Hacker News Reader

Comment by hapless | Hacker News Reader

Forty five million people live in the NYC and LA metro areas alone. NYC is about 3% of the national population. Los Angeles is another 2.5%.

The average American lives in a fairly considerable city, depending on your definition of "large." The vast majority live in cities of 100,000 or more.

Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs. For perspective, the #100 MSA is Fort Wayne, Indiana, at roughly 500,000 people.

Not to mention, struggling to make rent, homelessness, and poverty don't just vanish when you step away from the most expensive cities.

Living in "Santa Luna" (which I assume was actually Santa Cruz) instead of the suburbs where he worked didn't make his rent affordable in 1994, and it certainly wouldn't today, in 2020.

View on HN

I’m not really sure what you’re arguing for. I didn’t say anything of those things were non-problems, I said that having a minimum wage job isn’t some kind of homeless death sentence.

It is completely possible to survive on a minimum wage job in many cities across the country. It isn’t luxurious, it isn’t fair, and it certainty isn’t ideal, but exaggerating the facts to make a sociopolitical point only makes the opposition have a stronger foothold.

I think it's very plain that holding a minimum wage job implies a tenuous ability to house and feed oneself in much of the country. It is not a complex thesis.

I'm glad you were able to get by on the cheap in an unspecified midwestern city, but that doesn't change the picture for tens of millions of other people

He's arguing that this statement is false:

> The average American doesn’t live in NYC/LA/SF, they live in a small to medium size town.

http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-cities-factsheet

"It is estimated that 83% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950."

Demographic shifts are weird, man.

I'm part of this big shift - I moved from a rural town in flyover country, to a giant metro area in flyover country. That metro area is most of the population of my state. It's sobering - you add up all the little rural towns and the number of people there just doesn't add up to much. That wasn't true, in the past. And it's like this in almost every state. We all moved to the city because all the farming jobs and factory jobs dried up.

I’m not seeing where ‘urban area’ is defined in that document. I imagine it includes basically any town or city. The original issue was NYC/LA/SF vs. the rest of the country, not urban vs. rural. Plenty of college towns, for example, likely qualify as urban yet are extremely affordable.

It's worth noting that the Bay area, the entire metropolitan area, is about the size of Detroit. It's about a quarter the size of Los Angeles or New York.

It's a very, uh, Bay-centric view of the world that would lump those three together.

> Almost half of Americans live in the 100 largest MSAs.

Meaning just over half live in the rest, with far lower cost of living.

Well, "the rest" is a long tail of areas with between 100,000 and 500,000 people. Very few Americans live or work outside an urban area, and a very large fraction live in the largest urban areas.

Ignoring the facts of urban poverty because rural areas exist, at all, is ... not a great way to think about problems.

Not disagreeing, just curious where your data came from.

The census data >80% of Americans live in urban areas but that’s loosely defined as any area with more than 2500 people

Reply on news.ycombinator.com