What City Observatory did this week 1. Urban housing is a massive asset. How massive? Well, a comparison to the valuation of our nation’s biggest corporations shows it’s no comparison at all—housing in major cities has them beat, often handily:…
For advocates of less restrictive building regulations, especially in high-cost cities where more homes might help bring down housing prices and create more equitable, diverse neighborhoods, state governments often seem like the best bet. At a local level, for reasons…
We got quite a bit of interest on our post last week about how the Boston suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts had written itself a zoning code that would have prevented the construction of virtually the entire city of 80,000 people if…
Thanks to technological innovations, our lives are in many ways better, faster, and safer: We have better communications, faster, cheaper computing, and more sophisticated drugs and medical technology than ever before. And rightly, the debates about economic development focus on…
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 ($22 trillion) is more than double the value of the stock of the nation’s 50 largest…