Civic commons

In Philadelphia last week, the Gehl Institute convened Act Urban—a global group of leaders and practitioners in the field of the civic commons. After three days of fieldwork and observation, expert presentations and intense discussion, I was asked, along with other panelists to sum up what we’d heard and what the challenges are for this […]

Last week, the Pew Charitable Trusts released a fascinating report detailing neighborhood change in Philadelphia over the past decade and a half. “Philadelphia’s Changing Neighborhoods” combines a careful, region-wide analysis of income trends with detailed profiles of individual neighborhoods. Using tract-level income data, Pew researchers classified Philadelphia neighborhoods according to their median income in 2000

There’s a growing body of evidence that economic integration—avoiding the separation of rich and poor into distinct neighborhoods—is an important ingredient in promoting widely shared opportunity. The work of Raj Chetty and his colleagues shows that poor kids who grow up in mixed income communities experience far higher rates of economic success than those who

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of posts about income segregation, urban planning, and economic opportunity. In the first, we examined three different ways of looking at income segregation: the proportion of people living in low-income neighborhoods, high-income neighborhoods, or both “extremes.” In the second, we looked at another kind of income segregation,

Last week, we argued that the problem called “income segregation” is actually several problems, and broke it down with the help of different measurements designed to capture different aspects of the issue. In particular, we pointed out the need to distinguish between 1) the segregation of poverty, 2) the segregation of affluence, and 3) the

Yesterday, we critiqued a study that claimed to show that the benefits of putting low-income housing in very low-income neighborhoods greatly exceeded the benefits of putting it in higher-income neighborhoods—especially higher-income and predominantly white neighborhoods—where it might have more of a pro-integration effect. Among the several points of our critique was that the study severely

Yesterday, we introduced three kinds of economic segregation, and how you might measure each: the proportion of people in high-income neighborhoods; the proportion of people in low-income neighborhoods; and the proportion of people in either high- or low-income neighborhoods. Each says something important about how people are sorted by income in a metropolitan area. But

Much of the conversation about urban inequality today—from Raj Chetty’s work on intergenerational economic mobility, to issues of concentrated poverty and gentrification—is framed in terms of economic segregation. But it turns out that “economic segregation” isn’t just one thing, and what we mean by the phrase, and how we choose to measure it, has serious

When we talk about the costs and consequences of car-dependent urban development, we often talk about hard economics and climate science. Spread-out neighborhoods divided by big, pedestrian-hostile roads force people to spend more on transportation than they would in a place where many trips could be taken by foot or transit. In high-demand cities, relatively

One of City Observatory’s major reports is “Lost in Place,” which chronicles the change in high-poverty neighborhoods since 1970. In it, you’ll find a rich array of data at the neighborhood level showing how and where concentrated poverty grew. We know it’s a complex and wonky set of data, so we’ve worked with our colleagues