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In this debate, we should look to cities in other countries. As I understand it, Paris/ Vancouver/ London/ Tokyo etc have never been subject to the "rule" that young couples move to the suburbs once they are ready to raise families. Nor are they subject to the rule that cities are dangerous and have bad schools. 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.

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I reside in London, and not even as a youngster but even as a mid 50s you have to live in the suburbs.

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.

Schools in London were getting a lot of attention, I got the impression they had improved significantly in recent years.

> Also I'd argue that London hasn't fixed crime

Or pollution. The city is a cesspit. I can't wait to get out.

Wow, this is a very categorical view that does not provide any additional data or useful information.

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.

Median London salary is ~£35,000, or £2,247.27/month after tax - 1/8th of which is £280. Most people are paying a lot more than that, even for a room share, way outside of Zone 1. I would suggest yours isn't a representative financial situation.

> 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.

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.

Umm, he means the total price, not the monthly rent.

You missed the k which means thousand

You missed "k" in his prices. He talks about buying, not renting.

I believe he is talking about buying condos; those prices are in thousands of dollars. Based on friends of mine living in London, my understanding is that rent is much more expensive that that (and more or less in line with NYC rental prices).

You say "fix schools and crime" like it is known empirically what to do. It is not as simple as pumping money into the districts.

France, Canada, England, Japan and other "civilized nations" debate how best to fund schools and fight crime just like the US.

To add credence to your point, this headline from last week:

"Obama administration spent billions to fix failing schools, and it didn’t work"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/obama-adminis...

And here's an alternative solution: re-integration

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...

Moving students around schools in an attempt to equalize race and poverty levels isn't a new concept and it's been tried before (and possibly still done in some states/cities).

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing

> Moving students around schools in an attempt to equalize race and poverty levels isn't a new concept and it's been tried before (and possibly still done in some states/cities).

San Francisco assigns students to schools via a lottery. The result looks a lot like this.

What you fail to mention is that it worked. Seriously, busing students and reintegrating schools worked.

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.

You're absolutely correct - the average American theoretically believes that every child is entitled to a high quality, equal education, but in reality only if it doesn't cost them anything.

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.

As you mentioned, I think the option of being able to move to districts that weren't integrated and combined the way many districts tend to be funded (via property taxes) ended up being a net loss more than a net gain. If the integration experiment showed positive results as some have mentioned, families could still move elsewhere and they did. Even if integration had been enforced statewide, one could still move to a small district with only a few schools.

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.

Reintegration is a great plan for areas where a relatively few number of minorities live somewhat near middle income or better areas.

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.

>You could try to bus the kids to suburbia, but the logistics are tough.

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.

Fighting crime is not that much of a discussion topic in the "other civilized nations", because it is not as big a problem there. The US debate about crime might even be counter-productive as it bars the option to do things that have been shown to work (rehabilitation instead of punishment, reduction of poverty/inequality)

That's simply not true - there are a lot of people talking about rehabilitation over retribution and the role of poverty and inequality in crime. It's not barred by any means.

Also in e.g. Europe if you ask people how to better prevent crime many people probably would say to be tougher on criminals. The difference I guess is that crime is not really an issue often discussed in regards to politics.

Japan is pretty famous for having almost no crime. I doubt they're debating crime-fighting. Their main problems as a society seem to be workaholism and a lack of children, not crime or school quality.

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.

Crime is England is a lot worse than Japan or the US?

Um, no. It's FAR safer than the US, but not nearly as safe as Japan (but then, what is)? Comparing crime statistics is notoriously difficult due to differences in methodologies and reporting rates, but "homicide" is one statistic that has sufficiently uniform categorisation and reporting rate as to enable a comparison. Doing that, you can see that the US is about 4 times worse than the UK, and 13 times worse than Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

Edit: perhaps the grandparent comment meant that crime in England was "a lot worse" than in Japan? If so, then yes that's true.

As you said, it's hard to compare because of methodology and such. Yes, the US looks bad when you average everything together, but that ignores that some places are very different from others. Basically, if you stay out of blighted urban districts ("ghettos"), you're far less likely to suffer from violent crime. Many of the homicides here are because of gang violence, something that really only affects gang members and people living around them.

If you take out areas with high crime in any country then of course the statistics look better. Similarly of course it's possible to find areas in one country that are safer than areas in another country if you want to.

You're ignoring the fact that there's a huge racial division in the US. If you're a white person, gang warfare in the black or hispanic ghettos simply does not present a danger to you the way it does to those minorities. (Note I'm not saying these problems shouldn't be dealt with or that these minorities should be ignored or that the deserve it, just that this is the reality on the ground.)

From what I can tell, in European countries the divide isn't so stark and middle-class-and-up people are more likely to be victims of petty and street crime like muggings. Here, if you're a white suburban dweller, you just don't have to worry about being victimized in a mugging or carjacking very much, while in the ghettos you definitely do.

Where is your source for crime in England being "significantly" worse than the US?

Japan is pretty famous for having almost no crime. I doubt they're debating crime-fightin

The reason for this is not generally applicable outside extremely homogeneous populations.

Singapore is one of the most diverse countries in Asia and has similar crime rates to Japan.

Singapore is over 75% ethnically Chinese. That's still remarkably homogeneous by US standards.

It depends what you mean by "diverse". You could say Switzerland is diverse, they speak 3 languages there, but there is an essential Swissness that everyone generally agrees on. I believe the same is true of Japan. Maybe the word I actually wanted was somewhere between homogeneous and harmonious.

Over 15% of Singapore's population are non-citizens ("foreign talent"), so whatever they're doing it's not the same as Switzerland

Singapore has similarly low crime figures and is not remotely as homogeneous as Japan.

What's the reason, then? Looking at Appalachia and southern Italy, I don't see any reason to believe that ethnic/racial/cultural homogeneity is a magic bullet.

Pretty much all the crime in rural areas is a side effect of drugs. There isn't enough anonymity in those areas to actually be a career criminal (other than dealing drugs).

These societies' problems are certainly not recent, and they're not just due to drugs. For Appalachia, read _Albion's Seed_ or at least Slate Star Codex's review ("the sensibility is positively Orcish"); for Sicily, read Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_ (watch for the section on "asabiyya black holes"), and probably _The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society_. Both of these societies have been absolutely awful for centuries.

It's definitely not, proven by the examples you cited.

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.

But if good public education and low religiosity were the magic bullets, the Soviet Union would never have fallen; if homogeneity was necessary, Singapore wouldn't work and the Ottoman Empire would always have been dysfunctional; if high religiosity was bad in itself, Bavaria would be a hellhole. Some religions get in the way, others don't -- and some actively help to enrich their societies. (Zoroastrianism should come to mind. Rice was the staple crop of Persia before it was the staple of China, thanks to pious Zoroastrian agricultural research; and building an aqueduct or draining a swamp was a fast path to paradise. Down to the present, the Zoroastrians do pretty well for themselves -- the Parsis of India are the main population of Zoroastrians today -- and some of their habits of mind seem to still be present in Iran today.)

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.

You make some great points, but for your Soviet Union point I'd like to counter that indoctrination does not equal "good public education". Good public education teaches you to question authority and to think critically. That kind of education is notably absent in authoritarian regimes.

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.

The Soviets really did do a good job in some important areas. No one had taken the basic skills, the "three Rs", seriously in Russia before them; science and engineering were also pretty good (apart from Lysenko in biology), and while 20th-century culture was closed off, 19th-century was certainly accessible. (Hugo and Dumas were a big part of Soviet popular culture, not in the sense of "what the state sponsored" but in the sense of "what people actually read.") Insofar as critical thinking is a subset of logic, science and math taught at least a little of it, too. Understand that I'm not defending the Soviets as a whole -- I think they were mostly cancer, and that the historical record backs me up on that -- but deserve credit where credit's due.

I think that the American right is a unique sort of society, and that patterns drawn from their behavior can't be relied on in most other contexts. Their religions look like Christianity but act like non-syncretistic paganism ("worshiping oneself in the guise of worshiping God"), and their hostility to an awful lot of scholarship seems to originate in not wanting to be taken for a ride -- and in the confidence of many peoples, especially relatively backwards ones, that they already know everything that's necessary in order to live well. (The Persians told Chardin as much in the 1500s, as mentioned in The Structures of Everyday Life.)

Have you read Albion's Seed? If not (and it's about 600 pages of historical scholarship, so I won't blame you), look up Slate Star Codex's review, which makes the book's essential points in reduced (and maybe slightly caricatured) form.

You could say Japan committed quite a lot of crime 75 years ago, but the population hasn't really changed since then.

Probably, these days, everyone has something better to do.

People often claim this, but I have never seen evidence for causation--just theories, whereas the actual evidence is only correlation.

One thing other civilized nations seem to do is fund schools/police at the state/nation level rather than the local level. Funding at the local level entrenches inequality.

I raised my kids in Tokyo for a year and it was painful (there are upsides too). One of the things I struggled with the most was that living in an apartment building made it very difficult to let my children run free. They'd have to head down 30 floors in an elevator and walk out to a busy street with nothing but concrete around. Living right outside Seattle now my kids open the door and are able to run in around in the neighborhood without us.

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.

How is the lack of sun in Seattle?

I have no issue with it. We get an amazing summer each year, several months of straight sunshine. I like that the weather changes and we have a variety of weather. 30 minutes from my home to snow skiing in the winter. My only issue is that it's never really warm enough to swim, though you can if you don't mind cold water.

If you like open water swimming, invest in a wetsuit. I lived in Seattle for 7 years - a 2mm or 3mm thick wetsuit should make the water quite comfortable.

I'd invest in a drysuit instead for Seattle.

Is the swimming as refreshing and enjoyable in a wetsuit? I've never tried one before.

It's a matter of preference. Wetsuits keep you warm when the water is cold. I find them more enjoyable for that reason, but if you're the type that likes cold water then you'll probably find them restrictive.

>My only issue is that it's never really warm enough to swim, though you can if you don't mind cold water

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.

I remember somebody once posted a weather map of the country here, where he defined an ideal day and counted the number for each area. Seattle actually did pretty well, though this is coming from a Maine resident, so pretty much everyone else wins.

It depends on the season. Sunny weather sucks in the winter. When it is cloudy in the winter the weather is nice and mild, when it is sunny it gets bitterly cold. I would take cloudy over sunny any day during the winter. Of course, I'm someone who prefers it to be overcast. The worst part of the year, for me, is the summer when it is hot (80s and 90s) and sunny for months on end. That sucks. The best seasons are the fall and spring when the temperatures are warm and it is partly cloudy.

Seattlite here. I know people who have moved here and left because they couldn't deal with the darkness, people who are here and the darkness doesn't bother them, and people (like me) who actually love the climate including the large amount of dark days.

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.

Can confirm the darkenss is more of a thing than rain. Rain is easy to fix, you throw on a wind breaker. Also rain is easier to deal with than snow that other places have. The darkness on the other hand, especially if you work can be hard. Sun up at like 8:15 and down by 4:30 can be easy to miss if you spend your time in an office. Then you live the summer months and you think: "This place is perfect".

The winter is Seattle is best spent hopping from coffee shop to coffee shop and getting snug with blankets.

What were the locals doing in Tokyo? I think you may have been experiencing more an issue of being an outsider (and possibly being shunned a bit for that) than of actually experiencing an insurmountable issue.

They were doing the same as us with children who were around 5 years old -- going to to parks, playgrounds, and other organized activities -- it was all organized and controlled. Many locals complained to me about how exhausting it was to have kids in Tokyo and didn't enjoy it.

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.

This is in very stark contrast to what I've heard that Tokyo is a city where children maintain a lot more freedom than western countries (especially the US) have moved away from[1].

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

Sure, when they are closer to 10 instead of being closer to 5 years old. My children were 5 and 6. They need to be 7 to take the train alone.

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...

They very much do in London these days. Unless you are a banker or a lawyer you aren't going to be owning a family size home in London. London has good train links to the surrounding counties so 30 somethings have been fleeing the capital to setting down along the commute routes.

With a couple of notable exceptions schools and crime aren't really problems in most American cities. NYC, for example, is one of the safest places in the world and has very good schools. People leave when they have families because of the cost of housing.

Manhattan maybe... East New York, not so much.

Other OECD countries do not have Gen Y that is as big as US, looking at other countries may not help that much beyond a point.

>>>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!

What is hard is getting people to admit they're wrong. It's so very easy to see that there's rotten stuff in US society, but nobody wants to face it, that's it. The data is clear, european social democracies are better socially developed than the US is(and I don't mean it like I think have it all figured out and they're awesome, just that they've been able to do some sensible stuff, shit that should be just common sense not the saint graal for fucks sake), they have absurdly lower crime and misery rates, are better educated, this is a fact. IMHO it's not the matter of being "easy/hard", it's the matter of "political will", if there were will, it would be easy, since there is not, it becomes "impossible".

Half of the USA will reject anything but free market, pull your self up by your bootstraps, capitalism as "Socialism".

It is very common for Vancouverites to move to the suburbs when them want to raise children. The public schools are definitely better in many of the suburbs, and the crime is much lower in the wealthy suburbs than near the city's center.

Vancouver definitely does this. Young couples looking to start families cannot afford to live in the downtown core now, and move to areas like Victoria or Kelowna instead.

Vancouver isn't a good example. Families are fleeing the city for several reasons, ranging from impossibly high cost of living, the low probability of finding a 2+ bedroom apartment, and the unavailability of childcare.

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.

The criminality in Paris and surroundings is 2x to 3x the average of the country (including Paris).

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.

Even in the US, it isn't the rule. Basically the baby boomers did it and that's it. I guess that could be expected of their unsustainable IGMFY generation, but go one generation in either direction and you'll find plenty of aging people who have stayed in their cities. Suburbanization was a trend that peaked at McMansions and has been returning to normalcy ever since.

Exurbs are on the increase though.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/11/03/so-much-fo...

He says "exurb" like it's a McMansion ultra-suburb, but then the words "town center" "walk around" "business" come up, so isn't it actually a small city?

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