Young Join the Rich Fleeing America’s Big Cities for Suburbs | Hacker News Reader

Young Join the Rich Fleeing America’s Big Cities for Suburbs

bloomberg.com

42 pointspseudolus18 comments

One roommate took a pay cut and moved home with her family. Another decided to stay with an ex-boyfriend in Oregon, while the master tenant put in her 30-day notice. That left only Lewis and the other remaining roommate, who has been living with family in Sacramento since late March, to renew the lease and come up with $4,900 for May’s rent.

$4900 for just May rent? Not April and May? Hoooly moly.

Hopefully long term vacancies do something about that...

There's four roommates in total. My 4 bedroom apartment in Manhattan several years back cost more than $4,900/month and it was a good deal.

I think it's five actually: "one", "another", and "master tenant" left, leaving two

Yeah, if it's five, then each person is paying less than $1,000 for rent. That's really not bad at all to live in a city. And if they're splitting an entire house amongst them (vs the 3 bedroom apartment flexed to a 4 bedroom that I was living in), then their living situation is going to be quite pleasant.

This is uninformed speculation, but it seems like remote work becoming more common could be better for lower-income people everywhere, by creating an "evening out" of job opportunities, away from places where housing supply is too low.

People crowd into the cities for the high-paying jobs, and they create demand for the lower-paying service industries and such. So people also crowd to the cities for the lower-paying jobs, but housing is scarce and therefore expensive. They still come though, even though so much of their money goes to rent, because the city has actual (if low-paying) jobs, and opportunity for other, better jobs.

So if the higher paying jobs "spread out" to suburbs and smaller cities, there will be more of that demand created by higher-paid individuals, creating lower and mid-paying jobs in those areas too, instead of what they have now which is like, cashier at the Starbucks or Chipotle. So if more people can have opportunity outside the major cities - high, mid, or low-paying - then housing demand wicouldll drop in the cities and make it more realistic for people who still prefer to live there.

Housing demand will rise in suburbs, but there tends to be a lot less zoning regulation and lot more sprawl there than in cities, so hopefully the effect is dampened. My experiences with suburbs/exurbs is that the housing supply is often too high if anything due to zealous developers trying to cash in on empty farmland.

This is all kind of long-term wishful thinking, but it seems possible.

Now that companies are moving to remote-first and permanent work from home and there are fewer benefits of living in the city due to social distancing, it seems like this is a natural consequence. Companies will likely give a stipend for home offices instead of paying for food or commuting, then people can will want to move somewhere they can get more space for their money. I know people in their 40s living with roommates in SF paying rent that could be a mortgage payment in a suburb not far away.

To be fair, rent in SF is basically a mortgage payment in SF, when you compare apples to apples. It's accumulating the down payment and a buffer that's hard.

Yeah this is tough everywhere. In Chicago I could easily be paying for mortgage on decent house for what I'm paying in rent. It's just that I'm in my mid-20s and only really been making decent money for a year. It's going to take years to build up the down payment, meanwhile rent money is just flying out the window into someone else's pocket every month.

I could save a lot more by just not doing any retirement saving, but that doesn't seem like a good trade off, considering the money I put in now is going to have the most time to compound.

I didn't start contributing to 401k, equity accounts, and such until now (my mid 30s). I'm not in a crisis, my life isn't terrible, and its definitely still fixable with minor changes. But the feeling of falling behind peers savings/housing wise is definitely palpable. You're making a very safe and reasonable choice. You can always start a business or take more financial risk down the line too if you want, and you'll have the benefit of savings as a cushion.

Sure, but for what I'm paying in rent now I could buy a place in two other cities and have a summer and winter home or rent one out... There are way more options if you don't have to work from an office.

The counter point is that this will also likely result in depressed wages, as companies realize they don't have to price in local factors such as rent or commute. We can't discount the externalities which are then offloaded to the worker as well such as computers / monitors, home offices, internet caps etc.

For a large band of workers I think remote work makes sense, but for entry-level developers and/or people on the lower end of the spectrum I think it might be a harder sell.

I could see wages theoretically increase, too.

Geographic control is a major form of staff retention, because employees are less likely to want to change companies to work somewhere with fewer opportunities (smaller towns) or somewhere far away that they’d need to move all their stuff to reach (far away towns).

Reducing employee friction to jump ship to higher paying firms or to companies which previously didn’t support remote but which now do may make it much harder for companies to maintain staff loyalty when defection is now trivial, you have no comfy benefits or free food/drinks they need to give up to leave, and you no longer have an “office culture” besides what your company pays, and who the highest bidder is.

I moved from a big city to a small provincial town, the town is big enough to have everything I need. I sold my apartment in the big city and with that money, have financed the purchase of two houses with land. Luckily I have still been able to keep my clients in the big city and work remotely (and for big city rates). It can work for some people, especially in our industry.

I'm super curious how this will impact the future of elections; big cities tend to skew heavily blue. Suburbs tend to skew red. Will this change the suburbs? Example in the article was from NY to SC; SC tends to be red...

probably at least for one election cycle, until the blue voters that moved to the suburbs see how blue policies make it worse for them in the suburbs, and then start voting red (or whatever colour looks after their interests better) :p

I love city life but US cities are so poorly managed that I've lost hope that they'll be affordable nor pleasant to live in before I die, so now I've moving abroad to Tokyo and am living the lifestyle I'd hoped to in US cities - it's sad, cities don't have to be so prohibitively expensive and filthy if local governments were able to better manage themselves, actually reacting to the problems society faces, but even changing tiny things about the legislative process in US cities feels like a lifetime endeavor.

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