Socioeconomic sorting at the metropolitan level is making America more polarized | Hacker News Reader

Socioeconomic sorting at the metropolitan level is making America more polarized

citylab.com

148 pointsclumsysmurf56 comments

Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities. Boston's immediately adjacent suburbs like Cambridge and Somerville are filled with crappy run down houses converted to apartments serving 2-3 users or groups. No one likes them besides the landlords, they are generally of shitty quality / falling apart, and they are extremely expensive. If they were bulldozed and replaced with high rise apartments, costs would greatly fall. Similarly, if the T didn't suck so much and serviced outlying communities, people could more easily live farther away from the city proper, which would also reduce pressures on the city and proximal suburbs to support everyone.

Out of personal curiosity: I was in Boston for a while maybe 10-12 years ago, and remember thinking that the T was so far beyond what most other cities had, and served even the outlying areas well enough via the bus connections. (And I was previously from Philly, so no stranger to decent public transit)

In that context I'm surprised to hear you say that the T sucks. Is it that my memory is far out of date with respect to how the city grew? Or are my standards very low? (Also viable is that I was lucky in that the routes I needed to take were well served, usually starting from Cambridge)

To give another point of comparison, in Seattle now, I would give an arm and a leg for something even roughly comparable to my memory of the T, let alone SEPTA/subways. Baltimore was similar, in having little to nothing outside of unreliable and sparse buses, and token light rail only along 1-2 "primary" corridors.

(I grew up in Boston but now live in Silicon Valley.) The T has great coverage but shitty service. Boston is second only to NYC in terms of the fraction of the city that you can get to via public transit. The Red Line covers most of the densely-populated Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge neighborhoods, runs straight into the heart of the city, and then services even the lower-income neighborhoods in Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan/Quincy. The Green Line covers the whole Back Bay and Brookline area. Orange Line will get you up to Tufts & Medford, and Blue Line covers North & East Boston. All of these except the outer reaches of the Green Line have reasonable transit times.

By contrast, SF has good public transit if you happen to live in the BART corridor through Mission & Market streets, or around 4th & King or Potrero. But if you're in the Sunset, Presidio, Pac Heights, North Beach, Twin Peaks & highlands, Excelsior, or really anywhere else - you can forget about it. It takes as long to get from the Outer Sunset to Downtown as it does to get from Mountain View, 50 miles away, to SF.

However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.

Or the “every 10 minutes #1 bus” wouldn’t come for 40 minutes, at which point 4 of them would arrive, nose to tail, as if they were drafting each other on a NASCAR circuit.

The term you're looking for is bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

Anecdotally, it seems to happen more on longer routes into a city center, and gets worse if there's traffic / bridge opens / etc. along the route.

The MBTA's T, Red Line, in Boston around 1995: At the train approaches the station, people in the station hear an announcement and see it on a lighted sign. It is something like "Braintree train approaching", letting you know the direction and final destination. Inside the train, they see and hear something like "Approaching Park Street. Next Stop: Downtown Crossing. This is a Braintree train.". When the train stops, there is a similar announcement, again both voice and lighted display, both inside the train and on the station platform. People inside the train can read the brightly-lighted station sign through the windows, and people on the platform can read a brightly-lighted sign on the train itself. Another announcement is made just before the doors close, and another one right after.

The other lines were about as good, with a few oddities like a human announcer on the Green Line.

San Francisco's MUNI, around 2015, two decades later: There is no voice announcement or message display when I board the train underground, either in the station or in the train. Gee, I hope I'm going the right direction. The train pops out of the ground and runs down the eastern side of the city. It stops only when there is a person waiting at the stop or when somebody in the train pulls a cord, there are no station announcements in the train, and the signs on the stations are unlighted and/or hidden. There is simply no way to count stops to determine where you are. You have to truly recognize the city (for me: in the dark, as an out-of-town visitor) or stay focused on a GPS-based map display. I obviously couldn't do the former, and my phone battery was dying so the latter was a problem as well.

So it looks to me like SF in 2015 can't match Boston in 1995.

I could be wrong, but i lived by mgh for 3 years 2011 to 2014. I think they installed those signs while i lived there.

Yea it's a new addition

I took the Red Line every weekday in 1995, and I remember those signs.

MGH might be an exception, though the train itself would still have signs. It's also possible the signs were out of service when you showed up.

That's the MUNI, which is pretty shit, along with the surface street bus system. Caltrain and BART are solid though. The streetcars are pretty but somehow slower than biking.

Caltrain and BART would properly be compared to MBTA's commuter rail, which runs for dozens of miles out in every direction from Boston. These are things that are longer range and more expensive, with fewer stops along the way.

MUNI is what matches up with the MBTA's T.

MBTA's commuter rail is more equivalent to Sonoma County Smart Train or maybe Caltrain. Bart may go the distance of communter rail but it's far faster and more frequent, taking half an hour to cross the bay from Berkeley to 16th street mission - at the best of times with quite frequent service in busy times.

I've had horrific experiences with MTBA Commuter Rail canceling several trains on the weekend without announcement, literally waiting 3 hour or more at the station more than once.

BART isn't immune to horror.

A few years back, I almost planned to take BART from the airport to a hotel on California Street. I'm lucky I chose to rent a car and stay in a car-friendly hotel in South San Francisco instead, because BART stopped entirely due to a strike. That was 4.5 days, costing the region about $73 million per day.

It bewilders me that such a mess is tolerated. That properly calls for emergency replacements (possibly National Guard) and for the strikers to be convicted of criminal mischief endangering public safety.

Not really, in actual usage. BART is roughly equivalent to the MBTA's Red Line - it's the workhorse subway system, moves lots of passengers quickly from the highest-density residential areas to the downtown core and then continues on to high-density suburbs. Muni is more like the Green Line - slow, above-ground light rail that services outlying residential areas with some key connections.

Caltrain is a commuter rail, but commuter rail in the Bay Area is much different from in the MBTA. For one, it's a straight line down the peninsula; Boston's commuter rail branches out like spokes on a wheel. Two, it hits all of the major suburban downtowns, which are themselves much higher density than the Boston suburbs (Sunnyvale has more people than Cambridge, for example, despite being 40-50 miles from SF). Three, because of this it's always packed and runs much more frequently than MBTA commuter rails. I used to live along the Fitchburg Commuter Rail, which gets about 10,000 passengers/day. Caltrain gets 60,000.

Muni is generally considered worthless for daily commuting in the Bay Area, while most of the Boston MBTA stations are considered desirable neighborhoods. By contrast, the MBTA commuter rail is generally considered useless (everyone I know who lived in a town serviced by it would just drive, and usually work along the 128 or 495 belts instead of in the city itself), but Caltrain is considered a very practical means of commuting if you happen to live near one of the peninsula downtowns and work in SoMA, and the reason crummy housing stock in the Mission rents for $3500/month is because you can get to all the cool places either by BART or by BART -> Caltrain transfers.

> Orange Line will get you up to Tufts & Medford

Huh? The Orange Line has one stop in Medford. I live near it. Before that is an expensive shopping area in Somerville, and after that is Malden Center.

>However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.

Boston also sucks at supplying radial transit between the spoke-shaped lines running out of the hubs of North Station, Park Street, State Street, Downtown Crossing, and South Station.

The MBTA has suffered from funding issues, and it was saddled with billions in debt from the Big Dig. Many of the trains and track infrastructure are old and in need of replacement, but without the funds the MBTA has been forced to repair old equipment at higher cost. This article has more info:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/11/04/what-the-heck-is-wron...

For the last few months at least the stickied post on the Boston subreddit has been "Is the T fucked today?".

The system aged without improvements, and currently keeps actual blacksmiths on the payroll to make parts for the ancient cars that are no longer supported by the manufacturer. I believe they've been dropping a few billion on new cars/improvements but someone from Boston would be better able to report on that

If we had to give grade to the MBTA, we would give it a D (passing grade), because they deserve a large area. However, everything else is bad.

On top of that, all the improvements they are making are things that were needed 10 years ago, not things we will need over the next 10 years and onward.

The T is great -- if you live near it, otherwise it may as well not exist (otherwise walk/bike or maybe bus route if lucky).

Trouble is, as the city has expanded massively in the last 20 years the T has stayed static. Even the Somerville/Medford-greenline extension has been watered down/will it ever happen?

Cambridge, Somerville, Medford seem to have been instituting 25 mph limits and swapping out road-space for bike lanes. Seriously, who's going to try biking in 20" of snow. Or in the dark (Nov-March).

I'd rather they just ripped up some big streets and replaced with green-line style light-rail as they have done in Manchester UK (metrolink?). For example: Rt 99 through Chelsea, Everett-Malden. Medford St / Rt 38. Mt Auburn/Rt 16/Watertown Sq. Fellsway/Rt 28 into Stoneham/Reading. (sorry, don't know much of south of the city but I'm sure there are equivalents).

It just isn't possible to have such a densely packed city, constrained at the east by the Atlantic and allow one person-per-car ... not sustainable.

Alot of the shitty apartment buildings have been bulldozed, but they've been replaced with giant biotech buildings in kendal sq... I agree tho, the majority of housing is absolute shit. No insulation, old, worn down 100+ year old buildings everywhere. Way overpriced to live in 19th century log cabins.

Wasn't most of Kendall warehouses prior to the original felling of buildings 10-15 years ago? That was a bit before my time but it's the narrative I've heard. The newer buildings put up in the last 5 years or so exclusively replaced disused or low value commercial spaces. Same with the biotech buildings in Central.

You are right -- 3rd St from Broadway to Binney is all new in the last 10 years, previously was dead space or old industrial (i.e. not housing!). Even the old OSF building on Broadway is now gone.

However on 2nd street, between Hampshire and Binney, there are a lot of commercial buildings that I think used to be housing.

1st Street (Hampshire to Land Blvd) is also seeing a lot of regeneration (mostly old retail into new mixed development).

I left Boston for LA exactly for this reason. 4 years ago, I could rent a place in some of the nicest luxury apartments in LA for the same price a shitty, run-down place with no amenities cost in Somerville. I loved that town, but I'm really happy I left for LA, even though it's not as much of a deal these days, the weather is pretty nice...

Wow. I'm trying to square your "not as much of a deal" with the phrase we use here, "statewide housing crisis". Are things really that crazy around Boston?

Yes

> "Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities."

most big tech companies force people in these areas, and it doesnt have to be that way. furthermore, big tech company hiring practices ensure that qualified people could never make it by their interview process. How can a developer with a family 'implement a tree in python along with breath first search to solve a specific question in a google doc' when that skill seems to me as not generalizible to the industry. for someone to get past this gate keeper, they have to spend many hours outside work preparing for it by doing leet code questions, etc.

instead of trying to build more houses in places that dont want to build them, why not force the companies to spread.

Yours is a pretty weird description of the current real estate market here in Somerville.

It's a pretty even mix of owners and renters (about 40%/60% last I checked). Because of all the factors in the article, huge amounts of money are flowing in and they're being spent on upgrading the housing stock. Far from "shitty and falling apart", you see gleaming post-restoration projects everywhere, at astronomical prices.

Maybe I'm biased toward the west end of the city because I live there and the gentrification is furthest along here. But "it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements. The market remains extremely hot, and it's being fed by people with money who want to buy and live here, not absentee landlords. There are still some of those, but it's a shrinking group because the overwhelming financial incentive is to gut-renovate and sell as condos.

As for increasing the density, I'm all for it, but it's worth pointing out Somerville is already the densest city in New England. Denser than Boston proper, despite all Boston's own high rises. You don't find a denser city until you get to NYC. People underestimate how effectively you can pack a city even at three-to-five stories tall, if you actually stick to that height _everywhere_. We were lucky to be built in the streetcar era, and then ignored through the incredibly-dumb architectural trends of the second half of the 20th century. If the rest of Greater Boston was merely as dense as Somerville there would be no housing shortage.

My favorite strategy for getting higher density here is killing all the parking lots, along with simply getting our transit system back to the scope and quality it had in 1930, with streetcar lines all over the place.

>"it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements

I don't know much about the situation, but these are easily compatible statements. People might be trying to live where their job is or near the city they like or grew up in. Quality of the building you are living in is usually not the #1 concern.

concur, most of the 2-3 family rentals are shitty and very expensive.

building more housing has a lot of hurdles to overcome.

first, because we're close to full employment, it's hard to find skilled construction workers. we need to establish more and better trade schools and apprenticeships, and return esteem to these jobs (rather than to the vapid reality tv celebrities).

second, the regulatory environment needs to be improved. here are 25 regulatory proposals for california: https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-pers... (submitted to HN but didn't get any discussion). i don't agree with all of them, but many are very sensible.

and there are other hurdles like the lack of space. there aren't too many infill opportunities left, so construction projects get more expensive and risky because of the added cost and delay of demolition.

public transportation is great, but it's also expensive (some of which is due to corruption) and taxpayers are weary of that.

that's not to say i don't agree with you. just that we must overcome a number of challenges to get there.

As someone that lives in the south, this trend is extremely frustrating. A few weeks ago I visited SF for an interview, and it seems like every tech company on earth is in that one spot. The whole city feels 20 years ahead of where I presently live. But all of my family is in the south, so I’m stuck with the unfortunate tradeoff of choosing to focus on my career or living near family. Because it sure doesn’t look like the tech companies are moving where I am any time soon (with the hopeful exception of Amazon HQ2).

I always wonder why nobody asks why this sort is happening. There's a kind of willful ignorance at work here. Are the highly educated and the knowledge economy moving to cities because they like the beach? Or is there something else attracting them?

What's even stranger is the blame. Somehow it's the tech company's fault. Somehow it's the fault of the rich. I've even heard illegal immigrants blamed. Nobody ever seems to think there might be something going on in the south that is driving away the best and the brightest.

I moved away from the south because:

1. Few job prospects

2. Terrible transit

3. Disagreeable politics

4. Hot

In that order. I moved to Seattle (which didn't really fix #2) and much preferred it. Born and raised in Atlanta but no desire to stay. Off to NYC in a few months to see what I think!

NYC has terrible transit but still better than anywhere else in the US. Welcome!

Do you help reduce polarization by speaking well about the people of Georgia?

I do, though I'm not from there. I went to Shaky Knees on a whim with a friend last year, and I loved the city and everybody I met. It makes me want to move there. I loved going to bars and actually talking to people I didn't know, something that feels foreign and improper in Seattle.

I'm of the opinion that liberal western US cities hate southern politics so much that they quickly jump to the conclusion that everything in the south sucks. Terrible mistake.

Good to hear this. I see many comments on HN where midwesterners or southerners living on the coasts are dumping on their friends and neighbors back home, and I think that behavior isn't helpful.

Absolutely. My experience with Georgia was that everyone was lovely and friendly my entire life. I didn't love the politics but I could see that people were for the most part coming from a good place in their beliefs on the matter.

There will always be a part of my heart in Georgia.

Personally, I think it’s cultural. Very few people who live near me have any ambition beyond going to work for the paycheck and watching football / drinking beer on the weekends. And there is nothing wrong with that lifestyle if that is what makes you happy, but you can hardly expect the most ambitious people in the world to want to move here. (I’ll note this culture also seems to be passed down from one generation to the next. Moving away for a better job is considered “not caring about family” around here).

Those thoughts mirror mine in the role of culture in poverty and income/wealth disparity. Like you, I think it's pretty straightforward to conclude that your outcome in life is influenced by your culture and attitudes. And that the influence can be inter-generational. I just don't hear much talk of trying to improve economic equality via cultural and attitude changes. Probably because you'll be accused of "blaming the victim" as though you were stating this was the only or primary factor. It's easy to become dismissive of positions that make you uncomfortable by whittling away the subtleties until all you're left with is an enraging straw man whom attacking brings you back a degree of comfort. I also feel like consensus around diagnoses and remedies of social ailments suffer from snowballing effects. That is, a heard mentality. For instance, if rational assessments gave Cause A 60% probability of being the true cause, and Cause B a 40% probability, then over time, even with no additional insights, the population will not fall into this same proportion. Probably something like 90% will passionately believe Cause A to be the one true cause, with the other 10% equally convinced it's Cause B, especially if it is more comforting to them and their beliefs/self narrative. Apologies, this became a steam of thought.

Because it’s obvious. Successful people like to be around other successful people (even if you aren’t successful, at least your kids might intermingle with theirs), and people like mountains, beaches, and temperate climates with low humidity. Not much more to it than that. Also, the political views of the southeast US aren’t as frequently shared with academics and those working in technology.

tech companies fault that people are moving away from south? I am curious what their explanation behind this is.

Interesting book to read on the topic is Charles Murray's Coming Apart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)

Very much like this article, Murray focuses only on US, however, this is a global trend. A person born in Koškovce, Slovakia will move to Košice for high school, to Bratislava to attend college, they'll find their first job in Prague, second one in London and after a short while they'll arrive at San Francisco.

It wouldn't take a big stretch of imagination to write a dystopian Sci-Fi about a future where members of Mensa live in extremely liberal city states in Bay Area while the dumb are gradually pushed out to failing hellholes with mad dictators in control.

Fund it!

The movie Elysium was essentially that. Though you did not mention the homeless population in the Bay Area. Wealth does not make a place clean; the Bay Area is filthy. Of course that’s liberalism for you.

The filthy parts are well known and mostly keep to themselves. The non-filthy parts are some of the most beautiful city living in the world, with outdoors access that rivals a resort town. (I lived in Park City before)

Are you kidding? Have you been to SOMA?

This data is great to back up processes one can empirically observe -- none of this was a particular shocker, but the data quantifies the relative differences between metros' fates very well, such as Chicago punching above its weight in terms of balancing affordability with desirability among the highly-educated.

In my opinion, the one surprise is Pittsburgh's particular set of circumstances: in-migrants being less educated than out-migrants, but this can be an artifact of Pittsburgh being a destination for education, which then struggles to attract higher numbers of well-educated to stay or relocate there for work.

UPMC educates so many medical professionals it's not surprising that there's an imbalance. I don't think Pittsburgh could absorb all of those MDs even if they wanted to stick around (which most don't). I'm surprised Boston isn't similar.

There likely is an imbalance for MDs specifically, but Boston has a sizable VC-fueled tech community that can absorb non-MD grads.

Boston is similar.

With so many universities, local leaders are always bemoaning he fact that more of them don’t stay. For any type of specialized field, we’ve got the school... in triplicate. God knows how many law schools and business schools we’ve got scattered around the metro area.

I'd like to be thank the submitter for modifying the title of the article for HN. The original title refers to social class, but nearly the entire discussion thereafter is about economic class.

I wonder what happens as things get worse and the foreign money dries up?

you get a new rustbelt

So how do we reverse this trend? How do we get more educated people to choose to move to, or stay in, the Rust Belt?

Charles murray has a whole book abiut this stuff (Coming Apart) and its lit

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