Fed will continue to…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Bending the carbon curve in the wrong direction. After years in which Americans were driving less, cheap gas is helping to push those numbers back up—erasing a full sixth of the progress we had made against transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, we can’t expect that this backsliding will…

What exactly is the relationship between land use regulations and economic segregation? Previous research has shown that places with more restrictive land use regulations have higher housing costs and are more segregated by race, but now a new study from UCLA aims to give more detailed answers. The paper, by Michael Lens and Paavo Monkkonen,…

You may be surprised to hear that condos, all else equal, are more expensive than houses. You should be, because it’s not true. But that didn’t deter Joel Kotkin, the one-man cottage industry of curious urban criticism, from claiming so from his perch at Chapman University. As SF Weekly dutifully reported, Kotkin and his colleagues…

At City Observatory, we post several new commentaries each week on a variety of urban themes, and aim to provide discrete, coherent analyses of specific questions, and contributing to the policy dialog about cities. At the start of a new year, we’d like to pull back a bit, and reflect on what we think we’ve…

Gas prices are down, driving is up, and so, too, is carbon pollution. In a little over a year, the US has given up about one-sixth of the progress it made in reducing transportation’s carbon footprint. For more than a decade, America was making real progress in reducing is car dependence. The growth of driving…

This week, Planetizen named City Observatory one of its 10 best urban websites of 2015, adding that “every single post is essential reading.” We’re extremely grateful for the recognition, and are excited about continuing our work into 2016! (Check out the other great websites Planetizen highlighted at the link, too!) What City Observatory did this…

Cities are becoming more important to the economic health of the country. How do we know? We can boil the answer down to four charts, each of which plots a key indicator of urban economic strength. 1. The Dow of Cities The market value of housing in urban centers is increasing much more rapidly than…

Houston doesn’t have much of a reputation for public transit, although about 300,000 rides are taken on trains and buses in the region every weekday. Recently, though, the local transit agency, Metro, has been making some big moves. First, the agency worked with transit consultant Jarrett Walker and a local team led by TEI to…

We could extend housing vouchers to every very-low-income household—and expand housing support to the middle class, too — if we were willing to take away just one of the big housing subsidies to people making over $100,000 a year. But let’s back up. Previously, we’ve made the case that the SNAP program, or food stamps,…

Here are Daniel Kay Hertz’s five favorite posts of 2015: 5. Undercounting the transit constituency When we only look at the number of people who commute on transit, we’re missing others—especially students and the retired—who rely on transit for other reasons.   4. A modest proposal: treat affordable housing more like food stamps Comparing two well-known…

Over the last two days, we’ve give you readers’ favorite posts from 2015. Now we’re choosing our own. Here are Joe Cortright’s five favorite: 5. Want to close the black/white income gap? Work to reduce segregation The income gap between black and white households is one of the major racial inequalities in American society. It’s also…

6. Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia? While stories about displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods abound, more direct, egregious examples of displacement in suburban areas are often left behind. We focused on one particularly galling example of an Atlanta suburb using eminent domain to demolish an apartment complex predominantly occupied by lower-income people of color, to…

12. Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma In the last year or two, there has been a resurgence of awareness and debate about the big, structural issues facing America’s persistently poor neighborhoods. But one part of the equation has largely been left out: stigma. A large body of research has shown that stigma and reputation, above and…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup. When the Texas Department of Transportation tried to sell the public on its Katy Freeway expansion project, part of the story was that it would ease congestion. We covered how that worked out last week. (Not well, is the answer.) Another…

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…

Is there a “cross-ideological consensus” on zoning reform? Writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, economist Ilya Somin made such a claim. Libertarians, he wrote, have opposed the strict laws that prescribe expensive, exclusionary, low-density homes in most neighborhoods across the country for some time; but now, as noted lefty economist Paul Krugman’s recent…

When it comes to selling huge new road projects to the public, the highway lobby and their allies in government have many tools. Last week, we wrote about one of them: touting initial declines in congestion as success, without bothering to follow up as induced demand eliminates those gains in just a matter of years.…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Don’t bank on it. Hillary Clinton, as part of her campaign for President, has proposed a National Infrastructure Bank to help local governments pay for crucial infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. But it’s not so clear that such a bank is the answer to America’s infrastructure problems. Rather, the…

Back in August, we wrote about the phenomenon of the “missing middle”: the fact that today’s urban (and suburban) development tends to take the form of either single-family homes or very large apartment buildings, but not so much in the middle. And that’s a problem! Small apartment buildings perform a vital function in classic “illegal…

There are two big theories about who controls the pace of development in American cities and suburbs. One is the “growth machine.” In this telling, developed by academics like Harvey Molotch in the 1970s, urban elected officials and zoning boards are highly influenced by coalitions of business and civic leaders interested mainly in economic growth…

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton laid out the broad outlines of her plan for a National Infrastructure Bank, which would make low interest loans to help fund all kinds of public and private infrastructure. In an explainer for Vox, Matt Yglesias lays out the case for an infrastructure bank, and sets out some of the…

What City Observatory did this week 1. A $1.6 billion proposal. A film school teacher in San Francisco had some people talking about “ethical landlording” as a solution to the problem of too-high real estate prices. But substituting the private whims of land owners for prices as a way to determine who wins access to…

Later this month, the Federal Reserve Board (or “the Fed,” as it’s often referred to) will raise interest rates. After seven years of very loose monetary policy designed to facilitate economic recovery from the Great Recession, the Fed now apparently thinks that the economy is healthy enough to stand higher interest rates. Clearly, the financial…

There’s plenty of high-minded rhetoric at the UN climate change conference in Paris about getting serious about the threat of climate change. According to the Los Angeles Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is optimistic that, “even without a specific temperature-change limit and legally binding structure, a climate change agreement that negotiators in Paris are…

Whatever remained of the fig leaf claim that the US has a “user pays” system of road finance disappeared completely with the passage of the so-called FAST Act. It would be better to call the new transportation bill the “Free Ride” Act, because that’s exactly what it does: gives auto users something for nothing. It’s…

Last week, San Francisco Magazine reported on what, at first glance, just looks like another those-crazy-San-Franciscans-and-their-crazy-housing-market story. It begins with a film school teacher who had bought a home in the Mission neighborhood twenty years ago for just $90,000, recently decided to move, and put her home on the market—sort of. While similar homes in…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy. A guest post from the Knight Foundation’s Carol Coletta begins by noting some dismal numbers on voting in American cities—especially by younger people. But civic engagement can’t just be about once-in-a-while actions; it has to be a daily practice. Carol gives an…

Back in October, we wrote a post called “Affordability beyond the median.” While most discussions of housing costs measure based on a city’s or neighborhood’s median price, that’s not all that matters. After all, the median is simply the home for which equal numbers of other homes are more and less expensive. That may be…

Be afraid: Big foreign corporations are buying up our cities and stamping out our individuality. Or so warns Saskia Sassen in a piece ominously entitled, “Who owns our cities—and why this urban takeover should concern us all,” published in the Guardian Cities. The harbinger of our doom, according to Sassen: large corporations are buying up…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Ways forward to more equitable land use law. Following up on last week’s posts about William Fischel’s new book, Zoning Rules!, and its arguments about how America got into its current housing crisis, we look at what Fischel, one of the country’s foremost scholars on land use law,…

Even we at City Observatory believe in taking a break from all things urban on Thanksgiving. But in the spirit of the holidays, we wanted to take just a minute to share some of the things we’re thankful for. To begin with, we’re thankful for cities themselves: the places we live in and explore, that…

It’s hard to think of an issue that is more quintessentially local than zoning. It’s all about what happens on the ground on a specific piece of property in a particular neighborhood. It’s the bread and butter of local governments and neighborhood groups. Zoning and land use seem about as far removed from national economic…

It’s the hardiest perennial in the real estate business: “Now,” your realtor will tell you, “is a great time to buy a home.” Back in 2006, just as the housing market was faltering, that’s exactly what the National Association of Realtors (NAR) was telling us. In fact, in November of that year, the NAR launched…

Last week, going off a recent book by William Fischel, we published a parable that explained the evolution of American zoning over the 20th century, from non-zoning land use in the early years to the introduction of true zoning in the 1910s and 20s, and the “land use revolution” of the 1970s that helped create…

What City Observatory did this week 1. The high price of cheap gas. While many economists emphasize the positive effects of low gas prices—more disposable income in consumers’ pockets, which can act as a stimulus—it’s also important to acknowledge the costs. Reducing the price of driving, shockingly enough, makes people drive more—leading to more traffic…

Yesterday, we published a “zoning parable,” based on William Fischel’s arguments for why and how zoning regulations developed in American cities over the 20th century. Today, we’ll expand a bit on one of the book’s major arguments in non-parable form. The 70s: What happened? For people who care a lot about housing but aren’t ready…

This year, William Fischel, a professor at Dartmouth and one of the country’s leading scholars of land use policy, published a new opus on zoning: Zoning Rules! There’s far too much in the book to do a comprehensive review, but we’re going to pick out some of the most interesting and important arguments for posts…

At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap gas has serious hidden costs—more pollution, more energy consumption, more crashes and greater traffic congestion.…

What City Observatory did this week 1. What filtering can and can’t do. In most cities, the majority of homes that are affordable to people of modest or low incomes don’t receive special affordability subsidies—they’re just cheap market-rate housing. But since very little housing is built for people of below-average income, how does it get…

Trying to measure average housing costs for neighborhoods across an entire city—let alone the whole country—is an incredibly ambitious task. Not only does it require a massive database of real estate listings, it requires making those listings somehow representative at the level of each neighborhood and city. For a number of reasons, just taking the…

The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees paid by member banks—to bail out the Highway Trust Fund. For years, many macro economists…

“Affordable housing” can seem like a hopelessly vague term. First of all, affordable to whom? (Follow the link to a description of an “affordable” program targeting people making 40 percent more than the median income in San Francisco.) And even assuming we know who’s paying, what is a reasonable amount for them to pay? But…

What City Observatory did this week 1. More doubt cast on food deserts. The concept of a “food desert”—typically low-income urban neighborhoods where a lack of nearby grocery stores leads to poor nutrition—is widely accepted. But a new study adds to the evidence that in most cases, poor nutrition isn’t a result of food deserts;…

On Tuesday, voters in Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder, and elsewhere went to the polls to vote on referenda and other local elections with important consequences for urban planning and policy. Here’s an overview: Seattle: There are very good rundowns of the Seattle results from an urban policy perspective at Erica C. Barnett’s blog and The Urbanist…

Many studies of gentrification (for example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study we wrote about last week) begin by dividing neighborhoods into one of two categories: gentrifiable and non-gentrifiable. Usually, to qualify as “gentrifiable,” a neighborhood must rank relatively low on the socioeconomic ladder: one standard used by at least a few different reports…

This week, City Observatory’s founder Joe Cortright sat down with the Knight Foundation’s Carol Coletta for the Knight Cities podcast. Their conversation reflected on the work City Observatory has undertaken over the past year, and dug more deeply into some of the topics, like neighborhood change and inequality, that have been a focus of our…

It’s a plausible and widely-believed hypothesis: Poor people in the United States suffer from measurably worse nutrition because they have such limited access to good food. Confronted with a high concentration of poor diet choices (like fast food, and processed food in convenience stores) and with few markets offering fresh fruit and vegetables, the poor…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Introducing City Observatory policy memos. At City Observatory, one of our goals is to translate the best and latest urban policy research for advocates, organizers, and practitioners so it can inform their work. To better do that, we’re introducing the first of a series of policy memos: short,…

Recently, we’ve received three new pieces of evidence on how gentrification affects the lives of poor people in changing neighborhoods. First, a study from NYU’s Furman Center suggests that residents of public housing in wealthier and gentrifying neighborhoods make more money, suffer from less violence, and have better educational options for their children, despite also…

One role we hope to play at City Observatory is translator: taking some of the best, most rigorous research on American cities and urban policy and turning it into smart, sophisticated, and readable pieces that can inform people actually working on the ground, from community organizations to policymakers. So far, we’ve done that with blog-style commentaries and longer,…

Our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation have announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities more livable. The deadline to apply is October 27—check it out! What City Observatory did this week 1. Affordability beyond the median.…

Our recent conversation about the future of American driving habits, and the role of the price of gas in changing them, is a good reminder of a broader truth about transportation policy: prices are important, and getting prices right (or wrong) is crucial. And when it comes to driving, prices are frequently wrong. That’s because driving is extremely costly:…

At his blog, The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark pushed back this week on the idea that we’re seeing a revolution in the way people get around cities and suburbs, largely thanks to new transit-and-bike-friendly Millennials. In fact, he cites one of our posts as an example of a narrative he doesn’t think is quite right:…

Last week, City Observatory celebrated its first birthday. This week, we’re taking some time to look back at all the reports and commentaries we researched and wrote in the last year, and picking out some of what we think are the most important facts and insights. We put eleven of them into a one-pager with links to…

A few months ago, we published a three–part series about why the way we measure housing affordability is all wrong. In particular, we objected to using the 30 percent ratio of housing prices to income as the benchmark of “affordable,” basically because depending on income and other necessary expenses, a given household might actually be able…

Our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation have announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities more livable. The deadline to apply is October 27—check it out! What City Observatory did this week 1. Why America can’t make…

A year ago today, October 15th, 2014, we launched City Observatory, a data-driven voice on what makes for successful cities.   The past year has been a whirlwind: We’ve released four major reports—Young and Restless, Lost in Place, Surging City Center Job Growth, and Less in Common—each of which use data to examine some of the…

Two of the most fundamental human needs are food and housing. As a result, we have government programs to help people who might not be able to afford them. But the way those programs work is wildly different. So let’s imagine for a moment that we treated SNAP—the federal program, formerly known as food stamps,…

Here are two ideas that, if you’re like most Americans, you probably mostly agree with: 1. Government policy should help keep housing broadly affordable, so as not to price out people of low or moderate incomes from entire neighborhoods, cities, or even metropolitan areas. 2. Government policy should protect residential neighborhoods from things that might…

Last week, our partners and supporters at the Knight Foundation announced a new round of the Knight Cities Challenge, which gives grants to people and organizations around the country for projects that make their cities more livable. The deadline to apply is October 27—check it out! What City Observatory did this week 1. What’s behind…

Two recent press features have suggested that one Utah city has worked out the recipe for equitable development. The cover story from Newsweek’s October 2, issue offers “Lessons from America’s most egalitarian zip code.” It proposes that Ogden, Utah is a model for how the US can address income inequality.   The article is at…

A little over a year ago, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.70. Since then, that price has plummeted, and remains more than a dollar cheaper than it was through most of 2014. Over the same period, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick in driving in the US. After nearly a decade of steady…

What are roads for? For that matter, what’s transportation policy for? Much of the urban reform movement of the last few decades has been about re-asking, and re-answering, these questions. Most people who follow trends in urban policy could outline at least a rough sketch of the debates: high-speed car traffic versus “complete streets” for…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy. New data from the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis builds on our “Dow of Cities” post and Surging City Center Job Growth report to show that urban centers are at the heart of the country’s recovery. Large metropolitan areas—those with over a…

At City Observatory, we’ve written quite a bit about the phenomenon of city center job growth. We did a whole CityReport about the phenomenon, showing that since the Great Recession, urban cores have been outperforming the rest of their metropolitan areas on employment, reversing earlier trends. And just this week, we covered new job numbers…

Averting a housing crisis: Panel Discussion from oregonmetro on Vimeo. Last week, City Observatory’s own Joe Cortright took part in a panel hosted by the Portland regional planning agency, Metro, where a standing-room-only crowd heard him, TechCrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler, Elissa Harrigan of the Meyer Memorial Trust, and developer Eli Spevak talk about whether Oregon’s largest…

Cities have always played a vital role in the national economy, but in the past few years their importance has increased. Last month, we highlighted the “Dow of Cities”—how the rising value of housing in the most central portions of the nation’s metropolitan areas signals the market’s verdict about the growing demand for urban living.…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Zoning in everything—even the education gap. By now, thanks to renewed attention in major media outlets from writers like the New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones, many observers of housing policy debates are aware of the role of exclusionary zoning in promoting residential segregation. We look at a paper…

Last week, a columnist in Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger, expressed his discontent with modern housing development. As Berger sees it, today’s homebuilding pales in comparison to the virtues of early 20th century bungalow development: In a rapidly growing city where the haves have more and the have-nots are being squeezed out, the bungalows offer a…

This week, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and the affordable housing organization Enterprise Community Partners released a report sketching out various scenarios of rental cost and income growth for the next ten years. The headlines are fairly bleak: JCHS and Enterprise project the number of “severely rent-burdened” households to grow under almost any scenario.…

To butcher Orwell, all cities are unequal, but some cities are more unequal than others. While working with some of the Census-calculated income inequality numbers—in particular, the Gini index—we noticed an interesting pattern: the central city of a metropolitan area is almost always more unequal than its metropolitan area as a whole. What’s going on?…

A few weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones produced a tour de force report on school segregation in America, which became a two-part episode on the public radio show This American Life. In the first part, she dove into the complex legal and racial geography of the St. Louis metro area, explaining how the imaginary lines of…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere. Daniel Kay Hertz follows up on our earlier piece about illegal neighborhoodsto point out that most other wealthy countries allow the kinds of mixes of density and uses that most American cities have outlawed. Based on Sonia Hirt’s great…

In light of Smart Cities Week, we’re updating this post from March about the role of smart technology, people, and successful cities. The growing appreciation of the importance of cities, especially by leaders in business and science, is much appreciated and long overdue. Many have embraced the “smart city” banner. But what does that mean?…

A recent post from the excellent DC blog Greater Greater Washington has made a few ripples among transit advocates. In it, David Alpert takes the growth rate of WMATA’s operating costs (about 6% annually) and its operating revenue (about 1% annually) and makes the straightforward point that this isn’t really sustainable.   After all, these…

One of the most broadly popular ideas about urban planning today is that decisions should be made locally. After all, who knows better what a neighborhood needs than the people who live there? And what better way to squash any would-be Robert Moses than by empowering the people whose homes he would claim for some…

Ah, Paris! Perhaps one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a capital of European culture, and prosperous economic hub. What’s its secret? Zoning, of course!   Just kidding. Actually, Paris went for the better part of a millennium (until 1967) with nothing that an American might recognize as district-based zoning, a prospect that would surely horrify…

What City Observatory did this week 1. My illegal neighborhood. Guest Commentary writer Robert Liberty describes all the things he loves about his neighborhood in Northwest Portland—and then explains why all of them would be illegal to build in a new development today. The mix of apartments and single-family homes doesn’t fit modern ideas about…

Since the Texas Transportation Institute released its 2015 “Urban Mobility Report,” urban transportation experts and advocates have unleashed thousands and thousands of words poking holes at its methodology, assumptions, and political agenda. (We’ve pitched in our fair share of those words, and perhaps more.)   As one last entry to this conversation, we wanted to…

Editor’s note:  City Observatory is pleased to provide this guest commentary by our friend Robert Liberty a keen observer of and advocate for cities.   by Robert Liberty For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon. It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really…

What City Observatory did this week 1. Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens. A new research project on Bay Area neighborhood change defines “displacement” as any reduction in the number of low-income people in a given community. Daniel Kay Hertz argues that this way of thinking leads us down the wrong path in…