City Observatory

Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable

Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it

At City Observatory, we try to stick to a wonky, data-driven approach to all things urban. But numbers don’t mean much without a framework to explain them, and so today we want to quickly talk about one of those rhetorical frameworks: specifically, how we talk about driving.

Things that are more inequitable than road pricing

Don’t decry congestion pricing as inequitable until after you fix, or at least acknowledge, these ten other things that are even more inequitable about the way we pay for transportation.

You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs

The “commonly accepted” 30 percent standard for judging housing affordability leaves out transportation and location

The illegal city of Somerville

Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and…

Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution?

Item: In the past two years, Portland Public Schools has spent nearly $12.5 million of its scarce funds to clean up the air at Harriet Tubman Middle School. This money will buy an expensive state-of-the-art air filtration system that will make the air inside the school safe for students to breathe. Scientists from…

Gerontopoly: Homeownership, wealth, and age

Is the “dream” of homeownership really just a massive, intergenerational wealth transfer? Recently, that’s just how it has worked out.

California’s next bold step on climate should be building near transit

While the impetus for State Senator Scott Wiener’s proposed SB 827, which would allow apartment construction near transit lines was addressing housing affordability, the measure should also be a cornerstone of our efforts to tackle climate change.

Going faster doesn’t make you happier; you just drive farther

Speed doesn’t seem to be at all correlated to how happy we our with our local transportation systems.

“For Rent” signs are popping up all over Portland

“For Rent” signs are popping up all over Portland, signaling an easing of the housing crunch and foretelling falling rents

Why predicted gridlock almost never happens

Why predicted gridlock almost never happens and what this teaches us about travel demand