Spending half a billion dollars to widen a mile of I-5 will have exactly zero effect on daily congestion. The biggest transportation project moving forward in downtown Portland isn’t something related to transit, or cycling (or even bringing back shared…
The number of security guards is a good measure of a city’s level of “anti-social” capital In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam popularized the term “social capital.” Putnam also developed a clever series of statistics for measuring social capital.…
What are cities worth? More than big private companies, as it turns out: The value of housing in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas ($25.7 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest…
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of our current approaches to providing affordable housing. We present a summary of some remarks offered by Rob Stewart, a principal with JBG Smith Real Estate, reflecting on his experience working…
Another year later, and we’re still stuck with the same hypocrisy on climate change If it seems like you’ve read this post before at City Observatory, you’re not wrong. For the past couple of years, every Groundhog’s Day, we’ve stuck…