Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wcummings | Hacker News Reader

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>If you can remote-work

Lots of people can't. Most people don't work in tech, and probably can't. Telling service workers to live in the boonies and commute an hour and a half by car to their minimum wage job is stupid and tone deaf, obviously there are better solutions.

>use newly affordable automobiles to get to their workplace

Many metro areas are so congested automobiles are no longer the convenient affordable choice they used to be. For some mass transit is less about being planet-conscious and more about not wanting to sit in traffic for half the day and spend $300/mo on parking.

Property is hardly an optimal free market and there's lots of things we can do to improve the situation other than making fun of "Millennials". Most people I know would happily pay less to live outside of the city so long as they were still well-connected to the city center by the transit network. Expanding and improving commuter rail access and building denser more appealing suburbs will be big wins imo.

They can work in Kansas City instead of Manhattan or SF. I'd say the majority of folks never consider moving out of the big population centers (by definition, actually). And its a really good idea, not just because of housing and density issues, but other quality of life measures.

Cities are expensive for everyone. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to frictionlessly relocate. There's a reason lots of people live where they do. Telling people to "just move" is not a real solution.

Telling people its hopeless is actually not a solution at all. And those people 'just moved' to NYC after all.

City projects take decades to take shape. It's not hopeless, it just takes time and political will. There are people advocating for greater zoning capacity, streamlined permitting processes and investment in mass transit, among other things.

>And those people 'just moved' to NYC after all.

When the rich get priced out of downtown, they don't move to KC. They move to cheaper areas outside of downtown and drive up prices for lower-income people living there. When four young professionals pile into an old single family home because there aren't enough apartments, that drives up prices for families who have one or two sources of income, not four. This affects everyone who lives in a city, not just wealthy transplants. Yuppies are not the ones being displaced. The solution is a steady increased supply of market-rate housing.

> "The solution is a steady increased supply of market-rate housing."

Politically induced zoning density restrictions which benefit landholders over tenants and those who wish to buy housing should be reversed and then allow markets to create more housing. The cost of the high cost of housing is for this reason -- a market failure called "rent seeking." Fix the market inefficiency, -- the market failure -- and everyone but landholders benefit.

There is a huge gap between "not frictionless" and "impossible". Sometimes, people have to make hard choices. The reality is that if you want to live in a trendy/convenient/nice part of a major city, then you will have to pay for it, because EVERYONE wants to live there.

Sometimes, you just can't have everything you want.

It's not just the trendy parts. Eventually even nearby suburbs become very expensive. Yuppies are not moving to KC, they're pushing the poorest city residents further and further away from the city. It's fantasy to think it's the relatively well-off who will have to move, or that the poor people who are being displaced have that much mobility. Just look at all the people trapped in economically depressed rural areas, why don't they all "just move"? Lots of Americans have literally no savings and very little job mobility and moving a long distance is pretty much impossible.

The quality of life of Kansas City vs Manhattan is not an increase, or at least, very likely not for most people living in Manhattan. The "American Dream" of having a house full of rooms you don't need, 2.5 kids and a yard for the dog isn't all that appealing to a lot of people. Many of these people are pretty happy to be living in cultural centers where they don't need to own a car. Most of the cost of living savings you get moving out you lose in salary adjustments, car payments, and lack of small housing.

I've done Southern suburbia life, and now North East city living and I can tell you N=1 you'd have to pay at least 5x my salary to even tempt me into going back.

Manhattan has 500K fewer people than the greater KC MSA and there's only one Manhattan but uncountable number of cities across the country.

The marketing message might be that urban living is the only acceptable life choice solely because of the date of your birth (astrological reasoning) but apparently only a very small percentage of people are getting that message. Enough are, such that prices are out of control in the fad areas, but almost no one lives there on a nationwide basis so it doesn't matter as a national issue, which is why its not getting fixed.

A good analogy is every christmas season has "the toy" that is in insane demand that perhaps 95% of the population do not want, but the demands of an extremely vocal tiny minority always result in a human interest story on TV. Doesn't mean its important or a universal desire for all humanity, just means its good clickbait.

There's a luxury downtown apartment building a block from where I work that I acknowledge exists. Approximately 120 rental residents have gotten the message that urban is the only way to live and suburbs are passe and unstylish, and they pay five times my mortgage in rent for the "privilege". However, I live in a burb 20 miles away with an eighth of a million other people unwilling to pay five times more than our mortgage as apartment rent. And our schools are top of the line as opposed to the urban district being reported as worst in the nation. Similar, predictable street crime stats. And my burb doesn't have panhandlers lining the freeway ramps and homeless people pooping on the sidewalk, but somehow I survive the lack of those cultural attractions at my home.

>almost no one lives there on a nationwide basis

"About 1 in every 38 people living in the United States resides in New York City." [1] I wouldn't call that "almost no one".

>There's a luxury downtown apartment building a block from where I work that I acknowledge exists.

I wouldn't complain, if those "luxury" downtown apartments didn't exist, your nice little suburb would be more expensive, those people have got to live somewhere. "Luxury" is a meaningless buzzword that developers like to put on their marketing materials.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/data-maps/nyc-population/...

You need to compare the size of the numbers. My eighth of a million person burb can adsorb 120 people from one luxury apartment without a peep. We have a little private college where 3000 people appear and disappear every year with barely a peep in the market. Of course there is a building boom downtown of exclusively luxury apartments, nothing under say $3K/month, plenty up to $5K or probably higher.

I earn a 95%th percentile income for my area. The only urban housing being built is for people paying 5x as much as my income. That is a very small fraction of the local population. If income were linear instead of exponential that would be less than 1% of the population can afford urban living, the other 99% will have to live in the burbs or somewhere other than urban areas. If someone earning five times my income were kicked out of their apartment, they'd likely be living in a place much nicer than my burb, not that its anything bad, but its probably only the 3rd wealthiest burb in the area. There would be effects in the border areas where 120 people would be pushed downwardly mobile thru all the neighborhoods.

Different strokes for different folks man. It's not the siren song of the marketer's pyrite that draws people to the cities (and I'd love to see your numbers considering the total population of Kansas is a quarter of nyc alone). Living in a tiny town 20+ miles from the city center honestly sounds like hell for me, and many of the people I know; we have no interest in ever starting a family, in owning a car, in restricting our options for food and culture, hell in some cases even home ownership. Clearly the opposite is the case for you and that's ok, just, don't pretend like you have some cosmic truth figured out.

KC's not much better for a family if you want to actually live in the city. The schools there suck so you'll be paying for private school, housing of more than two bedrooms is rare and (by local standards and considering local wages) very expensive outside of dangerous run-down neighborhoods.

Granted the 'burbs aren't that far away compared to other cities—but our public transit's also terrible (likely too spread out to every have great public transit, no matter what) so you'll always be driving.

>Most people I know would happily pay less to live outside of the city so long as they were still well-connected to the city center by the transit network.

Nailed it. If I could drive 10-20 minutes and catch a high speed rail of < 1 hr to get to work, I would certainly do so.

Instead I rent a room from a person much wealthier than I a mile or 2 from the city center.

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