City Observatory
cityobservatory.org · Group blog · on HN since 2015
A think tank blog on cities, covering housing affordability, zoning, transportation costs, road pricing, and urban economics.
What HN saysCommenters cite it for data on housing, zoning, and car commuting, and for its posts on cities and corporate site selection.
66HN people shared it
51linked it in comments
98stories submitted
3.0Kstory points
2 years agolast shared
2015people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The illegal city of Somerville8 people · 199 points · first shared 2016 · 182 comments on HN
- 2Housing can’t both be a good investment and be affordable6 people · 496 points · first shared 2018 · 377 comments on HN
- 3What housing “filtering” can and can’t do6 people · 35 points · first shared 2016 · 26 comments on HN
- 4Things that are more inequitable than road pricing5 people · 235 points · first shared 2019 · 270 comments on HN
- 5You can’t judge housing affordability without knowing transportation costs3 people · 232 points · first shared 2019 · 241 comments on HN
- 6Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable3 people · 76 points · first shared 2016 · 52 comments on HN
- 7Homevoters v. the growth machine: Who controls the development of cities?3 people · 37 points · first shared 2015 · 11 comments on HN
- 8How luxury housing becomes affordable over time3 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9In some cities, the housing construction boom is starting to pay off3 people · 1 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 10Reducing congestion katy didnt3 people · first shared 2017
- 11Why do poor school kids have to clean up rich commuters’ pollution?2 people · 117 points · first shared 2019 · 148 comments on HN
- 12Why are pedestrian deaths increasing in the US?2 people · 96 points · first shared 2019 · 132 comments on HN
- 13The myth of revealed preference for suburbs2 people · 83 points · first shared 2018 · 134 comments on HN
- 14More high-income housing doesn’t make housing less affordable2 people · 35 points · first shared 2017 · 67 comments on HN
- 15Kevin Bacon and musical chairs: How market rate housing increases affordability2 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
ryukafalz · 2022-08-25
Yup. And the options available to us have been limited by decades of zoning policy encouraging single-family homes only.
My girlfriend and I are about to move to the suburbs to be closer to her family, but it’s to an inner-ring suburb with excellent transit back into the city. There are maybe two towns for this in the area that aren’t outrageously priced, and even those two are above average.
See also, “The myth of revealed preference for suburbs”: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-4-suburbs/
lonelappde · 2019-10-08
Meanwhile, on the world of facts and data, we see that car commuting is a privilege of the wealthier classes.
http://cityobservatory.org/why-do-poor-school-kids-have-to-clean-up-ri…
Land near metro got expensive (very recently! U St used to be (ugh) "ghetto") because it's GREAT and wealth inequality means rich people can bid up its price. The answer is to build MORE of this great thing so there is enough for poor people too.
robbyking · 2019-05-08
Where I live now, my bike ride to work is twice as fast as my bus commute, and in SF, it was about 30% faster. That said, my wife and I are both all season bike commuters, and because we make almost all of our trips (grocery shopping, taking our son to school, etc.) by bike, bikeability is a huge factor for us when we make housing decisions.
Nearly all the public transportation/cycling naysaying I read seems to be from people who didn't consider (or at least didn't prioritize) non-private automobile transportation into their housing decision, and typically, it's at great cost to them[1].
1. http://cityobservatory.org/transportation_housing_affordability/
davidw · 2018-08-06
> Corporations have choices. They could go about their business, and simply choose the best location, the one that makes the greatest business sense, and invest accordingly. Or they can as Amazon, GE, and dozens of others, go through the ritual of pretending to entertain a wide range of proposals, and use the leverage of competing bids to sweat the best possible deal out of their preferred location
http://cityobservatory.org/cash-prizes-for-bad-corporate-citizenship-a…
Whoever 'wins', may not come out ahead.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/9/10/what-can-i-do-to-have-yo…
jseliger · 2018-03-30
I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, and this point is underrated. Cities are great for many things: http://cityobservatory.org/the-triumph-of-the-city-and-the-twilight-of… related to agglomeration, innovation, and specialization—including social services.
The TCO of owning a car and driving is also wildly underrated by most people: https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs. In cities where a person can avoid car ownership, thousands of dollars can be saved. Too few people really get the TCO of cars.
testvox · 2018-02-22
Probably referring to the hatred many in the United States have towards urban development. In pretty much every city in the United States development has been slowed to a crawl due to zoning restrictions, despite increasing huge demand. People love to use SF as a prime example but I will point to my city, Somerville MA where rents have been soaring, yet there are only 22 lots that meet the residential zoning requirements. All other lots are over the density requirement. So practically any future development has to decrease the number of people who can live in the city, rather then increase it.
http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
throw0101a · 2021-03-23
> What most academics and others like them tend to miss about the American suburbs, is that most Americans like their suburbs.
Is income taken into account?
> Like published happiness research, the State of the City survey shows that reported satisfaction is highly correlated with income. Some 88 percent of those with incomes over $75,000 said their community was excellent or good; only 66 percent of those with incomes of less than $30,000 said the same. It’s worth noting here that the impact of income is larger than the impact of location in influencing satisfaction (a 9 percent difference between city and suburb as opposed to a 22 percent difference between high and low-income groups. These data suggest that the real headline finding of this survey should be “higher income people are more satisfied with the places they live.”
* https://cityobservatory.org/are-suburbs-really-happier/
Survey in question:
* http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/overall-americans-in-the-subur…
rcpt · 2025-03-21
Poor people are riding the bus."congestion pricing is regressive" is the most tired bad faith argument out there. Here's a list of things that are worse:
https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that-road-pric…
nayuki · 2025-02-13
Every aspect of owning and driving a car is regressive on the poor. https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that-road-pric…
ceejayoz · 2023-07-06
Other countries saw the same uptick in smartphones without the same huge uptick in pedestrian deaths, though. In charts:
https://streets.mn/2020/10/14/chart-of-the-day-pedestrian-fatalities-p…
https://cityobservatory.org/why-are-us-drivers-killing-so-many-pedestr…
closeparen · 2021-08-12
Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric. They are only walkable because current buildings are from prior to the adoption of the code. The Illegal City of Somerville [0] brought popular attention to this a few years ago.
I don't know why you insist on putting scare quotes around the words "planning" and "codes." In municipal governments all across the country, people who went to school for "Urban Planning" and have the job title "Planner" work for the "Planning Department" and administer the "Planning Code." These the canonical, legal names.
[0] https://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
seoaeu · 2021-07-03
This is called induced demand. Evidence suggests that for housing increasing supply doesn't cause demand to rise as quickly[0][1][2].
[0]: https://www.planetizen.com/news/2019/06/104783-doubt-cast-induced-dema…
[1]: https://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-neighborhood…
[2]: https://www.slowboring.com/p/induced-demand
et-al · 2021-05-27
I see you've read that CityObservatory article from a few years back [0].
Unfortunately as the Tiktaalik mentioned, we have a housing shortage now. So the trickle-down economics of luxury housing won't work for at least a generation.
Also, all the actual luxury housing that ends up being built is bought by wealthy investors buying their third or fourth property. Just look at the housing market in London.
> Throughout all of American history, new housing has almost exclusively been relatively expensive housing.
Eichlers and Craftsman homes were targeted squarely at the middle class of their time. Now in the Bay Area, the price of a "middle class" home is probably skewed to something around $1,000/sqft, but I don't know if middle class wages can actually afford that.
[0] - https://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-affordable/
tjalfi · 2021-04-01
> I'm surprised the number isn't closer to 80-90%, especially with the recent energy efficiency rules.
Sommerville, Ma is a city of 80,000; 22 buildings meet the zoning code[0].
[0] https://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/
dredmorbius · 2020-11-27
Real estate is the new pension.
With the virtual elimination of defined-benefit pesions, and inadequacy of Social Security, it's the combination of asset-based securities --- 401k (or equivalent) defined-contribution plans, and real estate, which most middle-class Americans rely on for retirement. (Those below this level are simply out of luck.)
So long as assets continue inflating, this works --- as an investment. But housing cannot be both aa good investment and affordable.
https://cityobservatory.org/housing-cant-be-affordable_and_be-a-good-i…
nilkn · 2020-10-06
This page ranks it 18th in that regard: https://cityobservatory.org/most_segregated/
Of note, LA is measured as being more segregated than Houston.
zip1234 · 2020-04-14
Sure we also subsidize them for other vehicles too.
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/katy/news/article/Bragging-rights-o…
Edit: would also like to point out that the billions that they spent to widen that freeway 10 years ago did not reduce congestion because more people built in sprawling suburbs 30 miles from Houston:
http://cityobservatory.org/reducing-congestion-katy-didnt/
oftenwrong · 2020-02-18
I recently read about an example of IDEO "missing the forest for the trees" on the subject of transportation and urban planning:
The limits of design thinking: The most difficult design challenge is asking the right question
by Joe Cortright (2019)
http://cityobservatory.org/designed-to-fail-2/
https://web.archive.org/web/20190509170145/http://cityobservatory.org/…
Essentially, they applied "design thinking" to transportation without considering the role that locality plays in transportation.
charstarstar · 2019-10-29
So, that CNBC article summarizes an article in WSJ that cites 27,000 people leaving some of the largest cities in the US. The problem is that the changes in each city are actually much smaller than the margin of error for the data that WSJ uses (I think it was ACS 5-year estimates).
This post goes into more detail on why that narrative is most likely noise: http://cityobservatory.org/no-youth_exodus_signal-noise/
Edit: 27k is approximately 0.25% of all 25-34 year olds living in cities with pops over 500k (which is what WSJ reported on). Not an exodus at all and it's really a bit of a nonsense narrative that WSJ has been pushing hard.
autoexec · 2019-09-04
the source gives a description: "We're killing more people because more people are ignoring traffic signals We've charted the ominous increase in road deaths in the past several years, and now there's a new bit o...
and links to this picture of a red light.
http://cityobservatory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/red_light-1024x7…
That's all the content I can get out of their source code.
pbiggar · 2019-06-21
Wonderful. Homes are for people to live in.
Related: http://cityobservatory.org/housing-cant-be-affordable_and_be-a-good-in…
D_Alex · 2019-06-01
>It is range that is the problem.
I'm surprised... urban bus speeds in the US are below 15 mph, see below, so even a 180 mile range should give over 12 hrs operation.
Electric buses are very efficient on hills and in stop-start conditions, btw.
http://cityobservatory.org/urban-buses-are-slowing-down/
dthal · 2019-03-03
Note that Zumper is not a reliable source for median rent data. CityObservatory wrote an article about their data problems a few years ago [1]. Zumper's data is, of course, based on apartments that are for rent and doesn't include currently occupied units. That alone skews high, especially when there is a lot of higher-rent new construction hitting the market. Also, it looks like Zumper's data skews towards higher-end neighborhoods.
For a broader look at the rental market, including occupied units and rent-controlled units, you could just consult ACS data. That says that median rent for all occupied 1-bedrooms in San Fransisco was $1912 in 2017 [2].
[1] http://cityobservatory.org/journalists-should-be-wary-of-median-rent-r…
[2] https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=16000U…
timerol · 2018-12-29
The assumption that increasing development leads to displacement is misplaced. Homeowners could turn a single family home into a triplex, adding two new units without displacing anyone. There are also always people trying to sell and move in any housing market. Building new housing leads to less displacement: http://cityobservatory.org/if-you-want-less-displacement-build-more-ho…
Nelkins · 2018-12-13
Housing can’t be a good investment and affordable
http://cityobservatory.org/housing-cant-be-a-good-investment-and-affor…
panic · 2018-11-03
Vienna also has a significant amount of public housing: http://cityobservatory.org/housing-policy-lessons-from-vienna-part-i/
jonchang · 2018-10-28
There's an interesting link to an analysis an (unaffiliated?) economist that suggests the study's methodology is flawed, in that it doesn't properly account for the simultaneous drop in gasoline prices (known to increase driving and therefore traffic deaths) as well as being unable to explain rises in death rates in both urban and rural areas (because Uber/Lyft are primarily urban)
http://cityobservatory.org/unsafe-uber-lethal-lyft-were-skeptical/
TulliusCicero · 2018-09-07
Sure, take a read here: http://cityobservatory.org/urban-myth-busting-high-income2/
bobthepanda · 2018-08-09
It does, which is why highway expansions generally fill up a few years after opening. http://cityobservatory.org/reducing-congestion-katy-didnt/