Extraordinary Observations

The Big City has some great photos of London's new Bicycle Superhighway. Go ahead and click through to check them all out.


As you can see, the superhighway isn't without its issues. I'm not really surprised, although I imagine a few optimists will feel disappointed. London's superhighway is still a great concept that other cities should seriously look at. At the same time, it shouldn't be blindly copied and its shortcomings shouldn't be ignored.

To me, this is a lot like Cleveland's Healthline BRT, something I've about quit a bit over the past few years. It's not that the Healthline doesn't have good qualities and do some things well.. it's that it's far from perfect.

When we look at other cities as models for urban design, there's a huge temptation to ignore the drawbacks that other city is facing, and just say: Hey, let's do this. It's totally awesome and working out great for this other city. That's a dangerous thing to do, because when we don't accept the imperfections, we can't fix the problems. And we ultimately risk failing to deliver on the promises that were given in order to win support for the project in the first place.

A few weeks ago I responded to Robin Marantz Henig's article about twenty-somethings. Lately I've seen a number of articles on this theme. They all seek the answer to a fundamental question: why are Millennials acting so out of the ordinary? What's different for them than previous generations?

There isn't a single answer, but personal finance undoubtedly plays a huge role. There are two trends that have converged to make life less than rosy for Millennials.

Trend #1: Real average student loan debt is high and continuing to grow.
Trend #2: Real average income for bachelor's degree holders has peaked and is on a downward trajectory.

Data on student debt is admittedly hard to find, especially data that goes back more than two decades. Nevertheless, The Project on Student Debt has data-points for a few cross-sections of time. I used the CPI to deflate everything into 2008 dollars. It looks like this:


Then there's income. Real income for bachelor's degree holders peaked in 2000 and is declining. Data here comes from the Census Bureau:


When I combine the two figures to calculate a simple Real Net Worth value, the situation looks worse still.


This is admittedly an over-simplified calculation that ignores other non-student loan type debt. But the impact would likely be magnified, with other types of debt being higher today than in previous time periods. This also fails to take into account declining principal (or rising principal, depending on the situation) over time. But again, the point is to identify trends, not calculate exact figures.

At the end of the day, this simple net-worth stat is really what matters. It depicts the purchasing power that Millennials have. It describes our real quality-of-life. So if you really want to know what's up with Millennials, the first step in that process is to look at how our average net-worth is changing, and it's not for the better.

James Ledbetter has a nice piece in Slate about why Netflix is really a stronger company that people think they are.


I first subscribed to Netflix back during college. I had four weeks off for winter break and needed something to keep me amused for a while. Netflix worked out perfectly. At the end of the break, I suspended my subscription. I re-activated it again the following winter during break. It was incredibly simple, and I was impressed with the fact that Netflix's billing only charged me for exactly what I used.

People talk about Netflix and how it's doing so much better than its competitor, Blockbuster Video. I don't think that's entirely fair though, because Netflix is way more than just a video rental service. Netflix's main competitor, from my perspective, is cable TV.

When I think about Netflix now, it's a question of whether I want to re-activate my subscription, or sign up for cable. When it comes to price, Netflix is way more affordable, as cable just seems to keep getting more and more expensive. And when it comes to service, I already know Netflix will treat me well, and I know Comcast is infamous for poor service and billing. It doesn't seem like such a tough choice, after all.

Most of my favorite TV shows are on network TV, so if I really wanted to see them, I wouldn't technically need to subscribe to cable anyway. The beauty of cable used to be that it provided entertainment when there wasn't anything interesting on regular TV. Now Netflix does that too - and it seems to do it at least as well.

I haven't been watching a lot of Seinfeld lately. I guess it doesn't help that I don't have a TV or cable anymore. Nevertheless, I've been thinking about the show lately. Even 12 years after it went off the air, it still manages to stay relevant to so much of every day life.

From an urbanist perspective, the show highlights a lot of the great things about cities. The four main Seinfeld characters live on the Upper West Side (aside from a few brief stints living elsewhere in the city). They walk to a lot of places in the neighborhood. The ride in cabs quite frequently, and occasionally use the subway. And except for Elaine, they all own cars at various points throughout the show.


I count at least four parking lessons that we can take away from Seinfeld.

Danielle Douglas has an article in tomorrow's Washington Post about a new restaurant, called DC-3, opening on Capitol Hill next week. The cuisine?.. Gourmet hot dogs.


Maybe you're thinking what I'm thinking: how could the words 'gourmet' and 'hot dog' possibly go together? I don't think they can, frankly. A hot dog, not matter how good you want it to be, is still a hot dog. You can dress it up with lots of fancy toppings, you can boil it in beer, you can inject it with cheese and other delicious fillings, but at the end of the day, it's still a hot dog.

According to Douglas's piece, "gourmet dogs at DC-3 will cost about $6 with a side order."

Here's the thing, I'm not against hot dogs. I'd love to see a couple of Gray's Papaya knockoffs open up around town. There's just something about the whole turning inferior food into gourmet pub fare that rubs me the wrong way.

On the other hand, a few years ago people could have made the same argument about a certain grilled cheese restaurant that I happen to like. But the thing about that is that the grilled cheese accompanies a killer bar. So maybe that's the key to this hot dog thing... draw people in with the dogs, but ultimately win them over with an awesome bar.

Phil Birnbaum recently had a pretty interesting article in Slate about the business behind Major League Baseball. He contends that the Pittsburgh Pirates, despite being notoriously awful, is actually a pretty profitable business organization; and as the result of MLB's goofy revenue sharing scheme, there's good reason to believe spending more money to win more games would actually reduce profits.


We can't know exactly how MLB team spending will effect profitability, but let's temporarily assume the Pirates are being a profit-maximizing enterprise by being terrible. Does that mean the team's owners are content with being losers?

Maybe, but maybe not. While owning a professional sports team is, in many instances, a great way to make money; most professional sports owners are already successful and wealthy business people well before the time they purchase a team. There are plenty of sports owners with gigantic egos. Profits have value, bragging rights have value too.

Admittedly, I'm ignorant about the Pittsburgh Pirates and its ownership. But the point applies to more than a single team - even if Birnbaum's back-of-the-envelop calculations are correct, winning games has value to sports owners, even if it means less money in the bank at the end of the season.

Lydia DePillis has the cover story in this week's Washington City Paper. Her 4000-word essay is a generally well-written and in-depth look at David Alpert and Greater Greater Washington.


I've been sporadically writing for Greater Greater Washington in the first few weeks since I moved to DC, but I've been a loyal reader since 2008. GGW is a blog that's become so influential that it's easy to overlook the fact that, 3 years ago, it didn't even exist. It's a blog that I'm lucky to have in my city.

GGW is a blog that every city needs to have. Unfortunately, few do.

If there is any city where this kind of project could be successful, Washington DC is the city. This is a place with the perfect combination of highly educated, progressive and politically wonkish individuals. There is no doubt to me that GGW is an asset to Washington DC. Whether you agree or disagree with the general opinion of the blog, its existence brings issues to light that, in other cities, people don't talk about.

The last two years that I lived in Cleveland, I used to read GGW every day in my feed reader, and every day I would imagine how much better Cleveland could be if it had a powerful voice speaking intelligently on urbanist issues. Every city has a handful of bloggers covering a handful of topics; but anyone who's attempted to write a serious or analytical blog as a hobby can tell you it's not at all easy. Many blogs don't have the resources to be influential or to produce the important content that needs to be read.

From my perspective, David has accomplished something that few urbanist bloggers have been able to: he's established himself as a legitimate and respectable source on urbanist topics. And by extension, he's established his contributors as similarly legitimate sources. In other places, these writers would be written off as 'just another blogger'. In DC, they're viewed as an influential group of policy advocates.

I have a lot more faith in the future of urbanism in Washington DC than I do in a lot of cities. Greater Greater Washington helps inspire that confidence.

Joel Johnson has a pretty interesting post over at Gizmodo about the rising prominence of canned craft beer.

I distinctly remember an event that transpired about two and a half years ago. I was sitting at Flying Saucer in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. A few minutes later two guys walked in and sat down next to me. When one of them saw Dale's Pale Ale on the beer list, he became unbelievably excited.. He launched into this big thing about how it's the most amazing beer ever, how this is the first time he'd found it in Texas, and generally kept hyping it to the sky. When the bartender brought it out, I looked at it and blurted out: How could this possibly be the best thing ever? Look at it... it's in a can!


Of course, my reaction was based on a fallacious belief. It could be argued that (at least up until that point) all good craft beers came in glass; Dale's Pale Ale came in can; therefore Dale's Pale Ale couldn't be a good craft beer. But the premise is all messed up. Just because all good craft beers happened to be bottled in glass didn't mean that they couldn't be canned.

In fact, if it's true that cans actually allow for higher quality of beer (and I find some of Johnson points pretty compelling) then stigma seems to be the only thing standing in the way of a structural shift in the industry.

Two weeks ago I wrote about parking, and the strange way in which it's priced. I started thinking about this again as I was watching this video with Dan Ariely, who's done some pretty interesting research on the concept of 'free'. (Click through to watch, because Big Think's embedding fails).


What's interesting isn't just that people consume more of something when it doesn't cost anything - that's predictable. Instead, people wildly over-consume things when they're free because of a psychological attraction to not having to spend money. Even once a small change is placed on a good or service, the demand drops more than you would expect.

Interestingly, I was at a grocery store in Washington DC last weekend, where every bag you take incurs a 5-cent charge. I paid the 5-cents, because I needed a bag; but the number of bags being taken from stores in DC has dropped drastically. From the Washington Post:

In its first assessment of how the new law is working, the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue estimated that food and grocery establishments gave out about 3 million bags in January. Before the bag tax took effect Jan. 1, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer had said that about 22.5 million bags were being issued each month in 2009.

In the scheme of things, 5-cents per bag is nothing, but psychologically, people don't like to pay. What's happened is that people have gotten smarter about how they shop. Now they consciously think before going to a store, they bring their own bags to pack stuff in, and they are generally less wasteful. A mere 5-cents is responsible for a huge drop in bag consumption.

How does this apply to parking spaces? If Ariely's theory holds, it means that people are wildly over-consuming parking spaces in places where no money changes hands for the privilege of parking a car. Motorists aren't thinking hard enough about the trips they take, because they know a free parking space is waiting on the other end.

Opponents of parking changes often argue that they're doomed to fail because, if one strip mall starts charging for parking, people will just get in the car and drive to a different strip mall. They say it's a race to the bottom that will only make businesses worse-off.

Admittedly, this is compelling in theory, but I could just as easily argue that people who don't want to pay 5-cents for a bag in DC will get in the car and drive to Virginia or Maryland to circumvent the charge. Of course, rational people realize that the cost of leaving DC vastly outweighs the 5-cent savings on bags.

There's a fear that if parking is charged at the 'market rate' that it's going to be really expensive. More expensive than the typical person can afford. That's not necessarily true; because if switching from 'free' to any charge, even a tiny one, changes parking behavior like a 5-cent bag tax changed shopping behavior, then the demand for spaces might drop significantly as well. A small charge would make people smarter about how they park, and consequently, how they consume parking spaces.

Every weekend, joggers, cyclists, power walks and other exercise enthusiasts hit the trails in and around DC to ‘get in some miles’. The region has some fantastic multi-purpose trails that are great for recreational exercise. Personally, though, when I go out to get a few miles in, especially on the weekend, I love riding in the city.


My rides are usually between 15 and 25 miles and I try to mix up the routes that I take. I like riding in the city because its the perfect way to see unique things. I’ve never really made much of an attempt to document my rides, but last Saturday, after I got home, I decided to write down, to the best of my memory, everything that I saw.

New York Magazine's Grub Street thinks that DC's restaurant scene has made some big strides lately. Personally, I think nice restaurants are cool and all, but I rarely patronize them (unless I have a Living Social or Groupon voucher). And while DC may very well be catching up to New York on the high-end food scene, I also think it's still well-behind on the low-cost food scene.


Granted, eating papaya dogs and greasy slices of New York style pizza is not something that anyone should do regularly; but in a city infamous for its high cost of living, it's nice to know that kind of food exists. Some nights you just don't feel like cooking, and if you don't make much money, your options are limited. Although perhaps what gets to me the most is how hard it is to find a good bagel around DC (a food staple for people on a budget).

I've always wondered... how can anyone possibly make money selling hot dogs or dollar slices of pizza in Manhattan? I suppose the sheer amount of volume makes it possible. I also don't know how much the business owners are paying for storefronts, and given New York's confusing rent-control rules, maybe it's less than I'd expect?

Whatever the case, DC still has a ways to go.

Fortune Magazine has a surprisingly good article about the secret world of Trader Joe's. Props to author Beth Kowitt for a well-done piece.


My roommates love Trader Joe's. I've shopped there a few times, but it's not my primary grocery destination. Maybe that will change if the rumored store in Clarendon opens sometime in the near future; but as long as the two closest stores are out in Virginia suburbia and across the river in DC, I'll stick with the supermarket for my grocery needs.

Maybe I'm not enough of a foodie to appreciate the value that Trader Joe's has to offer. I'm personally content with the store-brand groceries that I can buy inexpensively at the supermarket. The Trader Joe's business model is nevertheless fascinating.

Over at New Geography, Eamon Moynihan argues in against letting the Bush tax cuts expire. He contends that "rich" is defined in nominal dollar terms for tax reasons, rather than in terms of purchasing power. Thus, someone living in a high-cost-of-living city like New York or San Francisco or Washington DC ought to be weary of attempts to raise taxes on people in higher tax brackets, because they themselves would be disproportionately impacted.


The argument is somewhat true, in theory, although the solution isn't lower income taxes for the rich. If it's true that purchasing power is actually lower for people in big cities than people doing similar work in smaller cities, then replacing income taxes with consumption taxes is one way to even the playing field. Although this is a complicated issue that I'm not getting into details about, suffice to say that it has some legitimate backers.

What's really at issue here for me is the idea that concept of a 'cost-of-living' adjustment and the role of purchasing power in different cities.

For example, I could look at my job and say my salary should be worth $10,000 more if I were in New York, but it would be worth $10,000 less if I were in Kansas City, given the cost of living in those places. The problem is that my job doesn't exist in either of those places - it exists in DC; so if I want to do it, then I need to be in DC. This is true for a lot of careers. If you want to work in high-tech, you should really be on the West Coast. If you want to do fashion, you better be in New York. If you're into oil and gas, Texas is your place. There are jobs in these places that simply don't exist in other cities.

Of course, some jobs do exist everywhere... doctors, lawyers, nurses, kindergarten teachers, etc. We can look at salaries of the same profession across cities to draw a conclusion like: nurses in Omaha have more purchasing power than nurses in DC, even though nurses in DC have higher nominal salaries. Nurses in DC also pay higher taxes because they're in a higher tax bracket. When you read it like that, it sounds like nurses in DC are getting a bad deal and that the tax system is unfair. But then you have to ask yourself: why aren't all those nurses flocking to Omaha?

Eamon Moynihan ultimately thinks that high cost-of-living in New York is the problem to be solved, writing:

And in the longer term, we need to determine why the cost of living in New York is so high and then implement the reforms necessary to fix the problem and give New Yorkers a standard of living that is competitive with rest of America.

I've argued before that New York (and Manhattan in particular) is uniquely attractive because no other place exists like it in America. True, every city has its own unique charm, but as far as build environment, culture, and lifestyle goes, many of them are virtually the same. Manhattan stands out as completely unique. If there were more Manhattans, it might spread out the desire of people and firms who want to be there, and eventually lower the sky-high price-tag in New York. For now, the standard f living in New York is low because the quality of the city is so high.

Last week Pew Research released a new study about the president and religion. The findings are highly concerning.


Compared to a year ago, more people believe President Obama is Muslim, fewer people believe he is a Christian, and more people are unsure.

This isn't an opinion poll. It's a simple test of fact. Unlike a question such as: do you think the president doing a good job? Asking what religion the president practices is simply a question about the way things are. There is a right and a wrong answer. A majority of Americans cannot answer correctly.

Perhaps what's most bothersome is that media has chosen to report the Pew study as if it were an opinion poll. Doing this is like performing a study that asks people what color bananas are. Imagine that only a third of respondents answer yellow. The rest say 'purple' or 'don't know' or 'other'. Media can run headlines that say "more Americans now believe bananas are purple," and hopefully it's obvious how ridiculous that sounds.

By now most Gen-Y bloggers have already seen the New York Times Magazine, and one of this week's feature stories, What Is It About 20-Somethings? The piece seems frustrating to so many because, from the perspective of a boomer, it criticizes an entire generation for being immature and unable to "grow up". No doubt, this article has left a lot of people with a sour taste in their mouths; some are even asking What Is It About Robin Marantz Henig?


Marantz Henig's story begins with anecdotes of college grads who overqualified themselves for entry-level work with advanced degrees or who can't make a career for themselves for some other reason. The author dubs this a failure to "grow up".

Traditionally, "growing up" meant passing through distinct life stages: 1) finish school 2) start a career 3) become financially independent 4) get married and 5) start a family. Not long ago, all five milestones were accomplished by the time people reached the age of 30. Today, how many twenty-somethings are still trying to figure out step one? Marantz Henig sums it up like this:

The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

She then goes into a discussion of the history of life cycle theory, the potential for the new life stage "emerging adulthood" and how it's becoming more prevalent than ever.

What bothers a lot of twenty-somethings, myself included, is the tone of the article. The idea that the way our parents' generation did things must be correct, and therefore there's something wrong with the way our generation chooses to live.

Think about the first of five milestones that twenty-somethings seem unable to accomplish: finishing school. Not long ago, all you needed was a bachelor's degree and you were pretty much set for life. And if you wanted one, the price tag attached to that degree was affordable. Not anymore. Now, people graduate without highly specialized or marketable degrees that make it challenging to land entry-level jobs that previously didn't require a college degree at all. And in the process, many have managed to rack up tens of thousands in debt, something unheard of until recently.

Likewise, step two: start a career. Anyone who honestly believes that, in the past few years, starting a career is a simple task, or that college grads who can't find work are just lazy, is delusional. Many young people are completely unable to find work, even if they want to, leaving them stuck in step one as they hope for an advanced degree that will mean something. Others take the one and only job offer that's extended to them - often in a field or position nothing like what they imaged doing while they were in college. Should it be such a surprise that twenty-somethings switch jobs so often? If it were as simple as landing their desired career after graduation, I'd bet that they wouldn't.

The last three steps are all connected as well. It's harder than ever to become financially independent with the sheer amount debt that people are taking on, often because they believe it's a necessity and unavoidable. And arguably, it's inadvisable to start a family if you can't financially support your kids. Would anyone actually suggest it's better to rush into parenthood before you can afford it so that you can meet some arbitrary life milestone? Not to mention, what's the point of getting married by age of 25? Our parents' generation did that and it turned out badly for many of them.

Ultimately, it boils down to the fact that there have always been twenty-somethings who were unable to grow up. An entire generation is too massive to describe as a single group. It is true that more twenty-somethings today are waiting longer to complete the five milestones. In some cases, it's because they have little choice. In other cases, it's because they're being smart about the situation.

Is this behavior different than the behavior a generation ago? Yes. Is it wrong? Not necessarily.