The New San Francisco Suburbs, a Plane Ride Away
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
1. San Francisco is a right bastard to get around since the various districts are spread out and separated by huge hills. Portland is easily walkable.
2. San Francisco has slow, dirty, overpriced public transport. Portland has a convenient light rail system which is free in the downtown core area, and drops you right at the airport for a buck fifty.
3. San Francisco is filthy. Portland is clean. San Francisco has aggressive panhandlers and crazy people everywhere, Portland somehow keeps most of 'em out.
4. San Francisco is insanely expensive and only those earning multi-hundred-K a year can afford to actually buy there. Portland is nice and cheap.
5. San Francisco has great scenery which is spoiled by tourists. Portland has perfectly adequate scenery which isn't.
Another nice thing: no sales tax. That means that you wind up paying what it says on the label and don't have to do the "compute in head and fumble with loose change" thing. Plus they've got good food, funky bars, and a classic video game arcade.
What they unfortunately don't have is a first-rate university, or anywhere else that might be likely to employ me.
Edit: Actually it looks like Greater Boston is more like 80% white. The state of Massachusetts overall is ~88% white, and the Greater Boston area has about 60-65% of MA's population. Even if we assume every single non-white person in MA lives in the Boston area, they'd make up <20% of the metro-area's population.
I have to admit I'm not sure how drunk people get home from bars in Los Angeles, though, since there also seem to be no taxis.
I for one look forward to Portland, Austin and the rest picking up where San Francisco left off.
I've never heard of an example of a city that died from high real estate prices. Do you know of any?
Empirically, what seems to kill cities is crime, or the death of some industry they depend on.
(By the way, I'm not disputing anything you said. pg's point about real estate prices is what reminded me of the Yogi Berra quote.)
Or:
1. It's extremely difficult to build. Only moguls can build new properties in New York, hence the emergence of the massively overpriced "luxury buildings" with unnecessary and expensive conveniences.
2. Government irresponsibility. The New York government should be barring the parentally-funded nonproductives (e.g. fashion interns who whine to their daddies and get $5000/month apartments and useless hipster idiots) from living here, because of their effect on the rents, but right now that isn't happening.
I would much rather deal with a bureaucratic inconvenience such as this than get robbed blind on rent, and have absolutely no recourse. In other words, my answer is yes, because that would be an absolute improvement over the current, disastrous arrangement.
That second cause is interesting. What if, instead of dying, the industry were to just leave? San Francisco's benefits are built on network effects, and if the network shifts away, why remain?
Crime didn't kill cities, crime is the result of their death. White Flight to the suburbs wasn't fleeing crime, it was concentrating it.
The problem with Vancouver is that Vancouverites don't save their money for a down payment.
For example, my parents have worked modest, blue collar jobs all of their lives and moved to Vancouver 2 years ago and are able to purchase. My younger sister is a financial advisor and diligently saved with her husband to purchase a home in their mid twenties. My older sister is at the other end of the spectrum. She's a C-level executive and was able to save and purchase on one income.
The out-of-control prices comment is ridiculous. Work hard, save your money, and it is possible.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/08/r...
New York in the '70s. I wouldn't call this "death" since the city came back, but I wouldn't want to repeat that debacle.
It's not high real estate prices per se that kills a city per se, but real estate volatility. When real estate prices are high, repairs aren't made because there's no need to-- apartments sell themselves. When they're low and vacancy rates are high, repairs aren't made because there is no point.
High real estate prices and rents also impoverish a city; they draw money out of it, since most of the ownership is outside of it (cf. New York, where absentee assholes own most of the rental property). Some people in the city benefit, but the net effect is negative, especially since the young and talented are invariably on the butt-end of property prices/rents. During the boom, this isn't a problem, but after the boom ends, prices and rents remain high ("sticky" is the economic term) and this drains the city like a vampire.
Ten years later, due to disrepair, poverty, and exodus of talent, you have a shell of a city. Then the crime starts, and the city falls into an arrangement like New York in the 1970s nightmare.
What's difficult, if not impossible, to predict is when this transition will take place. It's likely to hit New York, but I have no idea if that will happen in 2011 or 2030. The tricky problem with bubbles (and New York real estate is still in a bubble, despite the semi-collapse of the national property bubble) is that it's very difficult to predict when they pop, although inevitable that they will.
How does that make sense? You're arguing that repairs are not worth it if it's easy to sell apartments (what does that mean? That the new tenants do repairs, or that everyone is willing to live with a leaky sink as long as they pay for it?). Or that repairs only happen when apartments can sell (so you'll only let the sink leak if you're going to live with it for a long time).
The utility of repairs can be positively or negatively correlated with real estate prices, but it's ridiculously unlikely for it to be both.
For what it's worth, I've lived in cheap and expensive parts of New York, and, miracle of miracles, people took better care of apartments they paid more for. As it turns out, it really stings if you'd be able to rent someone a loft for $8,000 a month, but you can't because they saw that that ceiling was cracked. People paying $400/month for a room aren't nearly as picky.
You could list a catbox on Craigslist and get over $1000/month for it. You wouldn't even have to empty the dirty litter first.
What he's saying really is that cities are subject to boom/bust cycles like sectors of the economy, stock markets, etc.
The high housing costs are a sign that the region's significance has outgrown its supply of housing stock, which will naturally send folks looking elsewhere.
Weird way to start my week ;-)
The latter leads to the former.
I was just using them as examples of beautiful cities with really interesting, vibrant cores but with depressing suburbs.
It's starting to get revived a bit though. Last time I was there it was getting nicer, and more young people were living there.
I, like the Northwest, needs to get my shit together and start behaving in such a fashion that I can attract what I want.