The first quarter of 2017 has marked a parade of announced store closures. The long awaited axe has fallen on 68 more Macy’s stores around the country. J.C. Penney has announced it will close another 138 stores. Other major national retail…
What City Observatory did this week 1. Are restaurants dying and taking city economies with them? In a column at Governing, Alan Ehrenhalt raises the alarm that a city economic revival predicated on what he calls “cafe urbanism” is at…
Speed doesn’t seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems. Yesterday, we presented some new estimates of the average speed of travel in different metropolitan areas developed by the University of California’s…
Which cities move the fastest? Does it matter? The raison d’etre of the highway engineer is making cars go faster. That’s reflected in chronic complaints about traffic congestion, and codified in often misleading studies, like those produced by the Texas…
Alan Ehrenhalt is alarmed. In his tony suburb of Clarendon, Virginia, several nice restaurants have closed. It seems like an ominous trend. Writing at Governing, he’s warning of “The Limits of Cafe’ Urbanism.” Cafe Urbanism is a “lite” version of…