Earlier this year, our friends at the Brookings Institution released a new tabulation of Census data on levels of inequality in the nation’s largest cities. Inequality, in this case, is measured by dividing the income of a household at the…
We all know and use rules of thumb. They’re handy for simplifying otherwise difficult problems and quickly making reasonably prudent decisions. We know that we should measure twice and cut once, that a stitch in time saves nine, and that…
There are two kinds of economics: macroeconomics, which deals in big national and global quantities, like gross domestic product, and microeconomics, which focuses on a smaller scale, like how the prices of specific products change. Macroeconomics gets all the attention…
What City Observatory did this week This week, we ran a three-part series on what we mean by “housing affordability.” 1. In The way we measure housing affordability is broken, Daniel Kay Hertz writes about the problems with the most…
Over the past two posts, we’ve argued that the most common measure of housing affordability – whether someone is paying more than 30% of their income – has a lot of serious problems. For one, housing costs are only one…