Why Invest in Cities? There's Always Another Boise | Hacker News Reader

Why Invest in Cities? There's Always Another Boise

bloomberg.com

145 pointsjseliger246 comments

Not the crux of the article, but:

> This doesn't mean that they, or the even higher-cost, more congested coastal metros, will adopt Manhattan or Tokyo-style density and transit patterns. Instead, Austin and San Antonio might be the new Houston and Dallas.

My goodness, can we /please/ stop this false dichotomy that a city either has to be a Tokyo megalopolis or a suburban sprawlfest?

I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan, even though that seems to be what everyone is scared of. Clearly the OP has never left the US.

Average density in Paris: ~6 stories. Barcelona: ~4 stories. Most cities in Germany: 3-5 stories. Moscow: maybe 6-7 stories.

Maybe those aren't perfect by a story or two, but point being, there IS a sustainable growth model, and it's a lot more than SF and LA's paltry 2 story average height, and certainly less than the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan that everyone is so scared of. You only have to look across the ocean to see it, and until the US realizes this, Boise et al. will just become another congested, sprawling, expensive suburb with an increasingly poor quality of life. If you want to live in the not-countryside, then density is the only sustainable model.

EDIT: And to respond to what I think the crux of the article actually is, that we'll never invest in sustainable urban planning because there will always be another inexpensive 100k population town that we can ruin instead, well that sure is a losing attitude. There probably is some truth there, and it makes me sad. Sure, it'll take a while for the coasts to get their act together, but let's continue to promote a vision of what a viable and sustainable solution looks like for America's cities. Any comparisons with Tokyo or the next Manhattan is just furthering a destructive narrative which, for the record, is what got San Francisco in this mess in the 1980s in the first place.

Tokyo is also not particularly congested.

It's really not. It's actually a surprisingly livable and automobile traffic-free city for being literally the largest in the world. (Obviously the train system plays a huge role in that.)

Nor is it particularly high rise outside of the center, it’s surprisingly sprawl-like as well.

The good thing about Tokyo is that they let people build whatever they want and somehow it works, there are congested areas and not so congested areas and in between areas and non consistent areas, they just have it all and people can choose where they want to live.

On the plus side, it's sprawl with train and subway stations, and plenty of buses and taxis.

Well, the metro population is ~40 million.

But even then, most of the "sprawl" is still very dense by American standards, a lot of the suburban areas have comparable population density to Boston or SF.

Most people commute by train. We are improving, but the morning commute is something foreigners consider particularly wacky, and not something that they want to repeat everyday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7kor5nHtZQ

I've seen these clips before and always wonder where these examples are on the scale of "average experience".

Is this the worst of the worst? ie- only the few most congested stations experience this during peak hours on a particularly bad day?

Or is it relatively expected? ie- most major stations will experience this during peak hours on an average day?

Station attendants pushing people in isn't that common, most lines in Tokyo have a train coming every minute or two during the morning and that would just make everyone late. However can't move your arms crowded is the morning commute everyday unless you live far from work at the end of the line and can snake a seat. Even then it's not guaranteed (another compounding addition to your stress) and often times you'll be just as miserable as everyone else but with the added misery of the longest commute.

It's interesting to experience once on vacation because you planned to go to the airport during the morning. It's something else entirely to do it everyday in a stuffy suit until you retire.

However that level of travel only happens in the morning. Overtime culture spreads out the number of people leaving after work, even though technically everyone should get off around the same time.

I usually spring for a hotel in Narita for the last night in Japan. While probably not the most charming place, it's a town in its own right and good food can be had so you're not dependent on the hotel restaurant.

Going to Tokyo for the evening is mostly out, since the train connections at night are terrible and a taxi will hit you with 200 - 250$.

Nevertheless it definitely beats the Shinjuku early morning rush hour with heavy luggage experience, which really is pretty fucking dreadful.

I was in a central part of Tokyo while working out of Google's Tokyo office for a few days, and didn't experience any crush passenger loads in the morning. In fact, the trains had plenty of space.

But I did experience a very, very packed train once while I was there, taking a commuter express line out of the city...at 9pm.

I don't see what stops cities from planning keeping some kind of growth in mind though. Rail, Bus systems are expensive but how about changing building codes to make it easier to build higher density near the downtown areas of these cities? And then maybe acquire land (at least) for a future mass transit option (monorail, subway etc.).

For Gods sake don't be like Austin, which totally ignored the problem and is now scrambling to get it together with some very very expensive options (likely to be even more expensive in the future).

People who are worried about turning San Francisco into Manhattan also don't know what Manhattan is even like! The Upper West & Upper East Side as well as Harlem do not look anything like e.g. the Financial District. Even within Manhattan there is a huge variety of building heights.

I used to live in Yorkville in a six story building in an area filled with other six story (and smaller) buildings. We had a nice park with a public pool, multiple schools with kids running around in the afternoons, and some people even owned cars. It was an actual community, not some caricature of what people think living in Manhattan is like.

John Jay park is so nice. I miss being able to take the kids there anytime of day and have tons of friends to play with. Here on the West Coast the playgrounds are all dry, hot, boring, and empty.

Out of curiosity, how much is rent per square foot?

I shared a ~650 sq ft 2bd/1br. It was $2650. That was probably below median for the area by a little.

By more than a little. The Q line helped Yorkville catch up to the rest of the UES, rent-wise.

Even Hell's Kitchen, where I live, is still primarily composed of 5- and 6-story walk-ups.

It sounds like you would benefit greatly from reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs - it provides a solid foundation for understanding urban economics.

Is Manhattan considered a mistake? I ask because, despite being one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere. Am I missing an unspoken “never again” moment? Is everyone who travels to New York doing it to revel in their hatred of the place?

There’s not nearly enough Manhattan to meet the demand to live in such a place, and I fail to see why we shouldn’t make more of it. San Francisco’s economic power and landlocked geometry seem ideal for doing so.

I don't think NYC is seen as a bad model everywhere. There are plenty of medium-sized cities that are trying to conjure up a high-rise downtown with condo buildings and office towers through various kinds of development incentives. Some because they see that as key to attracting certain demographics and businesses, others because they feel it'll subjectively make them be perceived as a "real city". But in SF specifically, "Manhattanification" has been a kind of bogeyman for a while now.

My amateur hypothesis is that a certain portion of SF residents have a local self-identity in part defined by being not-LA and not-NYC. So a planning proposal can be attacked by claiming it would make SF either more like LA, or more like NYC.

It's just that many of the stakeholders in these areas such as long-time property owners in the westside of San Francisco and residents with rent control fearing gentrification would not benefit directly from new development. Their incentives simply aren't aligned with younger generations who want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs. To break this quandary we simply to need intervention at the higher level. Congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy so when change comes it will come at the higher level than the city.

Oh sure, there are plenty of objections to the process of change. I'm more interested in why Manhattan is a boogeyman for the end result.

Manhattan is a byword for the unhappy worst-of-both-worlds situation where you have premium luxury housing no one can afford or run-down walk-ups where you're paying thousands a month for a hole-in-the-wall; pedestrians overrun the sidewalks and gridlock continues late into the night; there's technically trains but sometimes it's faster to walk; people are on top of each other and you can't find anywhere quiet.

Parts of Manhattan aren't like that, but that's not the image people have in their minds.

As opposed to SF? At least in the NYC area you have the option of cheaper housing in Queens or New Jersey and a not-too-horrible commute.

What about east bay?

The bay bridge and transbay tube are pretty much at capacity at rush hour (8-10a, 3-7p).

You can drive over the Bay Bridge in 15-20 minutes if there's no traffic. If there's an accident and a ball game and rush hour, you could easily be stuck on it for 90-120.

For those who don't know, the Bay Bridge has a relatively thoughtful design where rate-limiting is done at the approaches so that traffic on the bridge itself moves just fine. Then there are dedicated lanes so that buses can jump the queue.

Right now the bottleneck for bus throughput is loading bays at Temporary Transbay Terminal. When the new Transbay Terminal comes online, AC Transit will be able to substantially increase bus throughput over the Bay Bridge.

The Transbay bus system has many distinct routes that go express all the way to SF after making a few local stops in a couple of adjacent neighborhoods. Consequently, it's often faster than BART, especially if you don't live particularly close to your BART stop. Transbay Terminal moving the SF terminus closer to the Market St subway will also make the transfer more pleasant if Embarcadero isn't your stop.

there's technically trains but sometimes it's faster to walk;

I like to complain about train delays as much as any New Yorker but this perception is pretty much incorrect; once you're going more than 15 minutes away it'll always be faster to take the subway. Commuting from midtown to where I live takes 25 minutes by train during peak times and up to ~40 minutes late night; walking takes an hour and a half.

I guess I can see how someone who visits NYC and only visits Times Square / Canal Street gets that impression though.

Having extensively used the public transportation system in a number of US cities, NYC has been by far the best place to try to get around by subway. Is there another US city where you think the subway works much better?

Chicago's threatens to be borderline usable, but unfortunately as you tend away from the Loop to the vast expanses of suburbia, its utility diminishes exponentially. Still, by comparison to 95% of Middle America, Chicago definitely deserves a top spot.

The irony in all this is that NYC is actually more affordable than SF now.

I live in midtown Manhattan in a renovated studio on the 30th floor. I pay less than my coworker who is renting a 1bed apartment in Mountain View on a job rotation there.

Bay Area cities may have avoided turning into Manhattan but they have Manhattan-level rent prices. Congratulations people.

The Financial District of Manhattan (and Midtown) is the only place like that in the U.S., and most people have been to Times Square, so it does a good job conjuring up an emotional reaction in voters.

> most people have been to Times Square

A lot of people have been to Times Square, but I doubt most United States voters have.

50 million Americans visit NYC each year. Times Square is a marquee draw for tourists.

There are ~150 million (134m in the last Presidential election) active American voters. They tilt older and financially better off, which is also the combination that is most likely to have a substantial travel history.

I'd bet on the majority of active US voters - 75m+ - having visited Times Square at least once in their lifetimes.

50m visitors != 50m uniques.

There are people who never leave their home state, occasionally city/metro are, though I'm not finding a good source on that.

Where did you get that 50M number? That sounds more like the total number of tourists altogether, only a fraction of whom are Americans.

50M looks an awful like the total tourist numbers reported in this article[0]. I still hold the view that less than half of registered voters have been to time square.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/nyregion/record-number-of...

As a European I was surprised how many buildings in Manhattan are not sky scrapers.

Pardon me for appearing to be the spokes-person for market economics, but if "congestion, long commutes and sprawl is hurting the U.S. (and Californian) economy", wouldn't they be self-healing problems?

Do "younger generations ... want to live and raise families in a city with reasonable housing costs" or do they want to accumulate as much of the easily-available money there a fast as possible? (The former is available almost anywhere.)

It probably is self-solving, but probably not over useful timescales.

Further - it seems like the people truly making the decisions (i.e., the people deciding to keep company headquarters in SF rather than moving) are in a better economic position than the entry-level people who pay for those decisions in quality of life.

The "market self-healing" here is the development of multifamily residential near jobs and transit, which is already close to legal limits.

What's not available "almost anywhere" is your industry's center of gravity.

A lot of Americans are old enough to remember the significant rise in urban crime rates from the 60s to the 90s. Manhattan was a poster child for crime, drug abuse, urban decay, and corrupt government/police.

Obviously it's much better today, but the image has stuck. And to be fair, the image was mostly accurate at the time. Liberals were so fed up with it they were actually willing to vote for Rudy Giuliani.

I grew up in NYC in that era. Many people forget that the reason for the city’s problems was that it almost went bankrupt due to an exodus to the suburbs in the 60s.

> Is Manhattan considered a mistake

It's not so much a 'mistake' as it is an instant feeling of "no living thing could ever afford Manhattan". It's like a physical manifestation of the saying, "no one ever goes there anymore, it's too crowded".

> (Manhattan is) one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere.

Sure, absolutely. And Lamborghinis are some of the most desirable cars in the world. But if you told everyone in Milwaukee that all other cars were being destroyed ('upzoned' into Lambos) and all Milwaukee citizens would be forced to buy a Lambo or never drive in Milwaukee again -- residents would be freaking out in a similar way.

Personally, I actually like high-rises. I like the look, I like the use of space, and I like the lifestyle. But even as a person with a decent tech income, I could never afford to live in one (in any city, anywhere in the US). And I would be terrified if my city became even 10% more similar to Manhattan, because people already struggle to afford living here as it is.

Try telling families that can't afford $200k-$300k houses that their city should "be like Manhattan" and they hear "you should be paying 1 million to 4 million dollars for a 3 bed apartment, just like Manhattan".

I think we can all agree that there's a relationship between expensive real-estate markets and high-density structures. But are the buildings a cause, or an effect?

And if the reason to restrict density is cost, 1) how do we explain the participation of homeowners, and 2) how do we square this with the other ways people invest in their neighborhoods?

They don't have to be very expensive. High rises that subdivide to 1000-2000 sq. ft. have reasonably priced homes in Atlanta and Chicago, depending on location. 4000 sq. ft. is on the expensive side, but cheaper than a similarly sized townhome.

> no living thing could ever afford Manhattan

I stayed for a week at a hotel in Midtown, in February for about $80/night. Not a great hotel, but there were no bed bugs, rodents, or roaches. That's well below what most folks consider the median rent to be in San Francisco. Plus someone cleaned the place every day.

Hotel Penn is damn near the only place you'll find a rate like that, and if that's where you stayed, it sounds like you got one of the nicer rooms.

It was the Watson near Columbus Circle. The room probably hadn't been redecorated in the better part of thirty years, but I'd happily stay there again.

Whereas the truth is that the only way to bring rent and home prices down where demand outstrips supply and space is limited is to build higher.

"Sure, absolutely. And Lamborghinis are some of the most desirable cars in the world."

Isn't this a false parable? I thought houses themselves are not expensive, but the land on which they are built, is.

I.e. high rises are expensive in US because they are built in areas with high market demand - not that 'a highrise' would necessarily need to be expensive.

I might be totally wrong here, please educate me.

The high price is because there isn't enough of it now. If you make more of it (or something even sort of close to it), the price will fall.

>Is Manhattan considered a mistake? I ask because, despite being one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere. Am I missing an unspoken “never again” moment? Is everyone who travels to New York doing it to revel in their hatred of the place?

Manhattan is somewhat good, but has deficiencies:

1. Public sanitation there should at least be better than that in China...

2. Spacing in between buildings can be larger. Or it, better to say, the ratio of public space in between buildings and the building area should be larger. I like the idea "a lot of tall buildings with a lot of space in between" - Vancouver Coal Harbour and Yaletown are good examples.

3. Too much old buildings. Rules for mandatory "renovate or bulldoze" for old buildings.

4. Streets and sidewalks can be wider.

5. Elevated walkways will be a good idea.

6. District steam system can be changed to district heating, as a more safe alternative.

7. Public transport licensing should be liberalized.

8. Restrictions on building height, and land plot to height ratio should be struck down.

9. Brooklyn bridge can be replaced with something newer and fancier.

10. Architectural norms should be less strict, allow for more avantgarde designs

Or for a more american example: Union City, NJ https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/3/comparing-appro...

> I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan

What is that supposed to mean? I would settle for it being a less shitty Brooklyn though.

If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth.

The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.

Perhaps the federal government doesn't need to step in by paying for rail, but by creating efficiencies (and/or removing obstacles) that make transit so expensive now?

>>[...] Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.

Just so we're talking about the same scales, the 133 miles of the Paris Métro rapid transit system covers the entire Paris metropolitan area[1], which itself has a population of around 12.4 million residents[2]. NYC's population across the five boroughs covered by the MTA is around 8.5 million residents[3].

The last cost projection for the Paris Métro expansion[4] for 120 extra miles of tracks, stations and lines is roughly $25 billion.

If anything, this clarification only further reinforces your point that, even taking into account a hypothetical 5x cost overrun, Paris would still come out ahead from a $/mile metric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_M%C3%A9tro

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_metropolitan_area

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/03/tying-p...

Thanks for clarifying! That’s a lot of new track for one metro area. “Buying in bulk” seems to ring true with many of these expansions.

As somebody who literally lives in Boise I think my city is a shining example of poor urban planning, our public transit system is ill equipped to properly service our population which is spread out far too thin making it economically challenging to do so; at the same time we live in a fish bowl of a valley and nasty inversions are becoming more frequent as more cars get on the road every year due to our growing population.

I hope other municipalities learn from our mistakes before it becomes too late, I’m planning on leaving the area after living here almost my entire life because it’s unsustainable.

It's too bad, really, because as you say Boise is quite beautiful. But yeah, there was no plan for handling population growth. Too many people wanted to leave out by Eagle / Nampa, but work in downtown or at Micron. And of course there is absolutely no way to get anywhere except by car.

It is indeed beautiful, which makes it terribly difficult for me to even consider leaving - especially having a five year old daughter to whom Boise is all she's ever known as home. I wish I could stay, but between the increasing pollution, lack of transit options (I don't drive, so this is huge to me), lack of jobs I'd actually want should I need new employment (ClearWater, HP, T-Sheets, Kount, etc. all suck in some way) combined with the political nightmare that Idaho has become have all but pushed me away. Heck, I can't even enjoy the beauty of the area half the time because there's so much litter everywhere these days -_-

That really stinks. It's amazing how many otherwise modern US cities let transit infrastructure linger in limbo. That was my experience in Charlotte too, though at least they've finally rolled out another leg of light rail to help somewhat. Seattle is the only place where I've had the option of living very comfortably without driving, and man its a game changer. Though I don't know if it's my long term pick due to costs of housing. What kind of alternatives to Boise are you looking at?

Portland is my top option, keeps me in the PNW close to family, nature is still close by, housing is within my means and TriMet is fantastic (I used it every day when I was visiting for PuppetConf 2015, by far my favorite out of the major cities I have visited). Seattle is a another option, but I'm really not a fan of WA's regressive tax structure and it's not very close to outdoor activities.

If it didn't put me so far away from my family I'd consider Boston since my brother-in-law + niece/nephew live there, but my daughter is much less attached to them than my mother and grandparents so it makes sense to stay close (at least PDX and SEA both have nonstop flights available to BOS, makes it much less painful to visit than the BOI-DEN-BOS legs with Southwest).

I can hardly imagine trying to live in Boise without driving. Not because I love my car (now that I live in Silicon Valley I'm one of the few people who commutes by train), but because Boise is notably unfriendly to non-drivers. I agree that (every says) Portland should be much better for that.

Thankfully my wife drives, we made it work with bikes after we got married living by Capital High but after we had a child the car was a necessity. It’s hard for me because even if I wanted to drive my lack of peripheral vision on the left makes it unsafe (severe amblyopia as a child, my eye is aligned now but the vision center in my brain didn’t develop properly as a result).

Boise drivers are terrible as of late too, my wife hates getting in the car - just glad she is a stay-at-home mom so she doesn’t need to deal with I84 or the east-west arterials at rush hour :/

VRT is finally looking at expanding their hours and service area but it’s going to take a decade or more to even get to a point where they can invest in a rail line from Caldwell to Boise - I can’t wait that long, traffic is bad enough and the lane increases ACHD has been working on aren’t going to cut it. Pine Ave from Meridian Rd to Locust Grove is going to four lanes and it’s going to get clogged right back up.

Even in Tokyo, much of the place is single family homes or mid rise apartment and condo complexes. There are a number of huge skyscrapers here and there, but they are not as densely packed as manhattans.

Even Manhattan is not mostly skyscrapers. Anyone can open up Google Maps' satellite 3d view and see this.

The problem now, is that surburbanites vote.

Suburbanites, for reasons I can't fathom, have been getting a free, bonus, car-house that comes with the big suburban house, free of charge!

This car-house isn't fancy. It's just a plot of asphalt. But they get one, free of charge, * By their office * In the grocery store * Even right next to the train station in the most baffling example of all (Park and Ride)

And because places that, 100 years ago, would have been houses for people, are now little car-houses, there's nobody without a car left to vote accordingly. If you try to buy the land under these car-houses and build a human-house on it, you get screamed at in planning meetings. Apparently because you're going to add more traffic (i.e. cars)

I'm not sure how to fix this.

>I'm not sure how to fix this.

I don't think it's possible.

Maybe you can build more amenities close to where people live, and stop people using cars as much as they do. Maybe you can build public transport services more in low income areas where car ownership is lower, and people will have some way of moving around. But having lived and travelled in Europe my entire life and visiting America for the first time last year, I was honestly shocked at how car-centric every single thing was. I spent more time in my rental car than I did out of it. I couldn't find a tenth of the businesses I'm used to having within walking distance of every flat I've rented in London and every hotel I've stayed at in Europe.

And the biggest problem with the car-centric focus on city planning is that the majority of every city just seems dead. Las Vegas for me just died the second you stepped off the strip. Los Angeles died the second you walk a block away from the touristy bits. European cities which aren't built around cars have people walking around in almost every suburb, taking the car out for grocery shopping or going to the bank puts you in the minority in a lot of places.

I really don't think it's fixable in America within a generation, the automobile lobby has decisively won.

I hope otherwise, but I don't think it is either. It's why I moved to Europe (among other reasons).

What's crazy to me is that it can be plainly obvious people WANT this from the fact that the few neighborhoods that exist where you can walk are fabulously expensive. A 2 bed craftsman bungalow in South Park, a walkable area of generally walking-hostile San Diego, can sell for $900 grand. So why aren't we building more of those? Do developers hate money?

Answer - because it's illegal to build them. Because of the aforementioned suburbanites voting that way. Because they should get free (or dirt cheap) sleeping places for their car even if someone comes along and wants to pay half a million bucks for the very same land to build a place to sleep for their family. It's lunacy.

For what it's worth, I live in a city with a serious housing shortage and zero political will to improve transit and cycling.

I've been eyeing a smaller city 2 hours to the south, _solely_ because it has the finest cycling/walking greenway in the country. It also has the highest unemployment rate among cities in this country. Of course, that could make hiring cheaper. The dream is that it's a place where there's already low-traffic and an opennness to trying something new that could result in putting in proper, Dutch-style infrastructure.

I do wonder if there are others out there with the same idea. Maybe there's an opportunity here.

Paris has several times the density of NYC as a whole. The latter is far more than midtown.

"You only have to look across the ocean to see it"

You only need to look across any of the Harlem, Hudson, or East rivers to see it. Brooklyn, the Bronx, and much of New Jersey follow this development pattern, more or less. San Francisco's population would double at Brooklyn's density.

The fundamental problem with American cities is that Americans failed to recognize them the core engine of growth and prosperity as they are. Instead cities are viewed through a political lens. This NYC's problems are to be solved by the city/county and San Francisco's are to be solved by their local city/county politicians. The Federal government, which takes in 30% of income, chips in a very limited manner. Investing in cities such as these are often viewed as "helping a blue city" and this Fed infrastructure money is spent on building Army bases in rural areas that doesn't provide any return for that investment. Similarly many city dwellers do not recognize the economic importance of the city they live in and the role of the cities in driving growth, reducing poverty etc. Thus they hang on to things like "neighborhood character" and height limits to reduce growth. This is very different in many other countries, and especially Asian countries. There Central governments realize the value cities bring to the national economy and thus investments are prioritized. Look at China and how much investment the Chinese government puts in their big cities. Same with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, UAE, India etc. Indian government prioritized building expressway link between it's megacities. They also funded the Delhi Metro project.

The suburbanization (or decentralization) was promoted by the Federal Government as a deterrent against nuclear strikes

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/suburbs-defense-07-10....

Funny how Japan actually got nuclear striken and they took the completely opposite approach.

This is not just an oversimplification, it is also incorrect. Military installations are put in rural areas because nobody wants artillery practice to happen near their houses. That money comes from the DoD, not generally classed as 'infrastructure spending.'

Futhermore, all interstate freeways are built with federal investment, and HUD is heavily involved in funding development of low-income housing nationwide -- this is also subject to staggering amounts of NIMBYism. Mass transit is even worse -- there are major American cities who want to build, and have lined up federal funding, only to be blocked by state government intervention on behalf of more NIMBY. Baltimore's Red Line is the most recent example of this that springs to mind.

So yes, this is very much a problem for city and state politics to solve -- the federal government can't invest without their cooperation.

As for comparisons to Asian cities, I can only thank God that we don't handle our development that way here. Our rural residents have enough problems without repeating the mistakes of India here.

I’m not sure you can bundle India with the likes of Japan. Two totally different levels of development.

For what it's worth, Japan is hardly a model. Huge suicide rates and elderly so lonely they turn to petty crime just so the can go to prison, along with a rapidly aging and shrinking population. A lesson, yes; a model, no.

I wish people would stop spreading these half truths about Japan.

Japan's suicide rate is not significantly higher than that of Finland, Argentina, and the USA. South Korea is the one developed Asian country that has a notably high suicide rate.[1]

And yes Japan's population is shrinking and aging, but that is mostly a rural/inaka phenomenon. Tokyo is actually growing in population and manages to have lower rents than SF, NYC, London, and HK. Not to mention a meticulously run rail system that puts the NYC MTA to shame.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...

They do not have significantly higher suicide rates. Please provide evidence.

While I’m sure you can find anecdotes about elders turning to petty crime, I can find anecdotes of people not doing that in Japan. It’d be pointless. What I can do however is provide a chart of crime in the US vs crime in Japan, but then you may as well look at just a US crime chart since Japan’s line would be imperceptible.

Actually, we have repeated the mistakes of India. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/tw...

> Military installations are put in rural areas because nobody wants artillery practice to happen near their houses.

Reminds me of the cheeky MCAS Beaufort slogan, "The Noise You Hear, is the Sound of FREEDOM."

I think part of the difference is that the USA has a lot more "Tier 1" cities than other countries would have for their size.

Australia really has 2 major cities (Sydney and Melbourne), and two second tier cities (Perth and Brisbane).

I think it's also in part to how separated the federal government is from local governments. In Australia, tax money is collected by the federal government and then disbursed to the states (bit of a simplification). There's less of a clear delineation between "federal money" and "state money".

It is slightly unusual. Germany is somewhat similar, as is China (scaled to their population).

The Tokyo metro is famously 30% of the population of Japan.

It'd be like LA having nearly 100 million people.

The Moscow metro is 11% of Russia. The NYC metro is 6% of the US by comparison.

Germany's two largest metro areas - Berlin and Ruhrgebiet - have a comparable share of its population to NYC at around 6%-7%.

Stockholm is 23% of Sweden. London is nearly 21% of the UK. Paris is 18% of France. Toronto is 16% of Canada. Mexico City is 16% of Mexico. Madrid is 14% of Spain. Amsterdam is 13% of the Netherlands. Bucharest is 12% of Romania. Rome is 12% of Italy. Jakarta is around 11% of Indonesia. Lagos is 11% of Nigeria. São Paulo is 10% of Brazil.

Amazingly, the Shanghai and Beijing metro areas are close to or sub 2% of China.

> Stockholm is 23% of Sweden

But this is like saying "Phoenix is 23% of Arizona", which is also true. (Arizona and Sweden have roughly comparable populations, though Sweden is a bit larger.)

Not really. There isn't a governmental level above Sweden (the EU doesn't really count), but there is above Arizona.

And Athens is about 35% of Greece :)

Without adjusting this for population I don't know what it really tells us. Yes, Australia with a population of 24 million has fewer "Tier 1" population centers than a country with 325 million.

Just going by ratios I would expect the US to have 26 Tier 1 cities.

I would also expect the US and Europe to have roughly the same number of Tier 1 cities, since they have roughly the same population.

I agree that the federal model of the US (which cascades down and has similar boundaries at the county & city level) is probably one of the root causes. Having "NSW Police" versus 482 city police departments in California is just one of many examples.

About 40% of the population of Australia lives in the Melbourne and Sydney metros, about evenly split. So 20% of the population lives in Sydney, and 20% in Melbourne.

By contrast, the NYC metro area has around 6% of the population of the USA.

But it's also about bulk number of large cities. If the federal government wants to inject funding into a large city in Australia, they have 2 options. You can't really play politics there, especially since Sydney and Melbourne have similar political makeups.

> I would also expect the US and Europe to have roughly the same number of Tier 1 cities, since they have roughly the same population.

Europe's population is around twice that of the US and the EU itself has around 50% more people than the US, so that is not an entirely accurate statement.

Oh man I live in jeedimetla, Hyderabad,India ( lower) middle class neighborhood. We still have buses from the 90s, no paved roads, pigs, cows, musqitos, constant steet noise, no garbage pickup, twice a week water supply, nasty industrial air. Yeah please look at India from San Francisco.

The article's point is that the churn of spillover-boomtowns will continue: once the current crop of towns starts getting built out and accumulating problems like unaffordable housing, nightmarish traffic, lack of easy greenfield land to develop with cookie-cutter houses on tiny lots and giant office parks, the developers will find the next wave of towns to exploit, probably long before most of the human misery materializes in the one they just left behind.

Boise/Meridian/Nampa may be the flavor of the day now, but by the time you're commuting from Fruitland because you couldn't afford a home in Boise, the region will have become just another dusty built-out suburban disaster buoyed by but a handful of overinfluential employers -- like Tucson -- and you'll be reading articles about whatever buzzword is being used for the new generation moving to Hermiston and Hickory and fortunately-placed small towns no one has never heard of. This is not at all different from the cycle of suburbs that plays out within every metro [1][2][3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880734 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13665669#13666473 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744401#16746390

It's interesting how much blame you attribute to the developers. I would lay this squarely at the feet of city planners and voters; they hold all the keys.

It's both. City planners are constrained to their own jurisdiction, so they're trying to come out ahead by ensuring that the next wave of growth doesn't leave them behind. They're trying to solve a local optimization problem, where their competition is often the neighboring localities with whom they will share the wider trend of whatever the future may bring, but the resulting wealth will be allocated depending on exact settlement and zoning patterns. It's a prisoner's dilemma.

Meanwhile, developers -- as a loose cohort -- are absolutely the executors for the nationwide phenomenon. Their loyalty is to not to the land or their products, but to the cycle of plan, build, and profit. Wherever they are, they're deeply entangled in local politics, and lobby the local officials to let them build homes on farmland to be upzoned. They leave behind subdivisions that don't actually generate enough revenue to the town to make up for their hookups to utilities and services, but the population growth looks good for the town in reports that businesses look at to expand or relocate.

Just like a B-roll of the cities now scrambling to attract Amazon, these suburbs are hoping they'd be picked instead of the town one over when some company with national pockets wants to build a 200-job call center, data center, or distribution warehouse. In mainstream America, these tiny battles between neighboring towns are fought and lost thirty, fifty jobs at a time.

The availability of housing probably does encourage household formation and childbirth, so you're right, developers share in the blame. But if you take population growth as a given, some kind of housing development is necessary, and there's an ironclad bipartisan consensus that it had better not be the urban kind (especially not near existing urban centers). I hate cookie-cutter greenfield subdivisions as much as anyone, but we get them because they are what we allow at scale.

please shut yo mauff about Hickory. Us old folks need a place to go once we cash in on our SF flats and fully vest.

The sad thing is that trying to increase density in places like SV isn’t just about taming housing inflation, denser places are also better places to live. I think there are lot of people out there who would like living in a place like Brooklyn Heights, where you have 3-5 story row houses (small enough for a single family) that are connected together along a tree lined block, with shops, restaurants, and bars within walking distance. Governments won’t even allow you to build a neighborhood like that anymore.

> denser places are also better places to live

For you, maybe. But not for me or for everyone. I like my low-density suburban sprawl, and I intend to continue voting to keep my city [0] the way it is.

[0] Not SV, but in Texas.

Yeah, part of the underlying problem here is a strong view that anyone who likes low-density must be NIMBY or just trying to protect their property value. It's the typical "no one who knows what i know could possibly have a different perspective and value system than me" attitude.

Or just doesn't care about the wellbeing of the majority and prefers pollution with cars, sprawled cities, pushing people with low incomes always further from the center (where they might still work), yada yada. It's a terrible stance for both ecological and social matters.

You demonstrate a perfect example of that self-sure self-righteousness. I'd strongly suggest you maybe try to understand the perspective of other people more, instead of trying to paint it into a story that you can oppose.

A whole continent doesn't get it ; oppose this to most europeans, for whom it's very normal. I get the perspective, doesn't mean it's better for mankind/society/the earth. Having one's own, shallow interests (because it's often revolving around sacred concept of space, which mostly exists to stash more of the shit one can buy) to the detriment of global ones is not something to be proud of.

Yes and no.

I can recognize the advantages of such a neighborhood, but about 25 years ago, I decided I can't handle listening to my neighbor's stereo at 2:30 in the morning.

Then live in a modern building with real sound proofing, not something built 60 years ago, when it was t even on people’s minds.

Maybe it's reversed in US, but I find the exact opposite here in UK - a house from 1930s will offer much better sound insulation that any new build with its cardboard-thin walls separating properties.

It depends heavily on a property. I rented a room in a fancy new build flat for a while and the only way I knew the neighbors existed was when I met them in an elevator.

Definitely my experience in the U.S. also. Buildings are built to meet minimum code, including the amount of sound allowed to pass through walls between units. Minimum code is nowhere near good enough to block any amplified music/sound, much less if you're unfortunate enough to share a wall/floor/ceiling with a neighbor with a powerful subwoofer.

It is a very valid gripe but a solvable one: soundproofing, noise ordinance enforcement, white noise machines :)

Summary: Better building codes would help us all, they need to improve too.

They're better to live outside, but our building codes don't make them better to live /inside/.

(I mean actual refuge that provides quite private space with silence, clean air (no odd smells/smoking of various types/cooking/baby diaper pails/rotting milk trash cans), and true tranquility.)

Bad neighbors can exist anywhere though. The suburbs have streets which might be fine for small sedans but which loud motorcycles or 'MAC' trucks shoved inside of oversized pickups can ruin. It also only takes that /one/ person smoking somewhere even vaguely near-by to ruin the clean air around that house.

I wonder if this trend will result in further stratification of American society. I mean, we've always had enclaves where rich people lived and poorer people lived, but they generally used to be at least nearby each other in large metros.

Now, though, this city stratification feels like a multi-layer sieve. E.g. San Francisco is still a super-desirable city to live, if you can afford it, so the people who can't get pushed to mid-tier cities, and then in those mid-tier cities poorer people get pushed out as the city gets less affordable. The whole SF Bay Area -> Austin -> (now still less expensive cities like Chattanooga, Pittsburgh, etc.) fits this pattern.

It's always been this way. People didn't go west because they had a good life on the east coast.

By the time the "GENT-rification" reaches Chattanooga and Pittsburgh though, it's become something more akin to "SQUIRE-ification". The people moving in are not nearly as wealthy, so people are not really being pushed out in the numbers that they are pushed out in places like Manhattan or San Fran.

It's the difference between a few thousand hundred-thousandaires moving in, as opposed to a few thousand millionaires and billionaires moving in. There really is a material and nontrivial difference in the housing market ripples resultant from these two hypothetical immigrant waves. Far fewer people, if any, wind up displaced in the third and fourth tier cities that the hundred-thousandaires move into. Developers operating in these cities simply can't afford to remake the markets the way you can in the larger cities. The numbers typically don't allow for it. Whereas in the first tier cities, the market in entire swaths of these cities can be remade and become astronomically unaffordable in a matter or 5 or 10 years. And the numbers in that large market make it very profitable for a developer to do so.

>"The people moving in are not nearly as wealthy, so people are not really being pushed out in the numbers that they are pushed out in places like Manhattan or San Fran."

Backwards! Third-tier cities have contracted from their 20th-century peaks, so easily commutable lots and even homes are simply vacant. They're affordable to mere hundred-thousandaires because they're drowning in supply (though it might need some work). Displacement doesn't happen as much because abundance means you can get your own spot without taking someone else's.

The crappiest apartments in the San Francisco neighborhoods that time forgot are still insanely expensive next to national norms. No development is necessary for sufficiently high migration (against sufficiently low housing stock) to create a capacity crunch, and you're just as evicted when you're outbid by $500 vs. $5000.

Its already happened to a certain extent. Most expensive American cities have some core industry: Sf = tech, NYC = finance, LA = movies, Chicago = commodities. This clustering of talent attracts even more talent, keeping the city’s economic engine humming along. Since the housing stock and transportation takes longer to evolve, the big cities see higher and higher rents.

Usually economic downturns stabilize things a little bit. But we’re now in the midst of the longest economic expansion ever seen in the history of the US.

You have to keep in mind that this economic migration to and from cities is something that's been happening for centuries and likely since the beginning of human civilization. The US is a particularly great illustration of this since it's such a new nation. Every single city in the US was a remote backwoods not all that long ago. And then the same process happens over and over. Some city begins to attract more and more people. This results in development and growth. Those that succeed during this period rise to the top and thrive. Some of those that do not move on and try to take part in what becomes the next great opportunity.

Take San Francisco for instance. The thing that brought it from being a backwoods to a major city was the gold rush of 1849, which is also where the name of the football team 'The San Francisco 49ers' comes from). You get a huge influx of people, lots of money and resources flowing, and the next thing you know it's one its way to becoming one of the largest cities in the US with massive growth.

However, the opposite can also happen. For instance Detroit used to be one of the most desirable cities in the US. It was the 4th largest city in the nation with a surplus of great high paying jobs. This wealth and opportunity ended up attracting vast numbers of people - more than there was opportunity for. And then on top of that what jobs and opportunities there began declining. And next thing you know people are leaving the cities and droves and today it's home to countless empty buildings, the second highest crime rate, and one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

In the end the point is that cities, and the demographics within them, are in constant shift. Thing's change over time and it's always up the individual to find where the greatest 'value' is, with the meaning of 'value' certainly varying quite heavily from person to person.

This article misses an option I've seen used by the city which I live in: Austin, TX.

Instead of building a serious mass transit system, the city encouraged the greenfield development of high density urban clusters outside the downtown region. So the companies moving in now have option to be located in the Downtown or the "New Downtown" (called the Domain).

I think this has been a very successful strategy. But it depends on whether you can convince enough people/companies to move to the alternate high density development.

The “new downtown” is not the Domain. It’s Round Rock.

And the developers have not done any favors to Austin by building all the massive high rises near the river so that no one else can see any part of the river.

Nor have they done any favors to Austin by continuing to build out massive cookie cutter developments so that they can try to become the next Steiner Ranch — meanwhile causing very grave harm with the massive increased traffic on 183, Mopac, 360, 2222, etc....

i think you’re being generous calling austin’s city development and urban design even a “strategy”. austin for a long time didn’t want to grow at all, so they did everything to basically discourage it. then growth was forced on the city, and they’ve had to scramble to try, unsuccessfully, to catch up. that’s why there’s a double decker highway that doesn’t really help the traffic, an expensive highway that goes around the city that no one uses, a highway with practically no exits that goes through people’s backyards, an expensive train that no one uses and is almost pointless, no way to get across the city quickly, hardly any bike lanes in a city where bicyclists are plentiful, and more and more. austin is a poster child for how to not design and develop city infrastructure.

The train is expensive cause no one bothered to land bank for it, ditto for the freeways running through people's backyards. The lack of planning I saw when I visited Austin was astounding, but it is cultural at this point.

Just look at transit in Austin, its nearly a mile to get to a damn bus stop from the Apple campus, and even at peak service is spotty and extremely slow. Busses need to have priority, and be set up to feed your rail system (which is extremely small and needs serious expansion). The current system in Austin will never approach 70% ridership like Seattle or anywhere near it without major changes.

Don't forget traffic worse than silicon valley.

As a result of the recent growth Boise now has the 7th largest income gap in the nation[0]. And the median home price recently shot up $11k in one month[1].

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-19/migration...

[1]: http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/business/article208855154...

What I don't get about this is: why Boise? Are people just moving there for the scenery? There are major US metros with affordable housing and much better job markets.

There's a sort of implied dichotomy in this article: major metros are too expensive, so people will move into a succession of mid-sized towns. But, no: a couple major metros are too expensive. Others, like Miami, Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, DFW, and Houston are comparably affordable --- several of them are cheaper than Boise!

You are right. Guessing they picked Boise because it is fast growing.

They absolutely did, and that's the entire point: the growth-begets-growth tautology of land (and job) development in the US; a subtly-hyped gold rush for milquetoast everymen wherein people tired of high costs of living are trying to catch their lucky break by moving to the handful of areas at the exact right time where you can still buy a big house and snag a semi-rare high-paying job. They read 'metros with the highest rates of income growth' and they think their incomes, but strangely not their costs, would grow too.

People do want this, because they've done it with Raleigh, Nashville, and Boulder, and Austin before that, and Portland before that; and the article's point is that there's always another metro somewhere where growth can be jumpstarted for a few years before it fizzles out.

Established and mostly well-functioning metros like Chicago and DFW don't qualify in their entirety, because individual suburbs or exurbs within them fulfill the same role that Boise now plays. Boise is being used here because it's remote from other cities of comparable size, so it's riding solely its own coattails, and the failures of regions far away that draw people in.

Weather is a big factor. Personally, if I'm going to live somewhere cold, there better be some nice skiing options, and there are none in the eastern or middle states. Also looking to minimize humidity.

Government finances are also a concern, many of the east and middle cities are also loaded up with tons of debt from years ago.

I also think being outdoors-y is in vogue with tech and other high earners, which is also better on the west coast. It all comes down to quality of life and the type of people you want to be around, which I guess the other cities you mentioned can't compete in.

==Government finances are also a concern, many of the east and middle cities are also loaded up with tons of debt from years ago.==

Can you explain this line of thinking? Is the assumption that taxes will have to increase to pay these liabilities? If so, I would argue that faster growing suburbs and cities out west and in the sun belt are also going to need more tax dollars to build infrastructure (roads, schools, utilities, etc.).

Taxes will have to increase, and already have been quite a bit, to pay for underfunded pensions. If you have the ability to move, then it would behoove you to go somewhere your tax dollars are improving your quality of life rather than paying for promises from the past.

Even though California is deep in the red, it can get away with more than IL/NJ/CT/KY/PA/etc since it's weather and geography make it a highly desirable place to live.

Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut all have pretty good schools. They are all in the top 15 for Pre-K through 12th grade. I'm not sure I would argue that your property tax dollars are going farther in Texas (ranked #33 in public schools) versus New Jersey (ranked #3).[1]

Oddly, almost all of the bottom 10 ranked states for public schools are "low tax" havens. It's almost like the two things are connected. Funny enough, the outlier is California, which has the 44th ranked Pre-K through 12th grade public education, but has nice weather.

[1]https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

As someone who's currently looking to purchase a first home in Boise after living here for the last 9 years, all I can say is "meep". There's nothing like the crazy stupid money that Californians are brining in to the housing market to make we wish articles like this would stop shining the spotlight on Boise. The housing market has been nuts this season and I can't help but think that it's all the Californians coming in and buying houses off of the market in cash.

I don't mind more people coming in to our city. I don't care where you're from. Boise is a lovely place and I would love to have more culture and different perspectives help contribute to the current lifestyle of Boiseans. I just wish it wasn't to the detriment of the current lifestyle of the people who already live here.

Financially speaking, what good paying jobs are in Boise? I have cousins out there who both graduated with solid degrees, yet can't find work outside retail, and have learned the hard way that becoming management in retail has massive downsides (esp. on one's family).

Mainly tech. I work in tech and have had no issue looking for work.

> 7,000 science, technology, engineering and math jobs went unfilled in Idaho in 2017, double the number from the year before.

Sources:

[1]: http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/politics-government/state...

What companies are creating these positions? What is considered a "high" wage? In my eyes, that could be $58k a year or maybe a touch less depending on the authors perspective, which is a far cry from what similar talent would make in Portland or Seattle, let alone SoCal.

In my experience 60-70k is considered to be a 'high' salary in Boise. Like, someone outside of tech who is making is 60k considers themselves to be upper middle class. I know people who relocated from Boise to Bay area, and were given 30-40% salary boosts for cost of living. Of course, at the time real estate was so cheap in Boise, it was commonly noted that it actually costs much more than 30-40% more to live in the Bay area than it does in Boise, but that's what was offered.

Huh? A plumber or electrician can earn more than that even in rural areas, I wouldn't consider $60k to be upper middle class.

Some definitions of upper middle class start as low as "$62k per earner AND a household income above $100,000". So a huasband and wife who each make $62k would be "upper middle class".

Of course, these definitions are silly and depend on tons of things. A teacher making $60k with difficult-to-lose jobs and a great pension might be better off than a construction worker making $80k. The latter will have a shorter career at that salary, is more exposed to cycles, and will have a tougher time planning for retirement (assuming, of course, the teacher's pension is well-run).

A teacher making $40k with no dependents and no desire to reproduce is practically upper middle class compared to a software engineer making twice that but who's a single mother with 4 kids.

And a teacher making $60k in rural midwest is basically in a different economic class than a teacher making $60k in a coastal city...

> plumber or electrician can earn more than that even in rural areas

Sure. Class isn't just about income; it's also about value systems and educational attainment. Which is definitely classist! But then, we are literally discussing class...

Thanks. I know it's a tough definition, I just meant that someone making 60k is Boise is going to be at least as satisfied with his/her life as someone making ~100k in Silicon Valley...

Huh? Why do you define upper middle class so as to exclude the trades? Trades are frequently lucrative enough to place tradespeople in the income percentile required to reach upper middle class, especially if you own your own business, as many tradespeople do.

Most class definitions are classist.

"Upper middle class" has a definition in sociology that basically excludes the trades; it's the "managers and professional" class.

And it is not too unusual to find "trade" households making more than professionals.

Class and income are related but distinct. People with advanced degrees and high-autonomy white collar jobs ("upper middle class") are a distinct sociological cohort from people in the trades.

You may think this is bullshit, but class has some decent explanatory power for otherwise-puzzling observations, like how the children of the first cohort defy their own economic incentives to avoid the behaviors of the second.

It offends modern liberal sensibilities to treat class hierarchy as normative ("classism"), but most acknowledge its existence and utility as a descriptive concept, one which is a lot more nuanced than bands on the income spectrum.

The distinction can be traced to that between the liberal and mechanical arts.

Latter also goes by servile and vulgar:

Artes Mechanicae or mechanical arts, are a medieval concept of ordered practices or skills, often juxtaposed to the traditional seven liberal arts Artes liberales. Also called "servile" and "vulgar",[1] from antiquity they had been deemed unbecoming for a free man, as ministering to baser needs.

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

https://quidditycirce.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/liberal-arts-...

Closely related is C.P. Snow's ""Two Cultures":

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

This is reflected in educational systems, with a rough hierarchy from premier liberal arts colleges (Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Palermo, Stanford, ...), major research schools (MIT, CalTech, UC Berkeley, University of Michigan, ...), various technical schools (San Jose State, Michigan State), polytechnics and ag schools, secondary tech schools (often formerly "teachers colleges" or "normal schools") in the U.S., say, Midwest State in Wichita Falls, TX. Then two-year and strictly vocational schools.

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

Interestingly, liberal arts universities are some of the oldest extand institutions, with exceptionally durable prestige: Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Cambridge, Padua, and Naples, dating from 1088 - 1224. See:

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

The emphasis on basic skills and literacy is part of this. STEM (or STEAM) is the new "Three Rs", as is the focus on rote-work and standardised skills testing at primary and secondary levels in the U.S. and elsewhere.

J.S. Mill commented on this in the 1860s in the UK, via the late Hans Jensen:

First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the unversity "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opionions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speaches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental inperpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in ptoential attemtps at throwing off their fetters.

See: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...

I was trying to point out that $60k for skilled people of any type is absurdly low and not worthy of being called upper middle class, by pointing out two skilled trades that are commonly needed and well compensated significantly in excess of $60k/yr across the US.

The key factor that you seem to be ignoring is ratio of the income to cost of living in that area. For the purposes of this I'll define upper middle class as 'can afford a house, a reasonably nice car, and can afford to go to pretty much any restaurant in town for special occasions'. Sure you can argue about details but that may well be true for a successful tradesman, especially one who runs his or her own business.

IDK about Boise, but the few mid-sized cities I'm familiar with are bemoaning a tech talent crisis and citing huge numbers of unfilled positions.

But when I shop around for jobs in those areas, two things stick out:

1. While they'll generally do better than 58k for non-entry-level positions, midwestern employers won't touch 1/3rd of my coastal salary. Housing doesn't even come close to compensating. Even if someone straight up gifted me a house in the midwest, I'd still net close to 6 figures better on the coast.

2. More importantly, and 100% related to #1, midwestern employers have no idea how to leverage my skills. Therefore, the work is generally less interesting (lots of not-so-challenging implementation roles and a lot of that is web stuff; very little industrial R&D) with no room for growth (except perhaps into vaguely technical mid-level management at a particular type of company, which I'm not interested in).

3 (This one is admittedly purely about personal taste). The local support for public schooling k-12+ is spotty. Some of the best schools in the country, but also some of the worst. And you basically have to live in sprawlville to use the good schools. Meanwhile, the interesting jobs are still mostly where you'd expect and the bike/transit infrastructure connecting wealthy suburbs to downtown areas with interesting jobs just doesn't exist... so, better buy a comfortable car.

IMO this won't change for at least one more decade. The tech talent for one type of computer science will begin to fill in just as demand shifts to a different type of computer science. I'd be unsurprised if that continues indefinitely. The only way out is for these communities to build out their own talent pipelines a la Pittsburgh or Chicago. But Chicago is Chicago, and Pittsburgh can pull on its rich institutions from a glorious past. So, IDK how you bootstrap that sort of thing.

> 3

Surely you can't be saying that public schools are a reason to stay in the Bay Area?

There's a surprisingly large tech scene in Boise, quiet, but there.

What companies are there, and with what kind of pay range/job roles?

Micron, Clearwater, T-Sheets, Kount, WhiteCloud, Vacasa, VisitPay, Metageek, Blackbox VR, etc.

Micron - One of the worst places you could ever work. The amount of people coming out of there with PTSD was very high when I was in boise.

Clearwater - Old and boring

T-Sheets - sold to behemoth that will mess it all up

Blackbox VR - some guy who got lucky with a body building forum blowing money

Kount - ya scammy payment processing for the win

HP - reorg and layoffs never ending.

Tons of pretentious digital marketing firms who really only work for hp.

I can go on and on. The tech scene there is a joke don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.

Wow, yeah, that tech scene sounds very similar to what is north of the Columbia River in the Portland area, basically HP (failing forward at an astounding pace) and a bunch of sketchy "tech" companies that aren't great places to work.

Its livable, but not where I'd go out of my way to get a job at.

Why the sentiment? I'm having issues thinking of a company in SV (or anywhere else) that can't be degraded down like that :)

Oh Jason.

Your response sounds like an exact echo of Austin's gripes from 5-10 years ago, and thus I think highlight the point of the article.

Sorry, but it's a losing battle. While some of us still like to say we are trying to "Keep Austin Weird", the fact is it's not really possible to keep it that weird when bare lot values for anything remotely central in Austin now go for over $500k.

> Austin's gripes from 5-10 years ago

Started in the mid-90s here, but yeah.

Or Portland in the 80s and 90s.

You can't have a large influx of people from anywhere without the culture changing. You're going to get higher home prices and/or more sprawl, and more traffic either way. But you're also going to get more investment in the area, more skilled workers, and more consumers spending money.

To give an example from California: San Francisco started as a Spanish mission town. Then it was a gold rush town, and then a major port and military base with a predominantly working-class population. Then it became a center of counterculture and gay culture, and then a tech hub with a very high cost of living.

Every time the city changed, there were people who didn't want it to change -- but the people who resisted change were themselves responsible for changing the city when they arrived. Similar things could be said about cities everywhere.

This is the lifecycle of cities. It's what happens in a free country where people can live and work where they want to. Unless you were one of the people who showed up on a wagon train and built Boise out of nothing, you aren't any different than today's newcomers.

> There's nothing like the crazy stupid money that Californians are brining in to the housing market

In Austin we used to call them "equity refugees".

Good luck.

> There's nothing like the crazy stupid money that Californians are brining in to the housing market

Hi, welcome to the Our House Prices (And Other Things) Got Jacked Up By Californians club!

Sincerely, Washington, Oregon, Texas, ...

> As someone who's currently looking to purchase a first home in Boise after living here for the last 9 years, all I can say is "meep". There's nothing like the crazy stupid money that Californians are brining in to the housing market to make we wish articles like this would stop shining the spotlight on Boise. The housing market has been nuts this season and I can't help but think that it's all the Californians coming in and buying houses off of the market in cash.

This has been happening in Boise for a long time. "Keep California out of Idaho" has been a meme since at least the late 90s, and probably earlier.

Just to highlight the cost difference: I was just in a small city (Boise, actually!) for a work event. We rented a very nice house from airbnb for the stay.

It was >4000 square feet. The master bedroom was probably 4-500 square feet itself. It bad high ceilings, a private, gated, massive yard, mature trees etc.

Recently listed for $600k and couldn't find a buyer at that price. Just absolutely insane compared even to Phoenix, where I live, and which was the last "Californians flee hiding prices" city.

>Just absolutely insane compared even to Phoenix, where I live, and which was the last "Californians flee hiding prices" city

I'm not sure what you are suggesting. Here is a house for less money in Phoenix at that square footage range: https://www.redfin.com/AZ/Phoenix/1908-E-Vista-Dr-85022/home...

A homes value is a lot more than the square footage. The house in Boise was modern, had a very large yard, was a private, gated lot etc.

Very different than the house you linked.

Idaho's entire population fits comfortably in a small segment of any of the nation's larger cities.

When three people walk into the state, it leads in percentage growth. It's extremely silly to draw some conclusion from the fact that a tiny state managed 2.2% population growth while dozens of larger states managed 2.1%.

Where does Chicago fit into this? Interesting it was left out.

From a logistical standpoint, does Boise have a glut of available jobs for these migrants, or are they taking their jobs with them?

That's the first thing I think about when considering a move; can I work there?

If you're in tech, yes. There are a lot of tech related jobs that Boise has a huge deficit for. You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it.

Would it? From my experience, if you’re coming from a place like Google/FB/well paid smaller companies it’s still not worth it. You have to be making on the mid/lower end for the COL changes to account for the reduction in salary - in part because places like Boise simply don’t have jobs that are comparable to some of the better ones in the Bay, Seattle, and NYC

As an example, I moved from the DC metro area (itself already a high CoL area) to NYC to take a job at Google. I'm currently making 'exceeds expectations' L5 money, which is way more than you can make at basically any tech job in the DC area. And yet there are tens of thousands of engineers here in NYC making that much, at Big 4 and fintech companies.

Yes, the cost of living went up a bit, but it's utterly dwarfed by the salary gains. I'd have to somehow achieve a significantly negative cost of living for it to be worth moving to somewhere like Boise, where cracking six figures for a software job is significant.

Genuinely happy to hear that it worked so well for you. I think what you may be overlooking is that the vast majority of SEs don’t have the experience or talent to be at your technical proficiency ( trying not to sound classist here, just stating facts).

The way income/CoL works, though, the majority of SWEs will still do better in a tech hub where the highest salaries can be found, for SWEs of all skill levels. There's plenty of "mediocre" SWEs (I hate writing this, it feels judgmental) still pulling six figures in the Bay Area; in Boise they might only be making half of that.

As long as you're good enough to be employed, it makes sense to go to one of the tech hubs, where the salaries are the highest. I made the mistake of not doing that for the first seven years of my career and definitely regret it.

This is absolutely true. Working in good teams has the great benefit that even a mediocre person's productivity and skills go up if they're curious and open-minded enough to learn. And working in SV means that hopefully you have a better chance of working with high-performance and highly-functional teams.

I guess what I wonder is that even after getting all the benefits of working in the bay, whether everyone can reach the productivity/skill level that commands compensation that makes up for living in a high CoL Metro area. I do not believe that is the case, but I may be wrong.

Excellent point, and very true. I wasn't a great SWE when I first graduated. I've always been smart, but I wasn't learning great development practices at my previous companies. None of them even had a great culture of code reviews, testing, or continuous integration. I've become a much stronger developer now that I am at a top tier company working with very smart people who have very high standards; in a way it's allowed me to reach my potential.

> You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it.

No, it generally doesn't. It depends on the specific numbers of course (how much of a salary cut, how much cheaper is the housing costs), but a lot of people make that blanket statement because of a mathematical fallacy: The fallacy is if I make half as much, but my expenses are half as much, then I'm just as well off. That statement is mathematically false.

Here's a made up example: San Francisco salary is $140K (or $84K after 40% taxes deducted) and rent or mortgage is $3000/month ($36K/year). Boise salary is half as much at $70K (or $42K after 40% taxes deducted) and rent or mortgage are also half as much at $1500/month ($18K/year). Now calculate disposable income after taxes and housing costs: In San Francisco it's $48K (i.e., $84K - $36K) and in Boise it would be $24K (i.e., $42K - $18K). Clearly, in this example, you'd still be $24K better off in San Francisco.

I know that I made many assumptions above. I'm just illustrating the fallacy that people often make. Halving your income and halving your expenses is not neutral -- it is worse.

Plus, cost of living doesn't account for everything. Most consumer products, e.g. cars, computers, shoes, and clothing, cost about the same everywhere. Living in San Francisco with a higher salary and paying a high rent, your spending on such products will be a smaller percentage of your income than if you lived somewhere with cheaper housing and made less money.

But housing, schools, child care, etc., make up a much bigger fraction of expenses.

With more and more students coming out of college with debt, your student loans account for a much smaller percentage of income in a city like SF than in Boise

Lmfao, nothing cost about the same living in San Francisco.

Not to mention taxes are significantly higher as you earn more (progressive) and there are tons of things that nickel and dime you every day.

For example, a bottle of 200 ibuprofen in SF runs about $12-14. I buy it for $3-4. It was so surprising I started filling a bag full of non perishable items every time I'd visit family in the midwest. You add this across hundreds of things you use and it adds up quickly.

And that's nothing compared to the rent.

Parking in San Francisco is at least a second car payment. I'm not sure it actually matters that cars themselves are more affordable. And the rest is going to be trivial as a percentage of your income either way.

Housing isn’t twice as expensive in San Francisco, it is 10x. Median price per square foot is $129 in Boise, vs $1550 for Palo Alto, or $993 in SF, $1220 SOMA.

$/sqft isn't a good metric. The correct metric is "what am I actually going to spend on housing?"

This way, the answer begins to change as your family size grows. Which I think is accurate.

How about to rent? Still 10X? A lot more people are looking to rent than to buy (at least straight off anyway).

Looks like around 3-4x. RentCafe gives average SF prices of: studio $2.5k, 1bd $3.2k, 2bd $4.3k. Versus Boise: studio $0.7k, 1bd $0.9k, 2bd $1k.

https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ca/sa... https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/id/ad...

So you need to clear roughly $40K more in pre-tax salary to make up the difference between SF and Boise (accounting for both tax and rent on a studio). That seems doable.

Note that the difference is less if you didn't have a car in SF (or NYC) but need one in Boise.

It does sound doable. I'd probably put the breakeven at closer to $60k pretax for me personally, since I live in a 2bd and don't really want to downsize to a studio, though I realize some people are fine living in studio apts. Depends a lot on the job though. In my line of work (academia), I don't think you could easily get $60k more by moving from a low-CoL to a high-CoL city. From offers I know of, the salary difference is closer to $20k. Even Stanford (which isn't exactly easy to get a job at in the first place) pays only marginally more than comparable universities in low-CoL areas like Georgia Tech, CMU, or UIUC. But I'm sure you could swing a $60k+ raise in some other lines of work.

Yeah, academia is another whole can of words. Apologies if I didn't make it explicit, but I was talking about SWEs. And anecdotally I added a lot more than $60K to my salary by moving to NYC, so I'd have been fine to cover an increased CoL of up to $34K/year; in actuality, it increased by far less than that, less than $10K/year, thanks in large part to saving $600 per month after selling my car which I don't need here. Also, my current employer provides three meals a day, which saves a surprising amount of money (even if I don't eat dinner at the office everyday). That kind of perk simply wasn't available at most tech companies where I moved from.

Speaking of Stanford, one of my coworkers left to go teach there for a year and then came right back. She was actually losing net worth there because they didn't pay her enough for the area, and she didn't want to cut back on her lifestyle and live frugally like one would have to to make a future on that salary. It's sad, but there you go. Maybe there should be a tuition surcharge on CS majors to allow them to actually pay instructors enough to retain them, vs running right back to industry.

software engineer salary somewhere else is usually more like 20-25% less rather than 50% less -- someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver. They'll pay 5k less in taxes (both due to lower total income and lower state tax rates). So saving 18k in housing costs puts them at least in a comparable disposable-income range.

For people in lower-paying careers, the lower housing costs elsewhere almost always dwarf the pay differences. For higher-paying careers, the pay differences are the dominant factor. Mid-range software engineer salary is actually pretty close to the dividing line, which makes it particularly important to evaluate the specific numbers yourself.

> software engineer salary somewhere else is usually more like 20-25% less rather than 50% less -- someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver.

Worth pointing out that this function doesn't work for inputs much higher than $150k or so, and doesn't even work at points like $140k depending on the particular candidate.

> someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver

As someone who moved from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and had my compensation quadruple, I call bullshit.

As someone who was looking at the data on glassdoor while writing my comment, and who has dealt with offers from recruiters, and who has an extensive network of friends who are open about their earnings, I call bullshit on your calling of bullshit.

There are certainly outliers. There are certainly people with excellent skills who are being underutilized, and who will get paid a lot more if they find the exact right fit. Just a wild guess, but you didn't go from 35k in Pittsburgh to 140k in SF, you went from a lot more than that in Pittsburgh to a lot more than that in SF. If you're up in the 200k+ range in software in SF, you'd probably earn a lot less going anywhere except maybe NY or Boston. But if you're in the "average software engineer salary" range in SF, the falloff going to a mid-sized city is not nearly as steep.

> But if you're in the "average software engineer salary" range in SF, the falloff going to a mid-sized city is not nearly as steep.

But that is exactly why Engineers want to be in SF! Other markets won’t compensate you nearly as well, or increase your compensation as much, as companies in the Bay Area.

However, if one has a family and kids, I could see moving to a city with more affordable housing and good schools as a worthy trade off.

My point is most engineers in Boise are not making 6 digits.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/boise-software-engineer-s...

"software engineers" in SF aren't making 140k either.

If you look across several software-related job titles that are around 140k in SF (you may have to include terms like "lead" or "senior") you'll find Boise salaries to be closer to 3/4 than 1/2. Some are a little lower, some a little higher. Denver tends to be a little higher than Boise but still well below SF. Housing costs in Denver are also considerably higher than Boise and considerably lower than SF.

Which goes back to my original point: that it's particularly important for people in that approximate salary range to run the numbers for themselves and their own situations. While for people making a lot more the higher salary easily dwarfs the CoL and for people making a lot less the CoL easily dwarfs the salary, for people making not-particularly-exceptional salaries within the general software field, the numbers are similar enough that the specific offer + your specific housing need + other personal details can make the difference.

Your own data contradicts your argument. Assuming you're using Glassdoor as a reference like you mentioned, than Boise engineers make $85k and SF engineers make $145k - I am not filtering by title for either of those.

My anecdotal experience is engineers in SF make more than $140k, and engineers in Pittsburgh make less than $85k (although this is probably no longer true with all of the self-driving startups there now). I would suspect engineers in Boise make less than Pittsburgh, but I've never talked to anyone there.

> "Boise engineers make $85k and SF engineers make $145k"

if you click on the Boise link you provided and change the city to SF without making any other changes, it shows about $125k, not $145k. 145 is if you add "senior" to the title.

I haven't checked Pittsburgh, and I'm not trying to make an exhaustive list. Just making a more general point -- run the numbers for yourself, based on your specific offers and your specific needs. Because you might find that you personally can make >140k in SF and <85k in Pittsburgh and won't come close to making that up from taxes and CoL. Someone else might find they can make 140k in SF and 120k in some other city and easily make up the difference through taxes and CoL.

You are right: your single data point invalidates his theory. /S

Why is this a bad thing?

I live in a midsize city. High quality housing is $110/sqft. I can walk to my kids school, shopping, library and dining. My kid can take a bus to malls and parks, and my commute is approximately 7-10m, and few commutes around here would exceed 20-30. I can be in NYC or Boston in <3 hours. NYC by train is an option.

Why would you want to move from such a place to NYC or SFO?

NJ?

Can’t be NJ, it’s 1 hr from NY and 6 hours from Boston. Maybe near Hartford?

Hartford can have some bad traffic, so few commutes being over 30min seems unlikely.

New London is another possibility--it's the largest city on the Amtrak line between Providence and New Haven.

If "NYC by train is an option," but Boston is not, I'd guess upstate NY, maybe Albany.

I'm guessing Springfield, Massachusetts.

> Why would you want to move from such a place to NYC or SFO?

For the career or business opportunities, I imagine.

World-class theatre/opera, bands make a stop here on their tours, wide variety of restaurants, communities for some of my more specialised hobbies and interests. There are certainly costs, but big cities can offer a depth and variety of experiences that smaller ones can't.

In the Bay Area?

I don’t live there but have visited. It’s pretty vanilla suburbia. You’ll definitely miss communities of interest, but it’s not too different.

mid-size coastal cities are severely underrated imo. sure you miss out on some of the glamour, but you can get a pretty nice urban lifestyle and your tech salary goes way further. personally, i love being able to drive anywhere within the city limits in under 30 mins and being able to find parking when i get there.

> ...your tech salary goes way further...

Does it? When you are a saver, not a spender, you're better off with a higher gross salary and higher disposable income, since you're saving it anyway. It's a faster way to a nest egg, a down payment, or financial independence.

Lifestyle-wise, I'd be happier in a smaller city, but so far the tech salaries aren't even in the same league.

im on the entry level side of things. im making ~$80k and paying $950 in rent, and i pay moderate taxes. i would be much worse off making $104k at google.

you're right of course. any blanket statement will likely be wrong.

It’s easy to say “just move somewhere cheaper” but how do you put together a list of places? How many people who can’t afford rent can afford flying around the country trying out new cities? How do you find a new job if you don’t know anybody?

What companies are working on economic relocation? It sounds like something difficult and valuable.

I mean, may be eventually? Just because Boise is the fastest growing city doesn't mean San Fran and LA have negative growth.

The answer of whether Boise will stifle city planners' dreams will come down to the actual numbers over time which in general is hard to predict. People saying "SF is over" or "Seattle is over" seem to only look at the second derivative and ignore the fact that these cities are still growing today.

The sad part is that, after so many California exodus arrived, they will turn Boise to yet another CA city that they just left, as seen in other cities, by then they will move elsewhere I guess.

What is happening in Boise? The article doesn't really say.

Boise is absorbing a lot of people who either can't afford to live in California any more, or don't like California's political environment. Boise is currently the fastest growing metro area in the US.

This is happening in a lot of mid-sized cities in the western US. California's economic / housing policies result in very high cost of living, which causes a significant migration of poor people out of the state and into places like Boise, Denver, Las Vegas, Beaverton, Fort Worth, and so on.

You can frequently find articles like http://www.vvdailypress.com/news/20180203/packing-up-and-mov... from those places.

The impression I got from the article was that he was using a recent WSJ article[0] about Boise as an impetus to bash urban development.

The WSJ article is basically, that it’s cheaper to buy a house in Boise. Sure it is, but there’s nothing about what these people moving to the Boise metro area (population 700k) are doing. The two Californians they talk to are, a CEO who bought a second house, and a soon to be retiree. As it is, this is more of a cutting indictment of California, than Fort Lauderdale is of NYC.

Yes, the housing in the desirable parts of California is too high, but at the same time, it’s high because it is desirable. It’s cheap to live in places where no one wants to live. If I wanted, I could move back to where I grew up and a buy a house for $27,000[1], but then I’d be Royalton, Illinois.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/boise-idaho-feels-the-growing-p...

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/209-5th-St-N-Royalton-IL-...

Cali is 30x bigger than Idaho... if 100,000 people move to Idaho, 3,000,000 people need to move to Cali to keep pace in terms of percent growth.

Obviously it’s not sustainable for California to be a top growing state forever.

As someone who lives in a city with about the same pop as Boise, cities that size can be quite nice.

The difference is whether you're talking about numeric growth or percentage growth. Idaho is #1 in percentage growth but not in the top 10 in numeric growth. California is #3 in numeric growth, but not in the top 10 in percentage growth.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/estimate...

live rural and be happy. small farm,commute to work if you can't work remote,go to local town once a week for supplies. sorted.

live on a farm and content yourselves

My general view after travelling to Denver is that one of America's biggest issues is underpopulation. There is so much land in these areas and actually lots of infrastructure relative to population.

It all stood out to me how white these areas remain. I saw a handful of non whites and no Asians the entire time. Shocking how the whitest areas are the most anti immigrant. What are they so angry about?!

Bringing in migrants and capital to these areas could really set the US economy on fire. But since the country turned away from openness in the 1920s economically it's been declining on the growth side (carried by the productivity economy which is tech).

Denver is 30% Latino, 11% Black, 5% Asian. Not sure how you only saw a handful of non-whites.

Segregation.

Confirmation bias or lives somewhere with a much smaller white population.

Overall Denver is less white than the US as a whole, but has some neighborhoods that are almost entirely white (take a look on https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html ). You can hang out in, say, Cherry Creek or Wash Park and see almost entirely white people. Go to Park Hill or south Feds and you see very few white people.

He didn’t go to Aurora.

Many American cities feel like they've just suffered a bombing raid and are in the process of rebuilding. It's parking lots, abandoned buildings, and other junk for as far as the eye can see.

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