The high price of cheap gas
At least on the surface, the big declines in gas prices we’ve seen over the past year seem like an unalloyed good. We save money at the pump, and we have more to spend on other things, But the cheap…
Joe Cortright
The Week Observed: November 13, 2015
What City Observatory did this week 1. What filtering can and can’t do. In most cities, the majority of homes that are affordable to people of modest or low incomes don’t receive special affordability subsidies—they’re just cheap market-rate housing. But…
Journalists should be wary of “median rent” reports
Trying to measure average housing costs for neighborhoods across an entire city—let alone the whole country—is an incredibly ambitious task. Not only does it require a massive database of real estate listings, it requires making those listings somehow representative at…
A “helicopter drop” for the asphalt socialists
The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees…
What filtering can and can’t do
“Affordable housing” can seem like a hopelessly vague term. First of all, affordable to whom? (Follow the link to a description of an “affordable” program targeting people making 40 percent more than the median income in San Francisco.) And even…