Despite what you may have heard, poverty rates in suburbs are on average half what they are in urban centers There’s a growing chorus about the so-called suburbanization of poverty. A couple of years ago, Alan Ehrenhalt’s Great Inversion argued…
Politico’s survey of experts leaves out the most important challenges, in our humble opinion. A couple of weeks back, Politco, the wonky-insider beltway news source queried a dozen of the nation’s urban thought leaders about the biggest crises facing cities…
Let’s put a price on using the atmosphere as a garbage dump for carbon For almost six months, Chicago has been charging shoppers a 7 cent fee for using disposable plastic grocery bags. Rather than banning the bags outright, the…
What City Observatory did this week 1. Why median rents are an incomplete and often misleading indicator of housing affordability. Our colleague Daniel Hertz shows how the median rent statistics that are often cited to demonstrate whether a neighborhood or…
How buying high and selling low makes housing a bad investment for many disadvantaged groups One of the enduring features of American inequality is the wide disparity in homeownership rates between white Americans and Latinos and African-Americans. And because homeownership…