A think tank blog on cities, covering housing affordability, zoning, transportation costs, road pricing, and urban economics.
Commenters cite it for data on housing, zoning, and car commuting, and for its posts on cities and corporate site selection.
> 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-suburbs-are-still-the-happiest/378964/
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/
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-reports/
[2] https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25031&geo_ids=16000US0667000&primary_geo_id=16000US0667000
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/
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/
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/