Millennials Moving to Suburbs Will Change Economic Development
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
However after having run small businesses and/or freelancing for 10 years I can say that it is not something that everyone is cut out for.
The problem the cities have now is that they are not priced for people who work for a living. They are priced for people with access to intergenerational wealth and/or who don't work and just live off investments. Everything from the cost of property to the tax structure penalizes people who work severely and rewards people who own property and live off capital gains lavishly. Everything in the laws screams out "YOU SHOULD NOT BE WORKING HERE/EARNING A SALARY/STARTING A SMALL BUSINESS -- MOVE OUT, PEASANT."
People included in the "PEASANT" category include people earning low to mid six figure salaries. There is only so much that people will tolerate working hard to make their landlord rich. Other cities in the country that aren't the big offenders that everyone complains about don't really have this problem.
It is a problem that there is a solution for, though: move out, buy property, save money, work less, enjoy life more, get to keep the stuff that you used to give up to your landlord for the privilege of a few square feet in a dirty, stinky city with infrastructure that would humiliate someone from a country that isn't as backwards as the US.
We could own in the countryside or suburbs. Both have shitty commutes, limit opportunity, and come with worse arrangements. Sticker price is lower, but TCO is higher outside the city.
I'll take opportunity in the city; where I don't have to drive an hour.
And worse, our already large but planned to increase annually immigration levels, much of which are wives and children of the world's 1%, who also coincidentally choose to live in the two cities above, essentially guarantees that working class people (by that I mean anyone that actually works for a living) will be eventually pushed out, unless some sort of a public dorm system is introduced.
Whether income alone, property alone, or some (and if so, what) particular combination of those two should be taxed is a matter of some debate.
You can quibble about what the tax rates should be, but I was responding to somebody who made it sound like wealthy people pay no taxes, which is an utter misrepresentation of the situation.
Who? Because that didn't happen.
I wish you were right, however:
https://globalnews.ca/news/3773729/richmond-incomes-downtown...
A huge percentage of recent sales are to overseas investors (untaxed money), most of the appreciation wealth is accumulated by people who bought > 10 years ago, so no tax as it is their primary residence. So even though it seems hard to believe, in fact the majority of the money in this system is untaxed.
And if you're not familiar with the downtown eastside:
https://www.straight.com/news/847631/photos-three-months-dow...
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/3ddbwb/vancouver-dirt-now...
In case the logic isn't obvious:
If you own a house, you are wealthy.
Houses earn more than wages.
No taxes are paid on capital gains of primary residence.
Why should I have to pay higher taxes because I worked my ass off in school and continue to work my ass off, but someone who lucked into winning the modern day Canadian lottery gets a free ride? The legislation wasn't written with this scenario in mind I can tell you that for sure.
Our historic social contracts are starting to break down, if the state doesn't uphold it's end of the bargain, I don't see why I should uphold my end.
Wealthy citizens of the U.S. and Canada all had to pay income taxes on the money they used to buy the assets they own. People who are wealthy enough to get by entirely on income generating assets were probably at one time in the top income tax bracket, which means they forked over about 50% of their income to the government. Which, btw, is a much higher percentage rate than people in the lower tax brackets.
So, do wealthy people have it easier than non-wealthy people? Yes. But they had to earn an unbelievable amount of money (since they had to pay half of it in taxes) to get to that point. So maybe it's not actually that unfair. And, since high earners pay a higher tax rate, maybe it's actually kinda fair.
Usually, but not always. That's the point.
In some geographical regions in the world, ownership of real estate is starting to trump everything. When it comes to net worth, your income is largely a rounding error. Strangely, when this discussion is raised, a variety of standard responses seem to be raised, in this case, "oh, you're saying that this is the case always and everywhere - since that is obviously false, therefore your entire premise if false, end of discussion".
Another common conversational diversion tactic (that worked for several years in Canada) was shutting down any complaint by playing the race card. Since it is usually people from mainland China (unsurprisingly, considering the scope of new wealth in that country) who are involved in massive real estate appreciation is most parts of the world, again and again in all Western countries we've seen dissenting voices silenced by accusing them of racism, often by their very own governments who are supposed to be managing these things and protecting the best interests of citizens. And boy is it effective, up to a point. Citizens in Australia, New Zealand and Canada are finally getting fed up with their governments to brush off racism accusations, but it's far too little, too late - things are so far gone, nothing can be done without destroying the Frankenstein economies that the overall economy depends on. I often wonder if that was the plan.
People living in the US probably don't notice this nearly as much, as you have a large population and enjoy a massive and powerful economy, whereas foreign entrance into our markets cause significant effects.
I am a little more optimistic about things in general, though, for a couple of reasons:
1. I think Canada has a serious construction policy problem. My wife is from Langley, BC (we were just there over the Easter weekend). There is tons of land available to build on in BC. It’s incredulous that housing costs are so high with so much undeveloped land.
2. All it takes is a crash to flush all the investors out of the housing market.
Also another fun game the wealthy can play is they can fund a company with large sums of capital. Then make themselves officers of the company. Then the cars, houses, flights, and clothing budgets are all expenses of the company. So they personally pay no taxes and the "company" can write them off as a lose for the year.
But, if your new to city and want to come there, anything less than 120K (300K+ if you have a family of 4) isn't going to make it.
Not everyone earning $120k+ are "people with access to intergenerational wealth and/or who don't work and just live off investments". In fact I'd venture to say that most aren't.
True story. While the above is true for NYC, LA, Bay Area ... it's simply not true for Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio.
At the end of the day, I moved to Missoula so I can do my part as a millennial and start buying diamonds again.
I think about remote work drying up often, but I think if remote work dried up for me it would mean there was a major shift in the industry, so I don't think anyone would be safe from that.
Being near an urban center would mean that you could possibly pound the pavement for a new job in a major city a lot easier. If the industry changes massively, will being near an urban center mean there will still be a lot of jobs there? Maybe? Maybe not.
There are more, these are just the ones off the top of my head.
The burden of trust always falls on you, the developer. So you offer concessions to mitigate risk and hustle in the beginning to establish trust:
0) Reach out directly to the prospective job. Show them how you can make a remote arrangement work.
1) Offer a short term contract up front - if you're not "a good fit for each other" the terms allow either party to walk with little notice.
2) Offer to fly out to meet the team personally (most other prospective engineers won't do this). Factor this cost into your rate and _do not_ bother them with additional travel expenses. Tell them you'll "foot the bill".
2a) Give them a single invoice with one number - make it easy for them to pay you.
3) When you've finally joined the team remotely, quickly offer up cosmetic suggestions on PR's, open up new PRs to improve the on-boarding documentation, tackle a couple of simple stories and get a PR out within a few days.
4) Get the senior devs to do walk-throughs of the code on Slack. When you encounter something semi-difficult that Google can't answer, that would probably take you a couple of days to unravel but a senior dev already knows, _call_ them on slack. Swallow your pride. Make a call.
5) Goes without saying - don't miss the standups. If you were in the office, it's easy to see that you're doing something else. When you're 1500 miles away, especially in the beginning, nightmares of the remote dev going MIA kick in quick.
Would having the company coordinate your travel and expenses give you insight into how the company functions?
If you're trying to get a signal regarding whether the company is going to pay you and pay on time, request a tighter payment schedule, e.g. net 10. That reduces the risk a bit on your side (you won't end up working for two months for free) and isn't much different on their end.
> We know how and what to build when we're dealing with an influx of young urban renters. But what will they want as they age into their next phase of life, and how can policy makers meet their needs?
A lot of this article seems to be pinned on an unwritten idea that the suburbs are where you go when you want to grow up. This seems like a bit of a trap for developers and speculators, to me: at least in the city I live in, there has been some focus on urban development to provide services for families of all sizes.
This is basically been the case for decades in the U.S.
Other countries seem to get by just fine with living in cities and having kids.
Other countries don't concentrate all their disadvantaged people in the cities.
With that said, it's perhaps possible that millennial pushing for changes and upgrades and improvements and the fundamental human right of quality education for all might not yield an ideal outcome. Improving schools can very reasonably be expected to be multi-decade project of changing budgets, priorities, staffing, training, expectations, culture, and more. Someone with a toddler might want quality schools in the next three years instead of next thirty. This might, for some, incentivize a different set of somewhat more selfish reactions.
You're completely right. Millenials can, should, and are morally obligated to push for improvements and upgrades. But there may be a wrinkle or three.
With that said, is it possible that high-potential children could be viewed as something other than interchangeable widgets whose primary purpose is to make public schools that are failing many students look good? Especially given that such schools are often little better at meeting the needs of the high-potential children than they are all of the other children.
You're right. Charter schools are often guilty of creaming. Yet, are we doing anyone a favor by sacrificing the education of high-potential children to mask problems?
This seems to be in the same category as not letting a child walk alone to school, in a Western country, because of fear of Islamic terrorists -- possible, but so unlikely it is statistically improbable.
So their options are:
1) Take their child to the next closest and available school which is 30 minutes away
2) Pay for private school - which, as you can imagine, is expensive
3) Move
They're ultimately choosing #1, but I can easily imagine them getting sick of that quickly.
Oh well, I guess it's better than SF's system. Can't even imagine dealing with that.
It's interesting if that is the case in the US: it was also true in the UK in the 1980s and 90s with Central London having a reputation for poor schools.
However, today the UK situation is completely reversed and the narrative is more about why schools in the regions don't perform as well as schools in the capital.
One eye-opening statistic I read recently is that a disadvantaged/poor kid growing up in Hackney, East London (which is about as 'urban' as it gets here) is 3X more likely to go to university than a similarly disadvantaged kid growing up in the North of England.
That's how it is in the rural US.
We based this on:
0) We just really like the city and want to raise our kids in the city.
1) In Chicago, where we live, CPS students outperform the state overall. Source: https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/perception-vs-reality-c...
2) Breaking down a school's performance at the demographic level can often change the equation. The elementary school my son will attend actually scores higher for students above the poverty line than the one I attended out in the suburbs.
3) My wife is a STEM professor and has seen lots of students who attended the region's top-tier public schools (9/10 or 10/10 on greatschools, etc) that were woefully unprepared for college, despite otherwise decent ACT scores.
4) The suburbs are facing their own austerity crisis: postwar subsidized infrastructure gravy train is long over, so property taxes are rising. Their housing stock doesn't align well with the smaller and most cost-conscious millennial family. So a big worry for us was, do we want to buy into a "good school" suburb only to have our kid's school budget slashed to control costs? This is already happening to one Chicago suburb famous for its great schools (Hinsdale, IL)
5) School performance is, at best, a trailing indicator. Say you've got 2 kids under the age of 4. Is it worth buying a home somewhere because of a high school they won't be attending for 10+ years? It makes sense if you're talking about a radical difference in school performance, but marginal advantages seem prone to change.
I don't claim that this is the best course of action. For all we know, the city schools could just as easily go sideways due to budgeting issues, or maybe suburban schools are the first to break free from the trend of "teaching to the test" and our kids are left behind. But right now, it just feels like once you have a safe learning environment and some basic academic standards, most of the outcome is in the hands of the parents and students. High-performing schools don't produce great students so much as they attract the people who foster that attitude.
Uptown is amazing and while it is still rough around the edges it is easily one my favorite neighborhoods in the city. The crime is slowly getting better, but I think most parents of means send their kids to private school or lottery them somewhere else.... or move.
This is a classic: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...
It's much harder to find on Google today than it was 8 years ago.
For starters, I'm not moving. I hate moving and find it very stressful and disruptive.
Miami is going through the same, so many condo towers are going up it’s suppressing rents - in the most expensive area of the city. Yes, they are premium units, but the supply drives down rents across the board.
There's also the nebulous problem of investors buying units in new luxury buildings but not occupying or renting them. This could preserve high rent prices as new units are not being faithfully put into the housing pool. Stories about that pop up often but don't seem quantified as an issue.
I've lived in a very urban area and I miss it but I really don't. It's harder to get away there. I don't mind helping homeless people, but dealing with aggressively mentally ill people every other time you step out the door or drug addicts screaming at each other in the middle of the night is not something that's enjoyable. That happens in the city, I've never experienced it the suburbs. It just seemed like you always had to be on alert. Maybe that says a lot about how we handle social problems, but it can't be easily discounted.
> If people are moving to suburbs and exurbs because the urban cores are "full," with high rents and home prices, then the question becomes: Do politicians fight anti-development interests like homeowners who have sought to block construction in their neighborhoods?
1. Skimmer 2. Scroller 3. Titlefiend
>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
It's annoying that pointing that out to the didn't reader is against the rules, but derailing the discussion by not reading is perfectly okay.
But what do I know? Am shadowbanned most of the time.
It's HN's worst aspect.
The proper response, then, is to downvote the derailing comment, not to respond with an attack. Downvotes are HNs tool for maintaining S/N ratio, attacks making ascribing what you presume caused the poster to post in a way you find less-than-worthy don't deal with any problem, they just exacerbate it and fill HN with toxic noise.
>derailing the discussion by not reading is perfectly okay
Is according to guidelines, not me. My fault that wasn't clearer.
This is the one that matters in the Rust Belt. It's not more expensive, really, to live in a trendy neighborhood in St. Louis or Cincinnati or whatever, than it would be to live in a nice suburb, but the schools are terrible. It's a cliche in these towns that even the most "City committed" folks move out when they start a family.
Confounding this is the fact that those who do send their kids to city schools are poor because of lack of education and they are passing their lack of value for education to their kids. Even if one person does stay in the city it will be hard for their kids when all the peer pressure doesn't value education (this isn't insurmountable, but it is a negative parents have to fight)
Remember in the US schools have a significant amount of local control. The federal or state government in large part cannot step in and say "do thing this way" - even if we agreed on what is the right thing to do (we don't) the power to get anything done is lacking where it is needed.
In short there are significant headwinds that you would have to counter. You alone cannot do it, and getting enough other people interested is hard.
Not only can state government generally do so (and, in fact, most states do set standards and methods and control some funding decisions of local districts), some state governments have processed by which they will go beyond dictating the standards and methods, etc., to actually assume direct control of local school districts.
On the other hand, research indicates people choose to live in cities for career advancement and to find a mate.
If the research is representative of people's opinions, then perhaps this is a failure of marketing.
Even in the Nordic countries, smaller towns have a higher birth rate than cities:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0032472070157174...
Urbanism has always been associated with lower birth rates across nations from the US to Europe to China.
Do you really need to ask that? "We" have the land and the area for people, a lot of "the rest of the world" does not.
For other reasons, schooling and crime are such that for those that want families, cities are less than ideal than the suburbs. The ability to get around is relatively cheap.
And the economics reflect that. So you can anguish in your "what should be", but ultimately it mostly comes down to money and incentives.
Translated: White Flight.
There are great (public and private) schools in NYC, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Many of the cities with "poor" inner city schools are also cities where white flight and highway riots hit the worst.
Always with the race.... its obtusive
Today this behavior is illegal and perpetuating that stereotype reinforces racism
If you want to have a garden, or a wood shop, or race around RC cars or drones, or big pets, a city just won’t work well for you.
Most people are happy in cities because their lives aren’t much more than sleeping, eating, going to work, and then maybe going to some social events or watching tv, which is a perfect description of millennial life so far.
Also, if you like loud motorcycles, could you please f$%k off to the suburbs. Thanks.
I see plenty of medium and large dogs running with their owners on the lakeshore trail, and most parks have fenced off dedicated dog parks.
Cities work fine for all these things, it just requires that the city has shared space for people with hobbies that don't fit in an apartment.
Autocross/Track days
Sporting clays
Golf (dragging clubs on the subway is not fun)
Kayaking
Camping
There are other things to do, but NYC is a bad place for a person making less than 6 figures to participate in a lot of outdoor activities.
Festivals
Concerts
Bars
Shopping
Food
Gyms
Meetups
Zoo(s)
Aquarium
Beach
Bike/Jogging trails (606/lakeshore)
Holiday Parades
Holiday Events (Christkindle/July 4th, etc)
Architecture
Very accessible social circles (walking, public transit)
etc, etc
These are what I worry I'd be giving up if moving to the suburbs as a renter currently.
(edit) Can't figure out a hard-return for formatting
(edit 2) Trying to get into a bowling alley is ridiculously hard though, having an hour wait to bowl never has happened to me in the burbs.
Most suburban back yards are still far too small for RC flying so I'm not sure what the living suburbs gets you for this hobby that you can't have in a city.
DC is a special case because the entire city is subject to special flight rules[1]. You're SOL if you live there.
Perhaps the solution to the 2006 mortgage crisis shouldn't have been to immediately and urgently reinflate the bubble. Oh well. Same story, different year. Maybe the fed can finally play with negative interest rates during the next downturn!
But it's an article about living in suburbs... suburbs of cities... where the jobs are. You can catch a train (or take a company bus or drive in the US I guess) from a suburb into the city for your job. That's what suburbs are.
And who said anything about a long commute? You can live in the suburbs and be just 15 minutes from the city.
And a lot of jobs here are "close" to the city, but not in it (due to land for large campuses being cheaper).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-am...
> Nationally, 26 percent of Americans described where they live as urban, 53 percent said suburban and 21 percent said rural. (This comes close to the census estimate that 81 percent of the population is urban if “urban” is understood to include suburban areas.)
Of course, that's response-based, but if you look at the character of most American cities, there's very little truly dense urban areas. Though even the definition of suburban itself can cover a wide range, since "suburban" Los Angeles has a lot of 8-10K person/sqmile areas and "suburban" Dallas generally is more like 4K, and then others are even less.
Oh so you commute all the way out to the suburbs? Hey since we know you'll have nothing to do anyway please complete these additional tasks. If you work on the way home we won't bother you after you actually arrive there.
Exploitative behavior only becomes an expectation when enough employees prove willing to do it.
I feel like we're going to need differently organized cities to really see drastic benefits from self-driving cars in large cities.
[0]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/01/defining-gen...
* Anti-tax attitude
* Limited multi-cultural experience
* Less forward-looking attitude (this is hard to verbally pin down).
With respect to the child, it'll be more difficult in the city. But I want to stress that as a gestalt system, the big city is a better place to live for all of us. If we had the opportunity work out, we would live in Manhattan (but the relocation is a substantial logistical problem at present). Opportunities exist in the big city that are not present in smaller cities or suburbs.
Edit: I should add that people aren't just leaving Wburg, anywhere along the L line is impacted. I suspect it's creating a rental price floor in other parts of the city, at all price points.
I've been wondering how many 100's of dollars average rent for a bedroom will rise (100, 200, 300?) in the other BK neighborhoods that young, childless, salaried people tend to live. I've found that one of the biggest benefits of NYC is the salary to rent ratio (compared to other major American cities) if you're OK with roommates and a 30-45 minute commute on the subway. I wonder how much the L shutdown changes the math.
The much talked-about phenomenon of urban cores gaining jobs faster than their suburbs was confined to certain cities [2], and was entirely untrue in others. In the general case, suburbs have consistently posted higher rates of employment growth [3][4], and command a higher absolute number of jobs. In fact, some of the highest growth areas are metropolitan areas that hardly even have an urban core that stands apart from its suburbs [5].
Suburbs everywhere are living on borrowed time, because as their infrastructure ages, they will develop the same problems circling back to lack of funding as the big cities that gave rise to them in the first place, but without the political and business clout that big cities mustered up to retain their relevance. As the infrastructure ages, the taxes will rise, discretionary funding on quality-of-live services like schools will be reduced, and the most wealthy will begin to move out into a new ring of exurbs (or edge cities), or back to the urban core, leaving progressively poorer people to remain and take their place.
Only suburbs which can successfully pivot to being employment centers can avoid this painful demographic crunch.
[1] http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/30/urban-revival-not-for-most-am... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/upshot/more-new-jobs-are-... [3] https://www.brookings.edu/research/where-are-the-jobs-cities... [4] http://www.newgeography.com/content/005264-suburbs-continue-... [5] http://blog.indeed.com/2017/03/08/bounceback-for-job-and-wag...