Tag: Metro Economics
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City Report: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods
Today we’re releasing our latest CityReport: America’s Most Diverse, Mixed Income Neighborhoods. In this report, we use Census data to identify those neighborhoods that have the highest levels of both racial/ethnic and income diversity among all urban neighborhoods in the US. We were motivated to take on this analysis, in part, because so much attention…
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How much could US retail shrink? And where?
The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy’s stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other major national retail chains, including The Limited, Gap, Walgreens, Aeropostale and Chico’s, have also announced similarly large closures.…
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The Storefront Index
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,…
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Less in Common
The essence of cities is bringing people—from all walks of life—together in one place. Social interaction and a robust mixing of people from different backgrounds, of different ages, with different incomes and interests is part of the secret sauce that enables progress and creates opportunity. This ease of exchange underpins important aspects of our personal…
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Who’s Vulnerable to Retail Retrenchment?
This week comes news that Target is laying off 1,700 workers at its Minneapolis headquarters, looking to become leaner and more efficient. It’s just the latest move in a shifting retail landscape in the United States. Target is not just downsizing its headquarters, it’s shifting to smaller urban stores–Target Express. Other retailers like Walmart and…
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Has the Tide Turned?
Last month, City Observatory released a new report—Surging City Center Job Growth—chronicling a widespread rebound in city center jobs. For the first time in decades, job growth in city centers around the country has surpassed the rate of job growth in peripheral areas. In an article called “Fool for the City,” Jacob Anbinder of The…
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Florida’s Biotech Bet
For more than a decade, one of the hottest trends in economic development has been pursuing biotechnology. Cities and states around the nation have made considerable investments in biotech research, ranging from California’s voter-approved $3 billion research program, to smaller efforts in cities around the country, including Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Phoenix. One of the…
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Any Port in a Storm?
Over the past few weeks, there’s been a fair amount of media furor over the slowdown in container traffic handling on the West Coast as dockworkers and shipping companies negotiated the new terms of a labor deal. You no doubt heard a fair amount of hyper-ventilation about the economic consequences of disruptions to this international…
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Urban Employment: How does your city compare?
As chronicled in our report here and commentary here, we are seeing evidence of a shift in employment back to city centers. We believe that this is driven by a number of forces, including the increasing preference of young, talented workers for urban living; some of this shift is cyclical and coincides with the fact that more…
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Jobs Return to City Centers
(This post coincides with the newly released report, Surging City Center Job Growth. The report and more details are found here.) For decades, urban economists have chronicled the steady decentralization of employment in our metropolitan areas. First people moved to the suburbs for low density housing, and then businesses followed—especially retail and service businesses that catered…
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Surging City Center Job Growth
For over half a century, American cities were decentralizing, with suburban areas surpassing city centers in both population and job growth. It appears that these economic and demographic tides are now changing. Over the past few years, urban populations in America’s cities have grown faster than outlying areas, and our research shows that jobs are…
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Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place”
In this post, we’ll go over the data and mapping steps that were used to create our Lost In Place report on the concentration of poverty and the interactive web map. This post is one of several commentary posts that accompany the report, including an examination of how poverty has deepened. Data for our report…
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How Poverty Has Deepened (part 2)
Recently, we discussed the growth in the number of urban high-poverty neighborhoods, which we illustrated by examining the distribution of poverty rates among census tracts. This analysis showed that high poverty neighborhoods are becoming more common in urban areas. Today we will use this distribution to discuss what few of us have directly experienced: extremely…
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How Should Portland Pay for Streets?
For the past several months, Portland’s City Council has been wrestling with various proposals to raise additional funds to pay for maintaining and improving city streets. After considering a range of ideas, including fees on households and businesses, a progressive income tax, and a kind of Rube Goldberg income tax pro-rated to average gasoline consumption,…
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City Report: Lost in Place
Here’s a summary of our latest CityReport: Lost in Place: Why the persistence and spread of concentrated poverty–not gentrification–is our biggest urban challenge. Lost in Place traces the history of high poverty neighborhoods in large US cities, and constructs a new view of the process of neighborhood change. This article summarizes some of our key…
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Metro Economics
Metropolitan areas are the fundamental organizational units of our global, knowledge-based economy.