The Curious Engineer

City Observatory

2014–2016

485 posts

2017–2026 →

2016 258

December 2016

  1. The Week Observed, December 30, 2016
  2. Our ten most popular posts of 2016
  3. For whom the bridge tolls
  4. Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
  5. The illegal city of Somerville
  6. The Week Observed, December 23, 2016
  7. Denver backs away from inclusionary zoning
  8. Some timely technologies to help pedestrians deal with self-driving cars
  9. A rebound in millennial car-buying?
  10. The Week Observed, December 16, 2016
  11. More evidence for peer effects: Help with homework edition
  12. You are where you eat.
  13. Copenhagen: More than bike lanes
  14. Urban Transportation’s Camel Problem
  15. The Week Observed, December 9, 2016
  16. Some thoughts on Portland’s proposed inclusionary housing plan
  17. A policy that works: Raising the minimum wage
  18. Are the ‘burbs really back?
  19. Pollution and poor neighborhoods: A blast from the past
  20. The Week Observed, December 2, 2016
  21. Why biotech strategies are often 21st century snake oil

November 2016

  1. Destined to disappoint: housing lotteries
  2. Does Cyber-Monday mean delivery gridlock Tuesday?
  3. Does rent control work? Evidence from Berlin
  4. The Week Observed, November 25, 2016
  5. More evidence on the migration of talent
  6. Your guide to the debate over the Trump Infrastructure Plan
  7. The growth of global neighborhoods
  8. The Week Observed, November 18, 2016
  9. Supply starting to catch up with demand
  10. Parking: The Price is Wrong
  11. Daytime and nighttime segregation
  12. The Week Observed, November 11, 2016
  13. Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
  14. An infographic summarizing neighborhood change
  15. Cities and Elections
  16. A tax credit for renters
  17. The Week Observed: November 4, 2016
  18. Market timing and racial wealth disparities
  19. Affordable Housing: Not just for a favored few
  20. Halloween was yesterday: Let’s stop scaremongering about cities

October 2016

  1. The myth of revealed preference for suburbs
  2. The Week Observed: October 28, 2016
  3. Lies, damn lies, and (on-line shopping) statistics.
  4. Reversed Polarity: Bay Area venture capital trends
  5. Our infographic for thinking about the civic commons
  6. Walk on by: How not to improve walkability measures.
  7. The Week Observed: October 21, 2016
  8. The new mythology of rich cities and poor suburbs
  9. Cities and the price of parking
  10. The price of parking
  11. Our birthday wish: Cities for everyone
  12. The Week Observed: October 14, 2016
  13. Where is ridesharing growing fastest?
  14. The most interesting neighborhood in the world
  15. More fuzzy math: Vancouver real estate edition
  16. More evidence job growth is shifting to the center
  17. The Week Observed: October 7, 2016
  18. Memo to Stockholm
  19. Are integrated neighborhoods stable?
  20. A lottery isn’t the answer to our housing problems
  21. Bubble logic

September 2016

  1. The Week Observed: September 30, 2016
  2. The price of autonomous cars: why it matters
  3. How much will autonomous vehicles cost?
  4. Counting People and Cars: Placemeter
  5. Where are African-American entrepreneurs?
  6. The Week Observed: September 23, 2016
  7. Lessons in Supply and Demand: Housing Market Edition
  8. Caught in the prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
  9. Successful cities and the civic commons
  10. Kickstarting your local creative economy
  11. The Week Observed: Sept. 16, 2016
  12. Cities are powering the rebound in national income growth
  13. Parking meters and opportunity costs
  14. Portland considers inclusionary zoning
  15. McMansions Fading Away?
  16. The Week Observed: Sept. 9, 2016
  17. For low-income households, median home prices aren’t always what count
  18. Back to school: Three charts that make the case for cities
  19. Counting women entrepreneurs
  20. The Week Observed: Sept. 2, 2016
  21. Transatlantic advice on city development strategies

August 2016

  1. The politics of grand housing bargains: NYC
  2. The Economic Value of Walkability: New Evidence
  3. Who patronizes small retailers?
  4. The Week Observed: Aug. 26, 2016
  5. More Driving, More Dying (2016 First Half Update)
  6. The link between parking and housing
  7. Why Talent Matters to Cities
  8. How economically integrated is your city?
  9. The Week Observed: Aug. 19, 2016
  10. The role of mixed income neighborhoods in lessening poverty
  11. How do we know zoning really constrains development?
  12. The limits of data-driven approaches to planning
  13. The Summer Driving Season & The High Price of Cheap Gas
  14. The Week Observed: Aug. 12, 2016
  15. Court: Don’t spend billions on outdated travel forecasts
  16. Patents, place, and profit
  17. A postcard from Marietta
  18. The party platforms on transit
  19. The Week Observed: Aug. 5, 2016
  20. Five consecutive years of job growth: a clear cause for optimism in Detroit
  21. How Racial Segregation Leads to Income Inequality
  22. A To-Do List for Promoting Competitive Ride-Sharing Markets
  23. Let a thousand Ubers bloom

July 2016

  1. The Week Observed: July 29, 2016
  2. The triumph of the City and the twilight of nerdistans
  3. How gentrification affects small businesses
  4. The party platforms on housing
  5. Housing Cost Calculators
  6. Paul Romer to the World Bank
  7. The Week Observed: July 22, 2016
  8. A change
  9. Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable
  10. Homeownership can exacerbate inequality
  11. Homeownership: A failed wealth-creation strategy
  12. The Week Observed: July 15, 2016
  13. Lessons of Westchester
  14. Rules of the road
  15. The values of value capture
  16. Less than perfect
  17. The Week Observed: July 8, 2016
  18. Londonize!
  19. Review: State of the Nation’s Housing 2016
  20. The fourth virtue of public transit
  21. The Week Observed: July 1, 2016

June 2016

  1. Three challenges for the civic commons
  2. More evidence on the “Dow of Cities”
  3. Sprawl and the cost of living
  4. Cities and Brexit
  5. The Week Observed: June 24, 2016
  6. States on the front lines of housing affordability
  7. More on the illegal city of Somerville
  8. 21st century snake oil
  9. The market cap of cities
  10. The Week Observed: June 17, 2016
  11. Why Houston has been special since at least 1999
  12. The illegal city of Somerville
  13. When cities change
  14. How sprawl taxes our well-being
  15. The Week Observed: June 10, 2016
  16. How many carless workers are there really?
  17. Achieving scale in affordable housing
  18. Sprawl Tax: How the US stacks up internationally
  19. Neighborhood change in Philadelphia
  20. The Week Observed: June 3, 2016
  21. Introducing the Sprawl Tax
  22. Schools and economic integration

May 2016

  1. Self-driving cars versus pedestrians
  2. The Week Observed: May 27, 2016
  3. California’s latest affordable housing proposal gives insight into housing politics
  4. Cities are adding people, jobs and businesses
  5. City center job growth continues strength; suburbs rebounding from recession
  6. How we did the Storefront Index
  7. The Week Observed: May 20, 2016
  8. The demand for city living is behind the urban rent premium
  9. Nationally, apartment supply may be catching demand
  10. The long road to San Francisco
  11. Sprawl, segregation, and mobility
  12. The Week Observed: May 13, 2016
  13. The rising tide of economic segregation
  14. USDOT to shut down nation’s roads, citing safety concerns
  15. The positive feedback loop of integration
  16. Where should low-income housing go?
  17. The Week Observed: May 6, 2016
  18. How people are using the Storefront Index
  19. Income segregation along the whole spectrum
  20. There’s more than one kind of income segregation
  21. What it means to be in common

April 2016

  1. The Week Observed: April 29, 2016
  2. Storefronts and job growth
  3. Squaring off with the Storefront Index
  4. The Storefront Index
  5. The Storefront Index
  6. On the road again?
  7. The Week Observed: April 22, 2016
  8. A new look at neighborhood change
  9. Marijuana: its geographical and policy implications
  10. Excessive expectations: A first look at the DOT’s new road performance rules
  11. Daytime and nighttime segregation
  12. The Week Observed: April 15, 2016
  13. Urbanism isn’t yet a luxury good
  14. A surprising message about the connection between place and life expectancy
  15. Note to journalists: Stop quoting bogus rent numbers
  16. A mystery in the suburbs
  17. The Week Observed: April 8, 2016
  18. The limits of technology: Let’s hack an app
  19. What lifecycle and generational effects tell us about young people’s homebuying
  20. Sprawl beyond zoning
  21. The high and hidden costs of parking requirements
  22. The Week Observed: April 1, 2016
  23. Introducing the Pedestrian Pain Index

March 2016

  1. What works, and what doesn’t, with housing vouchers
  2. How brain drain measures can mislead
  3. Why mixed-income neighborhoods matter: lifting kids out of poverty
  4. Not peak Millennial: the coming wave
  5. The Week Observed: March 25, 2016
  6. County data is great, but it can’t tell us much about urban living
  7. The beat goes on: More misleading congestion rankings from TomTom
  8. Here’s your definitive field guide to median rent statistics
  9. A field guide to median rent statistics
  10. It’s time for a “big short” in parking
  11. When supply catches up to demand, rents go down
  12. The Week Observed: March 18, 2016
  13. Why the new Inrix Traffic Scorecard deserves a “D”
  14. Like Uber, but for redistribution
  15. Super long commutes: a non-big, non-growing, non-problem
  16. Finding nuance in the housing supply arguments
  17. The Week Observed: March 11, 2016
  18. How is driving mode share changing in your city?
  19. How should cities approach economic development?
  20. How we shut the door on housing
  21. Muddling income inequality and economic segregation
  22. The Week Observed: March 4, 2016
  23. CBO on highway finance: The price is wrong
  24. The problem with how we measure housing affordability
  25. Explore national transportation change trends by age group

February 2016

  1. Cities can’t solve all our problems
  2. The Week Observed: February 26, 2016
  3. Designed to fail
  4. What I learned playing SimCity
  5. Undercounting the transit constituency
  6. Another round on the Washington Post’s housing roundtable
  7. The Week Observed: February 19, 2016
  8. Costly misses on convention centers
  9. Urban myth busting: New rental housing and median-income households
  10. With highway expansion, be careful what you wish for
  11. More driving means more dying
  12. The Week Observed: February 12, 2016
  13. Inclusionary zoning has a scale problem
  14. Report: Market-rate housing construction is a weapon against displacement
  15. Why the first-time homebuyer is an endangered species
  16. More evidence on the “Dow of cities”
  17. The Week Observed: February 5, 2016
  18. More support for a real estate capital gains tax
  19. Bursting Portland’s urban growth boundary won’t make housing more affordable
  20. Who’s afraid of affordable housing?
  21. Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it

January 2016

  1. The Week Observed: January 29, 2016
  2. In some cities, the housing construction boom is starting to pay off
  3. Land use and transportation infrastructure: Two sides of a coin
  4. What is an “unequal” city?
  5. The market cap of cities
  6. The Week Observed: January 22, 2016
  7. Why not make housing assistance to the low-income as easy as assistance to the high-income?
  8. Are jobs really returning to the city?
  9. For highway advocates, it’s about the journey, not the destination
  10. Which federal agency has a big role to play in housing affordability? The answer might surprise you
  11. The Week Observed: January 15, 2016
  12. The many faces of exclusionary zoning
  13. Why can’t cheaply-built houses be an affordability solution in expensive cities?
  14. Pulling it all together
  15. Bending the carbon curve in the wrong direction
  16. The Week Observed: January 8, 2016
  17. The economic strength of American cities in four charts
  18. Houston has something to teach you about public transit
  19. Make housing vouchers an entitlement—we can afford it

2015 182

December 2015

  1. Our favorites from 2015, part 2
  2. Our favorites from 2015, part 1
  3. The Year Observed: Your 12 favorite posts from 2015, part 2
  4. The Year Observed: Your 12 favorite posts from 2015, part 1
  5. The Week Observed: December 24, 2015
  6. Who’s really rent-burdened?
  7. About that “consensus” on zoning
  8. The Katy isn’t ready for its closeup
  9. The Week Observed: December 18, 2015
  10. Where did all the small apartment buildings go?
  11. Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t
  12. Homevoters v. the growth machine
  13. Don’t bank on it
  14. The Week Observed: December 11, 2015
  15. Cities have reason to be wary of Fed moves
  16. Climate concerns steamrolled by FAST Act and cheap gas
  17. Pulling a FAST one
  18. A $1.6 billion proposal
  19. The Week Observed: December 4, 2015
  20. You need more than one number to understand housing affordability
  21. Is foreign capital destroying our cities?
  22. Engaged communities, civic participation, and democracy

November 2015

  1. The Week Observed: November 27, 2015
  2. Happy Thanksgiving!
  3. Zoning and cities on the national economic stage
  4. It’s a good time for buyers to beware
  5. Ways forward to more equitable land use law
  6. The Week Observed: November 20, 2015
  7. The origins of the housing crisis
  8. The shopkeeper: A zoning parable
  9. The high price of cheap gas
  10. The Week Observed: November 13, 2015
  11. Journalists should be wary of “median rent” reports
  12. A “helicopter drop” for the asphalt socialists
  13. What filtering can and can’t do
  14. The Week Observed: November 6, 2015
  15. Election results for urbanists
  16. Do the rich (neighborhoods) get richer?
  17. City Observatory on the Knight Cities podcast
  18. More doubt cast on food deserts

October 2015

  1. The Week Observed: October 30, 2015
  2. Truthiness in gentrification reporting
  3. What’s really going on in gentrifying neighborhoods?
  4. Higher-inequality neighborhoods reduce inequality
  5. Introducing City Observatory policy memos
  6. The Week Observed: October 23, 2015
  7. Beyond gas: The price (of driving) is wrong
  8. Why creating meaningful transportation change is so hard
  9. Eleven things you’d know if you read City Observatory
  10. Affordability beyond the median
  11. The Week Observed: October 16, 2015
  12. Happy birthday to us!
  13. A modest proposal: treat affordable housing more like food stamps
  14. Why America can’t make up its mind about housing
  15. The Week Observed: October 9, 2015
  16. The danger of taking policy lessons from extreme cases
  17. Talent, opportunity, and engagement are essential to successful cities
  18. The end of peak driving?
  19. What’s behind the debate over American streets
  20. The Week Observed: October 2, 2015
  21. One of the biggest myths about cities: Crime is rising

September 2015

  1. When it comes to transit use, destination density matters more than where you live
  2. The high cost of affordable housing and the shortage of cities: notes from a panel
  3. Cities’ role in growing our nation’s economy
  4. The Week Observed: September 25, 2015
  5. The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins
  6. What else does the new “severely rent-burdened” report tell us?
  7. Why are metropolitan areas more “equal” than their central cities?
  8. Zoning in everything—even the education gap
  9. The Week Observed: September 18, 2015
  10. What does it mean to be a “smart city”?
  11. Is WMATA’s transit cost problem a national issue?
  12. The prisoner’s dilemma of local-only planning
  13. Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere
  14. The Week Observed: September 11, 2015
  15. The top ten reasons to ignore TTI’s Urban Mobility Report
  16. What do we know about neighborhood change, gentrification, and displacement?
  17. My illegal neighborhood
  18. The Week Observed: September 4, 2015
  19. Who’s really rent-burdened?
  20. Contradictory conclusions and disappearing data
  21. Updated: Is traffic worse now? The “congestion report” can’t tell us

August 2015

  1. Looking at housing injustice requires a broad lens
  2. The Week Observed: August 28, 2015
  3. New Orleans’ missing black middle class
  4. UPDATED (again): Another tall tale from the Texas Transportation Institute
  5. Growing e-commerce means less urban traffic
  6. Are racial “tipping points” overblown?
  7. The Week Observed, August 21, 2015
  8. The Dow of Cities
  9. The war of words: rhetoric and the city
  10. The edifice complex and our infrastructure problems
  11. The suburbs: where the rich ride transit
  12. The suburbs: where the rich ride transit
  13. The Week Observed: August 14, 2015
  14. City home prices outpacing metro by 50%
  15. Between highrises and single-family homes
  16. The next road safety revolution
  17. The Week Observed: August 7, 2015
  18. The McMansion mirage reappears
  19. Revisiting Marietta
  20. Urban buses are slowing down
  21. Let’s talk about neighborhood stigma

July 2015

  1. The Week Observed: July 31, 2015
  2. The difficulty of applying inequality measurements to cities
  3. Our old planning rules of thumb are “all thumbs”
  4. How cutting back on driving helps the economy
  5. The Week Observed: July 24, 2015
  6. Measuring housing affordability: What about homeowners?
  7. Residual income: a better way of measuring affordability
  8. The way we measure housing affordability is broken
  9. The Week Observed: July 17, 2015
  10. The value of walkability across the US
  11. What can conservatives do for cities?
  12. Why aren’t we talking about Marietta, Georgia?
  13. The Week Observed: July 10, 2015
  14. The devilish details of getting a VMT fee right
  15. More evidence on the changing demographics of American downtowns
  16. The Week Observed: July 3, 2015
  17. Paving Paradise

June 2015

  1. Climate concerns crush Oregon highway funding bill
  2. Three more takeaways from Harvard’s “State of the Nation’s Housing” report
  3. The Week Observed: June 26, 2015
  4. The new trend in homeownership: Gerontrification
  5. Portland, the Mission, and the housing affordability debate
  6. Playing together is getting harder to do
  7. The Civic Commons & City Success
  8. Less in Common
  9. Is gentrification a rare big city malady?
  10. The Convention Center Business Turns Ugly
  11. Show Your Work: Getting DOT Traffic Forecasts Out of the Black Box
  12. The real welfare Cadillacs have 18 wheels
  13. Urban residents aren’t abandoning buses; buses are abandoning them

May 2015

  1. Fake city, flawed thinking
  2. New evidence on integration and economic mobility
  3. Undercounting the transit constituency
  4. Baltimore’s problems belong to 2015, not 1968
  5. There’s no such thing as a Free-Way*
  6. City of ideas, and the idea of cities
  7. How we measure segregation depends on why we care
  8. Gentrification: The state of the debate in 2015

April 2015

  1. More evidence on city center job growth
  2. On Baltimore: Concentrated Poverty, Segregation, and Inequality
  3. Peaks, valleys, and donuts: a great new way to see American cities
  4. Young People are Buying Fewer Cars
  5. Our six month anniversary!
  6. Want to close the Black/White Income Gap? Work to Reduce Segregation.
  7. Travis County, TX is booming. Cook County, IL is shrinking. What does that tell us about cities? Not much.
  8. City Observatory Welcomes Daniel Kay Hertz
  9. Walkability rankings: One step forward, one step back
  10. Should your city build a headquarters hotel?
  11. More evidence of surging city job growth

March 2015

  1. The Cappuccino Congestion Index
  2. How important is proximity to jobs for the poor?
  3. Twenty-somethings are choosing cities. Really.
  4. On the Road Again
  5. Who’s Vulnerable to Retail Retrenchment?
  6. Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage
  7. Has the Tide Turned?
  8. Florida’s Biotech Bet
  9. What does it mean to be a “Smart City?”

February 2015

  1. Any Port in a Storm?
  2. Urban Employment: How does your city compare?
  3. Datapost
  4. Jobs Return to City Centers
  5. Surging City Center Job Growth
  6. The Perils of Conflating Gentrification and Displacement: A Longer and Wonkier Critique of Governing’s Gentrification Issue
  7. Best Bar Cities
  8. How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 2: Small Business)
  9. How is economic mobility related to entrepreneurship? (Part 1: Venture Capital)
  10. How Governing got it wrong: The problem with confusing gentrification and displacement
  11. New Findings on Economic Opportunity (that you should know)
  12. Keeping it Weird: The Secret to Portland’s Economic Success

January 2015

  1. How productive is your city?
  2. One tip for a prosperous city economy
  3. You are where you eat.
  4. Tracking Neighborhood Change: How we made “Lost In Place”
  5. How Poverty Has Deepened (part 2)
  6. Is life really better in Red States (and cities)?
  7. How Poverty Has Deepened (part 1)
  8. How Should Portland Pay for Streets?
  9. Where are the food deserts?

2014 45

December 2014

  1. Happy New Year from City Observatory
  2. Understanding Your City’s Distinctiveness Through Occupational Data
  3. How we build our cities: What’s at stake
  4. Is your city or neighborhood poorer than 40 years ago?
  5. Anti-Social Capital?
  6. How distinct is your city?
  7. Ten More you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
  8. Lost in Place
  9. Gender Differences in Unemployment
  10. Ten things you should read about Gentrification, Integration and Concentrated Poverty
  11. City Report: Lost in Place
  12. Metro’s “Why Bother” Climate Change Strategy

November 2014

  1. Why Black Friday Just Isn’t Worth It
  2. Are suburbs really happier?
  3. Focus: Detroit’s Young and Restless
  4. Our Shortage of Cities: Portland Housing Market Edition
  5. Parking: The Price is Wrong
  6. The four biggest myths about cities – #4: Traffic is getting worse

October 2014

  1. The four biggest myths about cities – #3: Crime is rising in cities
  2. And the Talent Dividend Prize Winner is . . .
  3. The four biggest myths about cities – #2: Cities are dirty
  4. The four biggest myths about cities – #1 Cities aren’t safe for children
  5. Young and Restless: How is your city doing?
  6. Young and Restless
  7. Boo! The annual Carmaggedon scare is upon us.
  8. Talent & Prosperity
  9. Questioning Congestion Costs
  10. Urban Form & Transportation
  11. Innovation & Entrepreneurship
  12. Economic Opportunity
  13. Placemaking & the Consumer City
  14. Housing Markets
  15. Metro Economics
  16. Distinctiveness
  17. Widening the I-5 Rose Quarter Freeway
  18. Welcome to City Observatory!
  19. Portland
  20. Finding your way around City Observatory
  21. Data & Tools
  22. Upcoming Reports
  23. Is Portland really where young people go to retire?
  24. Kids in Cities
  25. Our Shortage of Cities

August 2014

  1. Neighborhood Change
  2. Young and Restless

2017–2026 →