Part 2. Are city boundaries the right way to measure inclusion? Municipal boundaries produce a myopic and distorted view of inclusion; the boundaries themselves were often drawn to create exclusion (Editor’s note: This is the second in a five-part series…
Inclusiveness is a worthy policy goal, but in practice turns out to be devilishly hard to measure. A recent report from the Urban Institute shows some of the pitfalls: looking just within city boundaries ignores metropolitan context and gives a distorted…
What City Observatory did this week 1. The limits of localism. A number of urban luminaries, including Bruce Katz and Richard Florida have been urging that we pin our hopes for social and policy change on local governments. At City…
A careful study of evictions in San Francisco says “No.” There’s a widespread belief among some neighborhood activists that building new housing triggers displacement. We-and most economists are highly skeptical of that argument at the metropolitan level, but its at…
Overselling localism is becoming an excuse to shed and shred federal responsibility Our friend, and director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, Amy Liu, weighs in with a timely commentary on the limits of localism. As regular readers of…