Jeremiah Moss (a pseudonym) has for years been documenting New York City's depressing transition into an outdoor mall filled only with Starbucks and drug stores, on his website Jeremiah's Vanishing New York.

You hear more stories of Detroit's revitalization every day. Last July, the New York Times Magazine went so far as to call Detroit "post-post-apocalyptic."

There's an interesting report in the New York Observer this week about the most forgotten borough in New York City – Staten Island. Reporter Jane Callahan lists all the reasons that Staten Island is next in line for a little revitalization (or gentrification, or whatever you want to call it).

This week, affordable housing advocates took to the streets to protest the New York City's plan to sell a blot of land in Brooklyn to a private developer for the whopping price of $1.

Land in New York is expensive...that's not news. That's led the city to become a housing market dominated by rentals, and those rentals essentially drive people broke. A full third of New Yorkers are severely rent burdened, which means they pay over 50 percent of their incomes towards rent.

First of all, if you're interested in Detroit and you don't know Alex B. Hill, you should. He's a Wayne State University graduate student who does some of the coolest data visualizations I've seen. They're cool not only because they're gorgeous, but because they prove important points – for example showing that…

Yesterday, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio gave his second annual State of the City address. And, in a historical departure from past mayors' speeches, de Blasio took the opportunity to talk mainly about one subject: housing.

Buildings on 57th Street in New York City are breaking all kinds of records these days: for height, for how much they cost, and for the ridiculousness with which they showcase how messed up our housing system is.

I've noticed every new real estate development in New York seems less and less like New York – there are pools and gyms, courtyards and big lawns outside. New York's condos seem increasingly like vertically stacked suburbs.

For some reason, whenever people talk about Detroit and its decline, they talk about it as if it's mysterious. Or the ascribe it to the usual suspects - government corruption, bad city planning, declining industrial might.