Peak Millennial? Cities Can’t Assume a Continued Boost from the Young
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Softening rents? That’s because you have a limited resource of people willing and able to pay $3000 to $5000 for a single bedroom apartment. It doesn’t take much construction to saturate that market.
The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. There are far more people who can pay $1000 for 1 bedroom, or $3000 for 4 bedrooms (roommates, typically), and it would be insane to ignore that market. But abusive zoning laws and the capricious permit process ensure that that price of housing would be unprofitable. So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction.
We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.
What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live.
NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.
What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.
To add some more concrete numbers, in 2015 there were 14,357 units completed in New York. Permits were issued for 56,528 units. (Only 20,000 permits were issued in 2014. They were down 65% in Q1 2016.)
For a city of over 8 million people, I would expect 50,000 units/year to be the sustainable level. 20,000/year seems quite low.
http://www.nycrgb.org/downloads/research/pdf_reports/16HSR.p...
The reason for this is new buildings have to follow modern regulations which drops the usable square footage of properties considerably (for example, having the building X feet back from the street etc). In Manhattan where every square foot counts this is of course unacceptable. Old buildings are grandfathered into older, less restrictive, regulations.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...
There's also opportunities to upgrade old industrial space to residential, no net loss in housing.
Like you pointed out, NYC is the most dense city in the US, followed by SF. Naturally, building shit will be difficult in these cities. SF and NYC suffer from a unique set of problems, well not totally unique, but these problems are magnified in these cities:
Space constraints
Very desirable places to live
Neighborhoods with world famous character
Large amount of wealthy people willing to pay high prices
Boom & bust industries constantly changing the rate of population migration and also the wealth of the population
Pretending that everyone else is so dumb that they don't understand supply/demand or there is some evil conspiracy to prevent building doesn't help anyone. There are actual difficulties here with no easy solution. Building in these cities used to be difficult, it's difficult today, and it will continue to be difficult. There is no fix that will magically make these problems go away.
SF isn't the second most dense place in the country.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
If you restrict it to the saner list of cities with more than 100,000 people, San Francisco is indeed second.
Your list is the best representation of the true density of South Florida, though. It is carved up into so many independent towns that just using total populations doesn't show the true picture.
Add to that, most of these projects are going to be financed by debt of some sort, and lenders are not going to be keen on seeing that you could pursue a higher profit margin and choose not to.
A relevant quote from City Observatory summarizing research and implications:
But very little private housing in the United States was originally built for low-income people. Instead, homes built for the middle or even upper classes gradually became cheaper as they aged, as people with high purchasing power moved into trendier, more modern homes in “better” neighborhoods. As higher income households move on, the now somewhat older homes or apartments they formerly occupied are sold or rented to people with more modest incomes.
This process is called “filtering.” While the evidence that filtering is a real phenomenon has been around for a long time—the core of nearly every American city contains neighborhoods with once-luxurious homes now occupied by people of modest incomes—the first study to provide a rigorous measure of how it happens was published only in 2013. In it, Stuart Rosenthal of Syracuse University uses nearly 40 years of data from the American Housing Survey to figure out the average pace of filtering across the country, and what makes housing filter more quickly in some places than others. [1]
[1] http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/
As mentioned, NYC isn't perfect but it has a reasonably functioning democratically elected city government that at least tries to deal with major urban issues and occasionally succeeds. Which I've heard anecdotally at least makes it a little different from San Francisco.
So you decrease the square footage from 1400 to 700.
You have to have customers willing to buy your product, and there are only so many $3000/month apartments you can make before you run out of people willing to pay that much. Either large numbers of last year's luxury places are moving downmarket or you won't be able to sell the building for what you expected.
It was bound to be complicated, and it's worth noting that it got built anyways. I've lived walking distance from the neighborhood in question for 17 years, and that project has nothing to do with a developer wanting to put up a regular old high rise rental apartment building or three, which seems to happen nearly daily around here. The Fulton/Flatbush corridors have been transformed literally in a matter of months.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_B...
There's a group working hard to do this every day. Consider joining SF Yimby: https://sfyimby.org
Alternatively, you can donate to Carla, basically the legal wing of SF Yimby. They are also a nonprofit & tax deductible. They sue Bay Area cities that are not meeting building targets under the Housing Accountability Act. If they win and set precedent it will be very high leverage / make a big difference, since most municipalities here are nowhere close to meeting their housing targets today.
I couldn't figure out if this included the cost of land, but I saw other estimates put the hard construction cost (i.e. not including insurance, etc) at ~$330/sqft in NYC (not just Manhattan).
With those sorts of prices, it's clear why people are building luxury condos.
I spent some time looking at prefab construction costs for sky scrapers to see if they could be part of the solution, and in NYC they were targeting cost reductions in the 20% range (even with union concessions), but ended with huge cost overruns and ended construction at ~60% of the planned height.
So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing.
A lot of that might end up as making people want to spread out, by building more transit (which also needs to get cheaper) or convincing people that they should spread out and build their own communities; they don't have to look like the suburbs, Brooklyn certainly doesn't.
I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.
This would have the effect of 1) reducing rents, 2) giving us Really Narrow Streets (tm), an excellent idea I stole from [0], and 3) sending property tax revenue through the roof while reducing road-maintenance expenditures so we can spend more money on subways.
Density doesn't have to mean expensive vertical construction. Instead we could just make better use of our existing land by not wasting so much of it on low-bandwidth automobile transit infrastructure. (Side rant: Have you ever counted how many humans in cars get through a crosstown intersection in one traffic light cycle? It's literally ones or tens of people, a pathetically low number).
As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive.
I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient.
I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.
I don't disagree but I think people will object to "cheap" based on aesthetics. The closest thing I can think of is Soviet Union I know they used prefabricated elements in their building construction. People love to complain about the ugliness of Soviet style architecture.
I think the industry prefers the term "modular" due to the stigma, but they're the same thing.
While I'm not a huge fan of how this turned out, here's a recent modular high-rise in Manhattan that doesn't look hideous: http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/
This doesn't really argue against your soviet comments either, but you can see that you can do a lot with the idea (though the complicated form lead and uilders' inexperience to pretty high costs): http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homel...
But you can stick whatever facade you want onto this. I've read quite a few comments about sticking brick veneer onto these to make them look just like regular buildings.
Using modules means you can build the modules off-site in a factory, rather than on a construction site, and maybe we can eventually bring some automation into how those modules are built.
But why do we tend to create such restrictive zoning and approval processes? I think it's inescapable to conclude that this is a rational response to the low holding cost we currently impose on holding land.
If you're a landowner equipped with the power of zoning, why would you want to allow more development elsewhere? In the immediate reaction (common to NIMBYs), one has everything to gain and nothing to lose.
In a more market-driven situation, the landowner would weigh the desire for lower density against a real cost-- that is, the rising value of land would create more of a tax burden. (This would be the case in California if not for the anti-market behavior of Prop 13.) In an ideal situation, the burden of additional development nearby (congestion, shadows, etc), would be perfectly balanced against a drop in a tax burden.
So I'll just conclude that you're correct, but not looking deeply enough. All things eventually go back to the taxation policy on land and other natural resources.
I can't recommend enough the book by William Fischel, "The Economics of Zoning Laws"[0] (later published in a revised edition as "Zoning Rules!") to see the rationality of all actors in the current paradigm.
And the constructive recommendations?
1) Repeal Prop 13. 2) Push for a Land Value Tax.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Zoning-Laws-Property-Approa...
Lots of ifs. I'm hopeful.
I moved to the East Village last year and plan to attend to my first Community Board meeting early next month.
From a quick glance of what the board did in January 2017:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb3/html/calendar/calendar.shtml
The focus was mostly on quality of life for existing residents - liquor license approvals, art installations and cultural activities. These are important things and people should care about them, but it's striking that those groups had meetings while the following didn't:
- Transportation and Public Safety - Land Use, Zoning, Public and Private Housing - Public Housing and Section 8 Housing
I'm going to spend the next couple of months attending these meetings to figure out how it all works.
I should caveat however that I'm atypical in this attitude. Because I spent the entirety of my childhood in dense urban environments - Dhaka and New York - I'm attached to city living. Most of my millennial friends are planning to take make the suburban trek.
For the first time, I’m also hopeful.
The problem with this is that you only have an indirect say in the government; one can't vote if one is priced out of the city.
Nobody is building modest housing options. They're all going luxory in Logan Square. That's incredibly unreasonable. I kind of hope that some of these developers are going to go belly up over this.
New affordable housing is needed as that the demand is high. (Chicago has had a very liquidable market for housing in the last few years)
I'm sure we can talk about lots of bad reasons why rent is high, but the mere fact of high rent isn't itself bad, right? Why do we need to reform?
Cities are important for too many reasons for me to enumerate right now. Basically, if we can't keep cities healthy, then our civilization will collapse, and we won't be able to rebuild.
We have a problem when the option to spend less is not available. Then, to have access to the jobs and opportunities of the city, the workers have to spend inordinate amounts of money on expensive rents and time on commuting, which reduces the social benefit of having jobs.
https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-...
It also reduces the real wealth, as value is diverted to past landowners (and tenants taking advantage of abusive laws, which are why I never supported the San Francisco Tenants Union) and not to the city as a whole. The Bay Area schools can't even hire teachers for all of their classrooms. We are awash in money, but experiencing poverty.
Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet.
I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably.
If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?
With a tech salary it's possible to float above the rising prices, but everyone else gets driven out.
Housing prices will not "balance" because demand is extremely high and much of that demand has high salaries, and supply is extremely restricted (by NIMBY's and the laws they support).
2. The money goes nowhere. It gets captured by landlords, and plowed into making real estate more expensive, instead of buying goods and rewarding productivity, or buying entertainment and rewarding people.
3. You're talking about barring the less well off from an entire city. Are you surprised that this is an unpopular opinion?
Beyond ethics, a few things you may not have considered:
1. High rent is a systematic, generational wealth transfer from the young to the old (property owners); this is not good for society (eg, funding social security or even social stability).
2. It is an enormous drag on economic output and productivity for a variety of reasons.
3. High rents (coupled with rent control) result in really crazy inefficiencies.
I don't want to live everywhere. Unfortunately, my occupation has chosen to highly concentrate a ridiculous fraction of the jobs here. So I'm here. Moving is not impossible, but it's got a considerable "barrier to entry" if you will, and as someone still fairly new with the whole being-an-adult-with-a-job thing, it's not as simple as just getting up and going. Aside from the actual logistics of it, I've been with employers who look at resumes and think short gaps between jobs == bad, and so that means I can really only look if I manage to have held onto something long enough. There's also the fact that I might like my current work; finding a job that isn't soul-sucking (and isn't a startup with no hope of success) turns out to be tricky when it seems like 70% of the offerings boil down to "we sell ads".
For example, in my searches it appears that the Boston area has ~10% of the jobs that the Bay does.
Thankfully, I'm in a high-paying role. But surely the Bay Area needs janitors, transit workers, teachers, retail clerks, etc.? How are they to afford rent, let alone a home? Is the answer for them "sorry, you're priced out; commute 15-20 hours weekly?"
And, I know you're asking honestly, but when people out here say "high" w.r.t. housing in the Bay Area, they don't mean "it's above average", it means "it's literally insane". My father's current house was probably ~3 yrs of his salary; small houses are selling for ~$1.5M; an engineer making ~$100k (~starting salary) would need 15-16 years, and a very senior salary of ~$200k would still be ~8yr.
You can be an engineer and have tons of money to afford cool gadgets, but you'll never own a home.
To clarify, I'm not saying that it's just fine. I'm saying that your argument doesn't work without something more - either a reason why those people not being able to live there is a problem, or is morally wrong, or something.
What people want is pretty much the only thing that matters when it comes to politics (although there are limitations based in what's possible and what's not).
A farmer in the middle of nowhere (US or Canada - other countries have different situations that I cannot comment on) is looking at more than 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store if he drives. To walk would be 10 hours each way.
As we go down we hit the suburbs - 10 minutes to the store, but still 2 hours to walk. (if you took the same route as the car it would be about an hour, but that means walking on a busy road with no sidewalks, so you end up having to take a much longer route)
High density allows stores and restaurants to exist just to serve the people within a couple blocks. You take the elevator downstairs, and within a couple blocks is everything you need to buy, and the job you need to earn money to buy it with. When this is the world you rarely drive anywhere so you are not adding to congestion.
Now there is still congestion all those stores/business need to be provided with goods to sell. However a truck that takes up 4 cars worth of space is bringing enough goods to last 400 people for the day, where the cars in the other examples where for 1 person (all facts in this sentence were made up - they seem reasonable but I don't know how to find the right ones). This limits how dense we can get with just surface streets.
Note that the above is a should. Zoning laws often put high density far enough away from stores that you have to drive anyway - this makes congestion worse.
That's pipe dream. There is a problem in NY and SF because people want to go the same place. That's the appeal of big cities: lot of job or activities in a limited space.
I have all of that in the shit area I live in London. I have a variety of restaurant, a street market 3 times a week, loads of shops ( food mostly ) all within 5 min walk. All good, except for work. That's all in the City or Canary Warf, you still need to get there. Despite being shit, the area is still expensive because the connection to the City is not bad.
You can get all of that in a lot of place but the price only become affordable once you can't commute with the City anymore.
I've never lived in a dense city so I don't know how this is done.
I doubt I could carry a week of groceries for my modest family (2 adults, 2 children) 1 block, let alone several. Do you maybe use personal carts or what?
The other grocer in our neighbordhood does deliveries. Go shopping as you normally do, at checkout groceries are loaded into a big plastic tote instead of a grocery bag. It's delivered to your door within the hour.
I grew up outside the cities (denser, working class suburbs, not mcmansion-style suburbs) and after city living most of my adult life I can't realistically go back.
Or you buy your own cart, you see them all over in NYC, for groceries and laundry.
Invariably, I forget something so I usually have a smaller midweek trip for things I forgot. The walk to Trader Joe's is about 20min each way.
Edit: more like a 20min walk; not 30.
You just run over to get some things for dinner or for a couple of days. You can fit a surprising amount of food in a single grocery bag.
The walk to my grocery store is under 5 minutes. I shop every other day because I can shop before 7AM. But if I had to shop later than 7AM, I would only go once a week, because the lines grow too long.
NYC is the only place I've seen bouncers outside of grocery stores to control the entrance (I'm looking at you 72 street Trader Joe's).
But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic.
Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...
[1] https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S...
I'm in the East Village and I have these subways in a 10 min walk radius:
4|5|6|N|Q|R|B|D|F|M|L
I can make a no transfer trip to anywhere in Manhattan and most parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
If I lived in a part of Manhattan or NYC that didn't have these levels of access, I'd be very tempted to get a car.
http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhat...
Sources: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/08/15/car-free-households-are... https://ggwash.org/view/35905/88-of-new-dc-households-are-ca... http://www.betterinstitutions.com/blog/2013/07/almost-all-of...
Furthermore, recent students are used to dealing with not having cars in many cases--even if it can be inconvenient at times. In addition, Zipcar and Uber/Lyft/etc. absolutely make a difference at the margins if you don't need a car on a day-to-day basis.
I'm not sure that they still employ "pushers" in Tokyo but they very well might.
And that's with the benefit of Japanese culture where people are generally clean and polite. Japanese density plus American social problems sounds hellish.
I'm male, but I know it happens, regularly. When we were in a group, we always tried to put the females in the middle.
Depends on where you want to live. I lived in Dallas for just over 14 years and never had a commute that was over 30 minutes each way. Half the time I was there it was 15 minutes door-to-desk.
Now that I'm in the NYC area it's 1+ hour each way and I'm beholden to a bus or train schedule. I could cut it at the expense of increased rent and less space, but that is not a trade-off my wife and I are willing to make.
If roads and highways are expanded then traffic will increase.
Seems likely that housing market insanity also puts political pressure on the zoning and permitting process to be more lenient with exceptions and approvals.
True but remember that the NYT, like any publication, isn't academic research or journal. It isn't 'graded' and doesn't succeed or fail on facts and accuracy. Almost the only job it has is in making interesting enough reading that will help them sell advertising. It's entertainment. Nobody (or at least no professional) is using it to make investment decisions. (Although actually I am sure that is perhaps the case but that's not the paper's responsibility).
Now the second that the housing markets soften a bit and we might actually have a chance of catching up a little to where we should have been in terms of keeping cities affordable to more people, they're acting like we should just forget about the whole thing.
Housing is so expensive in the city I don't think many people can afford it.
1 bedroom apartment in bad areas where your car insurance will be at the highest cause of thefts etc costs around £250k.
Towards central London you are looking at around £750-900k for an 1 bedroom apartment.
Also I'd argue that London hasn't fixed crime, or schools, certainly there are less gun crimes but thats it really, everything else is the same.
Or pollution. The city is a cesspit. I can't wait to get out.
As somebody who a few years ago was looking to move to London and was getting depressed reading all sorts of alarmist comments I feel the need to respond. This place is wonderful!
Concrete data:
* I pay a bit over 1/8 of my salary (_excluding_ stock, I consider that extra) on rent. I live in a nice two bedroom apartment in zone 1 and share a room with my GF; the second bedroom is rented by a friend of ours.
* I walk to work; pay nothing for transport unless I want to go visit something. I don't own a car and don't need it.
* The culture is awesome. For example, I like music a lot and I constantly find stuff I love that I can see live. I go to at least one concert a month. I don't think there's another city that tops London on music (at least for the genres I like).
* The food is awesome, quality is way, _way_ better than anything I've had in the US. Super varied and affordable - there are plenty of street markets selling delicious food for £5-8 / portion during lunchtime in the week. I don't have catered food at work, but I think I would still prefer the street food.
* I didn't realise how _green_ the city is. There are a lot of trees, parks and nice places to walk around.
* The weather's nice enough that I can run outside a few days a week for the duration of the year. The summer's lovely and there are loads of places to spend time outside.
* I don't have kids and am not interested, in the short term at least.
* I was lucky enough not to need any medical assistance / GP services so can't comment on that.
Please stop with these baseless categorizations. I lived in Slough for almost a year so I understand that there are places less than perfect here but let's try and base the discussion on objective facts.
> Towards central London you are looking at around £750-900k for an 1 bedroom apartment.
GBP 250 == USD 312
GBP 750 == USD 938
GBP 900 == USD 1124
Man, apparently rent is a LOT cheaper in the UK. Cause I'm positive you can't get a one-bedroom apartment in even the _worst_ parts of NYC or SF for $310 (not a single one I bet), and $900-$1100 for a one bedroom would be considered a deal in even the _worst_ parts of NYC or SF. (exceptions for long-time tenants with rent control)
A one-bedroom in NYC or SF is like $2000 and up. Way way up. A new construction-ish one-bedroom is going to start at $3000 (if you're 'lucky') and go way up.
Indeed, these rental prices are not typical of other US cities, just as I'm sure London is untypically high rent for the UK.
So my main takeaway is, woah, I had no idea rent was so cheap in London!
And I'm not sure people who don't live there (especially who live overseas) realize quite what we're talking about when we talk about how expensive rent has gotten in NYC or SF.
You missed the k which means thousand
France, Canada, England, Japan and other "civilized nations" debate how best to fund schools and fight crime just like the US.
Here in the US, crime has been falling steadily for decades now, and no one's really sure why. One big theory is that the elimination of leaded gasoline had a big effect: our population was suffering from low-level lead poisoning from all the lead in the air and environment. But crime here is of course still much, much worse than Japan. Crime in England is probably significantly worse, with the main difference being that you don't have to worry much about getting shot over there, but you have to worry a lot more about being mugged or knifed.
The reason for this is not generally applicable outside extremely homogeneous populations.
Where you get ultra-low crime is when you combine that homogeneity with good public education. Take a look at the education systems and levels in places like Japan or Norway, and then compare to Appalachia or Sicily or various middle eastern nations. Also look at the levels of religiosity.
I've come to believe that the potential to rise in social position is what matters most, except possibly in Zoroastrian societies. Appalachia, Sicily (including lower-class parts of Boston), and the Middle East all agree that where you were born is where you'll stay, and that ambition is ridiculous or contemptible; while the healthiest societies are the ones where talent can bubble to the top even if you're not the judge's son.
My favorite example of the vitality that social mobility brings is the Ibo of Nigeria -- "the Jews of Africa", the most successful and energetic of West African peoples. Also look at the dynamic nature of the early Islamic world, compared compared to the stagnant nature of the modern one. And what's true of the Islamic world is equally true of the Iberian one; Brazil and West Virginia have the same basic problem. And back in the Middle Ages, too, it was the most fluid societies -- Lombardy, England, the Low Countries, and the Iberian states -- that were the most successful ones.
Also, I never said that religiosity by itself would result in downfall of a society. Lots of religious societies have done well in history, but they also had relatively good education. The early Islamic world you mention I think qualifies here. It's when you combine religiosity with terrible education that you're really doomed. The education serves as a check against the religiosity getting out of control and turning into theocracy, or whatever you call the wackiness we're seeing in the right-wing here in America today.
Probably, these days, everyone has something better to do.
Edit: perhaps the grandparent comment meant that crime in England was "a lot worse" than in Japan? If so, then yes that's true.
"Obama administration spent billions to fix failing schools, and it didn’t work"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/obama-adminis...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
They tried forced busing of students to schools across the cities in Ohio back in the 70s and 80s to equalize school demographics. Parents moved in droves to the suburbs and Ohio cities only started recovering in the past 10 years after the program was ended in the 90s. No one wanted their children to go to a school 40 minutes away when there was a perfectly good one within walking distance.
If one still thinks this is a viable solution, how is it going to going to avoid the mistakes of previous attempts? Last thing the cities here need is a mass migration back to the suburbs when the cities have just started turning around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_City_Schools#1977_Des...
This is a good starting point:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
And the only people that didn't want this were the racist parents of students of upper-middle class schools:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSU1GvuLPs
It's actually quite embarrassing to watch.
In light of that, there's very little that the state can do to force middle class families to stay in integrated school districts, and that issue destroyed integration efforts in the '70s and '80s in most of the northeast.
The real solution to the larger problem is probably a completely different education system, but the solution to this particular problem is to expand busing to the suburbs. If desegregation is the only solution to highly unequal educational outcomes, we simply need to pursue to greater lengths.
Some districts like Columbus lost around 1/3 of their students over the 20 years they forced school integration. Ohio schools are funded by property taxes (not the best of ideas, but that's what the state decided), so Columbus was also forced to close many schools, cut back spending and likely hurt schools even further. It definitely hurt the city, since tons of buildings were left empty for years and no one had much of a reason to visit the city after 5pm.
San Francisco assigns students to schools via a lottery. The result looks a lot like this.
But in many major cities, the majority of children are already minorities. The white children who do live there are part of the upper middle class and their parents won't accept the downsides of re-integration. I see this in DC, parents either put their kids into private school, try to get a charter school, or leave the district for suburbia.
You could try to bus the kids to suburbia, but the logistics are tough. The suburban cities don't want it and fill fight it.
Desegregating the cities is the better option.
Well that's pretty hard to do in DC because now you're talking about crossing state lines. DC is a federal district, totally separate from Maryland and Virginia where the suburbs are. That's a lot harder than just busing kids from one school to another in the same district within the same state.
Not to mention, we had a 750 sqft, 2 bedroom apartment that cost $3,000 a month. It was a quality of life downgrade compared to living in the Seattle suburbs.
When I visited it seemed true: lots of rather young kids walking around the streets on their own, tons of tiny mixed use roads for kids to freely and safely walk around in, etc. Heck, culturally they even have that Kid Tasks[1] show. It seemed a lot better for kids than NYC (where I live now), Silicon Valley (where I used to live), or small suburban towns in the south (where I grew up).
I'm also surprised you lived in a lived in a high-rise, famously uncharacteristic of Tokyo housing, which may imply you lived in a less family friendly district than the typical Tokyo resident.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-young-children-solo-com... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5k5XTZy0rA
And yeah, I lived in Shinjuku 5 minutes walking from the largest subway in the world in terms of people going through and it and physical size. It was a busy area.
This is the apartment I lived in - https://tokyoapartmentinc.com/room/17207/
http://www.rental-apartment-tokyo.com/?post_type=fudo&p=2036...
I never felt like an outsider at all, that wasn't an issue. The issue was that you have to make a daily effort to get your kids outside whereas in the suburbs here in Seattle, they can just go outside when they want. That's not an issue once your kids get older, but at 5 and 6 it's a little early to let them run around Shinjuku. It would have been easier if we lived outside the Tokyo center.
The dark is a real thing. It is not just the rain. It's more the large number of overcast days plus the very short days during winter months.
Whether or not it bothers you is a different matter. As far as I can tell, it's practically a biological thing. The lack of light just gets under some people's skin while others aren't bothered by it. Ask yourself, do you find gloomy days draining: oppressive clouds looming overhead, color washed out of everything, can't go outside, cold, wet? Or do you find them energizing: turbulent sky looking different every day, you snuggly in the warm light inside, doing creative stuff on a rainy day at home, or bundling up and getting refreshed by the cool breeze and rain spray?
If you're more the former, Seattle will suck your soul out and drown it in Puget Sound. If the latter, you'll love it.
Personally, it's a great fit for me. I love the contrast in weather between the summer and winter months. When it's miserable out, I love nothing more than settling in under warm lamplight and reading or coding. I can't imagine living somewhere arid. I would dry out like a frog on a hot windshield.
If you're considering moving here, I would suggest renting for a year. If you make it a full 12 months and don't feel oppressed by the climate at all, you should be fine.
The winter is Seattle is best spent hopping from coffee shop to coffee shop and getting snug with blankets.
Surely there's indoor swimming pools you can go to. In that climate, it seems to be stupid to even bother building an outdoor swimming pool.
Of course, if you're talking about the ocean/sound, there's not much you can do there, but I never hear people in the Northeast complaining about it rarely being warm enough to swim at the beach. I doubt the water's ever warm in Maine either.
>>>If we can fix schools and crime, like other civilized nations, then there is no reason to believe people will move out of cities once they reach a certain age.
If it was an easy prop, it would have been achieved, may be you should see "The Wire Season 4" to get an idea!
Incidentally, Vancouver also used to be a city where people would flee to the suburbs when starting a family. At least, it was before the suburbs became just as comically unaffordable as the city.
Also rent in cities like Paris is prohibitive for most families. There is also the problem that in Paris, as in smaller-but-still-large cities, large apartments have been divided into several smaller ones to make more profit for the landlords. So it is even more difficult to just find a large apartment, supposing you could afford it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/11/03/so-much-fo...
Most parents leave SF because they don't want their kids being part of a failed social experiment. The SF USD has been playing social scientist since the 1970s with disastrous results.
Want to make it better? Kick the DINKs off the school board and make having an enrolled child a requirement for being on the board.
Honestly, if I found a partner who wanted kids, I'd be looking really hard at finding a job in another country because this country (US) is a terrible place to raise a kid.
[1] mostly white but from non-professional families.
Indeed. You don't see much investigation on the consequences of these experiments; the state is rarely introspective. If there was any bigger accelerant to the white flight phenomena in the 70's than the `integration' experiment I've never heard of it. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and when it was decided that Detroit (and therefore many other big urban school districts) couldn't force surrounding suburbs to participate in the experiment (Milliken v. Bradley) the fate of that city and many others was sealed.
I am well aware of this policy and have been for a long time.
AND YET, I still get mortified and upset every time I am reminded of it. It's mind-bogglingly bad policy. My children are not in SFUSD but even still, I feel like I should work politically against this policy just to make the world a (much) better place.
Do you mean Dual-Income No Kids? If so, which board members have no kids, or no kids in the district?
I do bet, though, that this experiment stemmed from people taking over the areas where the good schools were. You'd just be switching problems, though, by allowing people to go to schools they're geographically adjacent to. See school district boundaries.
I still think you'd just be trading one problem for another. In the case that you have to live close then you would have to be wealthy enough to live close to a school that has activities and after school functions, etc, worth going to. The only people who'd be OK with that are obviously the people who either (a) already live close, or (b) can easily afford to move close to the better schools (of course the rich can always just send their kids to private schools, as well).
Poor people would prefer randomness since they're unlikely to get a top tier education for their kids anyway. Randomness gives them a chance. People wealthy enough to care but not wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools, on the other hand obviously won't like this: they'd prefer to guarantee their kids educational security via money.
What has been improving San Francisco schools (e.g. Balboa High School) was Asians taking over. Which is not a preferable mechanism, in many ways.
What would make San Francisco schools even better is to be able to afford to hire more teachers. The naive approach is to pump more money into the district, and we really should reform Proposition 13 of 1978, but a more practical approach would be to legalize housing construction, so teachers wouldn’t have to compete so much for non-luxury housing with firemen and nurses and service workers and homeless crackheads.
Serious question here: Why do teachers, firemen, and nurses need non-luxury housing? Why do they need housing at all in fact? If they can't afford to live in SanFran, wouldn't it make more sense for them to just stay out, and go live somewhere else?
For getting people to do those jobs, then places in SF would then need to pay them a princely sum to endure a long commute from other nearby cities. Or if that's too much, SF can simply go without firemen, teachers, and nurses and many other service workers. Surely that would quickly fix the housing problem in SF.
One thing that does work: segregating students by ability.
To balance it out, you would need some sort of region wide tax on private school attendance. If you want to opt out, you gotta pay. That would never happen so...back to the drawing board.
I don't understand this. That tax already exists; everyone [0] pays for public schools regardless of whether they have children in the system. If you send your children to private school, you are paying for both public and private school. If you don't have children at all, you are still paying for public school.
[0] Of course, "everyone" likely means "every property owner", as school taxes are usually property taxes.
When my public high school in a wealthy LA suburb faced steep budget cuts in the million of dollars during 2009-10, the booster club diverted more than half of the $5 million dollars that they had just raised from donors (families and alumni) for a new fake grass football and baseball field. This saved dozens of teachers, extracurriculars, and even some AP/IB programs. When the music program was cut district wide, dozens of stay at home and working parents got together and saved it by writing grants and running fundraisers (which they have to do every year now). Despite being low-middle class and having single parents who worked all the time, many of my classmates and I were able to participate in anything we wanted to because we could get second hand sports equipment and donations to cover expenses from team members' families. We always had a classmate who had a car or a parent with free time to drive us around, take us to college visits, and help us with science fair projects or model rocketry competitions. Even a few wealthy students can drastically change the support and infrastructure poorer students have access to and it makes a big differences (it certainly did for me).
Related articles: https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/2015/apr/28/s... http://www.economist.com/news/business/21578020-sweden-leadi...
P.S I actually think we are unique in the world with supplying private companies with tax-money for health and school.
everyone pays property taxes, but only property owners pay it directly. for everyone else it is hidden in the costs of goods and services that required real estate.
It's not just helping out in the classroom and joining committees. Educated parents know what good education looks like (or at least, we have an opinion in the matter). We know when to demand better. We know when we need to thwart a pedagogical fad. My hometown school eventually adopted algebra in 8th grade, and calculus in high school, because a few parents hounded the school board. Simply by being around, we see what's going on. To be fair, we also support school programs when they work. And we also know how to demand resources, for instance by supporting funding referenda at the local level.
The problem with schools in the US could be expressed by saying that somebody has to stand in as the guardian of the schools, but we don't know who or how.
Selective schools, OTOH, can attempt to select against bad & disruptive students.
If the parents are upset, they won't be involved and you get bad schools.
- They aren't having children at all
- They are having children very late, essentially already settling in the city
- They are having fewer children if any
- Since all of the jobs are in the city, they are optimizing commute times
- The burbs housing stock are all 40+ year old homes that need significant system updates
- I don't see the unbridled consumerism the boomers had, less stuff = less requirement of space
I find that funny, because in Texas, the jobs are all in the suburbs and are rapidly moving farther out into the suburbs and even the exurbs.
I live in the suburbs of Dallas, and of the four jobs I've had, I've commuted further out into the suburbs for three of them. Only one of my jobs was in the city. And the number of jobs in the suburbs are growing: we've had some big-name companies relocate their headquarters from other states to Dallas suburbs like Plano and Frisco, and one big-name company that used to be headquartered in Downtown Dallas just moved their headquarters to Irving, another suburb of Dallas.
Also, my current employer is based in an inner-ring suburb (Plano) and there's been talk of how we're probably going to outgrow our office in a couple of years, and from what I've heard we're very likely to relocate to an exurb.
> The burbs housing stock are all 40+ year old homes that need significant system updates
This doesn't apply to Texas either. Most of the suburbs, and especially the exurbs, were built in the last 30 years or so, and a good amount of them were built in the last 10-20 years (e.g. everything in Prosper and Celina is very new development). Most of what's now suburb and exurb was farmland when I was a kid, and I'm only 32.
I could keep going, but the point is NYC, SF, and Boston are the outliers in the US, not the other way around.
Austin is no different from the rest of Texas. I have friends in Austin; the way they describe Pflugerville, it sounds exactly like Plano or Richardson. Dell's corporate campus is in Round Rock, too.
Yeah, the city center is full of hipsters, but the suburbs are indistinguishable from those of Dallas and Houston.
So...what kind of housing stock accommodates people living with roommates? The exact same 2/3/4 bedroom apartments that young single people share are the ones that families need. If the issue is that 4 single people with jobs can outcompete a couple with 3 kids, then the problem is with the total quantity of housing stock, not the mix.
New families don't have the income to pay what 3/4/five professionals can pool together to afford that 2/3/4 bedroom flat.
Some market regulation, like with fire codes, would really help with improving quality of life by raising privacy and encouraging larger unit-plan apartments.
Dealing with information asymmetry is one of the big functions of consumer protections laws, and is one of the useful functions of government.
An interesting anecdote: I live in Little Rock, AR, which, as I'm sure you're thinking, is just a booming urban metropolis. I don't know what is different about the city here, but every single apartment, townhouse, etc. is very clearly built with a family in mind. There's always a master bedroom and a child bedroom. (It was very frustrating when apartment hunting with a friend since neither of us were ever pleased with the child room.)
If I had to speculate, it's likely that the vast majority of people who can afford to live downtown are older. The city has a growing tech scene, but most of its employees are middle aged.
It could, but who is going to push for this change? SF has an extremely low proportion of families (fewest children of any major city). Are single millennials and DINKs going to make this a priority?
Even with more schools, the school board would mismanage them. It's easier just to move than it is to fight an entrenched bureaucracy.
With the greater density (3x according to [1]), you'd expect lower utilities, transportation, etc. costs. "Shelter" (i.e., housing minus utilities, furniture, etc.) is typically only a bit more than transportation as a category of spend, and about 1/5 of total annual expenditures.[2]
I've read claims that suburban property taxes are artificially low (mainly on articles on HN, but can't seem to find any right now) and obviously funding highways and commuter rail out of general taxes subsidizes sprawl.
I wonder how this cost comparison would look from a balance of system perspective as is, and then what a higher land tax would do. Has anyone seen or done anything like this?
[1] http://www.demographia.com/db-intlsub.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
Metro Vancouver studied this and found that when transportation costs were factored in, car reliant outer suburbs became more expensive than "pricy" downtown and inner suburbs.
http://bc.ctvnews.ca/suburbs-pricier-than-vancouver-when-tra...
That's not quite enough to support the blanket statement "living in the suburbs is not cheaper than living in a city."
As someone who's in this situation right now, I can guarantee you that moving out of my city is the frugal option.
The reason is for this is because many of these suburbs are wholly designed for the car and that's the only viable transportation option for anything and the car is the most expensive form of transportation.
But most of the major cities that I've been to in the US don't have a decent public transportation system. If they would fix this, then people could become less reliant on cars.
BLS estimates on average its more like 33%. And urban areas are significantly higher than the suburban areas. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/ConsumerExpend...
When you consider how little the average family is saving, then you'll see why there isn't a lot more extra money to throw around.
Some cities. (And, more specifically, some parts of some cities.) I'm sure it's not hard to find inexpensive housing in many areas of Detroit, to give one example.
It really boils down to demand and land value, which is a particular problem in cities that can't just spread out further.
Suburbs are much, much, much cheaper than urban areas when they are not near high income employment or have quality school districts. Suburbs near(meaning commute time) high income employment and quality schools are as expensive, if not more expensive as urban areas when controlled for square footage.
Because density costs a lot of money.
Density raises land values, which costs residents more money. Density requires better construction and better construction materials, which costs residents more money. Density allows for better serviced neighborhoods (closer to retail, closer to public services, closer to amenities), which are more desirable, which costs residents more money. Transportation becomes more expensive (once you factor in opportunity cost) which costs more money. Taxes are higher, to support extra services suburbs don't have or need, which costs residents more money.
Density has lots and lots of great positive benefits, in terms of land use and environment and such. But it has a huge cost drawback, that most people ignore, and which drives much of the development of sprawl.
It's not that suburban living is cheap. It's just way cheaper than urban living, which is crazy expensive (even in "low-cost-of-living" Midwest cities, urban living is usually 2x to 3x the cost of the suburbs).
Given the density in cities that you mention, properties like that simply don't exist or are outside of the reach of most people. Arguably, that's how it should be - most people shouldn't be able to live in expansive homes and work in urban environments, but that's the baseline we've setup for two generations now.
These 'clever hacks' are not sustainable solutions to the bigger problem at hand.
Jesus Christ. It would be very difficult to even spend that much money on a house or apartment near where I live, outside Charlotte, NC.
I doubt they'll still be living in the city by the end of this year.
Allow me to explain in plain English. People born in 1981-1999 are getting older and moving out of cities. Thus reversing a trend that was never meant to be ever-increasing.
However the author is missing a couple key components that lead me to believe the future will not be like the past. For example...
1.) In the past there were suburbs to move to. For example, in the 80s and 90s, Contra Costa (Walnut Creek, Danville, etc) were being developed as a viable suburb to SF. However, as far as I know there are no new suburbs being developed that provide a reasonable commute time or distance from SF.
2.) Of the suburbs that exists, those that are a reasonable commute time from major hubs are still pretty expensive. Again Walnut Creek maintains its value quite well. So it's not really a "cheaper option" from the city.
3.) Baby Boomers are living longer and staying in their suburb homes longer, which doesn't give an opportunity for millennials looking to start a family to move in. I've long since thought that instead of building new suburbs, we should be looking for options to move empty-nesters from their 4-bedroom homes that they don't need anymore. All of my friends parents still live in their suburban homes because they have no other options for the most part.
4.) Author assumes all millennials are waiting to have kids. (They're not.)
5.) We have plain old population growth to rely on. Cities collapsed in the past because there were places for people to go and a relatively smaller population. I strongly feel that we've exhausted a lot of those options while our population continues to grow strongly (at least in the US). Therefore, cities will remain full simply because of lack of other options and population growth (both by birth and immigration).
I'm not clear on why they think entry level jobs result in city living. If anything, the cost of living makes it seem like it would be the opposite.
Businesses and good jobs start to concentrate in urban downtowns, then the city gets too dense or polluted or expensive, people migrate for a better life to raise kids in a commutable distance based on the tech available (street cars, railways, cars), they go too far for the kids to find a job nearby when they are of working age, and then the kids move back to the city.. and the cycle restarts anew.
If the numbers are similar even for larger cities then I'm not surprised why people move out to the burbs - a 1 bedroom apartment gets very cramped with kids - especially when you don't live somewhere like NYC/SF with enough parks/amenities around.
Generations are always ~20 years or so. Gen X was 1961-1981, Boomers were 1943-1960, Silents were 1925-1942, GIs were 1901-1924, etc.
This is just my observation as someone who has seen and is currently engaging with a spectrum of youth in the school system. Thoughts?
http://www.lifecourse.com/about/method/timelines/generations...
And a Wikipedia article with an overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Source for Strauss and Howe coining "Millennial":
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/advertising/story/2012-...
> "No one knows who will name the next generation," says Neil Howe, who, along with his deceased co-author and business partner, William Strauss, is widely credited with naming the Millennials, a generation he figures spans from about 1982 to 2004.
One big datapoint here is the most recent election: Trump won several thousand counties to Clinton's several hundred. This was mimiced up- and down the ballot and was almost perfectly divided as a cities vs. everyone else thing.
You cannot escape economic reality no matter what the vote buyers think.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_the_Great_Plai...
Just having more online services like future-Amazon seems like money would leave the economy and destroy the town faster than building a Walmart does.
Laborers would have a role to play with exoskeletons, being the eyes on the ground, and directing the robotic labor. Technicians would maintain the systems, and managers would organize logistics and resources. And as long as there is industry, there will be all the other types of supplementary businesses and jobs that come with a town.
The second problem is that globalization and efficiency might mean there is nothing for the factory to do that anyone wants to pay for.
When I say "most", I am not kidding. A few studies tell that something between 70% and 80% of people living in Paris would like to move away! That's huge.
Residential-only suburbs were built with free money to create the road network, but produce no value, so they're running on loans but can't actually pay for anything. That's why many of had to start using speed traps for income.
http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/2/the-cost-of-auto...
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/8/25/stroad-nation.h...
The Rust Belt may have died, but not because they took too many loans!