Workers Are Fleeing Big Cities for Small Ones, and Taking Their Jobs with Them
wsj.com
wsj.com
In addition, while this is much more subjective, most of those cities seem to share a similar "cultural prestige"/influence as compared to other large cities like Columbus, Jacksonville, etc.
It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".
Maybe?
But how many clicks would that get?
Edit: to be clear, price for me was really the main reason to move away from SF and not to move for example to NYC. If there had been city similarly vibrant and interesting, large city as NYC or SF that is affordable I'd have chosen that in a heart beat over Portland.
I get it, I grew up in a small town and this feels like straight townie-ism to me.
Portland people who hate CA transplants have the same mindset as SF people who hate "techies" who have the same mindset as Red Americans who hate immigrants. There are always some cultural differences people point to (they are raising prices!/taking jobs!/crappy people!/more traffic!) but it is really just a form of territorial pissing that dumps negativity on individuals for societal shifts.
Otherwise ... No one occupies the high moral ground. Every newcomer, no matter how far back, changed forever what was there.
Edit: when I lived in San Diego in the seventies, it was all but impossible to get a permit for a new water hookup, effectively banning new homes and therefore new people. Your wife could start with that.
And the native Americans changed the land when they arrived.
And they were always leaving off the last syllables of words. But mainly property prices.
You say that as if it is not.
I could say a lot more, but am not sure what you'd be interested in.
Now I-85/985, I-20, and every highway between them is littered with tiny Atlantas at every exit for 50+ miles. Every former bedroom community is turning into its own little city. At least some of them are trying to manage it in a way that leaves them better off once the exodus ends and flips back around.
People seem to have decided 50 miles is enough, so the escapist development has turned to the west and north sides.
Isn't that a good thing, if you want people to have everything they need in their own neighborhood, rather than needing to commute 20 miles for a Costco and another 10 miles for a latte?
I'd rather have smaller (potentially walkable) communities than rows and rows of suburban housing where people just get in their car to drive elsewhere when they need to do something.
Highly recommend Alexander's "A Pattern Language." I just did an insanely massive purge, and this is one of the few books I kept.
Boise will have some growth pains, but it will have to really screw up to become California.
LA Metro area: about 13 million
Austin: about 1 million.
It may not be as large presently as those other places, but they're seeing higher growth rates. So it's reasonable to compare them in this report.
Ultimately people demand basic services which have to be paid for. Eliminating one source of funding may reduce the overall burden but more likely simply shifts funding.
Sales tax in many states is between 5-10 percent; the UK VAT is 20%. The top income tax bracket in the UK is a bit higher (45%) than in the US (37%) and the National Insurance Contributions are often larger than FICA (etc). The UK also has (e.g.) a TV tax, which the US doesn't.
we don't have to pay some one to do our taxes either.
Considering it's 100% complaining about taxes and has zero analysis, yeah.
Property taxes are quite high in Texas for example: https://www.kut.org/post/heres-why-property-taxes-are-higher...
Other states with no income taxes have highly regressive sales taxes: https://www.accuratetax.com/blog/regressive-sales-tax-infogr...
But but you can give yourself a loan out of company? Nope withholding tax due on that!
Ok what about expensing everything? Don't do it, Revenue will nail you as you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent in their eyes.
That is absolutely not how income taxes work. If you live in California and earn $100k, your tax liability would be around $6k before any exemptions or deductions.
These things can easily be looked up, FYI.
In my experience, talking to many many people considering moving to or from CA, the delta in salary coming to CA dwarfs any differences in income tax.
So your definition of "successful professional" isn't quite the proverbial 1%, but it's close enough for government work.
Washington has no income tax.
We do have stupid regressive sales taxes.
and taxes on sugary beverages that don't include milk based beverages because Starbucks.
"These things can easily be looked up, FYI. "
Sorry what? Yes, you could have.
Denver, on the other hand, has already “arrived” in my mind, as anyone I know who had any inkling of outdoor adventureness in them ended up there 10 years ago, the traffic is/has been a mess for years, and the ski slopes are way too crowded.
Agree completely. Many workers are moving from LA or Chicago to Phoenix, which is far from a small city, but is less expensive.
Analysis done during boom periods (low unemployment, high stock market) is worthless. During the dot com, housing and crypto bubbles, there were many trends of people doing X.
As Buffett says, "It's only when the tide goes down, you'll see who is swimming naked".
Real trends survive recessions and market busts. Take everything else with a grain of salt
It's just about money. You can have an absurdly well paying job in Seattle and it really doesn't matter because you still can't afford a house. You can pay absurd amounts for a small condo. You can have a god awful commute. Or you can move 3 hours south and your money goes further while you still get the appealing parts of living in a city.
I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood. In fact kind of improves if you factor in not worrying about getting mugged or accosted by homeless crazies.
My large home in one of the top planned communities in the nation costs me just under the shack I rented in the east bay.
Sadly the case for me seems to be that there are very nice walkable areas in these small cities, but everytime I interview for a job it turns out the office in in some way out suburban office park, so I have no way of commuting
Local employers can't afford to pay you your big-city salary, and the benefit for a big-city employer to keep you remote is retention and a known quantity (assuming you're worth your salt).
It's a win-win for the worker and their employer.
The article focuses on the supposed loser: the township that loses out on a local job - but the newly relocated remote worker adds to the tax base and pays for groceries, etc.
My wife and I lived in SF for close to five years. We wanted to have four kids and well, that would have been a nightmare in the city.
So we moved back home to family in Lincoln, NE. We now have four kids, live in a great school district and I've continued to consult with startups.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimjones2/
P.S. First year of being completely remote was fantastic. Fifth year? Really lonely..
Yeah, I have taken to trying to find work-ish community outside of work. If you don't meet many people who have shared as much of your experience as employees of your own company, at least you can meet people who have shared similar experiences. It's a bit easier than getting to know complete strangers.
Volunteering with an organization you care about is a great way to combat this. They're locals, you get to know the community you're living in, and you probably share a common interest. Also feels great to give back.
That works pretty well if you have co workers who are interested in doing that.
Curious how remote led to loneliness. I don’t find much value in being in an office, despite being an extrovert.
In fact, I code 8-9 hours a day remote, can _maybe_ code 2 hours if I’m in the office. That productivity feels amazing.
There really is no comparison. Less cost, less stress, and more productive. Bonus is valley companies tend to pay the same salary regardless of the jobs on-site/remote status. Got a house with 2 extra bedrooms - set one up as an office and the other as a 'server room'.
I'm renting a 2 bedroom house with a nice backyard, able to focus on my health, relationships, and interests, and it's totally feasible now for me to go back to school if I want to (granted, this one is probably made easier by the fact that I don't have kids myself). Compare with my life in the Bay, where I rented a tiny, musty smelling room with no closet in a house with a serious mold problem for the exact same price I pay today while barely scraping by.
I can't honestly imagine how living in the Bay Area would be with kids -- that seems like that would be incredibly hard.
Things I do miss: incredible produce, walkability, excellent public transit, fresh produce, fresh sourdough. But now I have excellent fresh green chiles, beautiful landscapes, slightly more interesting weather, and (IMO) nicer, less-stressed people.
But also, I'm probably more critical because I ran buying teams at grocery (brick & mortar and ecommerce) stores for 10 years so I'm always instinctively looking for minor blemishes
And yeah, really and truly I'm not being completely fair -- I haven't visited the farmers markets yet, and I've heard that about the trucks. Would love to check them out, hopefully I'll find some time this weekend.
The fruit has been pretty great though. I've been really happy with the stone fruit. One weird thing I've noticed is that the California avocados out here are consistently better than they were in California -- like, perfect ripeness, no browning, never disappointed when I get home, which would happen every other time in CA. Maybe there's more QA going on between CA and here, and time to ripen on the trucks
Were avocados cheaper in CA? It might be the Alchian-Allen Effect: https://medium.com/@byrnehobart/alchian-allen-and-agglomerat...
Always fun when recruiters reach out. Many simply can’t believe someone wouldn’t want to move back to a bigger city in return for a much higher paycheck (which I politely explain is effectively less money than I make now, due to costs of living).
Smaller areas typically lack competitive tech positions and larger areas don't want to take a risk on you when they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from.
Remote work wouldn't be possible in general if this were true. Hiring, especially for senior level engineering talent, remains hard and expensive
HN today: hey you guys know you can get 2700sq ft on 2 acres for half of what your studio costs right?
Besides, HN is more than one person, with different views.
“Small town” and “suburb” are overlapping categories, and if it's in the former category but also lets you work in a big city (so that what you can afford on the same salary is relevant), it's almost certainly also in the latter category.
The problem with this binary division is that plenty of real communities outside of metropolitan coresñ.ñ would be a blend of “small town” and “suburb” by this description, varying on a continuum between being nearly purely “small town” in their local core (which might or might not be styled as a “downtown”) to pure “suburb” as you get further from that core.
There are not many parts of Raleigh where you can do this, and it's still more expensive than suburb living out here. But I find that I have equal or better access to the stuff I actually want and use, so I don't feel like I sacrificed much.
I think the biggest evil of suburbs is the commute. I think part of the reason there's no social activity in suburbs is because, honestly, who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job and knowing you need to be out the door by 6:30 the next day?
I find that hard to believe.
I don't like to suburbs either but I'm currently visiting my brother who lives in one. Their socializing is kids basketball & soccer games at the park (which suburbs are zoned for), picnics at the local greenway (also zoned for), and swimming in the community pool. All of which are walking distance.
Not to mention, you know, inviting people over to their house because it isn't a tiny 400 square foot apartment. They make dinner for friends and watch football on the porch.
I'll bet this is also the case for cities in developed east Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan & South Korea as well.
I’ve lived in a few suburbs. One of them was blessed to have a dollar store within walking distance (you’d need to cross a busy highway, but you could walk). None of them so much as had sidewalks, though. Grocery stores were from 15-25 minutes by car. Entertainment (theaters, pools) were around that distance if not more.
Suburbs vary from place to place, just as towns and cities do. Some offer conveniences that make it hard to imagine living anywhere else. Some make it impossible to do absolutely anything without a car and a few gallons of gas.
There's also three parks within 10 minutes' walk, more a short bus ride away, and multiple shops and cafes surrounding us. And we're about 15 minutes by bus from the city centre.
Just saying... the issues the US seems to have with cities seem to mostly be a result of lack of caring about them, not inherent properties of cities.
Americans also have parks, buses, shops, and cafes. All the suburbs I have lived in are about 10 minutes from a "city center".
What is probably accurate is that there’s a lot less for a single twentysomething (though that depends on your interests). If you’re an adult with a family, there’s more than enough to do.
Takes me an hour+ to get home 6 miles outside of the city (still in the City, but not downtown) on the bus. Not a great argument you have there unless you ignore everyone that isn't privileged enough to live in the city downtown proper.
Many cities are planned well and easy to get around. But this isn’t really true for most American cities. Although if you’re working in a city and living outside of it, you’re almost certainly wasting more time than anyone in it during your commute.
I just wouldn't take a job where I have to commute 2 hours. I don't think most people do that, although some may.
When I lived 10 minutes walk from work, the bus took about the same time, but waiting for its schedule meant practically speaking it was more like 30 minutes. It felt a little safer than scrambling across three highways, but after a bit, I couldn't stand the wait, so I went back to walking, and then to driving.
If I lived in a popular suburb further to the north, then I wouldn't be able to ride the bus at all (although that's too far of a commute for me by car)
So, across the whole range of commute distances, I can't see any situation where riding the bus makes sense. It either takes essentially as long as walking, or isn't available at all.
Commute fuel costs aren't remotely the biggest inneficiency with living in a diffuse suburb, though. Someone has to grade and pave all those extra miles of road. Someone has to pour all that concrete for sidewalks that no one walks on. Someone has to trench and lay piping and cable through all that unused space. Those large diffuse houses need more energy to heat and cool both because they're larger and because they're diffuse.
And even then, granting that you're not commuting to work, your kids are commuting to school on vehicles that need to travel much farther, your family is commuting to dinner and shopping over much larger distances, and everyone that needs to be at your home for any reason (to repair something, deliver something, etc...) needs to spend more fuel and time to get there.
Suburban sprawl is a bad trade. The worst of it, for you, may be the psychological impact of the daily commute. But that doesn't mean the rest of it isn't bad.
Usually people say something about externalities to explain why they deplore certain activity, but it seems to me that when you spend an incremental dollar (such as to live downtown), it rapidly diffuses into the economy and represents the average amount of carbon-intensity. So I think how much you spend is the key to focus on, rather than the "niceness" of what you spend on.
There is, in fact, social activity in the suburbs. There may be less, per capita, then in big cities, but that's because what is in the suburbs is car-dependent, and once you have that a threshhold cost, the marginal cost of leaving the suburb for activity in the nearest urban center is low, so lots of social activities partaken by suburban dwellers occur in urban centers rather than suburbs.
> who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job
Weekday social activities are often partaken in near work prior to commuting back home, avoiding this problem and often reducing commute time by avoiding traffic.
So it stands to reason that the pendulum now swings the other way. People are very good at sussing out the economics of a trend that used to be profitable but no longer is.
Living in Manhattan, I sometimes go weeks without taking the subway or bus, years without taking a taxi/Uber/Lyft/etc, and I can't remember the last time I drove.
My point is face-to-face walking community. I've found no substitute.
Though the sea levels continued rising and everyone acting like other people should change factors in.
I've never been as happy as when I could walk to my local soccer teams stadium and walk to my local grocery store. Although the massive international and farmers markets are very close too, so I always have every fresh ingredient I could ever need for every dish from every culture I've wanted to try. Especially if you don't get to travel much, being in a place where travel comes to you can be very rewarding and enriching.
Has the prospect changed your outlook on where to live or the challenges / benefits thereof?
It hasn't changed too much. We have a house in the city, so the standing plan is to stick around for at least a few years. We both grew up in major cities (NYC, Chicago), so that preference isn't likely to change any time soon.
Things like quality of schools may change what neighborhood we prefer, but we still have some time before then. If it turns out home-schooling is the best way, then we'll go that route.
And no I'm not going to put on headphones. IMO my work environment should naturally be conducive to getting s* done. But that seems to have become crazy talk.
I don't personally do well with the same schedule every day, which was a constant issue when I had regular jobs. The more I tried to fit into the day the world wanted me to fit into the less happy I became. It's not the work. I honestly love the work I do, but I abhor having a "job".
I have a lot of other reasons I don't like working at an office. I'll try to list a few off the top of my head.
- I don't like having "office friends".
- I can't stand office politics
- Scheduling meeting rooms is confusing and silly
- It seems a lot of time is wasted in meetings and in between tasks
- I don't enjoy being locked to a single place in order to get things done that I can do anywhere.
- I spend a lot of time wandering around and staring in space while I try to work out a problem, and the office was never really conducive to that.
- These days with the open plan offices, forget it. The last startup I worked with was acquired by a company you've probably heard of and as much as I truly liked the people there, I couldn't get a single thing done in that place. Headphones kind of helped, but I felt like I was at a lunch table in high school. I only had to work in that office for about a week per quarter, and it was my least productive week per quarter.
So on to the pros of my situation
- I can work wherever and whenever I want; This is generally in my office at my sit-stand desk with my three monitors and fancy chair, but if I want to fire up my fire-pit and break out my laptop, as I did last night, nothing stops me - besides maybe the weather. Coffee Shops, Shared Spaces, Airports, Other Cities, Seaside Towns, Cabins in the Woods, etc are all perfectly acceptable places for me to work upon my whim.
- I generally allow my sleep schedule to change naturally, so sometimes I sleep days and work nights. I get tons more done when that happens, and without anyone to report to outside of a weekly stand-up, it's a total non-issue.
- I can do a couple hours of work and then go run errands, and then a couple more, and then have lunch with a friend, and then a couple more and make some dinner and then answer a few emails, and my day is through. I've put the same amount of work in, but I've had a full, accomplished, and social day.
- My time is rarely wasted. If I'm not able to focus for the day, I'll just leave my desk and come back to it later or the next day.
- My friends are all my actual real friends who I like to see regardless of what industry they work in. I hang out with some of the people I work with, but that's entirely by choice, when we happen to be in the same city.
- I probably set an alarm two or three times a year. I generally like to wake up whenever, take my time to make breakfast, make or go and get coffee/tea, sit on my front porch for a bit to read the news, and then kiss my wife, make my way into my office and shut the door. It's kind of like a commute, but it's just me making my way through the house "on the way to work".
Obviously my way won't work for everyone, but after 18 years like this, I'm not sure I could ever go back.
I am so glad to hear someone else does this. I sometimes feel like I'm wasting time when I get up to refresh my cup of coffee and then pause an extra four or five minutes to stare out the window and ponder what I'm working on.
I work remotely for an SF-based company from Greensboro, NC: population 300k, with a highly walkable downtown. Bought a townhouse in the heart of everything with a commercially zoned office as the first floor. I go weeks without driving and share a single car with my wife for the times we need it.
Most pollution comes from the energy used by motors to move people from one place to another, which is obviously more in a suburb environment rather than an walking environment.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Largest sector globally is industry and heat, followed closely by agriculture.
Big cities may be superior in some respects, but they are also the symptom of a larger problem - it’s a lot more of us on this planet than were pre-industrial.
Ultimately, poking people in the eye about their consumption habits is counter-productive. Cities are efficient, but not efficient enough to prevent global warming. This problem is only going to be solved through technical innovation and government regulation.
Then I moved to a city that's not very walkable but very bikeable. I miss walking sometimes, but biking is pretty awesome.
Above all though I had such poor access to natural beauty and wild country, which I now realize is important to me.
a rule of thumb I hear from a financial adviser: "Why work in a huge first tier city for 10% more money when you can move to a second or third tier city where housing prices are 50% lower?"
In fact our expenses fell so much I could even start working 60%, and we had about as much money left as before.
There are trade-offs. There are no restaurants except fast food, there is no martial arts training I used to do, there are no boardgame clubs and it's much harder to get friends. But if you can get through that economically it's a ridiculously beneficial thing to do (given you can get a job of course).
Academic Magnet High School, South Carolina
Maine School of Science and Mathematics
BASIS Scottsdale, Arizona
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia
Central Magnet School, Tennessee
Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, Georgia
Haas Hall Academy, Arkansas
International Academy of Macomb, Michigan
Payton College Preparatory High School, Illinois
Signature School, IndianaAlso, US News and World Report rankings are useless. They're a measure solely of prestige and brand, not of any actual quality of education.
I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just saying that this data doesn't support your point.
Healthcare seems more or less equal but I have less knowledge about that.
I'm not worried about education. Sure there might be more choices in the city, and the local education has it's problems, but it's still good enough. It might not be the best, but most schools in the city aren't either.
Health is the biggest worry (which I even forgot in my comment). Not because we'll get worse care here, but because the distance to the nearest hospital is very large (2 hours by car). Which is especially worrisome as we're expecting another child in about 5 months. A pretty big change as we used to live a 10 min walk away from one of the biggest University hospitals in Sweden.
Then again health care in the big cities, like Stockholm, isn't that great either. There's a lot of stories about understaffed hospitals, very long queues and how new mothers are sent home almost immediately after giving birth (otherwise you can stay a couple of days to get settled).
I was surprised by your 1/10th if the cost comment but perhaps less so now.
thank you
So maybe it sounds worse than it is in reality.
Same here in the UK interestingly enough. Two hours is a while though, but unsurprising as generally the UK is pretty compact.
2x the space for 1/2 the price. Our remote-working future cannot come quick enough.
If the outflow from the really big cities was equally distributed (say, as percentage of city's population), then your view would be accurate. But that's not what's happening.
It takes decades to build out another such city from scratch. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be done, just that it doesn't happen quickly.
Maybe time for a Kickstarter for cities?
That's to say, I think you're absolutely right - people want to move to these places cause they perceive them as little Brooklyns or little Seattles. They have the sensibilities and prestige of those places, but not the crowds or the cost.
I think people just want to be able to afford a mortgage without giving up some basic urban amenities like walkability or nice restaurants and bars. They might miss things about Brooklyn or Seattle and want to recreate it, but that doesn’t mean they think it’s a “little” anything.
I don't think this means that young people are going to stop coming to cities.
There are enormous benefits to many young people, lots of things to do, all in a small area.
But inevitably goals or expectations change (or the number of dependents increases) and it's time to move to the suburbs or the country.
You WILL give up things moving to the country, but if you don't care about or prioritize those things, it's ok.
Cities traditionally suck as far as housing/cost of living, crime and some recreation.
But I think they might have access to better jobs, transportation/airports, health care and nightlife/museums/venues/etc
And good weather might correlate to higher housing costs (think california here)
1. you stay remote (read: can handle work != social structure)
2. your spouse's employment situation is also accommodating
3. your community doesn't decline due to the brain drain / job drain problem of areas outside major metro centers
So you need to be resistant and resilient to the downsides of living away from so many techies.
IDK... I've done remote work too, but I now have a job in an office and it makes me happier to be around other people, and to be able to chat about stuff in a higher bandwidth way.
When I worked at home sometimes I wouldn't even leave the house for two or three days at time.
So as people move around to cities like Austin, they place immense stress on the transit system while the city is unable to act due to both the regional and state politics and poor city planning. The rapid gentrification of the city outpaces the creation of new homes or businesses which means in 5-10 years Austin will be in a really, really bad state.
Where I’m at now is probably the most multicultural city in the americas. You see signs in all kinds of languages on a daily bases. Neighborhoods actually have striking character. There are interests I have here that I could never pursue in any other city. There’s also the weed, the weather, the fact that ambitious transit is actively being built, and, my god, the FOOD. My ashes will be scattered across the santa monica mountains.
Funny how 95% of world population would be ecstatic about moving there, yet you describe it as hell.
That's where the overestimation comes in. You assume people are miserable and would rather live in a ridiculous house and have to take a car to go do anything.
(Edit: I’ve also done the Providence, RI to Boston commute, by rail, which was just over an hour typically.
Don’t forget that commuting works well when your job is near free parking/train/bus. It gets pretty bad when you have to add another 20 minute subway wait/ride in once in town...)
The train is on the Newburyport/Newbury town line, so not quite the center of town... but that’s a quibble. Parking for the train isn’t free either, and tickets cost more than the bus. The busses run more frequently too (they’re smaller, so it’s like breaking one big train into pieces.)
If you want to do it, then find some product that exists, that you like, copy and tweak.
Is that Joel Spolsky? Man I miss the SO podcast.
I can't think of what it is you do but thanks for your response. That's a good tip about existing product(existing market).
I have deer walking in my yard and 20 square miles of untouched forest to hike in directly where I live. Our internet provider recently upgraded service to 1Gbps, so video conferencing is snappy and glitch-free.
Many of my employees are making similar moves. One moved to a mountain town about an hour outside of the city. Another moved to a seaside village.
This is clearly the future, brought to us by the vast improvements in remote work infrastructure such as Slack and Zoom.
> In 2017, some 5.3% of adults in metro areas of between 500,000 and three million people worked from home, a rough proxy for remote workers. That was up from 3.7% a decade earlier...
It’ll be interesting to see whether these workers will be able to maintain their “big city” salaries over time, and how they’ll fare in a economic downturn (e.g. they’ll be far away from “most” jobs in their sector.)
But one big one is networking. I've been told by people trying to get into larger tech companies that the only way to get in as an experienced professional is referrals. Living in a larger tech hub opens up so much more potential for networking and career growth that I just cant get here.
Hopefully this is a trend that tractions as many roles can be shifted in this way and improve quality of life overall.
On the flip-side, will we see large corporation office space shifted into the virtual World? Will signs start appearing in offices "Will the last one to relocate, please not turn off this server". Maybe.
But the ability to use up an area and then move on, expand and repeat the process has been one trait humans share with many biological organisms. Is this just nature at play thru adaption to the environment,on some level - I'd say yes.
But any swing one way or another can shift that balance. You can look at the extreme of people all shifting to the countryside that the countryside itself becomes a town, a city.... But things tends to balance out.
After all, in many area's we are seeing the demise of high street shopping, is that a good or bad thing. But I'm sure many do not want to live in stacked up boxes so small as so they are barely affordable and all other activities reduced to door delivery. Though in many area's, that is kinda what people have already.
Then the whole aspect of the population not getting any smaller and such shifts will be more than offset by population expansion.
This money comes from the federal government, gets distributed down to the state level which then gets distributed out to the various cities and localities depending on need [1]. A lot of these towns are given grants or loans from the USDA in order to fund various improvements [2].
[1] https://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-state-budgets-f...
[2] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/7/1/my-journey-from...
And our schools! A new bond issue every few years for schools for a growing population.
And lets forget the myth that 'federal funding' is free, or come from somewhere else. It comes from us.
And on the iowa website itself [1] I can see the grants and federal funding used by the state government. My point being that if the more rural cities were required to pay for everything themselves, they would not be able to.
[1] https://iowadot.gov/transit/funding-programs-and-application...
But it gets down to local experience and equally the country for people, so one perspective can seem complete polar to another's experience.
Quoting from that blog post:
"“Cool,” which is to say, a certain type of bourgeois, with a certain aesthetic that unites it with larger cities while still maintaining a feeling of quaintness. In Tulsa, for example, there’s a gorgeous new book store, an ever-expanding number of breweries, co-working spaces in rehabbed brick buildings, coffee shops in rehabbed brick buildings, airy restaurants with farm-to-table menus in rehabbed brick buildings. There’s a walkable downtown, a First Friday art walk to get people there, a cultural tourist site (the Woody Guthrie Museum) and public (in this case, actually private) outdoor space (The Gathering Place)."
Sort of. They fly me in from NYC during the week for four days, then fly me back for the weekends.
I didn't really make a decision to move, I was looking for work in NYC, but was given a good job offer which said I'd be paid a NYC type salary, and have expensed flights, hotels, car rentals and meal etc. per diems. I haven't exactly moved, I rent in NYC and stay at a hotel down there. I don't plan on staying down here permanently - if and when I start looking for another job it will be in NYC.
I think some of what is observed is kind of illusory. Because what is really happening here? On a very broad level - am I from NYC saying I want to become more of an upper south kind of guy? Or is this upper south Fortune 100 company saying it wants to become more of an NYC-type company, and bringing me and others down there to accomplish that? From everything I have seen, more of the latter. Northern Virginia has already pretty much been swallowed into the Boston to DC megalopolis, and it's possible that Richmond, Virginia Beach, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and Charlotte are next. Or if companies are desperate enough for IT etc. talent, they might start offices in NYC, SF etc. looking for it. Our company already has a west coast advanced IT office, as well as some offshored stuff to India.
New York means not needing to own a car, because it has a massive public transit system (which has been a little shaky for the past five years though). It means 4AM last call. It means having technical meetups and conferences, and universities like Columbia and NYU with impressive CS professors and students. It means lots of job opportunities with good salaries. You can even avoid the city and live a suburban existence if you want.
All anybody talks about are the slim pickings in the local job market down there. You don't have that problem in San Francisco or New York.
https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/los-ang...
Nobody regrets their move yet to my knowledge. I'm definitely very happy to be saving money, and my standard of living is better. My urban lifestyle hasn't changed much (still only drive 2-3x a month for trips to cities, beaches or mountains) and I'm from NC, so culture stuff like the food and friendly people are a positive as well.
There’s dozens of big metropolitan cities outside the US that have better public transportation systems, lower rents, lower food costs, etc. that the analogous big city in the US, namely SF, LA, and NYC. I’m beginning to realize that the best way to continue living in a big city but lower my monthly expenses would be to move abroad.
That outsourcing conversation I had at every single startup I worked for, and I greatly hope the trend to remote work continues.
rural -> urban -> ~rural
decentralized -> centralized -> decentralized
No car needed, plenty of services for family and kids. My original city doesn't offer them at all and you need to own a car if you want to go somewhere.
And you can live close to work in those cities. I live and work in LA and commute on public transport for 20 mins one way. The rents may be high in LA, but even minumum wage is nearly $14 now, and rents are pretty even across many parts of town barring some obvious exceptions.
Art, culture, and diversity of people are what make a city so interesting to me. In LA, we have so many friends who are working on interesting projects and are very intelligent. Every time we discuss moving to a smaller town, we are concerned that we might have difficulty finding social circles that fit us. The average American and I just don't have a ton in common. I know that sounds super snobby, but people are different. I'm not saying one is right or wrong.
I always think about what will be the next tier of cities where remote work and satellite offices will be popular? To me, Asheville, Greenville, and to a lesser extent Chattanooga will be popular locations. CoL and an urban core are requirements, but also access to nature, transplants and local universities seem to help. A good airport is also big, as we love to travel.
I fail to see why families from big cities would be red. Most in big cities are progressive, even families. I havent seen data that would suggest otherwise
These workers "fleeing" big cities simply don't seem likely to be a uniformly sampled demographic, and for the article not to at least nod to that seems like pretty questionable journalism.
But maybe that's just a step too woke.
[1] Edit: heh, two minutes before the first accusation of racism. Pretty much what I expected.
I'd love to hear cases of people of color moving to smaller cities while retaining a sense of community and belonging.
the sixth whitest state
In contrast, New York state as a whole is predominantly white, while I would guess that Boise is the most diverse city in Idaho.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Boise is in fact the THIRD whitest city in the whole country .
Putting aside the qualifiers that the dataset[0] is specific to cities with population above 100K and that it's a decade old, the counts include Hispanics and whites together, which is obvious from Laredo, Corpus Christi, and El Paso all being in the top 8.
In other words, using your source, Boise is all of 1.3 percentage points whiter than Laredo, Texas.
[0] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/c...
they just don't fit the empathic narrative that tech media prefers to elevate
Not to mention that it'll be interesting to see what happens during the next recession when some of those people are let off and all the remote workers in Boise are a mismatch for the local economy. Which they already arguably are because as the article points out their purchasing power keeps spiking local prices without bringing in local investment and business.
Not saying it isn't a great deal if you can get it, but it doesn't really seem like a solution for many.