America, Stop Moving West
burgesspowell.medium.com
burgesspowell.medium.com
More than 50% of the power derived from nuclear at Palos Verdes just 45 miles from the city which evaporates wastewater to drive turbines and provide cooling. Another 14% from solar. Plumbed grey water throughout 80% of the metropolitan area. Per-capita water used declined by 20% over the past 40 years. Net groundwater contributor with 100 year plan for water usage anticipating drought conditions. This is actually the picture of a sustainable metropolitan area with low taxes and high quality of life.
Meanwhile the author lives in a city (somerville, ma) which routinely dumps its sewage and into the nearest rivers, in a part of the country that burns diesel to stay warm for months out of the year and where without a precision engineered weather suit between dec and may you will die from just being outside.
I'm not saying 118 is for everyone but if you have shade you won't die. Just comically out of touch.
"Arizona already averages more than 50 dangerous heat days a year, the second highest in the nation. By 2050, Arizona is projected to see almost 80 such days a year."
From 50 days to 80 is the difference between good and bad place to live? No. This is just handwaving nonsense. Not every worsening is a showstopper.
On a more socio-economic note: I moved from DC to PHX 5 years ago thinking I'd gtfo after 3 months, because, you know, it's PHX.
Despite my best efforts I really love it; you find so much more value in places you believe to have none.
Great cost of living, a HUGE variety human experiences, and a massive airport where you can catch a cheap flight out! I live in downtown PHX (I can see the basketball arena as I type this) and it's wonderful. I truly believe that PHX is seeing a boom akin to Detroit's in the mid-20th century. Hopefully we don't get that bust.
> In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to 66th out of 80.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-...
Oakland is similar in SF Bay Area, used to be quite livable 15 years ago.
Californians (and people from west coast states) that move there also bring their unchecked progressive views and will lead to the situation that we have in SF Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, LA and now Austin, Denver. Rampant homelessness, housing crisis, exploding crime rates, etc. No one wants to live in a society that keeps peddling failed policies. I can't wait to move out of Bay Area. I will still be a democrat but it's getting harder.
This is not a "progressive view". This is rich, elitist, anti-renter landed gentry shit.
Yeah, barely. I once spent a day in the shade at 113F waiting for a bus with a friend. We played chess and it was the dumbest game ever. We could barely function. Without aircon nobody is doing anything very much at that temperature.
You can survive, just, at 118F but you can't live.
You’re laying it on a bit thick. Here in Minnesota we call it a coat and boots.
Not to mention the damage to the Colorado, which no longer has enough flow to reach the ocean. That “Net groundwater contributor” comment? It’s because Phoenix drains the Colorado and pumps it into the city’s private aquifers
But far worse, it’s a desert. Nothing grows there. That should be your first hint to not try and live there.
Fresh water is the new oil. As a business you may be in good shape there as you’ll always be taken care of, as an individual I’d suggest you’re going to get the short end of the stick as supply tightens.
Before criticizing those seeking a better life in questionable directions first ask why are they motivated to do so in the first place? This pattern predates COVID, what is the problem in the North East that is causing people to move south west? Answer that and you might have a clue as to why the migration is happening and what to do about it.
Power and water seem to be the most important aspects regarding quality of life. I'm not worried about power because the southwest has tons of solar power available. And I'm not worried about water in the southwest because, yes, the Colorado river is oversubscribed, but only about 10-15% of it is used for residential use. The bulk of it goes to agricultural uses who are greatly underpaying for their water access and using it to grow ridiculous crops like cotton in Arizona. If there ever really was a crunch, those water rights would be obtained to let people drink and shower instead of to grow those crops (either through buying out, or just straight highway robbery).
Saying "America is a rich country" is a classic demonstration of the difference between median and mean in statistics.
Germany (typically used as an example of a wealthy country in EU) is ~49k mean (average), so US has higher median and mean income than Germany. One can get into services, etc, but still US is a rich country.
Once you get much past north west of EU, things get decidedly poor. While situation is not ideal in the US, most Americans have considerably more luxuries in their lives (in other words higher consumption of goods and services). Whether we are consuming and prioritizing the wrong things is a different question, and I suspect your criticism is more aimed at what do we actually get in return for this wealth/consumption.
There was just a propublica about this. Anyone that knows anything about capital gains, stock options, etc (and I'm assuming you do since you are commenting on a forum run by a startup farm)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
Shelter, rent out of control, let alone a house that might be within reach of purchase, is economic insanity. We don't usually think about shortage of food, water, and comfortable temperature; within the US anyway. Not if someone has even a basic job.
Housing also builds to the safety and security aspect.
Relationships, a sense of belonging, I've found it very difficult knowing that I'll move because I rent, there's seemingly no point to investing in anything resembling a sense of community, let alone personal relationships. Esteem is a related issue, as is self fulfillment.
This describes west coast cities more I would say. SF Bay Area in particular.
North East has many places that are far more affordable than west coast cities. Even rural housing in California is expensive.
People move to these cities because of PR and marketing? It seems like it is the author who is divorced from reality. Is there study on marketing dollar to population growth? Do mega cluster exists because of superior marketing?
A more convincing argument would be that policy attracts talent and business, and locations with bad weather is more likely to have better policy.
That and serendipity - Michael Dell and William Shockley come to mind
Meanwhile back home in the midwest I’m trying to coordinate someone to be at my house while the HVAC folks replace the compressor in my heat pump. I was going to wait until we got back but the temps are getting so high we’re concerned our fish are going to die.
this strip exists in some form for most of the so cal coastline up through roughly the central coast, where the mountain range edges up to the water line itself.
it's just not anywhere near enough land. Too narrow, and much of the land is impractical to live within outside of retirement or vacation circumstances (not even considering that vast swathes are on military property).
It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.
Sure it can, if it were built at any remotely reasonable density. But there are plenty of people deeply invested in that not happening who already live there.
My broader point is that there is a lot of land in ’the west’ that doesn’t meet the criteria that the author is talking about. Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado all have attractive destinations that aren’t (literally or practically) the desert.
Also, anecdotally it seems many of the folks migrating to Austin are actually moving east.
The point the author is making is legit, I’m just engaging in the time honored tradition of roasting bad titles.
is San Diego really different from LA water (or climate) wise?
Water-wise, San Diego also gets a lot of its water from the Colorado river, but it has a desalination plant as well. I'm not sure how much impact that has on the water situation there.
San Diego itself really does have an amazing climate though.
[0] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...
Putting aside any of the climate change arguments, suggesting that successful marketing could make Albany a “city of the future” is absurd. I don’t know what you would have to pay me to be willing to live in Albany, ever, let alone during the winter — but it would be a lot. Like, at least $1.5m a year. And even then, I’m going to be taking many bad for the environment flights to NYC or a more desirable western city as often as possible. I abhor the Midwest (although Chicago, Boulder, and Denver are some exceptions), but if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota or even Indiana before I would live in Albany.
The article also seems to ignore non-coastal western and southern cities that aren’t as deeply impacted by climate change. Yeah, Phoenix and Las Vegas might be fucked, but Denver? Salt Lake City?
It says “don’t move west,” but also mentions Seattle, NYC, and Boston and places that need to still concentrate on affordable housing to be attractive — which as a person who has lived in NYC and Seattle, I can tell you housing/rent hasn’t been affordable in NYC compared to the rest of the world in decades and Seattle is getting less and less affordable (I pay more in rent than all but one of my NYC friends and her mortgage is a monthly figure that would make even most New Yorkers choke), housing isn’t affordable because it doesn’t have to be.
That's as crass as when the 45th president of the US described entire countries like that.
Minnesota is a shithole? As a Minneapolis resident for 20 years now, that's news to me.
I left for personal reasons, and because I prefer super large cities but man... you're writing off A LOT of people.
Also, Colorado is not the Midwest.
The eastern half is. Denver is the border.
The high price of housing means there's a shortage. There would be arbitrage available but in many places housing is not being allowed to be built.
I live in a luxury apartment, alone, just outside DC on a junior SWE salary with most of my paycheck left over because the county I live in actually builds.
The north-east is going to have an expensive reckoning as they build billions of dollars of off-shore windfarms to start catching up to the renewable energy production that is already in the Southern US, and also the tens of millions of households that will need to replace their furnaces and boilers with heat pumps to stop burning fossil fuels to heat their homes.
But by the time I got about 3/4 of the way through, I realized that this was basically just some random blogger's opinion piece with little to no research or data to back it up. It falls apart if you squint at it.
First of all, the title implies that some general directional trend is at play, but then cherrypicks just a couple of cities. I'm not sure how Miami of all places is a good example of people moving west.
Also, attributing the success of the handful of cherrypicked cities to "marketing" is... bizarre. These are actual places with actual history that people can form real opinions of based on what the place is actually like to live in. People don't live in Austin because someone told them to live in Austin. They live there because they love it, a property they are able to accurately perceive for themselves independent of marketing telling them what to think.
I don't like to be negative online but this article is just not very good.
More power to her for going out and hustling, but understand that it - just like it's purported solution - is just marketing.
Also people move to places to live there today, not suffer a bad life just so their house will be worth more in 50 years.
That's a photograph of Monument Valley in Utah...
I spent about seventeen years in the north. I came pretty close to offing myself due to seasonal depression. There's a not-insignificant chance that New Orleans will end up drowning before the end of my expected GenX lifetime but I'm still gonna enjoy the rest of life several orders of magnitude than if I'd stayed in Boston or Seattle. Even if it ends in that flood.
Or maybe the Mississippi will finally triumph over the Army Corps of Engineers and start going down the Atchafalya, like it's been wanting to do for most of my life, and then a significant part of the city's revenue dries up.
Ain't nothin' permanent anyway. Any given hurricane could be The One, and everyone in town knows it, and that's part of why we have such big parties. Enjoy it while it lasts.
> The above-listed places are cheap because they have lots of land and few regulations...
Being clear here there's a difference between what "building more housing" means in SF, Seattle etc, that is, densifying existing detached homes and creating a compact city, and what is means in Vegas, Phoenix and other places, which is unsustainable, endless, automobile dependent sprawl. The former a much more politically challenging thing as it means pushing back against the "American Dream" of a detached home and white picket fence. Adding yet another house on the edge is of course quite easy.
This sprawl is part of what is driving the doom of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Woefully inefficient sprawl, absurdly large highways and countless CO2 emitting cars.
I'm sure electric cars will help, but it's gonna be a tough transition to there and the energy needs will be incredible. What really needs to happen is to stop sprawling and rebuild these cities, but who knows if the genie can be put back into the bottle there.
Wouldn’t dream of taking a walk in a shopping mall even in the dead of winter. I’d go for a hike in the Fells instead, with a couple of layers and some ice traction on my boots.
You’d have to pay me a fair bit to move to California. Maybe I’m just weird? Lots of people seem to like it here though.
So the options are move somewhere where it’s hell on earth for a portion of the year, move somewhere where it’s a frozen wasteland for a portion of the year, or move somewhere temperate along the coast which is also going to be impacted by climate change.
Author should get off their high horse.
It’s ludicrous to expect that there will be a region in the world that will be unaffected by climate change over the next 5 decades. There are going to be negative effects everywhere. But some places are going to be worse than others, and the southern half of the US is going to be worse off than the northern half of the US.
I personally think that we are 10-20 years away from the point at which climate migration makes sense for the smart money, with ready buyers of the property you want to leave behind. Put a reminder in your calendar and go about your life.