The more education you have, the bigger the payoff to living in a city A recent Wall Street Journal article painted the nation’s rural areas as its new inner cities, with high rates of poverty, limited economic opportunity and a…
Trump’s infrastructure package would let states pursue road pricing A trillion dollars for infrastructure. That’s been the headline talking point for months about the Trump Administration’s policy agenda, but the details have been murky at best. A short white paper…
Why we’re very skeptical about urban farming. At City Observatory, we don’t tend to have a lot of content about agriculture. Farming is not an urban activity. But every so often, we read techno-optimistic stories about how a new era…
Volunteering is one of the hallmarks of community; here are the cities with the highest rates of volunteerism The decline of the civic commons, the extent to which American’s engage with one another in the public realm, especially across class…
“Traded sector” businesses that employ well-educated workers mark a prosperous region At City Observatory, we regularly stress the importance of education and skills to regional economic success. Statistically, we can explain almost two-thirds of the variation in per capita income…