My family and I decided to stay on the north side of Chicago, a very high cost of living location, despite no longer needing to head downtown every day for work. Why not move outside of Chicago where our cost living would be substantially lower?
* We wanted to keep our kids in the same school, which is walking distance.
* We like being walking distance to the grocery store, doctor's offices, etc.
* Our kids can walk to their friends' houses.
* Proximity to the lake is important to us.
* We're close to family.
Moving to the suburbs would find us losing much of that freedom that comes with living in a dense neighborhood. The size of a house and a yard is only one factor here for quality of life. I hope the trend that comes from remote work isn't just people optimizing for the size of a house and low cost of living, especially if it comes at the expense of being able to be in a community with other people around.
+1. Walkability is the main thing that keeps me in the city. A very large part of me wants to go back to the suburbs, rent a house, have a yard, garage -- space in general. However, every time I actually visit someone in the suburbs, the long drive there, watching things get more and more spread apart until it's just strip malls, grocery stores, and subdivisions, really saps the excitement out of having more space for me.
There's no reason (besides inertia) that we can't have both. This is how thriving smaller downtowns are, single family homes within walking distance to amenities. It's just that all those areas get really expensive because there are so few of them. But there don't have to be so few places like that.
It is common in Europe for small towns and villages to be quite walkable, have a large relative percentage multi-family housing, and have a decent train or bus connection to a regional hub. Of course, they have the advantage of being around longer than the automobile has existed.
The problem in the US is mostly cultural. Most rural/semi-rural/exurban people think nothing of an hour driving each way. So why would they want what they perceive as a tiny lot, with more expensive housing where they can hear their neighbors when they can get a huge lot and drive a little more?
The non-cultural part of the problem is that the drive-everywhere paradigm is so heavily invested that even in a small walking-oriented European -style village, everyone would need to own a car anyway. If you built a train to a regional hub it wouldn’t solve the problem of the regional hub itself having terrible public transit. Plus, it’s a lot easier to build a road than a train politically.
It's cultural but also institutional. Governments think nothing of blowing tens of millions of dollars on highway construction and do not typically think about or care to invest in alternatives.
Beyond a certain point (which was a long time ago) we're just building roads and highways to create artificial growth.
It blows my mind how people don't realize the cultural piece either. They travel, "omg it's so walkable here! this is awesome! wow that cafe is so cute. Of course i buy bread from the local shop." then come back and it's like their experiences were completely wiped clean from their memory: "wait what do you mean not drive a car a quarter mile down the road to sit in the Zaxby's line?".
Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area.
You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
> Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area.
I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times.
> You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use.
It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
> Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over.
Except everyone with a reliable car still drives to the large grocery store and with a wide selection which has lower prices and better selection on basics but makes it up with lower volume, high margin luxuries that the small market c
doesn't have floor space for, and the small market, even if it starts as something else, ends up specializing in alcohol, tobacco, and dry goods, and neglecting general grocery items. Unless it's an area with a particular ethnic concentration and the small market survives by focussing on the unique demands of that ethnic community in a way that the larger store with a wider catchment area doesn't have any real incentive to.
Its not that there aren't enough small markets opened in areas of single-family homes to see this trend; you can't fix it with zoning, at least not in the manner you describe. (You can by driving density to transport capacity to the point where driving to the large grocery is impractical, of course, but that tends to be beyond allowing medium density, mixed use development.)
Ironically, my two best counter-examples of your claims above are both within 1 mile of each other.
Wiley St. Co-op and Jenifer St. Market are both relatively small grocery stores in the Marquette neighborhood of Madison, WI. The co-op is a bit larger, but less densely stocked and has no alcohol. Jenifer St. is packed to the gills, and sells alcohol. Both are surrounded by primarily single-family homes, with a few apartment buildings within walking distance. Neither are "ethnic" food stores, and neither sell much in the way of junk food, and neither sells tobacco.
I've been visiting them both for about 20 years whenever we visit relatives in Madison. I've always found them both remarkable, even given their placement in probably one of the most suitable locations in the USA for this sort of thing.
Of course, were I to comment on my own comment, I'd probably say "Yep, the exception(s) that prove the rule".
I think those are the exceptions that prove that it can be done, and can be viable. Totally agree that it's generally not a thing, but places like that show that all the other, similar neighborhoods are just missing out.
There are more than ten supermarkets within ten minutes of my walking distance, from the cheapest option to fanciest. In addition, even the fanciest bakeries sell the standardized type of bread for the standardized price.
So I know this problem is solvable because it is solved in places that are not the US
Most models outside the US would not work for the entire US, perhaps a few cities. Also, it doesn't seem possible to have more than 10 supermarkets within 10 minutes of your walking distance. They would have to be next door to each other. Of course, I'm thinking about this in the context of where I've lived in the US.
It would take me 3 minutes just to walk out of my apartment complex, and another 5 to get to the supermarket right next door to the apartments.
What you have as a supermarket in your country must be different than what we have here in the US: Kroger, Albertson's, SafeWay, Von's, etc... These are very large buildings that take up a lot of property.
Taking a friend's address in inner Copenhagen (a cheap place as she's a student), she has 4 supermarkets within 5 minutes walk (400m).
Taking a different friend's address in the suburbs, he has 3 supermarkets within a 10 minute walk (800m).
In the city centre, there are 10 supermarkets within a 5 minute walk.
The supermarkets in the city centre are smaller, and have a relatively limited range, although in practise I do 95% of my shopping at one. You choose a different supermarket if you need an upmarket/wider selection, but it doesn't matter as it's so close by (exception: if I really need something like a particular lactose free cheese for a recipe, I'll just go to an inner city supermarket rather than checking 3-4 shops in the centre). There is no parking.
In the inner city, perhaps 20% of them are large enough to be selling clothes, a few toys etc. There might be parking for 0-6 cars. Not having to walk across a ginormous car park saves a lot of distance.
You'll need to travel further (on average) to buy a barbecue, tent, etc. I think I remember the large American supermarkets selling this sort of thing — in Denmark, you'll need to go to the DIY / sports / etc shop. This will have a car park.
> You'll need to travel further (on average) to buy a barbecue, tent, etc. I think I remember the large American supermarkets selling this sort of thing — in Denmark, you'll need to go to the DIY / sports / etc shop. This will have a car park.
And that's if you don't get it delivered. And even so that is when you use the car (hence why Europeans have a lot of hatchbacks). Not driving to a grocery store a quarter mile away to get a bag of chips that you forgot for a party. The energy expenditure for that is crazy. It's no wonder America has such high resource consumption.
Two in the city centre are small enough that, if they were my nearest shop, I might not use them for most shopping. The proportion of ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook food (for workers / commuters) is too high, meaning there's less range of meat/fish/vegetables. I think the shop name is even a diminutive version of the normal supermarket to account for this.
Otherwise, I am not sure where to draw the line between a grocery and a supermarket.
It used to be that groceries were smaller shops with fewer categories of goods and less range within those categories -- they didn't sell toiletries, or light bulbs, or paper plates, or socks. Rice came in white and brown.
But around 10 years ago the large supermarkets started to take over shops this size, except with the same building they can use more floor space for retail. Their well-run logistics means they can deliver to them every day or two, so the smaller shop doesn't need a large stock room to maintain a wide range. Therefore, the smaller/independent general grocery businesses have mostly gone, but I can choose from perhaps 8-10 kinds of rice, compared to the 16-20 they have at the largest stores. The 8-10 kinds will be varied according to the area.
I do 80% of my shopping at one of these shops, 15% at another one (when I fancy a change, or walk home a different way), and less than 5% at a supermarket large enough to sell toasters, toys, televisions and t-shirts.
Suburban 7-11’s for example get a lot of foot traffic in the US. Much of it is from teens, but where available people end up including a stop while walking their dogs or doing other kinds of exercise.
High enough density to have a locals within ~1/2 mile, and or a location where people stop on their way to or from work are how you keep prices reasonable. It’s never directly competitive with Walmart etc but being much closer is a real advantage.
Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended).
The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc.
Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
I've lived in multiple small towns in America and the reality is the nice central amenities are too expensive for most working people, and at least half of the storefronts are boarded up, which means most people end up driving to the Walmart. The majority of people that do use the centrally located boutiques drive in from their homes which aren't in the center. Most new construction doesn't even include sidewalks or crosswalks, making walking dangerous even if you wanted to.
There's at least one, but not more than a few, exceptions in each state (Asheville, NC for example) where people move in with their money to larp "small town living" but it depends on outside capital to work and the original residents end up getting priced out.
>but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems
Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
As for the rest of it, I'm not arguing that the suburbs is a good choice. It's just the one people do choose and they choose it because of space and cost of living.
Europe doesn’t have suburbs like the USA does. In California if you drive an hour you’re in the suburbs. In Germany if you drive an hour you’re in another country.
Cost (more accurately price) indicates what is called a revealed preference. Actually a revealed preference is precisely what I am trying to point out here. There is a revealed preference for urban homes which is indicated by the higher price.
The broader point I am trying to make is that if the main appeal of suburban living is lower cost (rather than the actual suburban lifestyle) this is addressable not necessarily by expanding suburbs but by addressing the costs of urban living. In fact that would be better if it were really true that urban living is preferred.
In practice though I am sure many people would choose suburban living even if costs were equal to an urban environment. But the price difference does indicate that one (urban environments) is in higher demand than the other (suburban environments)
Cost is part of the preference, I agree. I think though that we're not accurately capturing the true cost. The suburbs appear to be cheaper and they very well may be on an individual level, but are they cheaper for civilization? How do we price in your commute, for example? Or the cost of roads or the government building a new power plant? I don't think we have great market mechanics for this which makes the cost comparison a little difficult to do to begin with.
But to the point of the person you are replying to, the price of a house in almost any reasonable case I can think of reflects desirability for one reason or another. If you see that suburban homes are cheaper than a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood (the kind that everybody visits and take pictures of) that would indicate that the preference is for that. Though I guess you can argue that due to lack of supply that the cost is increased.
What I have seen in my travels is that those cafés and bakeries are not all that expensive in places where they are the norm. They occupy an environment where they have serious competition from truly comparable businesses, and a larger potential clientele. That brings market forces into play, which means they are more directly incentivized to compete on price and make it up on volume, while keeping quality high.
Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
Supply and demand is the simplest possible model for pricing, and only applies in certain contexts.
The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
Supply and demand applies in all contexts. A veblen good simply has a different demand curve, but I would need to see more evidence that bread of all things would be a Veblen good, which are due to their (presumed) utility for displaying status.
Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.
The problem isn’t cultural, it’s governmental. It costs america so much more to build and maintain transit that it’s not a very attractive alternative to cars. My state just spent $6 billion on a 16 mile light rail line through the suburbs that’s not even grade separated: https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2021/02/26/purpl....
The DC metro, which I used to ride, is extremely well funded. It’s actually regressed since it was built in the late 1970s, with the automated train control (which used to provide a smooth ride) having to be shut down due to poor maintenance. Headways are now 33% longer than they were a decade ago. (Well even longer now due to covid related collapse.) Trip times are slower—everything takes 10-20% more time than advertised.
> Because as Henry Grabar points out, while $30 billion should be a game-changing investment in the Northeast Corridor, the actual plan from Amtrak is to spend about $30 billion on one tunnel under the Hudson River.
Americans are not as dumb as Europeans think. If we could build light rail for $30 million/mile like Germany, instead of $350 million per mile, that stupid 16 mile light rail could be a 160 mile network all around the Maryland suburbs. That would be a totally different value proposition. The high costs mean that
My wife and I currently live in Providence, RI (by way of NYC). We highly value walkability, but feel like we've aged out of tolerating some other big-city "annoyances." When Americans think of "suburbs" they think of culs-de-sac and arterials, but it doesn't have to be that way. New England is dotted with "small towns" that are basically just suburbs of Providence and/or Boston that are laid out on a grid -- with a main street, walkable amenities, and access to commuter rail. In St. Louis, where I'm from, there are half-a-dozen inner ring suburbs that meet this description (minus the commuter rail), so I assume it's the same in most cities.
There's a kind of exurban suburb that was built in the 1990s that has an outsized influence on our conception of suburban living. But there are lots of older "suburbs" that are actually quite pleasant.
Even arterials and cul-de-sacs can be great if you build them that way. Many Dutch post-war neighbourhoods are built around arterials and cul-de-sacs, but they all have sidewalks, independent bicycle paths, and each neighbourhood gets a shopping center and 3 primary schools (protestant, catholic and public, because that's how that works here) within walking distance.
These neighbourhoods are denser than American suburbs of course; houses come in rows, and you get a front and back yard, but not an entire plot of land around your home. But that also means plenty of kids to play with. In the street, because often cars are required to drive at walking pace and playing kids have right of way.
I grew up in a street like that. I hated it, and preferred a real city, but it's pretty comfortable living.
I'm not sure how universal this is, though. A friend of mine lives in Holliston, MA (a small town that's about a 45 minute drive from Boston), but still drives most places locally, even just to go to downtown, park, and walk from there. The problem isn't the distance, it's that the roads were not designed with pedestrians in mind. The route from their house to downtown has mostly no sidewalks, and roads with enough traffic on them that walking along the shoulder doesn't feel safe. In the winter it's impossible to walk, with plowed snow piled up along the only places you could potentially walk.
I'm willing to bet most, if not all, of those wonderful suburbs were built before WW2 and really before the car itself. Aside from a literal handful of experiments, we haven't built places like that in a long time here in the US.
My current neighborhood (in greater silicon valley area) was built in 1997-98 and I can walk to pretty much anything I need.
That seems mostly the norm in my experience. These HN threads always talk about suburbs where you need to drive 10 minutes on a highway to get to the nearest store but to be honest I don't know where those are, I don't think I've seen areas like that.
How do those smaller downtowns thrive? The few I know usually have rich populations that do not mind spending more than what Costco/Target/Walmart/big grocery stores sell at.
All it takes is the big box stores to setup camp 10 minutes outside of town and almost everyone with a car will opt to save money and shop there.
In Europe many smaller stores are competitive by aiming for high turnaround. The cut down on the selection to the things that get sold fast. German Lidl and Aldi are based on these principles and known to have very low prices. In fact I think they outcompeted wall-mart when it tried to setup shop in Germany.
I remember quite good prices in the Netherlands as well which is quite densely populated and where people shop in downtown stores rather than out of town big box stores. The exception would be things like hardware and furniture.
In many European cities, at least NL where I live, there isn't such a big distinction between the downtown and the neighbourhoods where people live.
Sure, if you want a big electronics store, you go to the centre of the city (10m biking), but for groceries, coffee, takeaways, restaurants, doctors, DIY stores, pharmacies, etc there's tons of these scattered around the city. It's quite multi-polar, there are many shopping streets, for these kinds of needs you're rarely more than 10 min walk or 2-3 minutes cycle away from those.
Where I live, for example, there's even 2 branches of the same chain of supermarket within about 400m, so <5 min walk, about 1 min on a bike. (Handy on the rare occasion that one of them is out of something!)
Lidl and Aldi are also doing very well in the US, and putting pressure on big grocery stores. But these are still too big to be downtown stores, and the merchandise is usually sold in quantities that make sense for a car.
They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.
> They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.
But you see it in Europe. I walk to lidl and buy my groceries, basically every person I know walk to get groceries. Some do big weekend shopping trips now and then to bigger stores, but that isn't the norm.
Presumably, this is in an area where you have a big population without cars.
In the US, these are few and far between. And Aldi/Lidl are going to optimize for their costs, which means not paying rent in a downtown if they have the option to build on cheaper land 5 minutes away from downtown. Which makes no difference to them, because 99% of their customers have a car.
In most of the cities I've lived in Europe supermarkets are usually outside of downtown (though there may be a few there) but still in walkable residential neighbourhoods. You don't want to have to go all the way downtown to buy food.
It's pretty similar to the way medium sized Safeways are spread throughout San Francisco, except the rent isn't $3000/month for a 1 bed and the soap and shampoo doesn't have to be kept locked away.
How much is a beer after work hours at a given pub/bar?
One thing I hate about the majority of the US's urban centers is they are extremely touristy and expensive. It is common to be paying $6+ per beer (it's local but still) and that's not even on weekends.
Yes, it requires a population that appreciates the local amenities to the point of paying more for them. Lots of these people exist, even if they aren't the majority of people. It's just that right now they are concentrated in the dense part of cities. But many of them would love to live in a bigger house if they could still walk to amenities, and would still be willing to pay more for the privilege.
You put in stores that sell things that the big boxes wont sell. Such as specialized restaurants, vacuum repair shops and so on. You can also put smaller versions of 'big boxes' or other chains in these downtowns, such as chipolte, walgreens, trader joes, "city" target, etc. Downtowns can also have rather large things like movie theaters themselves.
I live in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle and we just lost our vacuum cleaner repair shop next to our city target. It didn’t exactly go out of business, but had to move far away north on the highway where rent is cheaper and they have easier access to more customers.
Most consumer vacuum cleaners aren't really repairable any more. They're used for a few years until one of the plastic parts breaks, then discarded and replaced. Even if parts are available the repair service labor is too expensive.
As usual, it depends. As more people buy upscale gear (Miele or Oreck come to mind), they last much longer and are designed with servicing in mind. And the local vacuum shop services almost every vacuum around. Most vacuums are easy to fix assuming the motor isn't shot. It's replacing a frayed power cord, or a belt/beater.
It's kind of similar to how good shoes can be resoled.
I had an Oreck years ago, I thought it was a good brand, it looked solid, ads made a big deal of it being lightweight and used by hotels...but it didn't suck.
And I thought that's just the way things are.
But I got a Hoover upright, which was much cheaper, looks cheaper, like a toy, mostly garish purple plastic, and is also much heavier. But it sucks up an order of magnitude more dirt. It's bagless, which some people don't like, but it makes it very visible how much crud it's removing and allows it to be dumped after every use.
So I feel like the Oreck was perhaps a swindle, having the looks and characteristics that older people associate with appliances from long ago, except the actual performance.
And I'm glad I didn't spend a lot on a Dyson just to get a vacuum with no bag.
I've never gone there, but I think there's a storefront near me that says they repair vacuum cleaners. Don't recall what kind.
My Oreck worked great for 18 years, but it did have flaws. I disliked the bags (difficult to change), but it ran like a champ with a lot of abuse. My Miele isn't as light, but does a far better job (and is HEPA compliant). Hopefully it lasts as long as my Oreck.
I bought a dirt cheap bagless vacuum for 70€. The plastic parts broke off as usual. However, it lasted more than 5 years. I think it still works but I got a bag vacuum now.
In my very anecdotal observation – these small downtown areas don't rely on retail as much as food and entertainment. It's where the best restaurants, brewpubs, and general hangouts are.
If there is retail, it's _highly_ differentiated from Big Box.
Yes, but that is why there are so few places like that in the US. Not many people can afford to constantly eat out and consume entertainment at a sufficient frequency to keep those businesses going. And that was at the labor prices before the pandemic.
Not many relative or absolute? I think it is a fairly small percentage of people and also a very large number of people who can (and desire to) live this lifestyle.
Afaict, the primary driver of non-walkable suburbs is neighborhood layout, which is driven by maximizing house:land ratio.
I live in a suburban master planned development now that oriented itself around the residential-commercial interface.
Having previously lived in an urban core, it's not too much of a downgrade. Sure, you inevitably trade local for chain (boo!), because that's who the anchor tenants originally were. But over the decades the smaller spaces have filled out with organic stuff.
This honestly doesn’t sound too bad compared to the soul-crushing suburbs by me. But, the problem I usually find with all suburbs is that you have to get in a car to get to even one bar (let alone having a choice). Is that the case there too?
They aren’t all really that expensive, near Seattle consider Aberdeen or similar small old mill towns that have reasonable small urban areas next to housing. Farther away, Walla Walla or even Spokane. But the areas are economically depressed, the schools aren’t very good, they are unlikely to become WFH tech centers.
Thats Paris centre however, where about 600k quite rich people live. Ile-de-Paris is a bit larger, and is where most of us reside. We're happy if the RER is only 20m away from our house and work.
If you're willing to get a bike, it can greatly increase your range while allowing for more space. I'm in Baltimore now in a sfh and still within riding distance of everything in the city
For me, the COVID has really opened my eyes to how little I need walkability. My preferences completely flipped from "I want walkscore 75+ and ideally 90+" to "I want walkscore to be <15"
I used to be very pro-transit and walking (didn't even learn to drive till 30), and even as I was not walking as much just before COVID, I reflexively remained so. When most things closed nearby (so we went out less and finally discovered food delivery), I realized I don't really need to walk places - I don't miss them. With spotty reopenings, when some places were indoors and some outdoor-only in bad weather, we drove to go out and turns out it's much better (unless you plan to drink a lot). With more grocery shopping, walking to groceries was out of the question and turns out, even in a dense city, driving for the same amount of time to get groceries is so much more convenient. Etc.
I can see benefits of a park nearby, but that's about it... and then again, in overall less walkable areas parks are less crowded, larger, and also cleaner/nicer.
EDIT: reading other comments I guess I can see benefits for kids, although only with more old-style parenting. I could take a subway by myself when I was 10 or so, and walk around everywhere obviously, so that gives a lot of independence you cannot have in suburbs.
Automobile travel is nice in rural areas but it introduces too many problems for cities with any sort of density.
Traffic, noise pollution, air quality, and auto accidents are all things the unfortunate city dweller is forced to live with because cars are given free reign on streets.
Cities need to convert their freeways to toll roads and limit the registration of vehicles to what the infrastructure can actually handle.
I certainly drove more during the pandemic (though this may have been because I stopped using Lyft due to safety concerns), but I never stopped appreciating living in a walkable neighborhood. Certainly openings were a bit spotty here and there, but having a small grocery nearby, as well as a few restaurants with outdoor seating, was a boon to our mental health while otherwise stuck at home most of the time. We got food delivered more than usual, to be sure, but that still felt like a supplement, not the main mode of eating.
But "small places nearby" were also closed... that is what made me realize how little I need them. Having to drive to more distant places, something I previously might not have preferred, turned out to be much more convenient, something I didn't expect... try it ;)
I grew up in the country, used to live in the suburbs, and currently live in Chicago.
Yes, we could afford to have a lot more space that we personally own if we lived in a less dense area. But no, I don't miss it. I don't feel cooped up in a small space where I live right now. Nor did I feel cooped up living in a college dormitory, for that matter.
I do feel cooped up in a small space when I'm staying with friends and family who have palatial homes out in the suburbs for any length of time. My sense of how much space I have at my disposal changes drastically when I'm in an environment where the only space I'm allowed to use freely is space I'm personally owning or renting.
It hits my kids even worse. For them, one backyard, even a big one, is simply not enough room to run.
How did they close them? In Toronto they put up caution tape. The people walked through it. They placed reasonable restrictions, and the unreasonable ones were ignored. Honestly one of the biggest benefits of the pandemic (and there were very, very few) was the transition of classrooms, community and family events to the parks. I've never seen them so active and busy and it gave a liveliness to the neighbourhood that was refreshing.
> Sure a small backyard isn't great... But I live in a major city and instead we just walk to the enormous park, which is way bigger than any backyard.
In the suburbs you typically have both. We have a yard to play in (not huge, but a good yard with a few trees to climb, a treehouse, etc) and we have a large park about 1 minute away on foot. It's not only the major cities that have parks.
> isn't just people optimizing for the size of a house and low cost of living
An important point!
I moved recently to a small village from a large town in the UK mainly so that I could afford a good size of house compared to what I could afford in the town. Despite never considering my self a "city boy", I have found the move very challenging. I initially thought it was isolating because of lockdown but then realised that the pace here is very slow and I find the lack of activity troubling. I just have to get used to driving to everything, something I have never had to do before.
I couldn’t live in a small village - I’ve tried it, I found it suffocating, the gossip mill, the forced friendships with people who you otherwise wouldn’t associate with, the never ending charity drives and village hall events that make you want to crawl under a rock. (Young Farmer’s Association Charity Raffle! Over 55’s only!)
I now live a long way from anyone, in a cabin deep in the forest, about 10km from the nearest village over inhospitable terrain, 2km from the nearest trackway along windy and wild paths I cut along the side of a sheer valley. We don’t get visitors, apart from those that we invite.
It wasn’t the lack of activity that I found troubling - rather, the village people, filling their days with forced smiles and petty vendettas. Every time I sat down it felt like someone would knock on the door and ask me to sign their petition.
Here, it’s just me, my wife, and the wildlife.
The pace here is frantic, as surviving and thriving off-grid is a lot of work. I smile and nod at the villagers when I drive by on the weekly provisioning run, and that’s enough for me.
I think a city almost has more in common with being alone than it does with a small settlement - in a city, the crowds allow anonymity and this creates a virtual space for the individual. In the boonies, there is actual space for the individual. In a village, all is cloying, suffocating togetherness. Great if you like that kind of thing, but it really wasn’t for me.
My friend moved to a little village in Scotland. Super cute, walkable, near the Spey, easy drive to a city or two for a flight back to civilization. Great schools, no healthcare costs. The equity he cashed out from selling his place in California bought the nicest place in town for cash. He’s really liking it. I’ve gone to visit a few times. Makes me reconsider spending so much for my shoebox house in SF.
No offense, but presumably your parents did the same thing when they had you for similar reasons. This is simply what happens when you have kids.
However, there are separate but related trends which the articles points out:
- The south's quality of living has drastically increased over the last 20~30 years
- People aren't seeing state localized benefits from high state taxes (IMHO Illinois might the worst tax:benefit ratio in the country)
- Work from home acceleration has accelerated lower cost of living with high quality of life centers (see -> the south)
>People aren't seeing state localized benefits from high state taxes
I always think this, and then I leave Illinois and immediately notice that the infrastructure in neighboring states (Indiana and Missouri, namely) is abhorrent. I think it's just all relative.
It’s funny. Every human could tell you the things that make a place pleasant. (Walkability, cute shops and cafes, green space)
And yet we have people who’s whole job is “planning” and we get spaces that are aggressively unpleasant. No sidewalks let alone dedicated waking paths. Strip malls everywhere. It baffles me.
> And yet we have people who’s whole job is “planning” and we get spaces that are aggressively unpleasant.
These things are related. The person who's job is "planning," the one who demands that your store be surrounded by a sprawling parking lot, is neither the person who would build the store, nor shop there.
I enjoy watching a couple of shows about home renovations that take place in the US (some twin brothers and love or list it, or something like that). Two things always strike me as odd as an European:
* People on that show always needs a shit load of space. Especially in the kitchens, for some reason. Sometimes they are a couple without kids or maybe have one kid but they want 2 ovens? And a huge island is a must. Most of the kitchens in those shows are bigger than the average living room in my country.
* Houses made out of wood and walls that you can punch through. This is a different matter though.
Do Europeans not cook all that much? I imagine most suburban US families cook most of their meals, both for cost reasons and because taking children to a restaurant is viewed as a chore here.
Even without kids, my partner and I try to cook often. We have a decent-sized kitchen by urban US standards (it would probably be considered on the small side if we lived in the suburbs), but could still stand to have more counter space for food prep (and cabinet space for storage). Agree that 2 ovens is a bit much, but a huge island can be incredibly useful.
I personally don’t cook but luckily for me my girlfriend loves it, and even though we have a decent kitchen now that we bought a place, she seemed to do fine in smaller kitchens. And I’ve never met anyone with 2 ovens.
And even though kitchens are way smaller than in the US (or at least the average one in those shows), another difference is that we have the washer in the kitchen (almost no one has a drier though, and after using one in London I wonder why anyone would use one for anything other than sheets and towels, those things destroy clothes) and usually the kitchen was a separate room (due to the smell, I guess?), but nowadays an “open plan” has grown a lot in demand.
Putting the washing machine in the kitchen is just a result of limited space.
Houses in Britain with enough space will put it a different room, often called a utility room, scullery or laundry room. That would be difficult to find in London.
(Apartments in Denmark will put it in the bathroom, since the building regulations require a floor drain in case of leaks.)
I would guess Europeans cook more than Americans, since the average disposable income is less in Europe. Beyond that, I'm unwilling to generalize over Europe. HN people are unlikely to be typical on either continent.
I do know a European with two ovens. It's very unusual, but they really like cooking. Even so, they only use the second oven rarely -- perhaps roasting meat in one, and baking in the other. The additional oven was installed after seeing two ovens in a kitchen on a trip to the USA.
A kitchen much like a server is designed for peak use, not average use. having the space to prep and cook thanksgiving for the extended family or host a party is valuable even if you need maybe half of it on most days.
By "move-to", not sure if you mean Chicago overall, or the north side in particular, but if the former Chicago is growing slower than the national average. 2% last decade (vs 8% nationally) https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/8/12/22622062/chicago-cens...
I had the impression Chicago was actually losing people, but that info was old, from the previous decade where it lost 7%.
Chicago is a weird place for various political and economic reasons (I’m from Minneapolis, so just a neighbor), and was not growing pre-pandemic. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that trend reverse given its relative LCOL - especially with the Denver/Austins of the world no longer being very affordable.
I think people are social creatures and will always choose to have social interactions. The difference between high and low density living is whether you can choose the absence of these interactions, even temporarily.
I live in a city and it suits me just fine overall, but I also need some of the "I don't want to deal with loads of people and their drama right now" time to remain sane.
I live in the burbs. Here's my metrics relative to yours
* Kid's school is technically walking distance, bike ride more reasonably
* Walking distance from grocery store, doctor's office, dentist
* Kid can walk to friends' house
* Can ride my bike to a conservation area with camping
* Lakes are all around, but not really fair since I live in FL
* Multiple outdoor parks within walking/biking distance
* Neighborhood/community swimming pool
* Walking distance to gym
* Extremely low crime rate
I'm not saying you should move, especially because of the close to family bit. Nor am I suggesting most of suburbia is like where I live. But if you seek out suburban areas that are designed to be in proximity to things, you will find them.
Chicago, and the rest of Illinois, is in the middle of an ongoing fiscal crisis with no clear path to a solution. Will you continue to stay while taxes increase and government services decrease?
I found the difference in land price appreciation in other more expensive areas (specifically Western and Southern US) more than made up for the extra up front costs. Although it is not "coast" vs "not coast", as NJ/CT land prices changes were in a similar situation to IL land prices.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Different people value different things. You prioritize your kids school and proximity to important destinations and so that neighborhood makes a lot of sense.
When your kids move away after college, does that change the calculation much for you? Both of my kids are away at college and so I'm looking at where I live and what kind of life I want and am leaning more and more to moving further out of the city (I'm already in the suburbs).
Suburbs are very unfriendly for the elderly compared to cities.
The ideal suburbanite is an upper-middle-class person in their 30s–50s in good health who really likes driving their large car and has hobbies they can do individually from inside their own home (e.g. woodworking, gardening), and doesn’t mind that life is miserable* there for their kids. Everyone else is more or less a second-class citizen.
* Edit: suburbs are unpleasant for kids because anyone who can’t drive is completely dependent on someone else (for kids, usually a parent) for transportation: few destinations are within walking/cycling distance, buses are few and infrequent, in general non-car transportation is discouraged by the urban design. Everything is harder to get to, and there are far fewer resources available for people with particular interests.
Why do you automatically assume that kids are miserable in the suburbs? My kids rather like running around in our backyard, use our pool everyday in the summer, and having tons of friends on the block.
At the same time, I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment, having no yard to play in, etc.
This disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch. It's okay to think differently. I'm glad you enjoy living in the city! Luckily, this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
==This disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch.==
It's also out of touch to assume every family in "the city" lives in a 2 bedroom apartment with no yard. Lots of families in my city (Chicago) live in 3 story walk-ups, duplex-downs or even single family homes which all have yards.
Perhaps we could all be a little more open-minded about how other people live.
A 3 story walk up is going to be a 2 br apartment in most cases, and may have a shared outdoor space but it’ll cost as much as a large house in the suburbs with a big garage and 2 big lawns.
==but it’ll cost as much as a large house in the suburbs with a big garage and 2 big lawns.==
Based on what metric?
Here [1] is a three-bedroom apartment in one of Chicago's nicest areas (Ravenswood/Lincoln Square), with heat/water included, right by the Brown Line for $2,100/month.
Find me the large house in the suburbs that will run you $2,100/month. Don't forget to include the 20% down payment, on-going maintenance, utilities, and an additional car.
Kids like suburbs just fine before they understand there's a big world out there outside the family unit. Often things fall apart after that phase.
> I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment
OK but that's a problem with a limited imagination, not how your kids would actually feel. Do you know that 90% of families in the world live in close quarters, in places like 2 bedroom apartments (or -- gasp! -- smaller)? Do you think all these kids really hate their lives because of the size of their apartments? Do you think young kids even realize that they "should" prefer a 3000sqft house to an apartment?
> this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
Sure there's space, but space isn't really the issue. The negative social and environmental impact of a suburban lifestyle is unsustainable. Future generations are going to look back on our settlement patterns and think we were truly insane, hundreds of millions of people each with multiple personal cars spread out from each other such that cars are necessary to do even the most minor tasks. It's taken some incredibly opaque collective blinders for us to have ended up thinking suburbs are a responsible way of living.
I've lived in countries where families living in 2 bedroom apartments is the norm, and sure, they don't hate their lives. But they live in them because they can't afford more. The families I knew all aspired to a more suburban home.
"The negative social and environmental impact of a suburban lifestyle is unsustainable." That's a problem with a limited imagination. Cars are becoming electric. There are things called towns that exist in suburbia and can be reached easily by bike or walking.
The environmental impact of suburban lifestyle is not limited to personal transportation carbon emissions. It also involves huge amounts of expensive (in land and resources) infrastructure, and individual suburbanites have a much larger resource footprint than other people.
The same people would consume dramatically fewer resources (each, individually) and cause dramatically less environmental destruction if they lived in a smaller personal space with far less bulky/expensive per-person infrastructure and used shared rather than individual services (e.g. transportation).
The problem is solved in my suburbia since the county has resisted any sort of building for the past 50 years. Also, the new suburbia housing I see being built, is much more concentrated. Seems people like houses but don't care as much about big yards.
My suburbia is trending the same way. Almost all new construction is on a lot of 5000 sq ft max. Most is closer to 3000 or multi-family. The trouble is that the old way of zoning still prevails and all of this semi-dense housing sits multiple miles away from the retail and job centers in the town. Everyone still needs one car per working adult, so really nothing of substance has changed.
Only if you examine the problem so superficially you can't think of any other cost of personal vehicles than burning gas.
Cars burning gasoline isn't the only or even the smallest problem with everyone needing to own a car. Think of the supply chain required to produce, deliver, and dispose of personal vehicles for everyone. Think of the civil infrastructure required to enable everyone to have a personal car. Think of the human cost that humans being terrible, irresponsible drivers takes on society. For starters.
> There are things called towns that exist in suburbia and can be reached easily by bike or walking.
There is a thing called weather in much of the US and world that makes this unrealistic. Further it's disingenuous to claim it's feasible to walk to a town to do your groceries from a suburb. You're going to need to walk at least 2-3 miles (best case) to a grocery store and you're not going to be able to carry more than a couple days' worth of stuff, less for a full family.
The suburban way of life is going to crash and burn, spectacularly. It is running on credit it can never pay back. At least 2 generations have covered their eyes and ears and yelled "naaa naaa we don't believe it". It's time to acknowledge that we can't carry on that "tradition'. Either we voluntarily adapt, or our surroundings will force the change.
It wildly varies by suburb. The one I grew up in had few-to-no kids on the block, and even if there had been, there were only a couple of small, underwhelming parks within walking/biking distance. Comparing notes with other people, this seems like the more common experience of the suburbs.
The disdain (at least for me) comes when you do the math and realized how absurdly subsidized the suburban lifestyle is.
Who is doing the subsidizing? You hear about cities annexing suburbs to access the tax base. If suburbs were a drain, wouldn't they be doing whatever the opposite of annexing is?
A few of the wealthiest suburbs in the country are enclaves of people who rely economically on the city but don’t want their property taxes to pay for poor people’s amenities and services, so carve out a separate municipality. Cities want to re-absorb these, because the current setup is grossly unfair.
This is not representative of suburbs in general. Many suburbs, especially older ones whose infrastructure construction (but not maintenance) was heavily state-subsidized, are struggling and financially unsustainable, leaving their (less wealthy) residents in deep trouble in the long term.
After asking this question I started reading more about it. The biggest subsidization is about mortgage interest tax deductions. I never thought about that as a subsidy, but I suppose it is. They should end it.
I grew up in the DC suburbs. The closest pool was a few miles away, so required a car. The schools were all miles away, so required car/bus. By the time I got to high school, most of my friends lived miles away, so for a few years, seeing them required transportation. Grocery store required a car. Heck, even the closest corner store required a car. Fortunately, my mom was able to stay home for many years, and when she did return to work, she went into teaching, so that transport was readily available. For kids with 2 working parents, getting around kinda sucked - it impacted their ability to get to/from school off-hours, get to sports, etc.
I still live in the DC suburbs, but picked an area with a lot more walkability. Walkable grocery store (plus pharmacy, coffee, dining). Schools are walkable. Bike paths and walking trails everywhere. Golf course out my back door. Walk to work. Walk to Metro. But, the median home price is higher here than my parents' area, and that's in an area that's already expensive.
When I was old enough, I did as well. Didn't help for some things... middle school was ~7 miles from home and across several major arterial roads - making that ride in winter wouldn't have been safe (would have been in the dark on way to school).
I raised (or rather shared in raising) a kid in a 2BR apartment in Manhattan with no yard.
We also happened to have a weekend/summer cottage in the suburbs. It was near the beach and had a yard and bikes and all those wonderful suburban pleasures.
He absolutely begged us every weekend to let him stay in the city where he could see his friends by subway/walking, didn't need us to drive him anywhere, had freedom etc.
> disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch
Have you yourself been a child growing up in places of different density? I personally did (my time spent mostly in one of the nicest suburbs in southern California, but alternating for a couple months every year with a walkable small Mexican city), and then since then have been in cities (where my small kids are now growing up).
Are you sure I am the “out of touch” one here? Have you ever tried living with kids in a 2-bedroom apartment? It’s really not a big deal (though note, there are also plenty of larger apartments/condos and single-family houses in cities, and plenty of cities around the world without outrageous housing prices). In the city you might not play in your yard, but you can play at the nearby playground or park with the many neighborhood kids.
I think you underestimate to what degree people design their life to provide what they think is the best thing for their kids.
A lot of people ended up in the suburbs because of their kids, not in spite of them. Proximity to other kids, organized sports, good schools, after-school activities, etc... It can be very car-centric as you pointed out, but when there are other families on your block going to the same things, you quickly figure out how to car pool to share the burden.
There's more than one way to live a great life with kids.
Fwiw, I hated growing up in a suburb precisely due to the inability to get anywhere without being driven. I had to rely on my parents any time I wanted to see my friends. Having a back yard to play in wasn't much of a consolation.
My kids love the suburbs. There's almost no crime. They can bike into the hills, forests, lakes, downtown, friends houses, the mall. Schools are great. One of my friends raised his kid in SF before finally moving out to suburbia when she was a teenager, stayed in the house most of the time. Now she's got a great circle of friends and is never in the house. Cities are for single adults trying to find a mate.
Evidently it's somewhat odd, but the suburb we bought in has an elementary school and middle school built right in the middle of it. It's very walkable for a large portion of the neighborhood (though, it's the outer Seattle area - so the rain does keep many from walking for a large portion of the year, anyway).
I certainly don't think we put our child's mental health second. I'm not sure how to quantify that for a stranger on the internet, nor do I feel the need to... I am in the 30-50 range, though.
The thought of living in Seattle, personally, is abysmal. It smells of piss, all of the time. The homeless have taken over and there are no decent programs to help them out, nor do there seem to be any effective programs on the horizon. City corruption seems to take care of that. Business is taking a nose dive. There are no grocery stores. Food deserts are a very real thing. Rent is unimaginable. You can buy in the suburbs for a fraction of the cost of renting in downtown, easily. People in the area are not the most outgoing in the first place (the colloquialism is the Seattle Freeze), but add into that the normal distance of city dwelling and you are almost robotic to each other. While public transport is lacking (to say the least), it is there and available from these horrible suburbs you have warned us about.
The dream of city living seems, honestly, to be for the VERY rich or the young and naive, to be honest =/
Have you ever actually lived in the city of Seattle? Your description is a caricature that doesn't really exist. Particularly amusing is the idea of food deserts here. What parts of the city suffer from this? Where I live, I can walk to 3 major supermarkets, a produce market, a weekend farmers market, countless cafes, bakeries, delis, restaurants... And somehow I manage to breathe over the constant smell of piss. Lol.
Can you fill me in on sth? Where Ive lived in Europe, the onlt car-only areas are burbs. Small towns tend to be walkable too, on account of being small. Now, not every small town has a wide variety of shops of course, but most things are bikeable. The only things that are not where I now live are places I'd need a car anyway (furniture, construction, etc). I thought it'd be the same for small town America, but I guess you're saying it's not?
You're right, it's not like that in small-town America: small towns aren't walkable in the US.
There aren't many walkable or bikeable areas in the US, and those that exist are in a handful of large cities. Many US cities aren't very walkable, e.g. Los Angeles (the second largest US city).
What would you think of a combination of high density and large green space? Lay out a city like a fractal with the interior being dense, but you're always close to woodlands, open fields (farms?), or parks. I know zoning boards are incapable of maintaining such a structure without constantly making exceptions for developers, but what would you think of such an arrangement?
That's not far from London, a pretty dense city as they go, but also one that just about, technically speaking, counts as a forest thanks to the number of trees [1]. I live in one of the densest boroughs of London, on a main road, and I've got ample access to parks and green space.
Toronto is very similar. Outside of the very dense core, but still very much in Toronto proper, you can get lost in forests and ravines and have to be on the lookout for coyote!
> I know zoning boards are incapable of maintaining such a structure without constantly making exceptions for developers,
Also not a lot of undeveloped cities either to try it out.
For what its worth, something similar (but less dramatic in scale) was already tried before [1]. People tended to not like it. The park space made it a lot harder to get around. You lose the "its ony three block away" nature of cities when you add lots of dead space, and things like rain cover along sidewalks become a problem.
One of the major things that make city streets "walkable" and enjoyable is stuff happening on the street frontage. The complexity of various shops, eateries and city amenities abutting the sidewalk mean there is reason to be there and things to do. You lose that when you recess a building.
I think a much better approach is just to cede some land to be in-city-grid parks, and take over some minor roads and alleys as green-walks where the road is reduced (eg. curved to force slow traffic) or removed, and theres lots of trees and gardens and walkways. Basically get that green space from incremental reclamation, and protection of existing opens spaces. Leave actual city structure as it is.
most people move to hcol areas due to jobs, they don't really have much of a community or family in those areas, so it is an easy decision for many to move away if they could. I myself have lived in dense cities, although i enjoyed the walkability of everything, i also felt myself missing time with nature, to enjoy the peace that life offers etc... and weirdly enough felt more disconnected to humanity living in the midst of a lot of humans.
> Moving to the suburbs would find us losing much of that freedom that comes with living in a dense neighborhood.
This does not make sense. Yes, moving to the suburbs and not using a car would lose much of freedom, but it is not how you live in the suburbs...
When you live the suburbs (with a car or multiple cars), you have way more choices to grocery stores, doctor's offices, friends' houses, public parks, lakes, etc.
I will say, if anybody cares a lot about freedom, would want to live in the suburbs. The whole idea of prioritizing walkability is against freedom.
Walkability means limiting choices, not expanding choices. You are basically shrinking the area of 15 min driving distance (radius of eight miles) to the area of 15 min walking distance (radius of three-quarters of a mile). No matter how dense you set in the area of 15 min walking distance, it will never be comparable to the area of 15 min driving distance (around x100 area space).
In addition, you gain more freedom when you live in the suburbs with a backyard and a garage (or a shed in the backyard). You have lots of things you can do (like home lab, wood workshop, etc.) which aren't available to you if you live in a small house or apartment in the city.
If you chose not to own a car, that's a totally separate topic.
> When you live the suburbs (with a car or multiple cars), you have way more choices to grocery stores, doctor's offices, friends' houses, public parks, lakes, etc. Walkability means limiting choices, not expanding choices.
Walkability doesn't strictly limit choices, especially if you consider walking+biking+transit since they go hand-in-hand. E.g. compared to a car-oriented suburb, personally I certainly have more food options within an X-minute accessible radius, but I don't have as many nature options. It's a tradeoff.
I also don't need to drive, which is probably the freedom OP was talking about, and one that both of us value even if some others like yourself don't. I like that having a no-car option means it's easier to be healthy and active when walking and biking are practical choices for day-to-day errands, that I don't have to think about parking or traffic for popular events, that I'm more likely to bump into friends on the street, and that I don't have to think about designed drivers when alcohol is involved. You may not value any of that, but some people do, and so they prefer living somewhere with that choice.
It's fine if you prefer living with a car, but it's rather silly to say it "does not make sense" to consider it freeing to live in a place that doesn't require one given that many people make that choice.
> Did you see my last sentence? If you chose to not using a car, it's a different topic. But not using a car does not give you more freedom.
Yes I did, but if that's your counter-point, then I fear you've misunderstood this thread: it was about how where you live, not whether to have a car. Buying a car when you don't have one clearly adds options, and avoiding having a car when you need one clearly restricts your options. But that's obvious, and nobody was claiming otherwise. The point is you can't live without a car anywhere, and there exist people who are not you who prefer the freedom of living in places where they don't need a car (even if do have a car!).
> Also, your thinking reflects a typical young person live alone on this forum. Not much need to be said.
Yikes, "I suspect you belong to a specific demographic" should never be a reason to dismiss someone's opinion out of hand. I hope you see how disrespectful that is, and how it closes the door on mutual understanding. (Your assumption isn't even right, BTW.) Otherwise, I suppose our discussion ends here.
Also in Chicago (northwest side). After our kids were born, we stayed for many of the same reasons.
+1 on school within walking distance. Walking to-and-from each day with my son has been an amazing experience. A big surprise for us has been the sense of community within our neighborhood and school.
I grew up in the north suburbs of Milwaukee. Did you consider it? Outside of keeping your kids in the same schools (and the schools north of Milwaukee are great), it hits all the same marks and it’s a LOT cheaper.
I love visiting Milwaukee, and Wisconsin in general for the sheer amount of outdoor activities. Unfortunately it would send us the wrong direction with respect to visiting family. I want to spend less time in a car in general.
Have you considered remote/teleconference family visits? The last two years have shown that it's perfectly possible to lead a normal social life on Zoom, etc. There isn't really any need to get into a car and drive several hours just to see someone.
It's not. How do even chat in a group of say, 4-6 people or more? Bigger in person groups naturally diverge and converge in real time, while with Zoom you're either completely separated or have people taking turns speaking in a very unnatural fashion that kind of works for business meetings but not for casual social interaction.
I sure am. I live in San Jose (which resides in the Bay Area). Here’s why I am leaving.
- $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment.
- Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment.
- Smells like urine on many sidewalks.
- Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown).
- Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings.
- Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your head low if you aren’t progressive.
- We’ve reached $4.99 per gallon for gasoline.
- I’ve experienced two car break-ins.
- Trash everywhere.
- High taxes.
- Crummy roads.
I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what? My standard of living is low. I’m leaving for Texas or Florida. Hopefully either of these two states provide me something better.
Nothing would be better for California in general and the Bay Area in particular for people to move away for a while. The infrastructure of that region is swamped. Everything is overpriced and congested.
I was born in San Francisco a long time ago and it used to actually be a pretty cheap city to live in California once. A lot of LA based law firms would open up offices in San Francisco because it was cheaper to live there then lots of parts of Los Angeles and lots of people thought the city was charming. That's hard to imagine now. To me the charm was hollowed out by it becoming so expensive. So now SF is a boring like Manhattan and Oakland is the Brooklyn of the region.
The only reason anyone pays $2700 for an 500 sq ft apartment in San Jose is because they have a great job near by. I don't want to say anything bad about San Jose but IMO it has always been pretty far down the list of places you want to live in California. You shouldn't have to suffer that much for a job, and it seems like the way things are going you won't have to.
What areas don't have political and ideology homogeny anymore? There are two Americas. I would enjoy an area with better tolerance to the other side's ideals, but it seems that's in short supply everywhere. There's a real viciousness for the other side at the national level, but I can't understand it at the individual human being level or the community level. Your neighbor may not share your politics, but it also doesn't imply they embody all of your opposition's ideas. We pick sides because we have to in a first-past-the-post system.
I think the divide looks more bridgeable on a personal level - on a recent trip to a rural area of Oregon I got to speak with an anti-vax, huge pickup driving, hunting, Christian man. He seemed like a genuine, kind, thoughtful person, and I sincerely enjoyed talking with him. He acted respectful towards my pro-vax, Prius-driving, suburb-dwelling attitudes. Seemed like there was mutual respect there, and I don't think it's too unusual for people to appreciate learning about each other and to respect differences.
Guess I'm just hoping that controversy appears bigger than it is, and most people still do know how to get along and respect each other.
Every us state has liberal and conservative chunks within it - i feel like best bet is to find one of those in the opposite of whatever your state is. Those places I feel like are better balanced and don’t suffer from the excesses of extremism
> I would enjoy an area with better tolerance to the other side's ideals, but it seems that's in short supply everywhere.
There isn't better tolerance on either side. You're mistaking agreeing with group think for tolerance. What is tolerated is just a different set of behaviors, but intolerance is high regardless for behaviors outside that set. You just don't see the intolerance when you agree with the majority.
Not a California thing. I live in Dallas and am all for coming to Texas, but don't expect miracles. There are homeless people everywhere, vacant buildings, my catalytic converter has been sawed off twice, trash all over the place, major road out of my neighborhood has had a pothole big enough to knock a wheel off for 8 months and the city has done nothing about it.
These are just city problems.
On the other hand, my mortgage, insurance, and property taxes are $2,500 a month for a 3,000 square foot, 4-story townhome with a private rooftop deck with a downtown skyline view, so there's that.
you don't have to move that far to escape all that. Plenty of areas an hour away from San Jose that are nice and a lot cheaper (still more expensive than Texas or Florida, sure).
Depending on if you need to change jobs and the family situation sometimes it's just as much effort to move states than move a few hours away.
If you have the opportunity it's good to look at the entire country, sometimes even the world (though for tech the US is by far the best option) for the best value.
Even moving 2 miles away will result in better quality of life. Downtown San Jose has the some of the highest crime rates and largest homeless encampments in the city, and the rent in other parts of the city is not a lot higher.
But if I'm moving an hour away, why not move farther? I was born, raised and have lived 31 out of 34 years in California and I just can't fathom why anyone would choose to live here anymore. I bought a house in Southern Oregon 4 years ago and moved up here full time a year ago thanks to the pandemic. I really hope I never have to move back.
Southern Oregon is a far cry from Texas and Florida as the top comment mentions. I don't see how either of those states would factor in especially for my partner who champions women's and LGBTQ+ rights...
No need to drive even an hour. Downtown San Jose is certainly a hellhole (I worked downtown on Santa Clara St. for a while) but just a few minutes away there are very nice suburbs like Campbell, Willow Glen etc.
There is flight from major metropolitan cities right now. All the problems are the same across these cities. While I'm in the honeymoon phase of my recent move from the city I love and grew up in. I was tired of many of the things you listed.
> I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what?
The weather. The high cost of living in the bay area and California is largely about the weather. People come to California for the dream and stay for the sun.
It's weird how subjective experience can be so different. I live in East San Jose a mile from downtown. I'm very happy with it. I love riding my electric bike around town and my only complaint is that for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized. I can't related to most of your other complaints.
Your other complaints are complaints you often hear from conservatives about San Francisco. I took my bike on the train to SF not long ago and spotted no feces and smelled no urine as I rode around The City.
Homelessness is a problem in San Jose and SF, but no worse than in many other cities I've been in.
> for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized
No, it's worse. Every time I have to drive in Santa Clara County, I get the impression that the traffic engineers they hired are sociopaths.
The traffic lights on El Camino are perfectly timed to force you to stop at every. single. damn. one. That is, unless you drive 20+mph over the speed limit. I initially thought this might be to encourage walking and cycling, but you run into the exact same problem on a bike. The infrastructure isn't very ped-friendly, either.
I just don't get it. The stoplights are timed to make travel excruciating no matter how you do it. The problem with El Camino light timing ends when you cross into San Mateo county, btw.
It's the polar opposite of LA, where you can drive 10's of miles (late at night) on surface streets with the cruise control set right at the speed limit, never touching the gas or breaks. Cycling in the valley or on LA's west side, you can usually hit 3-5 greens before needing to stop (and then only briefly).
I used to drive Uber and I agree that El Camino is the worst. It's so bad somebody should lose their job for incompentantly managing traffic. Santa Clara Ave through San Jose isn't any better. It's maddening and I agree, it doesn't matter if you bike or car. The irony is San Jose is near the top of the lists for IOT smart cities. Ok, but your traffic lights say different.
Florida is pretty terrible. Even if you are totally cool with never doing anything outside, never engaging in culture, and never talking to other people, there is literally no positive side to living in Florida other than the combined lack of winter and access to a beach. Sure, people are more right-wing, but I'd much rather live in Texas than Florida. Even a desert is more interesting than endless strip-malls, and big Texas cities are more cultured, and even more commercially diverse, than any part of Florida. Practically speaking, Florida is also always overpriced, and insurance and hurricanes are annoying (and going to get worse).
This wasn't intended as a gotcha, or anything, I was just honestly curious what informed your experience. I lived in Tampa for ~10 years, and found it to be a pretty decent city in general, though with the usual southern caveats of public transit being non-existent and the sprawl being excessive.
Once you get past the angry drivers, random chickens, Ybor, rush hour, crime, etc, the main problem with cities like Tampa is they are just soulless. It's like someone paved over the entire world and installed palm trees and Jamba Juices and nothing else. Everyone is angry, everything is boring and expensive. But if all you want to do is sit inside and look at a screen, you'll almost never notice.
The two states mentioned are near the bottom of my list but I think your nod to ideological homogeny notes that you are on board. I personally find the policy decisions (and elected leadership) of both to be third world, backward, and dangerous if not outright fraudulent and refuse to entertain offers that would put me there or working for companies there.
Depends what you're looking for, CA is a ginormous state with basically anything you fancy on the menu. Rural, urban, mountainous, coastal, desert, agricultural, it's all over the place.
It should simply be obvious that judging the state from a narrow sampling of life in San Jose is an extreme case of wearing the SV rat-race blinders and utterly failing to take advantage of what the region has to offer.
I'm going to have to recommend against Florida. Remember, the last gubernatorial election there was decided by ~50k votes. And blue-staters have been migrating there en masse since last summer. I sold my house to one of them several months ago (home prices have been going up like a rocket, btw) and left.
This article and similar ones have been written at least a 1000 times for the last decade with a clear political tinge. The poster child is always around how people want to move to Florida and Texas. But somehow it forgets to include Washington and Seattle which has probably seen the biggest tech migration and grown into the second biggest tech hub in the country, far greater than Austin or Miami (hyped up constantly). I guess it doesn’t fit with the narrative ? My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
> My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
This is my general thinking as well, and it happens to fit with my current life experience.
I'm unconvinced that there has been, generally speaking, a fundamental change in the preferred environment people wish to live in; instead it seems more likely that traditionally popular American urban areas are just too expensive and offer relatively little (compared to other parts of the world) in terms of services to justify living there... Even for those that might otherwise choose to.
There is a litany of social and governmental problems plaguing California, but I always stayed because it's the climate that feels the most natural to me. What finally drove me out was the seasonal firestorms and rain of ashes.
The San Francisco Chronicle has done some analyses of the Bay Area exodus, and the majority are not moving to Texas but instead to places like San Joaquin and Madera county (counties that border the Bay Area). People want the bigger house, but they also want to be able to visit their friends and family.
I'm typing this from Madera County. People are fleeing the Bay Area to move to the worst air quality in the country? My wife and I are figuring out how to move away (again) because the smog is really messing with her health. The air is so much worse here than when we were growing up. Heck, she wants to move to the cleaner air of Santa Clarita (north of L.A.--where we used to live).
This is accurate in my anecdotal experience. I'm from the Bay Area (5th generation or so) and so I have a lot of cousins, aunts, and uncles here and the general trend for friends/family has been to move to cheaper areas in the exurbs: Stockton, Tracey, Antioch, Fairfield, Vacaville, Modesto, etc. This is where the working class are getting pushed out to as they can no longer afford to live in the inner Bay Area.
It looks like FL and TX each had ~130k net migrants per the last reported data. [1] Washington had ~40k in the same year. There's a reason journalists talk more about migration to FL/TX, and it's because there are way more people moving there.
Texas has 4x the population of Washington state, has more urban centers and a much larger state. As a % of population, looks like WA has more migration compared to Texas given your numbers
Sure, and that would make it a very important story for WA residents. There have been stories that emphasize the impact on local communities, like those in ID and MT, that were sparsely populated and are experiencing an influx. But most of the nationwide stories are about the net flows in absolute terms, not considering the percentage of the local population.
Also, as others have pointed out, most of the TX influx has been in/around Austin, so it's not like people are moving from SF to the middle of nowhere in TX, and having no impact on the local communities. Real estate prices in Austin are skyrocketing, as would be expected, in the few areas where people are moving to.
I used to live in Florida and you couldn't pay me to move back. The weather is hot, sticky and humid, the politics are right wing, the religion is old timey and in your face and the (mostly) latent racism is unpleasant when you encounter it.
I moved to a larger city in the midwest and it's great. Yes, winter is a drag but that's about the only negative that bothers me. Tech salaries go a long way, public schools are high quality and plentiful, politics are generally more balanced (than Florida or Texas), religion isn't a constant presence, crime is low and people are mostly friendly.
People move to Seattle mostly because it is great. But if you are a certain political bent Texas and Florida offer a safe haven to be so. I have a (gladly) ex-worker that is on his way to FL or Montana but all that does is add 2 seemingly nice folks to the pile of racists already there.
For the most part that migration ended about 10 years ago. People are now moving away from there. Right now the hot spots are Idaho, Montana, Florida, Texas.
All of which are experiencing house prices in the last 5 years to shoot through the roof from what those people originally had. That said, Texas is huge so I'm really talking about Austin and 2 hour surrounding cities.
I grew up in a rural town around 4 hours from St. Lois.
I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID!
A short list of things I disliked:
- Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads.
- Conservative values. My parents are solidly blue voters, but growing up in that environment surrounded by racism, you learn a lot of bad stuff that you have to unlearn, or else sink deeper and deeper into the bad stuff.
- Our house became worthless. The community is dying, and the house my family owned is reasonable and has been sitting in the market for years. Nobody wants to move or live there.
- Lack of culture. My parents, up until this year, had never eaten Indian food, real ramen, or a huge number of other commonplace things you get in a city. There weren't any "garage bands" or other artists or coders to collaborate with as a kid. They are getting older now and they are realizing how empty and boring the place they have chosen to live is. My dad is getting really into video poker. There is NOTHING ELSE FOR THEM THERE.
- Bad schools. I had the same teachers as my parents, who graduated 20 years before I did. We had HUGE behavioral problems. Students who fell behind were sent to another school 45 minutes away... until that school filled up and could no longer take the overflow. It was constant triage and if you were a little clever you were BORED. A lot of students their senior year just sat in study hall for 6 hours a day because they didn't have the rooms and the teachers to teach higher level classes. I didn't even know what AP classes were until I got to college.
- Bad hospitals. We had to close ours down because we couldn't play doctors enough to move to our town.
- Total lack of community. You think "less people == people are closer". No. There is nowhere to gather, the only land you can use is the land you own. There are not enough people to support hobbies or meetups. Most of the people get a degree or a trade job and get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
Every time I see an article about an exodus to rural America I am reminded of the rural America I grew up in, and frankly it's terrible compared to living in or near a city. For all the reasons you cite and so many more.
Of course cost of living is cheap in rural America, demand is low and supply is high for land far from modern conveniences.
This rings true to my experience as well. Growing up in a conservative Christian county where I was the only queer kid drove me to attempt suicide twice in my teens before I promptly ran as fast as possible to a large university and never go back except for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It’s swear it’s so much worse because of the boredom. School got out around 3pm and most days I had to stay inside with a sympathetic teacher until my parents got off work because a group of kids would just hang around waiting for me to walk home.
Thank god for the internet, not sure I would have made it out without it.
I've heard this brought up as a kind of second round of white flight. The middle- and upper-class (primarily) white population is once again moving out of urban centers because telecommuting is something that these high-salary jobs afford them.
I think it will rebound a bit (but not much), as moving from urban to suburban is a very difficult transition, but its even harder going the other way once you've adjusted.
I miss living in NYC, but I'm actually looking to retire in the next few years, and pick up some remote land that I can settle with Starlink, and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years. My retirement will look vastly different from my parents, as I will still work (building web apps, games, furniture, whatever tickles my fancy), just not for anyone but myself.
> and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years
Do you mind sharing how much?
I'm curious why most people seem to think $1M is somehow not enough money to retire modestly on. If previous trends continue, you could easily live on >$4K after taxes per month indefinitely. That's almost 50% higher than median wage (after taxes). Median wage = ~$41,000. Even with $0 state tax, just after federal tax, you're at ~$30,000. At this income, you likely can't deduct more than the standard deduction...
It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
Even at $500k - you can draw down the same amount for ~10 years, and then rely on SS (which would be much more modest - although, obviously still completely doable considering almost half the senior population does it).
Also - a lot of people still do something that makes money in retirement...
>I'm curious why most people seem to think $1M is somehow not enough money to retire modestly on
>It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
It is because they have a different definition of modest than you. I know I can live on even less than median wage. I grew up with far less. But my family did not have access to healthcare and good schools or being able to help out family members if they needed support. We were always 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined.
Is living 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined modest? That is a personal opinion. I aim to cover the legal and health risks for me and my family members, so $1M is nothing where I live. I also predict that I need quite a big buffer the way the population pyramid is shaping up, because labor is going to get more and more expensive, along with devaluation of the dollar.
I also think either me or at least my kids (years 2050 to 2100) is going to have to contend with problems due to climate change and access to clean water and air that have yet to materialize, so need buffer for that too.
The "4% rule" [1] would recommend pulling out $40,000 each year if you had $1 million. This is the amount you can draw down each year without ever depleting the $1 million. The theory is that after you draw down your $40k, the remaining $960k will grow enough to get you back to $1 million by next year's draw down.
You can still live on $3,333/month, (especially since this person plans to keep working and there is likely some social security after age 67) but wanted to add some context.
Many retirement calculators assume post-retirement montly outflow of ~70% of pre-retirement amount. I don't know if this holds true for very high income families, but whenever I run various scenarios, I leave it.
I also assume many people won't have paid-off homes, so they're stuck paying rent or mortgage. Cars aren't cheap to keep running. Medical expenses are insane in the US.
I may still have a mortgage in 'retirement' (~10-15 years off, depending on multiple factors), and... depending on provable income, may not be able to get another one. While it's definitely a 'monthly debt' to pay off, it will likely not even be close to the cost of health insurance. Current lowest cost plan we got last year was $900/month for two people - that was $150 more than our mortgage. Mortgage/taxes/insurance were coming out around $1000. Even if I paid off the mortgage, property taxes and insurance would be ~$300/month. Health insurance is (for us) 3x that right now. Yes, it's insane.
If you also have to look after parents who never saved, you'll need to calculate out a fair bit. One example I saw on reddit was about 40% more than you need for yourself. Then there's teh part that if you don't own a home, you'll be paying that off in retirement.
The person who accumulated $1M (above real estate equity) likely did so by having a larger than median income over their working life (and likely has an associated higher expense profile).
For me, I think a 4% safe-withdraw-rate feels about right. Some argue for 3.5%. Others for 5 or 6%. Each of those has an impact on the cashflow in retirement, but $1M is probably not going to provide a replacement income for the typical folks who accumulated $1M. (Median household income in my state is $87K/yr before taxes.)
You can add a couple grand from Social Security and I guess the assumption is also that your house is paid off. Also, you no longer have a commute or any of the related expenses. Given those three things, you can live pretty comfortably. Not lavishly, but quite comfortably.
The current (November 31) valuation of my assets is almost $200k. That isn't counting debts (which are small, but still exist), and that isn't counting the assets or value of my consulting company (which unaudited is around $50k).
I'm hoping to stash away another $150-200k over the next couple of years to really make my retirement last.
But either way, it isn't THAT hard to have a working retirement on < $500k. You aren't rich, but you are financially secure enough to chose what you want to do.
It definitely helps to not have a family, and not to get sick, but if the finances work out after considering everything a generic fear of medical expenses shouldn't necessarily keep someone from pursuing an early "retirement". Home expenses are the more important consideration I think unless you've already got some medical stuff going on. I kind of did things in the wrong order and quit my job last year before finding a place to move to, and still haven't really settled on a new location, so I'm continuing to rent in high cost Bellevue WA. With no job, if I want to buy a home (that's absurdly overpriced even in places like Wyoming relative to 2019/most of 2020) somewhere and not pay in cash I'll need to do an asset depletion loan, whose typical 70% of assets calculation puts me at about a third of the more traditional 28% monthly income rule for qualification purposes.
My personal health insurance is a crappy plan that's $250/mo (it's going up to $280 for next year) -- I don't plan on actually using it and I have an HSA fund from my last job that will cover 1-2 years of hitting the out-of-pocket max if something does happen. Depending on the something, and its chronic nature, that may force me to change my situation, but top of the list of likely doable changes is to just go back to work (either to afford a better plan that'll cover something I need or get with the group plan the company has). If being "retired" young doesn't work out so well in the first few years, it's not that rough to become un-retired, compared to being in your 60s or 70s, and hopefully at least you had a fun break.
Second point is good. For first point, they might be getting their healthcare included via work, so their hidden compensation is higher. Or perhaps they're taking a risk, which is certainly possible, but not a great way to have a stress-free retirement.
Many like you are buying up lake-front properties in rural places.
I recommend it, playing farmer-cowboy-houseboateer in Kentucky/Tennessee is a magnitude cheaper than out west, even if you fail, you are out less money than simply living elsewhere.
I'm currently in the process of buying my wife's grandpa's house in rural Louisiana. It isn't on a lot of land (only 1.5 acres), but he's selling it to us "at cost" and that was how much it cost him to build it 20 years ago. We haven't decided if we want to live there full time and give up all the niceties we currently enjoy (a target within 10 minutes vs 2.5 hours, every type of ethnic food you can imagine, etc)., but it is always there for when we retire. Starlink gets over 60mbps in the area, and my wife's telemedicine practice only needs 10mbps for SD video, which is what most of her clients run at anyway since they use their phones and iPads for their sessions.
I know it's hard to believe, but the only difference between a major metropolis and bum-fuck nowhere is the lack of ethnic food, and less stressful traffic.
Almost all modern-niceties have been commodified to even the outer regions of the hills.
As someone from bumfuck nowhere currently living in a megacity, there's more to it than that. Cultural events for one; the difference between a 20 minute train home and a 7 hour drive is pretty significant. Job availability is another one, remote helps but even with COVID we aren't there yet.
I've spent months at my wife's grandpa's house, they are lacking (at least without making a full day's trip) in almost every modern convenience.
What is funny though is once we close on it, he's loading up his 5th wheel and driving it to an even more remote property his friend owns out in Colorado. They are fully off-grid.
>Almost all modern-niceties have been commodified to even the outer regions of the hills.
It's hard to commodify a large economy of local businesses like you'd find in a large city. I can't imagine anything worse than being beholden to a handful of chain stores or the amazon catalog for all my wants and wishes. I've been doing all my shopping lately with local businesses, hard to do that in smaller areas that lack the customer base needed to support all these different businesses locally.
I had a chance last March when all the temporary remote work started, to grab a nice rural property and move there from the Bay Area. Chickened out because I didn't know how permanent the remote culture would get, but I wish I had pulled the trigger. Seems like since then, the rest of the country (including rural areas) has caught up with the huge real estate price hikes. Every stereotypical "lake house" has spiked and it doesn't seem like such a bargain anymore. Too bad!
Honestly I'm from rural Tennessee. They aren't worried about you being an "outsider" they're most likely wondering if you're rich so they can overcharge you for work on your property.
I've got family in Athens, TN and from parts more easterly.
That's generally true now and previously, but I wonder about the next decade+ as relocation shifts into higher gear. My historical impression has been that locals are usually okay with a few outsiders... but when it turns into a deluge, and everyone who moves there is wealthier than them...
Well, better to be nondescript than driving around east TN or KY with a CA or NY plate.
I have family in Nashville, friends in Austin, and former co-workers in Toledo and Columbus. They've all experienced the great migration from California, and they all feel very negatively about it.
I live in Houston, TX now (and grew up here), and couldn't tell you whether we have any Californians here since we've always been a super diverse city.
Yes in the Nashville area we are very aware of it.
Most of Nashville Metro and surrounding counties are actually transplants or children of transplants. Once you go to a county that doesn't border metro Nashville the culture and accent change tremendously.
Everyone in the area is aware of "outsiders" and resents it to some degree.
I'm a young SWE from TN. I can't compete with SWE's from the coasts who have immense savings up on me and they're buying up all the homes.
SWE's who are 40+ in the area immediately bought brick 4 bed homes in the burbs in the nicest part of town when they got hired 10+ years ago. SWE's closer to 30 who are local are just able to buy an apartment if single income.
However it's a huge tide, this money coming in, the issue is most locals don't have ships to ride it.
Only having been to Knoxville on purpose twice, it definitely felt way too busy for how small it was. I-40 was stopped basically on a random friday at noon. Same happens in Nashville, but Nashville is sooooo much bigger, it is expected.
Basically anyone and everyone in the North from Ohio to New York who is driving to Florida is going to pass through that that section of interstate. The I640 bypass doesn't really help - it merges back into mainline city traffic before were most people locally are traveling. Poorly executed. The Great Smoky Mountains are nearby and is the most visited national park adding to it all.
That being said, check out Market Square for a bite to eat or KnoxDevs for a pretty cool dev community.
Also don't vote for the policies which made you pick up your bags and leave the place you came from or your new place of residence will eventually start to look like the one you left.
> Also don't vote for the policies which made you pick up your bags and leave the place you came from or your new place of residence will eventually start to look like the one you left.
Maybe people didn't leave because of the policies, but because of their position relative to them. I mean, people who aren't legacy homeowners and find California too expensive but otherwise like it might well prefer to become a homeowner and then have the place they are in become like California.
People leave because of second-order effects to policies that they voted for. California is expensive because of decades of policy that make it hard to build housing, some of the more ridiculous ones I've heard are banning natural gas in new homes and mandating photovoltaic panels on all new constructions.
Since basic economics still applies, prices get inflated, some of the people don't like the economics of what they voted for so they decide to move to Arizona or Texas or Florida and then once they've "got theirs" they smugly vote for more of the same policies that always apply to "someone else". Hence where the acronym NIMBYism comes from.
Basic economics says prices are set based on supply+demand not cost. Cost of course affects supply, but right now the main housing supply limiter in urban areas is restrictive permitting and to some degree lack of construction labor (a nationwide echo of 2008). As a result increased construction costs mostly come out of landowner's returns.
Most efficiency standards actually lower monthly housing costs, including your two examples of solar panels and natural gas bans. Note that the solar can be built offsite, and solar + electric is a natural (hah) combination.
A lot of the "California problem" policies work at smaller city sizes and just fail when scaled to major city/metro, so would be great at a lot of those smaller towns. Especially because they can be more humane and well thought out than whatever that town had to start.
> they can be more humane and well thought out than whatever that town had to start.
In other words, you'll go to those small towns to teach those hicks some manners. No wonder they're not that keen on seeing refugees from "more humane and well thought out" places settle in their towns and villages.
If that is your message to your new neighbours may I suggest you go somewhere more welcoming of those "humane and well thought out" policies? It is a sad thing that those places tend to be the ones people are moving away from but that means there should be lots of vacancies.
They did not move because of "inhumane and not well thought out" policies, they moved because there was no employment to be had - Bruce Springsteen touched this in "The River", Chris Rea in "Steel River". Industry closed down, production moved overseas, people moved to what they hoped were greener pastures but found them to be gray and inhospitable. Now that employment can be had through a network connection people are moving back.
Employment is a policy failure. Likely "not well thought out" if it didn't work as intended :)
California and its policies have created an ton of jobs. So many jobs that theres not enough space to put the people who work those jobs. Much of Silicon Valley in the 50s was farmland. Why hasn't every other rural town transformed into the economic powerhouse of the 21st century? Could it be (partially) policy decisions?
> Bruce Springsteen touched this
Not the authority on human migratory patterns i'd expect.
Employment is a policy failure on a much larger scale than that of the small towns which lost the factories which moved overseas - whether that be in the USA or in Europe, doesn't matter. Do you think those small towns could have kept the rust belt alive if only they had some of those ex-Californians around to teach them those "well thought out and humane" policies? Would Appalachia have been a thriving centre of development had only the majors of Bumfuck and Podunk gotten their acts together?
Of course not. The policies which gave California those jobs you mentioned are not the policies enacted by the current crop of Californian politicos. This can be seen by the population stats for the state which for the first time ever (?) see a downward trend [1] due to the number of people fleeing the place. Where California used to enact policies which made people flock to the place they now do the opposite. Maybe California was not the best example to give, seeing as how it is currently melting down in more than one way? Power failures, skyrocketing crime, rampant homelessness, tell me something which they're doing right...
As to Springsteen not being "the authority" on "human migratory patterns"... really? Why does it take an "authority" to see jobs disappearing from your town/county/state? You forgot to mention Chris Rea, is he more of "an authority"? Of course he isn't and of course he is since this whole "authority" spiel is just that. Both Springsteen and Rea made songs about things they saw happening around them, both of them involve rivers, both saw the jobs disappearing. Rea noticed that there are salmon swimming in Steel River, Springsteen thinks back to better times. They're artists, not "authorities".
> Do you think those small towns could have kept the rust belt alive if only they had some of those ex-Californians around to teach them those "well thought out and humane" policies? Would Appalachia have been a thriving centre of development had only the majors of Bumfuck and Podunk gotten their acts together?
Yes.
Obviously its a little glib to be an arm-chair critic and just handwave all externatilities and decisions away, but yes i think the rust belt was (partially) a policy failure. eg. Cleveland was once one of the richest cities in america, but did nothing to protect or incubate the next generation of businesses there. I used to live near Cleveland's millionaire row. The mansions are now homeless shelters and frat houses, and the rich are gone. A strong policy for employment is to push diversity of the work - lots of different industries, and new ventures so economic cycles don't affect the whole region. Today, that same strip of road is being re-imagined as the "Health-Tech Corridor", is being outfit with a massive fiber line, and encouraging peering between institutions to share medical data for research purposes. I think this is a step in the right direction: instead of waiting for stardard oil to move back, invent your own future. They say a nearby hospital and university collab on medical research, and the gov paid for infra to attract lots of new orgs to the area (its working so far at attracting orgs). Who knows if it'll revitalize the area in 20 years, but it was pretty cheap and paid for by grants, so why not?
California proved for years (but maybe flew too close to the sun recently) that you could charge high taxes and high regulation and people would still go, and still start businesses, if you made it worth it. How many "Bumfuck and Podunk"'s are raising taxes to generate more revenue for the locality to offer more for their citizens?
Protect workers (humane) and give them affordances to start new ventures (good policy). Bring in (and welcome!) outsiders (humane+policy) who will offer new perspectives and start new businesses, and bring new needs to be met with economic growth.
Speaking of outsiders, this whole conversation could be avoided if these podunk places (or those that speak on their behalf?) weren't fearful of outsiders coming in and doing things differently. Be open to outsiders! Be open to change! Just because outsiders are different and not like you doesn't mean they're bad, or wrong, or will make your life worse. Maybe what "podunk" needs the most is some west coast open-mindedness.
> The policies which gave California those jobs you mentioned are not the policies enacted by the current crop of Californian politicos.
What is the difference between then and now? Genuine question besides obviously politicians come/go and get different string of names on a ballot.
> Power failures, skyrocketing crime, rampant homelessness,
to be clear, power failure isn't texas-style "our grid is poorly managed" power failure, they turn it off to avoid starting fires at key moments. Still means you don't have electricity, of course, so something needs to be done - and they're actively trying to fix it.
The homelessness is a huge policy failure of CA. I agree. NY/MA handle it way better on a policy level (which is more humane too).
> tell me something which they're doing right...
They have great worker protections. Eg. they don't honor non-competes, a huge requirement for entrepreneurial activity.
They are one of a few states to enact privacy laws. This is great for forcing companies to respect users, instead of the state respecting businesses.
They are one of a handful states that offer strong LGBT protections in the workplace. A very "humane" law thats missing from most "bumfuck" areas.
They have/had strong gun controls and protections.
The legalization of cannabis was huge for reducing "crime" and giving people more freedom.
Their push for EV and renewable power on the grid is one of the strongest in the country. Driving an EV in cali is easy because of all the chargers, and so many other cars are EV that it creates positive feedback loop.
The most destructive California laws I’ve seen (prop 13, disbanding mental health care for homeless, etc) were pushed through by conservatives long ago. (For example, Ronald Regan made it essentially impossible for mentally ill homeless to get health care, regardless of public funding or even their own personal wealth.)
Silicon Valley types haven’t been in the state long enough to have voted for those polices, and are (in my experience) strongly against them.
There is some really dumb stuff happening now in the name of progressives (like a state mandate that all cities reduce the number of commuter miles the road infrastructure supports), but they’re thinly-veiled NIMBY regulations that prop up property values for our landed gentry.
Silicon Valley types leaving the state typically don’t hold their dynastic wealth by hoarding California housing.
Most of the problems people are moving away from have been decades (or even centuries) in the making. Not sure the recently migrating voters should foot the blame for that.
Currently, it is by paying $850/mo for health insurance for my wife and I. In the future I hope that my CoL expenses drop enough that the cost is fine while I continue to work for a lot less income, or if not, that my wife and I would qualify for subsidies on the marketplace.
I've entertained the same idea from time to time, but just don't see how it can work out financially. What is your contingency plan for medical expenses? Kids?
So in rural America you definitely give up access to top-notch medical care, but I'm relatively healthy currently, and if we drop our household income, we start to qualify for subsidies. My wife only just started her career, 17 years into our relationship, so she's going to start ramping up income over the next few years, and that will hopefully cover any unforeseen issues.
I actually tried retiring this year. I paid to go to university in the UK in a very cheap place to live, but we had a few people in our family pass, and we decided while everyone is aging, we should stick around.
>big fan of your blog posts.
That is so kind of you to say. I'm a big fan of writing them... once or twice a year when I finally remember a story worthy of writing.
It is not necessarily the case that one gives up good med care in rural America.
I live in a suburb of an 8000 person city (town?) and med care is top notch. I do believe that anywhere one chooses to live there are compromises. Those compromises, if you do your homework, are up to you.
We have zero violent crime, and no fear of our neighbors. However, there are raccoons.
Restaurants exist, but they are exceptionally mediocre. We have grocery stores, however, and one learns to cook.
A car is indeed a necessity. The terrain is hilly and a bike riding is exhausting.
Children are free roaming. Bicycle gangs of laughing children invade day napping.
The unstated pressure to maintain one's lawn is intense, ridiculous and mildly fascist. I comply grudgingly.
One has fish and game on speed dial in the event wild animals misbehave.
Strangers may wave at you from their cars if you are walking. It is unsettling.
There is a smaller pool of craftsmen and tradesmen to fix your shit and they will stick it to you.
People would rather talk about weather than politics. It is difficult to identify those who deserve to be politically shunned, so one must instead judge their diligence regarding lawn care.
One can lead a life of quiet desperation, or enjoyment, in either the city or the country.
Being near a level 1 trauma center can make a big difference in extreme circumstances.
Not that it is objectively worth giving up whatever benefits not being near a level 1 trauma center bring, but it does provide a material difference in the level of healthcare and hence probability of outcomes you can expect.
I've paid quite a bit in taxes over the years, should I not be allowed to extract value from them when I'm no longer earning enough to cover my basic expenses (especially expenses like health care???)
The point of a social safety net is catch people falling through the cracks that are unable to support themselves. Using social safety programs when you are able bodied leaves less for those that are unable to do so
And in America we are all one unexpected medical expense away from bankruptcy. I'm not going to toil my life away doing things I hate just because America's safety net has been defunded by a bunch of people who view gainful employment no matter how unnecessary the job is as the only way to get to Heaven.
That is untrue... I will be continuing to work for myself and hopefully increase my income, but the safety net is there if I don't quite hit my mark. This is the same with anyone. Trust me: I WANT money. I LIKE money. But if I cannot earn enough, I'm more than happy to take from the benefits I have spent a lot of money to fund. I also vote regularly to increase taxes and to expand funding for the social safety net, so that it is available anytime ANYONE has to pull from it.
I live just west of Minneapolis with my wife in a house that's been in my family for generations.
I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this.
Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.
Police budgets are at their highest levels in history, and yet crime is up. The correlation just isn't there. Wasting money on police isn't solving this problem, which is why you are seeing the calls to move our funds elsewhere.
Nationwide, crime has been on a downward trend for decades. Yes, there are spots where it flares up. And COVID appears to have caused a marked increase in some crimes. But, overall, the US hasn't suddenly degenerated into a state of lawlessness.
FBI crime stats for Minneapolis proper don't look that much higher than the last 20 years, and considering that the metro population has almost doubled since 1990 you have to discount them per-capita. Are you sure it's not just that you are reading too much Nextdoor?
I occasionally see people in Portland cite 2019’s crime stats as proof that things are fine and that you’re just bigoted against homeless people or whatever.
Portland didn’t get the 2020 numbers from the FBI until late September 2021, which at that point showed an 80% increase.
Homicides I tend to discount because homicide victims aren't randomly selected. Anyway this is right in line with what I just said; saying that a rapidly-growing metro exceeded a nominal crime stat from 26 years ago is not that meaningful.
Robberies are something I do watch because the victims are pretty much random.
Counterpoint: we live in Edina, a nicer suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. No real crime except for a single hit-and-run by an out-of-towner in the last two years.
Walking distance to two grocery stores, several restaurants, and two malls. Affordable utilities and rent.
I've been out of town the past few days, so I'm not surprised I didn't hear about that yet.
The circumstances are particularly shocking. A violent carjacking in broad daylight at an upscale grocery? The perpetrators must be a special brand of stupid.
Oversimplified, inflammatory statements like "defund the police" and "ACAB" gain a lot more traction composted to more measured statements like, "We believe in maintaining a secure society for everyone and not just certain preferred communities, which isn't possible with the current policing and social care system. We need massive, decisive, and prompt reform that doesn't involve funneling more and more of the city budget directly to the police dept, and if we can't have that then we'd rather re-start from the ground up and police ourselves than sit by while the situation worsens."
Those oversimplified phrases gain traction by provoking an emotional response, but that cuts both ways.
"Defund the police" was very easy to interpret as "abolish the police." It was a gift to the other side of the argument, and to that side's candidates in the 2020 election. Overall it looks like it backfired as a slogan politically, and no major police departments have actually been reformed.
If all your slogan achieves is making your own side feel better, while it alienates moderates and gives easy talking points to your opponents, it's a bad slogan and you shouldn't be proud of it.
How exactly is a community going to police itself?
Look at the marches(if you can, they're rarely shown on any kind of media) every time a 5 year old is murdered from a stray drive by shooting bullet in chicago...thousands of people in the community come out against it, and...nothing happens.
As a Chicagoan I can assure you, the police aren't doing anything about it either. Everyone realizing that the police are stealing money from us is a large reason why defund the police is so popular. Lived here my entire life, met plenty of cops, have never found a single one to be pleasant let alone effective. Everyone you meet here has similar stories.
Pay them more to keep failing to provide protection? The cops extort you (the tax payer) by playing with your safety for the sake of inflating the budget.
The point of the calls to defund the police is that the assault and robbery is a symptom of a wider systemic problem. Arresting and jailing the people who committed that particular assault and robbery is like taking a painkiller when you've got a gut wound. Sure, it'll let you ignore the pain for a while longer, but you're not addressing the real core of the problem.
I moved the the suburbs way earlier than I had planned due to the pandemic and my job being much more WFH. I love it. I’m still accessible the city (14-28 minutes by train depending on schedule), I have way more space, and I’m near some really wonderful nature areas. I love having a garage and a yard and a grill. Im still near restaurants and stuff, and I kinda outgrew the bar scene a few years ago — now I’m more likely to hit a brewery or 2, which are dense in the suburbs too.
That sounds great, but I am very skeptical. 14 minutes by train - what's the actual door to door commute time? I'm not aware of any city in the US with commute times that short where the place you live wouldn't be more urban than suburban e.g. Hoboken/Harrison, NJ, Quincy, MA, etc...
The 14 minute train is from Route 128 in Westwood, MA to Back Bay, in Boston’s downtown. I give myself ~15 minutes (for traffic buffer) to drive and park, take the 14 minute train, then it’s a 5 minute walk to work. I’ve done it in 30 minutes seat to seat.
Oh, that makes sense. I grew up around there, and I do think Boston is the best place in the Northeast megalopolis for access to nature stuff and relatively easy to get around...
128's kind of funny, though. Unless you live in one of a handful of nearby streets, you need a car to get there. And you're at the Boston line (the suburban, single family and industrial park part of Boston, but still.)
It’s why I love New England, so many great places within a couple hours drive (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Berkshires, Cape, Newport, Islands…) but also reasonable commutes to good jobs
I think a lot of people are seeing what they want to see in this. Once a company figures out how to leverage a developer in the Midwest as effectively as one in the Bay Area what stops them from hiring in the Dominican, or Mexico or South America? I've worked with fantastic developers from those areas who can effectively work on the same timezones, communicate well and write high quality code.
I know personally, I've seen a lot of hiring shifting to Latin America in the last 2 years. I don't think this is going to be the midwestern/southern renascence that people think it's going to be.
This isn’t an article about developers, tech, or remote work.
It’s about a general trend of existing US residents across many industries relocating to the affordable, low tax, business friendly suburbs of cities where people do things besides converting funding into JSON.
"They" could always make it harder to transfer money from inside the US system to the "outside" world. This is what an exit-tax is, basically making it harder for established people to move away from the system. Or AML for international wires. Or Minimum Corporate Tax.
Unluckily for First-World countries, the politicians seems to be focused on the symptoms rather than the disease itself. This will not change course of what will happen, of course.
I've been thinking about what gives big cities their edge. Why some even become global hubs for particular industries. Two reasons are clearer to me now than they were in the past:
- Lifestyle advantages of living amongst specialists: people can outsource various chores/tasks/jobs/errands to local specialists who can complete them much more efficiently. For instance imagine if your village doesn't have a plumber and you have to spend much of your own time fixing pipes, rather than focussing on activities where you have comparative advantage.
- Poaching. Modern companies struggle to maintain a competitive advantage since their employees can leave and join their competitors. But key employees will usually have roots in a particular place, so competitors can only hope to lure them away if they co-locate their offices in the same city. So almost all of them do.
That said, the internet has introduced some counter-effects, for instance externalizing specialist knowledge on public websites, and enabling remote working.
I think your specialist comment here rings very true. Talk to anyone who grew up on a farm in a small town. Those people are often their own plumber, electrician, construction worker, mechanic, etc on top of their normal jobs!
There was a discussion societally around millennials (men in particular) not being as "handy" as their parents, but specialization of those parents is largely the reason. Sure, my dad might have learned how to use a table saw as a teenager in shop class or how to change his car oil from my grandpa, but I only had an art elective available (no shop class option) and my parents were too busy to justify changing oil at home for our econobox cars when the jiffy lube down the street would do it for $40.
Now is that a problem for society? That has yet to be proven, especially when you factor in the rise of online teaching through mediums like YouTube. My dad might not have taught me anything handy, but my internet "dads" on YT have taught me many things beyond even what my own father knows. It's a trade off and I don't see us reverting as a society anytime soon.
Depending on specialists for everything is fragile. What happens when there are no plumbers available at any price? I see it as just sad and pathetic when city dwellers can't even do basic home maintenance like replacing a faucet cartridge or toilet seal.
How far down the rabbit hole are you willing to go? Will you teach yourself how to butcher your own meat so you don't have to rely on a butcher? Teach yourself surgery so you don't have to go to a doctor?
Our society thrives because of specialization. It's what allows a person to focus on what they're best at to have the greatest chance at innovation.
> I see it as just sad and pathetic when city dwellers can't even do basic home maintenance like replacing a faucet cartridge or toilet seal.
That seems rather harsh. A big reason why "city dwellers" can't do home maintenance is because cities have more renters then owners. When you rent a property, you're strongly encouraged to offload all home maintenance onto your landlord. Not only is the landlord obligated to cover maintenance costs, but they can withhold a deposit (or even outright fine) for any damages done if maintenance is done incorrectly.
It bodes poorly for the environment if people are increasingly moving from denser cities to sprawling suburbs. This is in many ways a self-inflicted problem of high-cost cities, but it should be a national priority to reverse this trend.
It's always crazy to hear that suburbs are cheaper. Dense living inherently requires less infrastructure and less transportation, so it should be considerably cheaper. It's only through the subsidisation of suburbia and the low supply/high demand of high density urban areas that this is the case.
Car centric suburbs aren't just terrible for the environment, terrible for safety and terrible for transportation; they're also incredibly costly.
This is a bit simplistic. There are a lot of other reasons housing is more expensive in dense urban areas:
Low supply due to underbuilding.
High costs due to difficulty in getting housing approved and forced BMR units.
More expensive land price.
Not needing to own a car saves you money.
And, most importantly, proximity to jobs and services. Living in a dense urban area saves you the time of driving and commuting, and has more amenities, restaurants, and things to do within a given X minutes. Buying time is expensive and a luxury good. This is where a lot of the demand comes from.
The problem is not just subsidization. Urban (especially “ultra-urban” in dense areas like Manhattan, non-suburban SF, central Boston or DC, Brickell, etc) residences have low supply and high demand.
The lowest travel time to work by mode of transportation was still walking or bicycling.
I think the discrepancy between this and what I said is that I was mentioning extremely dense areas and this probably has a much broader criteria for what constitutes as urban. For example the city of Houston may be urban but there is nothing walkable about it. There are markedly few areas in the US that are mega-dense. Check out the individual places I mentioned
> Dense living inherently requires less infrastructure and less transportation
Not really. Firstly, it costs a lot more per square foot to build a high rise than a single family home. Secondly, it costs a lot more to maintain it (elevators need constant maintenance, you can't just run to Home Depot to get replacement drain parts, etc.).
And the infrastructure costs more to maintain -- running power to a high rise requires a lot of specialized commercial electric equipment that can handle the high loads and variability. Same with water -- you need special pumps and extra big boilers. Sure you can gain some efficiency by sharing those resources, but at the end of the day the costs per person are roughly the same.
The main impact comes from needing less transport of goods and people, which is an environmental plus, but not something priced into the cost of living.
> Not really. Firstly, it costs a lot more per square foot to build a high rise than a single family home. Secondly, it costs a lot more to maintain it (elevators need constant maintenance, you can't just run to Home Depot to get replacement drain parts, etc.).
Just to clarify: High density doesn't mean high rises. It means traditional developments at 2-5 stories. No elevator, water pump, special power, etc. These places are significantly cheaper than single family homes and provide dense walkable living.
Wouldn't this be addressed by economies of scale? If you have 400 people living in a building, even if the complexity of the infrastructure is greater, isn't it more efficient than having 400 single family homes? Not that one can directly replace another, but I'm talking about the number of people being the constant.
> The main impact comes from needing less transport of goods and people, which is an environmental plus, but not something priced into the cost of living.
Transportation I think is especially huge, but I imagine there are other efficiencies of living in a dense urban area. And I think that regardless of whether or not external costs are priced in, they should be counted towards efficiency of infrastructure.
> Wouldn't this be addressed by economies of scale?
It would seem not. It's hard to find data, but a good proxy is condo fees for high rise condos vs low rise condos. Typically the high rise condo fees are higher than the low rise condos in similar areas, when the offer similar amenities. And usually condo fees are true cost representations, because the residents control the spending of their own money, so it's not a profit area for the owner, like the rent is.
Which means by proxy it's more expensive to maintain a high rise than a low rise complex.
Roads alone cost $2-3M/mile and last 30 years. Amortized, that's on the order of $100k/yr/mile.
In a city, that would be $100k / 10 city blocks, probably 100 parcels with 100-1000 low-to-mid rise housing units. In a rural area it might be just 10 housing units, at the cost of $10k/yr/parcel. And productivity in rural areas is 2-3x lower, so it's even higher as a percentage of per-capita GDP.
Add on top of that electric grids, water supply, sewage, emergency services, hospitals, etc. Bottom line: rural areas only survive due to subsidies from productive and overtaxed urban Americans.
> Roads alone cost $2-3M/mile and last 30 years. Amortized, that's on the order of $100k/yr/mile.
Do you have a cite for that? I believe that figure for new roads, but you generally don't have to rebuild the entire road, including roadbed, after 30 years, just repave, which is a lot cheaper.
Urban roads don't last 30 years. Major roads with high traffic get repaved every few years, and even residential roads in urban areas need to be repaved every decade or so.
Suburbs are "cheaper" because it's a ponzi scheme. When older suburbs eventually have to face the bills of renewing their ultra expensive infrastructure costs hollow out and decline, developers simply build a new suburb and people move.
That new suburb is of course in no way economically sustainable.
> It's only through the subsidisation of suburbia and the low supply/high demand of high density urban areas that this is the case.
This is a myth espoused by cityfolk. Oregon trail settlers didn't need subways. Those in Alaska and that live in the woods do just fine without your "help".
Many people have ranches, like to hunt, and enjoy nature.
Some city thinkers like to prescribe ways for others to live, but these people should look inwardly first. City air is toxic and is killing your pulmonary system. Zoning is NIMBY and school funding shows even the most liberal prefer to protect their own.
Live your life and stop telling others they are wrong in their lifestyle. It's like nails on a chalkboard. Elitist, and will contribute to a Republican win in 2022 and 2024.
(I'm a social liberal, fwiw. I think most of us are doing this wrong and are increasing polarization.)
The structure of the US economy changed faster in the past 50 years than infrastructure could adapt to.
With globalization and automation, the US pretty quickly turned into a mostly-service economy and shed tons of manufacturing and agriculture jobs. Service and other white-collar jobs mean working either for or with others, so they concentrate in cities. Manufacturing and ag jobs are where the raw materials, shipping, or farmland is, so tend to be more spread out.
The result is that jobs in small towns and cities evaporated and most opportunity became concentrated in large metro areas. People go where the jobs are, but the cities couldn't grow fast enough to keep up.
So, yes, even though cities are more economically efficient, they are still more expensive simply because the demand grew much faster than the supply.
It's clear that, because people view housing as an investment, supply and demand increases the value of city housing (often to levels that seem ridiculous).
Can you elaborate on the subsidisation of suburbia? Are there tax provisions that advantage them?
I think this is the "StrongTowns" argument - roughly speaking some local / federal government borrows billions and builds a suburban area, roads, sewers, schools, hospitals. Rich white people move in, taxes are collected etc. The marginal cost of the services is covered, but the bonds that raised the money may or may not be. And 2 years later the sidewalk is cracked, the sewers need replacing, the roads need widening, and there is no money - the long term sustainability of a town needs tax revenue from dense living and from local businesses that thrive in density, not businesses that sit thirty miles away at the end of a commute.
So the town slowly dies, and another municipality starts to raise a bond issue ...
The town was subsidised by a bond issue against National creditworthiness, against a building project with no long term revenue plan and the people living there did not pay for full long term cost of utilities (although to be fair that's the case for most utilities as they all chronically under invest)
StrongTowns isn't entirely wrong, but they exaggerate problems in suburbs to advance a political narrative. In reality large, dense cities are more likely to have problems funding infrastructure maintenance and government services due to persistent corruption, mismanagement, and the pernicious influence of public employee unions. Just look at the ongoing fiscal crisis in Chicago.
Generally yes. Those problems can occur anywhere but the financial incentives for malfeasance are lower in smaller cities. Plus the officials in smaller cities usually focus their budgets on a limited set of core services rather than funding progressive social experiments.
With remote work becoming the norm, it is significantly less terrible. I remote 100% and the only time I drive is to visit family and friends. I put around 1500 miles a year on the car.
It's different for everybody. In my 20's my apartment was where I slept and bathed and that's about it. The city was great because there was always something going on and the energy level is high. All that energy fed me in some way.
In my 50's it's the reverse. I know who I am and what I like and the things that make me get up and be excited about the new day are now mostly internal. Being around a lot of people drains me. I've spent decades figuring out what I love and my home contains the stuff that makes me happier than anything outside (with the exception of really great restaurants).
I hate saying it because I know it was really hard on a lot of people, but during the COVID lockdown days, I was happier than I've been for a long time.
Locked inside? You can step out any time you want. Such a silly exaggeration.
Personally, I very much prefer country living where I can go to many hiking trails and campsites, have clean air, a quiet environment, and not be beholden to my neighbours for enjoyment of my own property.
maybe. There are very few city centres compared to city-not-centres by definition, but even so there is not much stopping us making a suburb the density of Chinatown. I wonder why we don't?
Suburbs aren't always or necessarily cheaper. Compared to where I live, some suburbs outside the city are cheaper, some are more expensive.
A lot of the prices in the suburbs near me seem to depend on how good the schools are supposed to be, what types are jobs are nearby, and, maybe ironically given the discussion, how easy it is to access the city.
Building a high-rise condominium downtown will always be more costly and expensive than a plot of single-family homes in the 'burbs. Car travel is only getting cheaper in the suburbs with solar and EVs, while subways and trolleys are getting more and more expensive to build in big cities.
> Car travel is only getting cheaper in the suburbs with solar and EVs, while subways and trolleys are getting more and more expensive to build in big cities.
Man I really hope EVs keep dropping in price because they still seem like a virtue signal for the wealthy at their current prices.
It depends on whether or not the move to a less dense area corresponds with increased travel and car use. My wife and I can go days without leaving our house. We have a single car. When we lived in a city, we went out multiple times per day, but it was almost exclusively on foot. We probably had the same number of car trips per week to visit friends, since most of them lived in the suburbs, plus wanting to get out into nature, which we value.
When we lived in the suburbs, in an in-between space, we probably had the highest car use, and life required two vehicles.
So, it's not either-or. There's a spectrum. You can't expect to maintain the same habits and lifestyle in a rural location as you do in a dense urban environment, etc.
Expanding rural access to electric vehicle infrastructure, and re-investing in regional rail would be transformational for these communities, though.
Except that this is not what's happening according to the OP. It's mostly a move from the largest, most expensive cities and suburbs towards smaller, but still high-density cities. Which implies less urban sprawl in general.
I'm not so sure it's mostly about high-cost. The people who have new freedom due to increased remote work opportunities can probably afford the city. I think it's more likely that they are moving for quality of life reasons. I know that's true for me. Also, we've just been through (and might still be in) a pandemic. I'm very glad I didn't need to use public transportation for the past couple of years.
I don't think the city is fixable for people who don't want to live in a city.
Silicon Valley / SF have had a stranglehold on the digital economy for the last 20-30 years -- nearly anything that touches electrics or software had a "tax" where some portion of that innovation flowed back as cash.
With covid / the great reset, I've seen so many leave the bay area now that they can work remote. It's occured to me that SV / SF will need to reinvent itself and be in a rough patch for a couple years. The benefit to the rest of the americans is that all those high paying jobs and new ways of doing business are being dispersed throughout the rest of the USA which is better for all of us in the end.
There’s a fine line with this though — the advantage of hiring Americans in the Midwest versus hiring in Europe and Asia needs to be solidified somehow.
Timezones and the whole mess of laws and regulations around paying international employees tend to keep American companies hiring primarily American workers.
1. Many great workers either won't or don't want to live in SV. I've known a bunch of them, over the years. Moving more development to where these folks are brings them in to the fold.
2. The people in SV don't represent and aren't regularly interacting with most of America or the world. They are in a different bubble. The majority is part of the out group to them. Hiring people in distributed places means you hire people who are more likely to interact and relate to the majority. Relating to people that will use technology is useful when building solutions.
If you are hiring from a pool of candidates who, by nature of their skills and relative wealth, lie at the 90th percentile or higher in their communities, does it really make that much of a difference? Yes SV is a bubble, but hiring people living in a similar bubble in Omaha isn't going to move the needle that much IMO.
Several factors still favour Americans - stable, business-friendly laws, crazy high human development index, American work culture, predictable interpersonal experiences.
It’s going to be a rich continent for many generations to come.
I think the Californians are going to be first on the chopping block. They're expensive and what can they do that a bunch of midwesterners can't? I think international teams are a given in both cases.
I think the companies there will also need to reinvent themselves. I'm currently interviewing and both Apple and Facebook required in-person or based around a satellite office. I'm in Los Angeles so it shouldn't be a crazy ask. They lost out on a candidate and my labor will go to a business who lets me continue living my life.
Given thoughts like Individuals Matter [1], my speculation is that these companies are currently losing a lot of valuable individuals who can command more flexibility. There are plenty of remote first companies paying competitive salaries.
There is a downside to some places as well. You have people moving into areas with high paying jobs and expectations of high cost in housing. The locals who have lived there for years are priced out of their own community with the influx. This has happened around Austin TX, and from what I understand in Colorado.
They actually aren’t dispersed at all. You have more remote workers than you had before, that’s pretty much it. It really remains to be seen what happens when those remotes go to switch jobs.
I have no concrete plans to move anywhere, but just knowing that I _could_ easily pick up and go anywhere I want without commute or general work location being a deciding factor has been so freeing.
And part of it is what public schools are doing to our kids. My 6 year old is required to sit outdoors to eat her lunch in 40ish degree (F) weather, and is not allowed to socialized. My 5 year old has to wear a mask 7 hours a day against an illness that doesn't kill kids. I'm at my wit's end with these school administrators. Hoping to be in Wyoming in 6 months' time.
This is an interesting thread. The meta-issue here is that communities differ in their risk tolerance too. You just discovered that you are an outlier in your community.
People can agree 100% on the “science” and still disagree on the risk-reward tradeoff:
PS: the risk tolerance varies by issue. E.g. blue cities seem to have a lot of risk appetite when it comes to lenient treatment of crime. Or gun-use in other parts of the country.
Can you provide an example of a child in that age range dying when without a secondary illness that made them high risk? All the examples I've seen are children with cancer or something else.
The percentages still don't pan out to having such massive restrictions on children that young.
> Can you provide an example of a child in that age range dying when without a secondary illness that made them high risk? All the examples I've seen are children with cancer or something else.
Can you assert that without them getting covid, they would have died as quickly?
> The percentages still don't pan out to having such massive restrictions on children that young.
All of aspects of life has risk. Saying that covid is dangerous to children is pure fear mongering. Compared to basically everything else, virtually no children have died.
Your child doesn't wear a mask to protect your child, they wear a mask to protect others. While they may not feel very strong effects from the virus, they can pass it on to other who will.
FWIW our district is considering removing the mask mandate at school as soon as we reach 80% vax rate among the students, so hopefully your nightmare of making your child wear a piece of cloth will end soon.
Your district is going to remove the mandates when pigs fly, I'm sorry to say. The "nightmare" is really about continually-shifting goalposts and the false promises of administrators. The funny thing is that those figures won't be reached, thanks to parents with enough common sense not to inoculate their kids with something they don't need. If the parents are vaccinated, let the kids alone. If the parents aren't vaccinated, well, that's their choice - so let the kids alone.
> continually-shifting goalposts and the false promises of administrators
Ever since the vaccine came out our county has said that mandates will go away as soon as we hit 80% vaxxed and community transmission is low, as defined by the CDC. The goalposts haven't moved. We're almost there too -- we have 79.4% of all residents vaxxed, but transmission is still "substantial".
> thanks to parents with enough common sense not to inoculate their kids with something they don't need.
That's not how vaccines work. You get vaccinated to protect both yourself and others. We still vaccinate for polio even though it's basically been eradicated, because if we didn't, it would come back.
Luckily I live in an area where people are mostly educated and believe in science, so our child vax rate is already at 64% fully vaxxed for the county, despite the fact that you could only be fully vaxxed as of last Thursday.
The polio vaccine is a traditional vaccine that provides _immunity_. The mRNA shots are called "vaccines" by the medical establishment, but they only (and they are clear about this) provide _protection_. This is why the very definition of "vaccine" had to be changed: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126.... The new variant has been contracted by people who've received triple shots. That getting the prophylactic shots protects others is simply not true; it's a tagline being repeated on the news to convince people otherwise.
Also, I did receive my shots, and I "believe in science" (whatever that means) by actually reading the studies (such as those listed under the parent comment) showing that children have a greater chance of being stuck by lightning than becoming seriously ill from this virus. Believing in science... that doesn't mean anything.
I hope no one in your county's kids get any heart problems as a result of this decision. After two of my friends' kids had to go to the hospital due to chest pain, with no history of cardiac issues, and with Twitter actively suppressing stories highlighting "myocarditis", my bullshit detector, developed from long years of life under the Iron Curtain, simply went ballistic.
You might not have heard, but the illness does (albeit very infrequently) kill kids, but more likely, kids can bring it home and infect their older, more vulnerable family members. Which is what recently happened in my kid's school district, when some nitwit parent also "at their wit's end with these school administrators" sent their COVID infected kid to school.
My wife and I are vaccinated. Any other "vulnerably family member" can get vaccinated, too. Problem solved, right? It _is_ in the land of reason and rationality, but not in bizarro world, where our governor and school administrators seem to live.
Of course, since the beginning of time, our kids could transmit the influenza virus to "vulnerable family members" too, but we were wise enough not to subject them to humiliating practices such as having lunch by sitting in PNW winter-temperatures and barring socializing.
Maybe you ought to pay more attention to what it actually says instead of getting upset at what is obviously a generalization about the overreaction to COVID when it comes to young children-
>A smaller subset of states reported on hospitalizations and mortality by age; the available data indicate that COVID-19-associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children.
That's just one report that mentions 75% with an underlying medical condition.
When people say it doesn't kill kids they're generalizing, flagging it as misinformation is completely silly. By percentages and how we react to every other virus this is NOT something we should be scared of when it comes to children. We certainly shouldn't be subjecting children to measures that may cause psychological and developmental harm for something that's VERY unlikely to be a threat to them.
Thanks for bringing in that hard data. I don't understand why the news media keeps saying "thank goodness kids can get vaccinated now!". Why are they trying to normalize annual or 2x a year shots for these kids, who are more likely to suffer from myocarditis as a result than to actually contract or get ill from this virus? Nobody freaking knows.
>Asymptotically spreading COVID has been discussed and documented all over the world. I don’t believe this question is in good faith.
Then you should easily be able to back that up with data. So please provide it. Hypothesis are not evidence. I have plenty of evidence that shows the opposite.
Have fun. If you'd like more to keep you busy let me know :).
>Some people would like to spend time with their families this Christmas without having to worry about their children being vectors for a fucking plague that has now mutated to dodge the vaccine.
Normal people will not be wearing masks to Christmas. Why would we worry about children being vectors? "The science" doesn't back this up and even if it did there's a vaccine for it. Are you confused about how the vaccine works? If COVID is this big of a deal then you should just avoid Christmas and leave the rest of us alone. Why are you venturing out if it affects you that much? I have a hard time believing you're acting in good faith when it comes to stopping COVID infection and then talking about social gatherings. It appears that you just want to control others.
>Wear a mask ffs so we can move on with our lives.
Massive strawman happening here.
I've already moved on with my life.. That happened like year ago when everyone was able to get the vaccine if they wished. You have health anxiety, get it treated please and stop turning your personal fears into authoritarian rhetoric you think you have the right to shove down other people's throats.
That's one link vs several I gave you. Are you implying that your science is better than mine? Why? What standard proves this? All of the links I gave you are peer reviewed studies. You've proved nothing.
I'll choose my studies over yours. You're just bloviating cult like adherence to "the science".
How are we still pretending that people who've received the vaccine (which should really be labeled a prophylactic) can't spread or contract the virus?
Your comment comes off as very angry and vindictive, which makes it hard for me to think that your views are informed by science and statistics. I am tolerant of both people who will have their kids injected with this stuff and those who won't. But for those of us who are concerned that their 6-year-old daughter has a higher risk of developing myocarditis from the vaccine than they do of dying from the virus itself, a little tolerance and compassion would be appreciated.
You’re dammed right I’m angry, stupidity and double standards like this are why nearly a million people have died in this country.
Whether you choose to vaccinate your kids or not is your right. Just don’t expect others to “tolerate” your decision. Vaccines are required in public schools for a reason.
Regardless, your original post was about masks and how you felt they were somehow damaging your kids, which is bullshit.
First: It's fair for you to call me on the carpet for this one.
Second, though: "We've had to ask you about this a lot"? I recall exactly one other time in eight years that you have done so. I recognize that I'm just begging for the man with the database to expose the flaws in my memory, but... I really don't recall any more than that one other time.
Here's what I found, though to be honest I thought there were more, because I recognize your username as one that does this sort of thing a lot. Would you please stop that and be a better citizen of this place?
We've banned this account for posting egregious flamewar comments (alas, tons of them) and ignoring our many requests to stop. You can't post this aggressively to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. The same goes for any other user.
My family moved out of NYC during the pandemic. We have a young kid and a dog - so finding a spot which had more space was imperative (given that both our gigs were remote).
The few factors for us :
* Is the neighborhood family / kid-friendly ?
* Is it comfortable ?
* Does it have space ?
* Does it have some of the conveniences of a city (not a cut-off remote suburb)
We moved to TX to be closer to family and it checked all of these boxes. That being said, I don't think we have it in us to do another relocation unless forced. It was painful to execute and I can only imagine it gets harder when you have deeper ties in the neighborhood/city with kids/family
Does "kid friendly" for you include a means for your child to operate independently of you in the time between "go play outside" age and driving age? I ask because I grew up in a suburb where I had the equivalent of a small urban park's playground in my back yard, but the time between that playground being useful and when I could drive were terrible for me and for my parents (who had to drive me to almost anything I wanted to do) and would have been worse if I weren't able and interested in walking/biking 3 miles to the library or train station.
I was so very jealous of my friends who lived in more urban areas who could walk home from school and do things independently of their parents at 12 rather than 16+.
This is something a lot of parents don't think of! As I keep my eye out for new houses, one thing I noticed is that no one emphasizes walkability in the suburbs anymore. It exists if you know where to look. Where I live now we can walk to some stuff. When my kids are older they will be able to walk or bike to the park, to school, to the shopping center to hang out, and I want to make sure it stays that way.
I certainly don't want to be on the hook to drive them everywhere like my parents were!
For us it meant having enough established services such as good schooling, daycare, recreational activities within a reasonable distance.
One of the big stressors in hyper-growth cities has been that the infrastructure doesn't scale quickly enough and the waitlists for somethings can run months, if not years
> First, people have been leaving large, dense, expensive urban cores for smaller, less-dense cities and suburbs. Second, people and companies have been moving to warm, low-tax states in the South and Southwest.
Seems like there could be a convergence of the demographic trend of millennial family formation with pandemic related increase in people's perception of the value of square footage that is pushing people toward that classic Single Family Home housing product.
Problem being of course is that they're not distributed in the right places.
Of course the era of normal people without incredible levels of wealth owning a detached home in cities like SF, Seattle, etc is long over. There will only ever be less and less SFHs as these cities urbanize further.
The market urbanist solution to this issue has been to build more housing, and more apartments, townhomes and duplexes with larger footprints that are suitable for a family, so that one wouldn't need a detached home for a larger family to affordably live in one of these big cities.
That we're seeing people abandon certain urban places may be a sign of the failure of those governments to actually get any of that product sufficiently built, but it also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper.
> That we're seeing people abandon certain urban places
I suspect that "abandon" is way overstating the case. Where I live, in the Twin Cities, the most growth in the state is in the cities themselves, while rural areas are continuing their decades-long decrease[1]. The enormous cities (SF, NYC) may be seeing a bit of a decrease in population, but I don't think it generalizes beyond those specific ones to urban areas across the country.
As a millenial forming a family, it's the former part of your last paragraph that's keeping our family out of the city. We live near Seattle, and we'd much rather be in Seattle, but we can't afford anywhere near the same square footage, owning or renting. We'd absolutely be happy renting in the city if it was remotely affordable.
Yep and zoning is front and center the problem here. There's a reason developers are building skinny, tall units instead of 3 bedroom flats or heck just duplexes/triplexes/quadplexes.
But the parent poster says he wants to live in a single family home.
Zoning in Seattle is not a problem for families. They want single family housing. Demolishing beautiful old pre war neighborhoods for developers isn’t going to entice families away from the nearby suburb with big yards.
I think your last paragraph is interesting and the crux of the question. I think all else equal that people will prefer detached homes. But I also think that all else is not equal; there is a trade-off between that and access to amenities without driving. I think a smaller but still large set of people place high value on that. Large townhomes with nearby amenities (restaurants, libraries, coffee shops, work spaces, schools, parks, rec centers, etc.) could be a sweet spot for a large number of people.
> also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper.
That seems unlikely since townhouses and the like have been quite popular in places outside the U.S. where they're reasonably common. Detached single homes are incompatible with dense urban living, and this will always limit their popularity.
Until communities embrace mixed-use zoning everywhere in their cities little will change. My suburb is chock full of duplexes, townhomes and apartments. Pretty much all of them lie a mile or more away from shops and employment centers which are located on very bike/ped unfriendly roads. The result is that every adult needs a car and parking becomes a nightmare for everyone in those areas since the city will waive parking requirements to encourge "density" but does nothing to change the mix of development types. This problem is not unique to my town.
> That seems unlikely since townhouses and the like have been quite popular in places outside the U.S.
I think it's should be pretty apparent that the US is fairly unique among other western democracies. I think a combination of "protestant work ethic" and "frontier spirit" are deeply ingrained in the culture here and have a lot of knock-on effects.
I really think it’s mostly lack of supply. If the problem were solely due to lower value of MFH vs SFH we wouldn’t see 1bed market rate condos in SF going for $700k.
Of course, all things (including location and sq footage) being equal, it seems logical most people would prefer SFH. No shared walls, nobody living above you, no/less-influential HOA, potentially large upside of land appreciation. However that is a false dichotomy because prices are higher (because land prices are likely to be high anywhere a SFH is near large condos). So what really matters is the demand curve for SFH vs MFH - MFH may be an “inferior good” in the economic sense but it is not so inferior that, for example, rich techies are buying $500k SFH in Richmond, CA rather than $800k condos in SF.
The whole narrative of a mass exodus is pretty suspect in general anyway. There is not a huge amount of vacant housing in most cities - the carrying and opportunity costs are too high, though IMO they should be higher. For every person leaving an urban area, on average, someone is replacing them.
If the demand for large townhouses is naturally lower than detached homes and you can fit more of them in a given unit area then maybe just maybe they actually have some hope of addressing the housing shortage in expensive metros.
So far, though, evidence is that people will still pay a pretty high price to live in denser housing in SF, Seattle, etc.
With a remote workforce what is stopping people to move to South America, etc?
Cost of living is rising dramatically with YoY housing prices hitting 20-30% (even in middle of nowhere) it just doesn't make sense financially if you arent established to stay.
Cultural differences, distance from family, language barriers, laws against foreign land/home ownership, crime, corrupt governments, etc.
I'm all for traveling and experiencing different cultures but there's a lot more than money that comes into play when you're considering a move to a developing country.
Not much and I think we'll see more of this for the reasons you mention. You can just "rent" a place somewhere or buy a trailer and claim that as your official home and then just live in another country. Latin America is ideal for this for Americans because of the timezones as well.
Though of course it depends on the country, your goals and ideas, etc.
For me, schools are a huge part of this. Zoom schooling has demonstrated how little learning actually happens during a day. Simultaneously, online alternatives have popped up/become popularized, and people are realizing how much more a student can learn through good/personalized remote learning.
Parents who pay tens of thousands of dollars in property tax — largely for access to 'great schools' — are now able to move anywhere they want and access online options that are in many ways better than their tony suburban schools. Many of these parents are allowed to WFH now, which makes moving to rural areas possible, for the first time ever.
I imagine there will be some people who move away, realize the grass isn't always greener, and then move back. But overall I think WFH and remote schooling will unlock regions to a huge pool of families who never previously thought of living away from urban/suburban centers.
The people I know who have pulled their kids from public schools are either homeschooling or enrolling in online charter schools. This allows for a great degree of autonomy, and basically lets kids learn via whatever platform works for them. I've heard about people using informal platforms like Outschool and more formalized courses from Beast Academy or Potter.
Online school can be a boon for the right type of student, especially if they have strong parental support. It can also be the end of the line for students who don't have that. My district has historically used the "online academy" as the dumping ground for kids they need to keep on the enrollment roster but that they don't want on campus or know won't bother showing. I don't know how things have changed since they quintupled enrollment this year with students wishing to avoid the mask mandates and other on-campus distractions. Hopefully it will become a positive element in our district rather than the last-chance lounge.
Absolutely agree that it doesn't work for everyone. But it's a great thing for people to be able to opt into, especially families that are relocating to less expensive regions.
For example, a family may well be able to live off of one salary in their new location, freeing up the second parent to spend more time with/educating kids.
As an European, I love the American culture. But if you had the European standards on healthcare (The Spaniard one it's great), America would enter in a 2nd golden age.
As an European with extensive knowledge about government budgeting and costs, I find the naivety of most people regarding European healthcare systems incredible. There is not enough money in the world to deliver the promise of the European hc systems and there is no serious reporting on the results to make people aware of the gap. Most people believe healthcare is readily available, free and unlimited, none of these being completely true and the overall picture being completely not true.
A friend of mine works in a global healthcare company and launches products in multiple countries. Very eye opening at how barebones many universal healthcare systems are.
USA is first and foremost a federation of relatively free countries, most legislation is at state level and it works in a way like EU with an integrated military. The major difference is they used to have freedom to choose healthcare, it is not forced like in EU (ex: in my country 10% of your income is paid as healthcare tax and you can be treated in state owned hospitals when there is a place available; note there is no obligation for the state to give you any care, but you go to prison if you don't pay up).
While I'd love to see some stats supporting the quantity and severity of laws we live under by each level of government, most of our taxes going to federal doesn't seem to support your assertion.
My company pays for the best healthcare money can buy.
It's still a miserable experience compared to what I was used to in Europe. So much bureaucracy and paperwork and it takes forever to get appointments.
That does not sound like a good price at all. Can I ask if you have shopped around? I think that you can decline all coverage from your employer and buy directly.
I have had kaiser for over 40 years. Note Kaiser isn't available everywhere and I'm primarily talking about California+Washington State.
Kaiser has strengths and weaknesses, which is unsurprising in healthcare.
Dermatology is garage-level bad.
Cardiac care is world class.
Reconstructive surgery for joints is amazing.
Pediatrics has always been great, since that's what Kaiser started with.
Psych is mainly pharmacological, if you can be purely medicated it's great.
If you have anything very exotic like McCune-Albright syndrome, they can't do anything but medicate you (which Kaiser is very liberal about).
Yeah, Kaiser GenPrac are pretty low rent, but that's true everywhere for General Pracitioners.
My family (all Kaiser), my coworkers, and ofc myself, have had a lot of time with Kaiser. Yeah you can get better cardiac care at the NIH or neurological treatment at UCLA, but Kaiser will make the recommendation for you and you can get that treatment if you want.
Anyone who thinks Kaiser is categorically bad, doesn't know what they are talking about, imo. Go see an independent that has Blue Shield/Cigna/etc and it's not even a question.
And yet people hate it. I agree that it seems good in theory. In practice, it seems quite bad (because again, people hate it). This is one of the things that makes me less convinced about universal healthcare proposals than I innately would be. They also seem much better on paper, but if in practice people would hate it, then that would be a bad outcome.
What I've seen from others and what I've read in attempted quantitative reviews is that Kaiser quality, perhaps not surprisingly, varies by region and facility. I don't know if anybody has invented a management strategy which can truly remove this variance.
Qualitatively, as a patient, I'd say the biggest difference with Kaiser is that you engage something more like a government bureaucracy. You do not get complicated billing adventures when you go to your Kaiser clinics, hospitals, etc. But, you do get some long waits, occasional referral limbo, and sometimes indifferent treatment from overworked nurses or clerical staff. Of course, there are still individuals involved in each care event. I have seen two different family members have different levels of satisfaction and frustration from the same facilities, and my take is that the personalities of the patients had more to do with the different experiences than the facility or staff.
I liken Kaiser to going to the DMV for treatment. This is most true as a young to middle-aged person, where your common care needs might be for unplanned, urgent care rather than periodic checkups or predictable chronic care. I know others who have used Kaiser in the same regions for more chronic and acute conditions including psychiatric, metabolic, and geriatric care. I have been reasonably impressed and would like to keep myself in the same system when I retire and grow old.
I may be biased by having known the system since I was a child, but I prefer this to the non-HMO US experience I know mostly second hand. Instead of the DMV, I've had friends and relatives liken their healthcare to engaging a car dealership or some boutique investment firm, with every interaction transactionalized and tinged with financial worry.
My company has gone to work-from-anywhere-as-long-as-it's-in-the-USA, there's some sort of complicated tax thing that comes if you live in another country but work in the US, and they don't want to deal with that.
> there's some sort of complicated tax thing that comes if you live in another country but work in the US
As an employer I have to fill out a lot of extra forms for someone outside the USA. But there are companies popping up to solve this -- they take care of all the paperwork for you, for a fee. Usually you negotiate with the employee to reduce their paycheck by however much the fee is, and everyone wins because they are going somewhere with a much lower cost of living (or you just eat the cost to keep a good employee).
I expect we'll start to see more employees who work in the "USA" for employment tax purposes, but are physically in Thailand or somewhere connected via VPN. Short of a detailed audit it's difficult for authorities to tell where someone is actually living. (I'm not encouraging tax fraud, just stating that this is likely to happen.)
That would be tax fraud in two separate countries, and depending on local laws, a crime in the country the individual is working from.
Connecting through a corporate VPN to the corporate network wouldn't shield your location, and I'm not aware of any company that lets employees connect using their own VPNs? With corporate VPN connections, it's usually pretty easy to trace back to the geographic area of the connecting IP, and IT generally keeps logs of these.
While most companies are cool with short term remote work in other countries (especially for employees who do not work on revenue-generating products or services), undisclosed long term remote work is generally grounds for for-cause termination.
It's a lot easier than you think. If you made up your mind, then ok, think what you want, but for the rest of the people who are reading this thread: trust me, it's much more doable than you think.
Honestly, the barriers are not so great, and definitely finances are not at the top of the list of things to overcome. Without giving any numbers it's not clear what is required to be secure, but it also depends a lot on where you live.
That being said, I'd say language acquisition is more important than having a lot of money. Once you have enough money to reach escape velocity - again, this is personal, so I couldn't say what it is - more money doesn't really matter and just makes it more likely that you'd lose it because it's an easy button.
Language acquisition and learning how to meet new people are far more important, but fortunately they're free! (almost)
Consider that what would be considered a lower standard of living by consensus American standards could be considered a higher standard of living by a different consensus standard.
And that one is able to choose which standards by which one evaluates one’s living.
What are the other options? After seeing how Europe and other western nations have responded to COVID in the last 2 years I'm less likely to consider moving there. It was actually something I'd considered before all of this.
It’s a little hard to go you a specific answer as it’s highly personal but the pandemic is also highly local.
Europe is hard with the pandemic because it’s crowded in the main towns and cities, and a little colder than the USA. In smaller places the virus is much much less severe than you think.
That being said, I think the impact of the virus will diminish with the combination of vaccines as well as the virus continuing to mutate and compete against other variants.
Probably it will eventually become endemic and not so life threatening and reach an equilibrium, but that’s just what I think. It’s probably not great for the virus and it’s babies to kill lots of people and then suffer massive human led reactions like vaccines and quarantine measures. Maybe the cold or flu thousands of years ago were much more deadly.
Anyway, speculation aside, there’s also quality of life to consider. A lot of other places in the world really emphasize this.
The big picture is it’s an amazing world with cool people, and it couldn’t hurt for those of us who are without families and with some savings to explore it.
>Anyway, speculation aside, there’s also quality of life to consider. A lot of other places in the world really emphasize this.
Ok feel free to give me some. I'd like to know the COL in these places as well.
A lot people here tend to complain about the US but are living in ridiculous high cost coastal areas and are unaware of more affordable options. Most of them are willingly sacrificing QOL because they refuse to change their attitudes.
COL is lower in many places for a reason. This is not enough to state that somewhere else is "better" to live. It is only better for individuals making money in a higher GDP country. What do you think happens to that country if everyone decides to move away? This is a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. It only works if a small percentage of people do it.
First, I'll say that the USA enjoys an absurd quality of life - but only in some aspects.
Infrastructure, transparency, and just shit working is really amazing in the USA. Plus, access to USA markets is incredible. Being able to have same day delivery of groceries is mind blowing to people abroad. So, I really consider all of it, not just roads and bridges, as part of our 'infrastructure' and it's really good in the USA.
That being said, there are a lot of things that money can't buy, and culture is one of those things that's virtually priceless. It just takes time to develop. I don't mean to imply the USA doesn't have culture, of course it does, but it doesn't have X, or Y, or Z country's cultures.
I stayed in Mexico for about 11 months for example and I can honestly say I just 'felt' happier. Yes, sometimes I was super pissed because everything was broken: sometimes there's not water, power is constantly browning out (I really mean on a continuous basis), and the government in the south of mexico can be a mess. These kinds of things get perpetuated and affect the citizens as well over generations... yet still, Mexican culture was amazing and I enjoyed my quality of life there.
This is unfortunately something that's hard to put into numbers, but obviously there are proxies for it like the numbeo list in this thread. It's a personal subject though ultimately, because it's a qualitative assessment, so that's why I hesitated to "speculate", but thanks for asking :-)
That being said, I'm now in Italy and I got to say I like it even more here. Northern Italy in so many ways has the best that all of Europe has to offer. You can basically drink the alps on tap, any where you go, people are super duper smart, kind, hilarious, passionate, and then there's the food and all that other stuff. It's a lot more expensive here (for reference one could live easily in the south of mexico, like Oaxaca City, for about $500 USD if they wanted or $800 USD if they didn't feel like messing around with finding an affordable place), but it's also much cheaper than living in San Francisco was, and again the quality of life is much higher.
I actually think in general professionals will reach a point in the USA where they'll start spreading out, just like this article says, but it won't be limited to domestic destinations. Other countries, with aging populations, will start to attract these people, and they'll go abroad and start businesses and families. This is how the world has always worked. Italy for example was the pinnacle of the world now 2 times in history, they're kind of used to it, but the USA is just beginning its journey.
Sorry, that was probably a little meandering, bear with me, but hopefully that's satisfactory? I'm totally happy to talk more, I'm just not sure what people are interested in hearing, if anything haha. Ok have a nice day everyone.
Maybe maybe not. A lot depends on what happens next. The assumption here is that people are moving out of urban areas and then not commuting back in. If that really is the case, unlike in the commuting form of suburbanization, then service businesses will follow those people, if they are allowed to. This would be a great outcome, but it depends on a lot of assumptions.
While I agree we don't really know, I think it is quite likely to have a negative effect.
Take, for example, these comments, which are full of people who have left NYC, a place where you can function entirely without a car, and moved to places like Texas and Florida, where you, for the most part, cannot. Sure they might not be commuting anymore (which was likely by public transit anyway), but they are now driving several times a day, likely relatively far distances, when they were not before.
This seems like a sample bias. Even if lots of people here who have moved used to commute by public transit, the reality is that most people commute by car. Reducing commuting is generally a very good thing.
Eliminating the commute, when it is replaced by living in a suburb with essentially no access to services without driving (especially when there was access before), can still be a net negative... That's the point of the anecdote...
Yes I know. My point is that I think it's unlikely that anything comes out behind eliminating commutes. Even "essentially no access to services" is closer access to services than the common exurban commuting distance.
I mean you responded as if you think I was using HN comments as a representative sample and not as an illustrative anecdote...
> Even "essentially no access to services" is closer access to services than the common exurban commuting distance.
Okay... But it's not a one-to-one replacement... A single two-way commute might be replaced by significant drives to the grocery store, restaurants, schools, after-school activities, etc...
Honestly, despite all of this discussion, I think the idea that commutes will be broadly eliminated long-term is the bigger assumption than general suburban driving being a net positive compared to commuting or vice versa.
I think it's very likely that commuting to white collar jobs is in the process of undergoing a very significant and lasting change. The magnitude of it remains to be seen, but even significant changes on the margin can drive structural shifts.
> If that really is the case, unlike in the commuting form of suburbanization, then service businesses will follow those people, if they are allowed to.
That would require these areas to be zoned for mixed business/residential, which very few suburbs are.
Yes, I didn't say explicitly, but this is what I meant by "depends on a lot of assumptions". It will require different regulatory thinking for this to work out positively.
I lived in a walkable city for 7 years and since moving to a 1950s style neighborhood do not really miss it. You can only have so many trips to the bakery, the coffee shop or the local bookstore until eventually its just your normal life and no more exciting than driving 5 min to the same thing. Plus a lot of the local places closed because of high rents and only chains or overpriced places tend to stick around.
This year I moved from New Jersey to Michigan (since my job is now 100% remote).
Homes in NJ are around $400k. In Michigan I bought a duplex for $160k. I could rent out the other side of the house, but instead we had our friends move in. We are 4 blocks from main street in a tiny town and enjoy the peace and quiet without obscene NJ traffic.
This is an easier decision since I have a life partner and am not trying to meet new people or see new things. It's especially easier since we do not intend to have kids.
I am baffled that some of my friends choose to live in Seattle where, if they buy a house, they would spend most of their working lives paying it off. While they would miss out on some big-city amenities if they moved out, they instead could have the ability to retire a few decades early.
"A countervailing political force is that some of the people who are moving into Texan, Floridian and Arizonan suburbs from California and the Northeast consider themselves political refugees, fleeing badly-run state and local governments. They may cast votes against Democratic candidates in an attempt to ensure their new locations will not resemble the places they left."
I can't help but wonder whether the people with the means to flee California were partially responsible for its poor state of political affairs, consistently voting for more progressive candidates and policies. They left a mess of their own creation. Just as Mike Tyson famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
Spending from two to four hours each day in the car comuting means a few years from your life you will lose. I'd rather live in an apartment building and do more meaningful things in my life than having a big yard and drive a few hours every day.
My Big Ten university town is offering cash incentives for workers to relocate there. It makes sense. These towns have benefits of a small town—low COL, access to nature, minimal commute—with big city amenities—transport, walkability, entertainment.
I moved to somewhat of an expat bubble in rural Portugal, lots of advantages, the few disadvantages for me though are having to drive everywhere and lack of options for schools. Granted these are not specific to Portugal, but more for the "moving to rural / suburbs areas". Some people don't mind the driving, but for me, realizing I will be a taxi driver until kids get a driving license is a little depressing. Especially the driving to school part...
However, the advantages still offset the disadvantages for me.
This makes sense; as generations come of age in this country there has always been a shift in where people live based on the advancements in technology. From the early days of trains allowing living outside city centers, to the invention of the automobile and subsequent suburban sprawl with the interstate system, it would follow that the internet and remote work would change how we live. As demographics change, so does the politics based on who stays and who goes in each city.
Moved out of the city (Tampa) to rural Alaska. Currently working remotely with the help of a local ISP that does wireless internet (on the waiting list for Starlink).
I'd go South if the politics start to blue-up. I figure if this trend holds as the article says, by the time I'm ready to retire there will have been two censuses. I care about social justice, local produce, and warm weather. The south has 2 out of 3.
In my case, I am white but my wife is foreign born naturalized citizen with brown skin. There is no way I am going to ask her to move some place where she has to constantly be looking over her shoulder because the locals can't handle the fact that she looks different. Sure TN is cheap but not at the cost of our mental health.
Okay, then, don't move to the rural areas. As a child of Republicans and a recent visitor to Nashville suburbs, where my parents have moved, I assure you that no one in the bedroom suburbs of major southern cities cares about someone with "dark skin" (they don't hate black people either, but I'm guessing she's South Asian, or you would have said black).
A friend of my brother is South Asian and grew up in Mobile, AL in the 1990's. Said he had zero issues with race and more racial diversity in his neighborhood than where he lives now in Silicon Valley.
Do you care about being around social justice or bringing about social justice? If the former, sure, move to a blue area. If the latter, wouldn't moving to a purple
area be more impactful?
I ask myself that every day. Should I be the change? Or should I wait for someone else to do it? I don't have the guts to jump headfirst into a deep red area: I already get harassed for driving a truck with an obama sticker when i go off-roading in the red counties 5 hours from where i live. But I am interested in moving to one of the isolated purpler cities in the south. I'm hoping there's a "diffusion area" where it is safe to be liberal, but still having a net effect of changing a demographic.
If everything goes as planned with global warming, we may have 3/3 here in the north as well (at least some of us). Where I live it’s noticeably warmer, winters milder and summers longer just in the ten years I’ve been here.
I have a home in Nashville, Tennessee but chose to move to Seattle, Washington for work (software engineering), but stay here for the access to everyday life improvements- restaurant variety, activities, etc. Nashville has grown a lot, but you are still car dependent and the Conservative values run deep there, though those folks are being displaced as the housing market continues to boom which makes them more hostile to outsiders than they already were.
Huh, interesting. I’m visiting Nashville from Seattle. There’s definitely not as much Asian/Fusion food or Indian food in Nashville, but overall there are tons more restaurants - just not Pho or chicken tikka masala everywhere.
I’ve spent some time in Nashville and visited Brentwood, Franklin, Nolensville, and further east towards Murfreesboro and Smyrna. In a week, I felt like there’s a restaurant metric you’d measure in some metric like restaurants per square mile. There’s just food everywhere, and even on a Monday night, restaurants are packed.
No disagreement at all obviously on the politics. IMO, Seattle is too liberal for me (you committed a crime? It’s okay. You’re actually the victim) while in TN they’re maybe an extreme on the other end. I will say though that politics aside, people in and around the Nashville are are waaayyyy more friendly. It’s not even a comparison.
I do see tons and tons of new construction in Nashville and surrounding areas. On the other hand, the liberal, equal rights and affordable housing/healthcare/childcare crowd is drowning in NIMBYism.
The Economist used to be somewhat boring, but at least it had honest reporting about parts of the world you don't read much about. Good for you, in other words.
In the new world of the web, they seem to be trying too hard to amplify conventional opinions. Chasing clicks, in other words. Long after a trend has started up and enough people have heard of it (moving out of expensive areas, in this case), they jump on it.
> In the new world of the web, they seem to be trying too hard to amplify conventional opinions.
They've always been, fairly overtly, about amplifying a narrow range or neoliberal viewpoints. At the height of the UK/US neoliberal consensus of the late 1980s and 1990s, that may have been less obvious since that narrow range basically spanned the entire Overton Window.
I used to occasionally daydream about moving someplace rural or semi-rural where land and housing are cheap.
When I got my first vaccine dose, it was difficult to impossible to get an appointment in the Chicago area. I managed to find one in Urbana. I drove down on a Sunday to get my shot. Along the way, I stopped at a McDonald's to use the bathroom. Coming out, I had someone berate me for wearing a mask and declare mask wearing to be selfishness (I would later discover from reading a blog post that he was mirroring language he'd heard on Fox News).
I do not wish to live somewhere that my neighbors would be brainwashed by Fox News and engage in behaviors/have attitudes that would kill me. It may cost more to live in an urban liberal environment, but it's worth every penny.
There's a bit of racial cheating going on here by assuming the reasons that black/hispanic people are leaving cities are identical to the reasons wealthy whites are leaving cities, and that the trend started at the same time, follows the same lines, or ends up in the same suburbs. It's all glossed over by calling suburbs diverse by citing demographic percentages of all people who live in any suburb.
Black/Hispanic people have generally been priced out of cities by gentrification, and have been forced to move to places that are even farther from jobs and services than the previously neglected urban areas that they came from, and this started when millennials moved into the cities from the suburbs. Black people in particular have had a Southern migration because Northern black people are often only two or three generations from the South anyway, so they have family who can help with shared housing, childcare, and leads on employment.
This could be easily shown by showing rates of outmigration by group over time. Chicago's black population was dropping while its white population was rising. It would also be shown by individual attention to the suburbs that are being moved to, not only would you find that they were very segregated, but you might notice that plenty of them are hellish and poverty-ridden compared to the cities that people moved from.
I might as well quote the entire discussion of ethnicity, which occupied the body of a paragraph with nearly unrelated first, second, and final sentences. Maybe the word "urbanizing suburbs" in the context of an increase in amenities worked as a subconscious trigger to discuss black people moving to suburbs.
"The allure of suburbs has been a trend more than a half-century in the making, but covid-19 offered an additional boost. “Urbanising suburbs”, as Mr Clark them, are gaining amenities but keeping their characteristic sprawl. Contrary to the stereotype of identical white homes with white occupants, today’s suburbs are ethnically diverse. Wendell Cox of Demographia, a consultancy, estimates that 86% of the population of major metro areas live in the suburbs or exurbs. That includes 90% of whites, 83% of Latinos, 81% of Asians and 76% of African-Americans. Latinos, in particular, have been relocating to suburbs at greater rates in the past two decades: since 2000 their number has risen more than 50%, compared with a 20% rise for African-Americans and Asians and just 1.3% for whites. Ross Perot, Jr., a real-estate developer, says he’s “never seen as many people moving into Dallas. It’s shocking.” But far more people are going to the suburbs surrounding the city."
Note: a 20 year trend for non-whites, and a statistically insignificant blip for whites. Yet the article paints everyone as young upper middle class urban professionals trying to dodge taxes and city government.
"Housing costs are one indicator of where people are going. Kalispell, Montana, has seen the largest increase in property values in the country—with the average home up nearly 50% year-over-year. Second is Austin, Texas, followed by Boise, Idaho. Towns that people might never have considered living in full-time have become contenders. Traditional vacation destinations—including Bend, Oregon and California’s Lake Tahoe—have seen a surge of interest."
If you look at the demographics of these cities, it's obvious whose POV is being used to characterize this migration. In the case of Austin, in particular, the story has been about the shrinking of the black population while the city was growing, and the bleaching of neighborhoods that black people have lived in for a couple hundred years.
Visit Texas or Florida first. I've lived in Texas and visited Florida many times. I've also visited San Jose. TX and FL are hell compared to CA. I don't care for CA either, but that's because of cultural (coastal) differences. The NorthEast is heaven on Earth.
You won't find a 70F winter in Dallas... you'll be lucky for high 60s in the deep winter months. Most weeks are more in the 50s. That said, given how climate change is progressing, it tends to be warmer until January, so if you just want the nice temperatures for your holiday plans, then it's a decent option!
Yep- though I'm leaving to be closer to family, Austin suburbs are a nice in pretty much every axis other than commute, which hasn't been an issue since going remote.
As a recent transplant from SF Bay to Greater Boston... I'm inclined to agree. It's actually cheaper in my neighborhood than it was in East Oakland, and I can walk to almost anything I care about, incl. work, friends, pub, gym, grocery. Massive quality-of-life upgrade, assuming you're OK with freezing temps in the winter, and humidity and bugs in the summer.
There are humidity and bugs in Texas and Florida too, and even more so! If you're lucky, Texas will get another snow-pocalypse too if that tickles your fancy.
Where are you moving from? I just moved to greater boston and I love it.
Where I live has just the right level of density -- you see people around at all times of day, but it's still peaceful at night. And almost everything I do is walkable.
If you think human feces in public is a problem worth leaving for then try living in a place where you don't know if the water is poisoned, if the power will stay on, or the ground will literally crumble under your home. The local governments are neither equipped nor interested in making those places habitable. It's getting worse and will continue to. Hurricanes and rising sea levels will bankrupt TX and FL each in this century.
I can't speak for all of Texas, but my water district has high quality water standards. I look at the reports published from time to time, they're well below EPA and TCEQ limits for contaminates. Perfectly clean water here. Sure, there's areas of pollution in the state but there's pollution that happens in the Northeast as well.
> if the power will stay on
I forgot the fact power failures only happen in Texas, literally the entire rest of the United States has never experienced a single power failure, ever. Good luck assuming you'll never experience a power outage.
> Hurricanes and rising sea levels will bankrupt TX and FL each in this century
The Northeast is also very affected by rising sea levels. Which states will be more affected by sea level rise: New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, or Texas?
The entire Eastern seaboard seems to be having trouble responding to the challenges of stronger and more common hurricanes.
Don't get me wrong the Northeast is a great place to live but don't bury your head in the sand thinking that the Northeast never has water quality issues, never has power outages, never gets hurricanes, and is immune to sea level rise.
> I forgot the fact power failures only happen in Texas
No, but only Texas repeatedly ignored federal advice to fix their power grid which directly resulted in children literally freezing to death.
Texas's state government is too focused on insane abortion laws and locking down a ruling white minority class through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and empowering election officials to throw out election results.
If you're worried about freezing to death the Northeast is definitely not the place to go. Far more people die from hypothermia in the Northeast every year than in Texas, even without having a massive pretty much unprecedented storm. And yes, this storm in February was way worse than the storm a decade ago.
I do agree with you though about the priorities of the Texas government. I don't agree with and vote against a lot of those idiots.
Refusing to acknowledge the ERCOT problem doesn't mean it isn't there, it just means you're content to let it persist. It's not new. This has been happening since long before I was born.
On water: living in a place where it is on-brand to not investigate public health disasters is not great. You've heard of Flint, but not Piney Point.
So basically you’re upset about Florida and Texas for a different set of hysterical political reasons.
Personally, I’d find my daily life more affected by feces on the sidewalk than I would the existential dread of sea level rising half a meter in the next hundred years. Frankly if you want to be scared of natural disaster over that time period, it’s probably more dangerous to live on the fault line in San Francisco than it is to live on the beach in Miami (sudden catastrophe with no warning vs. decades of observably rising sea levels).
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. That's exactly the opposite of what commenters should be doing here, and we ban accounts that do it repeatedly. We've already had to warn you about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29018199.
That is really stretching it. Why is the OP who started this thread about “feces in the street” (an obvious political dogwhistle) not receiving the same “warning?” Not to mention the comment I replied that who took OP’s bait and turned it further political by countering with two Republican states. If I took this thread “further into flamewar,” then surely the same logic applies to the chain of comments above mine.
I can tell you for sure that it has nothing to do with which political side anybody is on (Anyone with the stamina and bad judgment it would take to read through enough of my tedious moderation comments should easily be able to satisfy themselves of that.) Actually, I don't even know which political side a lot of users (you, for example) are on—my brain pattern matches for other things after doing this hundreds of thousands of times.
That's beside the point, though. The point is that you broke the site guidelines badly (specifically in the first sentence of your post), and we've already had to warn you about this. Users, including you, need to follow the site guidelines regardless of how badly any other user is behaving. Pointing the finger at someone else isn't a good move, and there's a deep reason why: it always feels like the other person started it and did worse. Since everyone always feels that way, everyone always feels justified in whatever they do. That's no basis for conduct; it leads straight to a downward spiral. We're trying to avoid that. Therefore we have a set of principles that everyone needs to follow.
A sudden catastrophe such as a highrise you live in collapsing, a sinkhole swallowing your house, the power in your region being off for an indeterminate amount of time while it is below freezing, or a hurricane wiping your city off the map? Wanting to live isn't hysteria and knowing how to survive is not a political stance.
It’s easily Googled; ~30 million people move each year.
The CEO of Upwork is engaging in SEO.
An academic in Canada is calling normal behavior a “great unmooring.” Then bail on any other discussion they had with said academic.
Suburban developers with data from Mar 2020-2021 ignoring easily Googled fall 2021 data showing a reverse in the urban exodus.
This article is SEO spam, ostensibly about a big deal, but their data is normal movement of the population, and outdated sampling, wrapped in grand language.
People have always been on the move. The Dust Bowl led to the big recent migration to the west. Although the migration post covid from the Bay area is negligible in absolute terms compared to the total population versus the Twitter accounts of some famous tech and VC folk like Keith Rabois.
Seattle just elected more moderate candidates willing to tackle the homeless problem seriously [0]. We've never made it to the levels of bad described here, but we were headed there. Possibly stories from our CA neighbors spooked us (many transfer up here.)
It's unhealthy to escape to be where "your tribe" is. I love my city and I did feel represented with moderate voices winning this election cycle.
Your city (and country) does not need to have a massive homeless problem. This is something the city and state government can fix. Housing, mental health support, drug treatment support and better community policing are all possible, and proven to work.
How to get the city and state (and national) governments to fix this problem is another issue.
Ah yes blame the "city" and not the various municipalities sending their homeless to said city. Most of the homeless are not from the cities they are in. They just end up there and then the city has to pay for it for some reason.
I don't entirely blame the city government, though that does have some responsibility, the rest lies with the State and national government.
If the homeless people got the support and resources (eg, healthcare, a secure job, and a reasonably priced place to live) they needed somewhere they were familiar with, far fewer would be leaving to head to a city to try and survive.
I've lived in a major us east coast city up until the pandemic. My tax dollars kept going down the drain dealing with homeless who by in large were not originally city residents. Your opinion that these people were enticed to the city is wholly unfounded and totally made up. Just another reason I've mentally checked out of the debate. Y'all have fun with that. I'll live in the burbs.
This is just not true. Everyone is talking about the homeless problem all the time. NOBODY is happy about the homeless situation in our major cities.
I don't know a single city, liberal, moderate, or conservative, that has solved it.
I am just a single citizen, I pay out the ass for taxes, and nothing is being done to help these people.
At this point is appears there is no political will to do anything. Instead everyone walks in circles while funneling the money into porkbarrel spending, the police force, and roads.
Housing First seemed to be working in Utah. They achieved 90% reduction in chronic homelessness.
A remarkably simple and cost-effective answer. Essentially it states “get people housing and then it’s way easier to treat the things making them homeless” plop someone in a home and then it’s easier to get medication to them and they stop showing up in the ER 4x a month. Get people housing and then you know where they are to check in on how dependency treatment is going. Psychiatric condition? Way easier to treat if they have a roof, heat, an address to send medication.
It is actually cheaper than just doing nothing and allowing people to remain homeless.
But then they stopped funding it in 2015.
“Man this remarkable looking approach stopped working!”
“Oh? When?”
“Right after we stopped funding it!”
“Huh, weird.”
The other 29% need to be sent to a re-education camp until they want to be part of society again. I'm not kidding. Vagrancy is a plague on civil society.
That's not Chicago, maybe West Coast or Austin, but Chicago got super aggressive about homeless in the 90s when gentrification started. Then, the homeless use to die under the freeways every winter and Wacker Drive (the "lower drive" as seen in The Dark Knight) was a giant homeless camp.
A lot of US cities publish their urban development plans. Pick a state and look up their major cities' 2040 plans and see if they are planning extensive developments in the area your interested in buying. Sometimes the plans are overoptimistic or pessimistic but usually they generally give you an idea if the city itself thinks it will grow quickly or slowly.
Future expectations are largely considered in current prices. Some of this will depend on your time horizon. Let’s consider 5+ decades.
1. Look for areas that have a long history of growth. You don’t want to invest in a fad.
2. Look for areas that aren’t too rural. Many of the most rural areas are actually losing population as people leave services like grocery stories and doctors leave and thus drive out more people. Look at rural Kansas as an example of this, places 100 miles away from a city had a population peak with the baby boomers.
3. Look for a diverse local economy. Oil/Factory/Company towns exist and they tend to disappear when fortunes change for the host. You need more than remote workers to run a local economy.
4. Consider climate change. Almost everywhere in the US will be effected for the worst, but Miami is probably more risky than Nashville.
5. Do your homework and invest in what you know. I’ve picked the locations of my property very carefully. I usually can find deals when the market undervalues one particular property short term for various things reasons. Maybe I’m the first solid offer to a motivated seller (this may become more common again soon). Maybe it’s a home that needs some renovations. Maybe it’s in a neighborhood whose gentrification isn’t widely recognized yet.
My niche is residential realestate in a single mid-sized metropolitan area. About 50% of my investment portfolio is real estate. I actively manage these properties, while working full time as an engineer.
I’ve been rethinking this as well. I think I came to conclusions that too much diversity isn’t a good thing. I myself isn’t American and rethinking hard if I should obtain my American citizenship (currently PR)
I want to move back to Asia where there are less diversity and society is less complex. I value harmony more than diversity.
> It’s the fact that they can live their daily life and send kids to school with minimal restrictions.
I completely disagree with this. This is the number one reason why I will not move away from a science believing/respecting area. I don't want the headache of people with lack of basic common sense on top of everything life throws at you. If the pandemic has taught us anything trusting science is amazing and that many people are willing to blatantly abuse it.
COL/SOL in California is appalling. SOL continues to degrade here to the point where certain parts of Bay Are (Oakland, Hayward) look more like Syria than first world nation. Trash is everywhere, even in nicer neighborhoods. Not a single park here in East Bay without encountering a homeless person. And, then I meet people here that continue to defend 1) Food is amazing 2) SF sucks! Oakland is the best place ever 3) Well, we are kind here so we tolerate homelessness 4) All those NIMBYs, otherwise this place would be perfect 5) Our government cares about people more than infrastructure 6) We should tolerate crime because we are kind unlike other cities/states 7) California houses out of state homeless (this is false, despite of being repeated ad-nauseum on HN. Let me know and I’ll dig up sources).
These reasons are not convincing anymore. It’s a self perpetuating degradation of living standards.
I am currently looking for a job in Colorado, Texas, NC, etc.
Okay, but you have to understand, when you say things like "Oakland == Syria" it's incredibly hard to take you (and the people who make complaints like this) seriously.
I can walk four blocks and buy, like, 19 different lattes. I can walk two blocks and get on a train that takes me to downtown SF in 18 minutes. In a 10-minute drive I can get to literally any cuisine the world has to offer, and it's fucking delicious. These are not amenities available in third-world countries (or, I might add, in many cities in the U.S., at least not at this density and quality).
Do I see homeless people on the way? Yeah. I live in the Bay Area, an area going through a horrifyingly serious homelessness crisis. Parks are bad. The encampments under and along the highways are massively depressing.
But there's not rubble in the streets. Families are not starving to death in their homes. People are not being gunned down against walls.
Shit is bad right now, and I am afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better. But let's not pretend it's a third-world country. That helps neither your cause nor mine.
To further your point on the homeless: most of them aren't SF (or even Cali) locals. Their almost all drug addicts from other states who came to SF because they were told drugs were easy to get here and the weather's better than where they came from.
Gov Rick Perry used to brag on national TV that Texas' solution to the homeless problem was to buy them tickets to California. And their director of health services recently admitted that they still do that. Texas didn't solve their homeless problem, they simply made it someone else's problem to deal with.
> To further your point on the homeless: most of them aren't SF (or even Cali) locals
Yes, they are. SF’s own research on the homeless population identified that 70% lived in SF immediately before becoming homeless, 55% for over 10 years; the 30% who did not live in SF include 22% from elsewhere in CA and 8% from other states.
Migration and dumping from other states happens, but it's not the main source of homelessness.
I thought it goes without saying to not take it literally. We don't have bombs falling here. Aesthetically, vast areas do look like Syria. May be not rubble, but very very far away from first-world (Switzerland, Japan).
Food is amazing in a lot of big cities. There is no objective measure. New Yorkers say the same and so do people in Portland.
Even after back pedaling, this is still really out of touch.
You don't seem to know what Syria looks like and "aesthetics" can't make something into the third world anyway. Not looking like a wealthy Swiss town or Japanese metropolis doesn't make anything third world.
Lived in Mission Bay for 3 years after visiting the Bay Area double digit times over the years. It’s the type of place you love to hate and hate to love. I don’t regret leaving, moved to Washington but I do miss it and hate it for all the reasons you mentioned.
I personally am happy that many people are eager to leave California and many more are actively discouraged from moving here. We've got plenty, thank you, and all are welcome to believe that this is a terrible state covered in syringes and human feces. I'm almost willing to believe it is deliberate propaganda by people who love California and have no intention of ever leaving.
That said I have no idea why people cannot separate the Bay Area from a state larger than many countries. So be it. I'd rather live in Fresno with its easy access to the Sierras than anywhere in the South.
Yes, SOL of living has been going downhill in the Bay Area in the last 10 years. I grew up here and I can see everything just getting old and uncared for.
These are the reasons I chose to leave the East Bay. It's a dump (almost literally). Californian exceptionalism is rampant too, like many people have never visited a place where you aren't afraid to park your car on the street or don't step over human feces. For the low low price of $2,500/month (and that's not particularly expensive).
What bothers me most is that when I talk about this with people there the reaction is somewhere between "good riddance" or reducing my complaints down to cost of living. But I distinctly remember talking to a mayoral candidate in Berkeley canvassing for the election last year and discussing things like solar mandates. He seemed baffled that I asked why the city couldn't keep my street clean or do something about the number of brush fires and assaults at the nearby homeless encampment.
The Easy Bay could be great, but they're lacking basic municipal function and acting like the weather, mountains, and liberalism make up for it.
Could you dig up sources on that? Not challenging you, but as an Angeleno I've always believed this to be true myself. Curious what may actually be happening.
This article is several years old but does a good job illustrating where people are moving to and from. It's also not any local government policy to bus homeless people to other cities. Most of the time it's family and friends buying them tickets.
(As a resident of MA,) I'd also like to see the data.
If I had a choice to be homeless here or homeless in the Bay Area, it's not even close. The weather here is terrifically worse than anywhere near the water in CA.
In LA, 20% of our homeless population last year came from out of state and another 2% from out of country. See slide 24 at [1]. People like to downplay this as “only 20%” which is ridiculous. 20% is a huge portion. As always, though, lack of affordable housing and true social safety nets are the biggest drivers by far.
LAHSA's statistics are skewed, since they count someone as local once they've been living in LA for a certain amount of time (I think it's a year), even if they have been homeless their entire time in LA.
In 2018, the LA Times ran a series of articles on the homeless situation, and had reporters accompany county social workers. More than half of the homeless were from out-of-state, with Texas being the largest single source of homeless in LA. More than 3/4 of LA's homeless weren't local to LA.
There was a big study a while back that showed something like only 30% from out of state?
The tricky is they had an expansive definition of "local": they were measuring where people most recently became homeless, which means almost any housing in SF for almost any amount of time meant they counted as local.
I was, several times, beginning with ~ 1982 till a few years ago. I lived in that region for a while and in US for a while. What is the point of the question, to argue it is not that bad, an ad hominem or a red herring?
Hmm, interesting. I live in the East Bay (Walnut Creek) and spent a weekend in Healdsburg. Eating at Single Thread, drinking at Marin Layer, and staying at H2 hotel at the plaza. Seemed to be like SOL has gone up 10x over the last 10 years
Oh goody, another Californian who is fed up with the trash heap they've created and is moving to Colorado. Can't wait for another local business to be replaced by a car wash or a Pollo Loco.
I mean, I can appreciate the snark (CO born and raised) but the who "Californian" really hit the peak in the 90's. The next wave was Texas, and now there are so many people moving here it's hard to pinpoint a majority. Ironically, I'm very strongly considering leaving because all the things I love(d) about Colorado are being destroyed now.
I've heard that before, but I think that's just visibility- Texans keep their license plates because registration and taxes are cheaper there, Californians change their plates first chance they get to stop paying CA taxes.
Don't bother with CO. Our front range is well on the way to becoming SF 2.0. There's already a staggering amount of homelessness and the COL is through the roof.
In my city (Seattle), you never know if a mob is going to set up a month-long occupation outside your building, whether unregistered sex offenders have set up camp in your doorway (can't roust them), every road puts cars first, and the school is removing gifted programs for being racist. I'd love to live in a safe, well-managed, urban city. I don't believe any exist in North America.
How does Denver fit in with the other two? I currently live in Denver, and have also lived in NYC and Jersey City. The latter seem like completely different worlds from Denver.
It is not that subjective. It is simply more probable to survive as a homeless person (not a person prepared to camp, a person without means to properly clothe themselves or a drug addict or otherwise mentally unwell) outside in Seattle than Montreal. It barely ever snows in Seattle, the temperatures do not go below freezing, and there is low humidity so there is less heat loss hence it feels much warmer than the same temperature in Montreal.
