The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location At City Observatory, we’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons
You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs Read Post »
Where are walkable local shopping districts in your city? There are just six shopping days left until Christmas; while much of our shopping is done on-line or with at big box stores and national chains,
Where you can walk and shop locally: The Storefront Index Read Post »
The “body count” view of suburban population misses the value people attach to cities Lately, we’ve seen a barrage of comments suggesting that the era of the city is over, and that Americans, including young
A critical look at suburban triumphalism Read Post »
One of the great ironies of urban economies is the wide disparity between the price of parking and the price of housing in cities. Almost everyone acknowledges that we face a growing and severe problem
Parking: The Price is Wrong Read Post »
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,
City center job growth continues strength; suburbs rebounding from recession Read Post »
We’ve received many questions on how we did the analysis behind our Storefront Index. This post will describe our dataset, our method, and how we created our visualizations. We hope that this will spur future
How we did the Storefront Index Read Post »
