What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban Myth Busting: Idling in traffic and carbon pollution. There’s a frequently repeated, just-so story about carbon emissions: if we didn’t spend so much time stuck in stop-and-go traffic and idling, we’d emit…
The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location At City Observatory, we’ve long been dissatisfied with commonly used measures of describing housing affordability. There are lots of reasons to believe that a single,…
Over the past year, rent inflation has declined in 48 of the top 50 markets For the past several years, rising rents have been at the center of the nation’s housing affordability debate. A combination of former homeowners dispossessed by…
Since 2000, the number of people living in extremely poor neighborhoods has doubled; neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are still disproportionately in the densest urban places. Last week, the Joint Center on Housing Studies released its annual “State of the Nation’s…
The fallacy of composition leads people to get the connection between density and affordability backwards Our good friend at Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn is utterly right about a great many things. But he’s committed a classic Kotkinesque blunder when it…