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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

This boils down to the baby boomer generation doing a terrible job at saving for themselves outside housing, and demanding millennials buy them out of their investment. When they don't, they scream "stupid millennial, why don't you just have more money" ... so they can ultimately get that too. They are largely not very desperate, yet still so afraid that even in their later years they horde wealth.

In the Bay Area, I feel like rent or buy, I'm just working hard so the older generation can continue living well off our backs. The vast majority of them have made no intelligent investments or savings other than property. And they are now incentivized to make life as miserable as possible for the next generation, so they can live out their remaining years as well as they are accustomed too. My landlord whined about how she makes so little, whilst attempting to hold onto 2.8mm USD in property.

I find it hard to swallow... but also inevitable.

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The cohesiveness of existing communities is always going to be at odds with the ability of new communities to form and take hold. It's almost heartwarming that Boomers built lives they love so much, they're willing to go to such lengths to prevent any change.

I expect the Boomers would have faced the same thing from their parents and grandparents. What saved them was, rather than pushing inwards to city land already occupied by the powerful, they pushed outwards to sprawl, or into racial minority neighborhoods which didn't, at the time, have a legal mechanism to meaningfully resist.

When society saw how destructive this was, it made it much harder to repeat. This is, often, the history of downzoning and the origin of those processes that notify and invite busybodies to stop development. There are moral justifications behind these controls (particularly as they apply to disadvantaged neighborhoods), and to get anything done, we'll have to engage with them.

We're completely screwed now because the door is closed to "urban renewal," and sprawl is at its natural limits (under the levels of investment in public transit currently contemplated), and the impetus to live in cities with these problems is more economic necessity than personal taste.

> they pushed outwards [...] into racial minority neighborhoods which didn't, at the time, have a legal mechanism to meaningfully resist.

AFAIK in the boomer years the prevalent phenomenon was the opposite: minorities moving into formerly majority neighborhoods, and the majority moving out. This was known as "white flight".

You're right, I'm talking about the (mostly stalled) attempt by Gen X to walk back white flight in the 1970s, which is where much of the current thinking and policy around gentrification comes from.

According to Wikipedia, for Generation X "demographers and researchers typically use starting birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1960s and ending birth years ranging from the late 1970s to early 1980s."

So any members of Generation X were still children in the 70s or not yet born. I think you mean a different cohort or a different time.

What would flip that back around is remote work. The only reason jobs are in cities is the collaboration effects that it confers on service and thinking jobs. If we can get the technology to completely match or exceed those effects people will have a lot fewer trade offs to spreading out. At the same time, the main reason I would live in a city is access to people that only live in cities (you can have a lot more minorities in dense spaces). I imagine the future could be microcommunities of like minded people, or theme communities (much like we have on the internet now). One can argue that's what the suburban moves in the 20th century was all about. Diversity helps people access like minded people and exposes them to other viewpoints to an extent, but if you can still get the viewpoints why not live in a community of like minded people?

Where are the gay suburbs?

Cities have been densifying since the beginning of humanity...a trend that precedes the very existence of knowledge work. Remote work can only eliminate the usefulness of cities to the extent that work dominates our lives. Are you gonna make play remote too? Dating? Art? Dining? Music? The only people I know who have 100% remote work jobs still live in cities: New York, Miami, Puerto Vallarta, Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Bangkok, etc. They're no longer tied to the city chosen by their employer, but they still live in cities.

The utility of remote work is great, but its potential effect on urban form has been greatly overestimated.

Major cities may have densified from the beginning of humanity until downzoning; it doesn't follow that they will continue to do so. We're not talking about living in the woods here; there are plenty of third-string "cities" with cheap real estate.

>Are you gonna make play remote too?

Especially among SF tech workers, play mostly consists of leaving the city for nature sites and hiking/camping/climbing them.

>Dating?

Small cities and towns reproduce at a much higher rate than elite coastal cities. Some of those matches may have been made in college or while working in big cities in early adulthood, but the educated reproduce less. So, apparently yes.

>Art?

Hollywood, television, audio reproduction equipment, the Broadway tour, the music tour, and traveling exhibitions between art museums made art remote. Small, cheap cities often have thriving (though less nationally famous) local theater, ballet, symphony, and opera, as well as visual/performing arts venues capable of receiving more prestigious national tours.

Smaller communities may even have strong community/educational theater traditions and spaces, which while not exactly High Art, are a lot more personal and participatory than anything you'll pay $200 to see in Manhattan. Theater in small cities/suburbs is unique among the art forms in that average people get to work on reasonably high production value projects and present them to their peers and families. Tight real estate markets can't allocate so much space to amateur performance, and it's easier to put an awesome lighting rig in a high school auditorium when you don't have a homeless population.

>Dining

I guess the dining culture is more about what you cook, who you cook it with, hosting potlucks and BBQs and dinner parties in your enormous house and backyard, etc.

>Music?

Any tour that passes through the likes of San Francisco will pass through the likes of Milwaukee, and if not it'll certainly go to Chicago, an always-fun and usually-accessible jaunt from smaller Midwestern population centers.

>Are you gonna make play remote too? Dating? Art? Dining? Music?

Do you really think all of those only exist in cities?

Do you really think the quality of those found in non-cities even approach that of cities?

Maybe you have some alternate theory as to why remote workers overwhelmingly choose to live in cities?

https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/how-manage-remote-team/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2016/02/04/the-t...

Quality and diversity - the further out you go the more conservative heavy you get, and the more focus on schools and churches as community bases.

Have you ever left the city yourself? There's great food everywhere. The best food I've had has been outside of cities. There are art galleries at every college and some outside of them too, but even if cities have "better" art, I'm fine with just getting it from the internet. Same for music - Woodstock took place on a dairy farm. I'm not sure of the exact intent of "play" but things like hiking trails and snow tubing hills are found outside cities, along with again the internet. The only point here that might make sense is dating, if you assume a higher density of people means a higher chance of finding the right person for yourself, but it also means more competition.

If you want alternate theories, one influence could be that cities having higher populations means that among the group of people who have remote work, more of those people will live in cities. Also, someone who works as a programmer likely had to move to a city in the first place to get a job and wouldn't want to move out immediately after being used to living there. There are likely other factors too but I'm really not seeing how the quality of food and entertainment is supposed to be better enough in cities that it would be a driving factor.

The trade-off of some additional convenience living in the city might give you, for always having to be on the look out for pickpocketers, no outdoor privacy, not being able to feel as safe being out at night, having to pay for parking or use public transportation (I'd rather not have to only take home from the grocery store as much as I can fit in a backpack and then have to carry around a gallon of milk on the way home), having to deal with aggressive panhandlers and drug addicts asking you for money all the time, and higher cost of living among other things, isn't worth it to everyone, even if that's hard to believe for you. I've spent a fair amount of time in cities and I know that the negatives I listed are enough for me personally to not really want to live in one if I don't have to.

Can you explain what was destructive about sprawling outwards?

Sure. Cars kill about 40,000 people directly through collisions, and many more through the environmental toxicity of tailpipe emissions, before we even consider climate change. A built environment where cars are far and away the best option for getting around exacerbates these problems. More sprawl generates more traffic, meaning cars need to run and produce emissions for even longer to go the same distances.

Infrastructure like water and sewer is naturally cheaper at higher population densities. Low density municipalities are finding they don't have be tax revenue to maintain what they've built.

Then there's the environmental destruction inherent in clearing literal green fields for greenfield construction projects.

Then there's the social decay and public health crises like opiate addiction that come when a town built around a small collection of employers loses one or several of its major employers. People don't want to leave these places because they have family ties, so dysfunction festers and enters negative feedback loops. In cities, the same people could stand a chance of obtaining other jobs while still in proximity to their families, and benefit from government services will funded by the industries that didn't evaporate.

I've been seeing this for a while and predicting it for a good decade or so, but I think the next political divide will be young vs old, instead of right vs left. Boomers have done a million things to fuck over everyone that comes after them, and it's gonna take a while for it to happen but the younger generations are gonna start pushing back.

Anecdotally it already happens. I attended a Bernie Sanders rally here in Seattle and it was interesting to see the hordes of millenials cheering and chanting the whole time but go completely silent when he starts talking about the importance of social security. Millenials don't care about social security and it would probably be a net benefit for the majority of them if it went away, because the system as it is structured is just a massive wealth transfer to boomers which will be completely neutered by the time they are eligible for benefits.

The capped real estate taxes (in CA) is a perfect example of this.

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