Category Commentary

How we shut the door on housing

Note: Tomorrow, NYU’s Furman Center will hold a seminar with Dartmouth professor William Fischel on his new paper,”The Rise of the Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the Growth Machine.” This post contains some of our…

The Week Observed: March 4, 2016

What City Observatory did this week 1. Cities can’t solve all our problems. Like other people who think and work about cities and urban issues, we’re often focused on how ground-level changes can make cities better—things neighborhood groups or local…

CBO on highway finance: The price is wrong

A new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report confirms what we’ve known for a long time: our nation’s system of assessing the costs of roads—and paying for their construction and maintenance—is badly broken. Entitled “Approaches to Making Federal Highway Spending More…