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…
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…
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…
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…
Why does economic inequality—as opposed to just poverty—matter? There are a lot of reasons, but a big one is that higher levels of inequality make it harder to improve your economic position. As Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has argued,…