Gentrification: Here’s your all-purpose list, from artists to zoning, of who and what’s to blame We first published this list in 2019, but the search for scapegoats has expanded, and now includes little libraries and microbreweries. When bad things happen,…
What City Observatory this week 1. 2019: The Year Observed. We take a look back at 2019 and review some of the most important City Observatory commentaries, interesting stories and valued research. Our most read post of 2019 was “Ten…
Turning renters into owners is not a simple solution to housing affordability Housing affordability is a tough, multi-faceted problem. Portland is wrestling with one approach to that, a new ordinance that would make it easier to build “missing middle” housing,…
Enabling low income households to move to high opportunity neighborhoods is one way to promote equity and intergenerational mobility. But some people apparently don’t want anyone to move. Last year, we profiled an experiment in Seattle that tapped into the…
What City Observatory did in 2019 We spent a lot of time this year addressing Portland’s proposed half-billion dollar Rose Quarter freeway widening project. You may have thought Portland put its freeway fights behind it in the 1970s, when it…