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…
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…
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…
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…
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…