Americans are rethinking where they want to live
economist.com
economist.com
* We wanted to keep our kids in the same school, which is walking distance.
* We like being walking distance to the grocery store, doctor's offices, etc.
* Our kids can walk to their friends' houses.
* Proximity to the lake is important to us.
* We're close to family.
I live in a city and it suits me just fine overall, but I also need some of the "I don't want to deal with loads of people and their drama right now" time to remain sane.
These things are related. The person who's job is "planning," the one who demands that your store be surrounded by a sprawling parking lot, is neither the person who would build the store, nor shop there.
It's expensive, but let's be serious it's nothing compared to the coast – with a good quality of life (as the reasons you stated).
I had the impression Chicago was actually losing people, but that info was old, from the previous decade where it lost 7%.
Chicago is a weird place for various political and economic reasons (I’m from Minneapolis, so just a neighbor), and was not growing pre-pandemic. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that trend reverse given its relative LCOL - especially with the Denver/Austins of the world no longer being very affordable.
An important point!
I moved recently to a small village from a large town in the UK mainly so that I could afford a good size of house compared to what I could afford in the town. Despite never considering my self a "city boy", I have found the move very challenging. I initially thought it was isolating because of lockdown but then realised that the pace here is very slow and I find the lack of activity troubling. I just have to get used to driving to everything, something I have never had to do before.
Honeymoon phases are common.
I now live a long way from anyone, in a cabin deep in the forest, about 10km from the nearest village over inhospitable terrain, 2km from the nearest trackway along windy and wild paths I cut along the side of a sheer valley. We don’t get visitors, apart from those that we invite.
It wasn’t the lack of activity that I found troubling - rather, the village people, filling their days with forced smiles and petty vendettas. Every time I sat down it felt like someone would knock on the door and ask me to sign their petition.
Here, it’s just me, my wife, and the wildlife.
The pace here is frantic, as surviving and thriving off-grid is a lot of work. I smile and nod at the villagers when I drive by on the weekly provisioning run, and that’s enough for me.
I think a city almost has more in common with being alone than it does with a small settlement - in a city, the crowds allow anonymity and this creates a virtual space for the individual. In the boonies, there is actual space for the individual. In a village, all is cloying, suffocating togetherness. Great if you like that kind of thing, but it really wasn’t for me.
All it takes is the big box stores to setup camp 10 minutes outside of town and almost everyone with a car will opt to save money and shop there.
It's kind of similar to how good shoes can be resoled.
And I thought that's just the way things are.
But I got a Hoover upright, which was much cheaper, looks cheaper, like a toy, mostly garish purple plastic, and is also much heavier. But it sucks up an order of magnitude more dirt. It's bagless, which some people don't like, but it makes it very visible how much crud it's removing and allows it to be dumped after every use.
So I feel like the Oreck was perhaps a swindle, having the looks and characteristics that older people associate with appliances from long ago, except the actual performance.
And I'm glad I didn't spend a lot on a Dyson just to get a vacuum with no bag.
I've never gone there, but I think there's a storefront near me that says they repair vacuum cleaners. Don't recall what kind.
I remember quite good prices in the Netherlands as well which is quite densely populated and where people shop in downtown stores rather than out of town big box stores. The exception would be things like hardware and furniture.
They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.
But you see it in Europe. I walk to lidl and buy my groceries, basically every person I know walk to get groceries. Some do big weekend shopping trips now and then to bigger stores, but that isn't the norm.
In the US, these are few and far between. And Aldi/Lidl are going to optimize for their costs, which means not paying rent in a downtown if they have the option to build on cheaper land 5 minutes away from downtown. Which makes no difference to them, because 99% of their customers have a car.
It's pretty similar to the way medium sized Safeways are spread throughout San Francisco, except the rent isn't $3000/month for a 1 bed and the soap and shampoo doesn't have to be kept locked away.
Sure, if you want a big electronics store, you go to the centre of the city (10m biking), but for groceries, coffee, takeaways, restaurants, doctors, DIY stores, pharmacies, etc there's tons of these scattered around the city. It's quite multi-polar, there are many shopping streets, for these kinds of needs you're rarely more than 10 min walk or 2-3 minutes cycle away from those.
Where I live, for example, there's even 2 branches of the same chain of supermarket within about 400m, so <5 min walk, about 1 min on a bike. (Handy on the rare occasion that one of them is out of something!)
One thing I hate about the majority of the US's urban centers is they are extremely touristy and expensive. It is common to be paying $6+ per beer (it's local but still) and that's not even on weekends.
If there is retail, it's _highly_ differentiated from Big Box.
The problem in the US is mostly cultural. Most rural/semi-rural/exurban people think nothing of an hour driving each way. So why would they want what they perceive as a tiny lot, with more expensive housing where they can hear their neighbors when they can get a huge lot and drive a little more?
The non-cultural part of the problem is that the drive-everywhere paradigm is so heavily invested that even in a small walking-oriented European -style village, everyone would need to own a car anyway. If you built a train to a regional hub it wouldn’t solve the problem of the regional hub itself having terrible public transit. Plus, it’s a lot easier to build a road than a train politically.
Beyond a certain point (which was a long time ago) we're just building roads and highways to create artificial growth.
It blows my mind how people don't realize the cultural piece either. They travel, "omg it's so walkable here! this is awesome! wow that cafe is so cute. Of course i buy bread from the local shop." then come back and it's like their experiences were completely wiped clean from their memory: "wait what do you mean not drive a car a quarter mile down the road to sit in the Zaxby's line?".
You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times.
> You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use.
It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc.
Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine.
Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.
Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
There's at least one, but not more than a few, exceptions in each state (Asheville, NC for example) where people move in with their money to larp "small town living" but it depends on outside capital to work and the original residents end up getting priced out.
Except everyone with a reliable car still drives to the large grocery store and with a wide selection which has lower prices and better selection on basics but makes it up with lower volume, high margin luxuries that the small market c doesn't have floor space for, and the small market, even if it starts as something else, ends up specializing in alcohol, tobacco, and dry goods, and neglecting general grocery items. Unless it's an area with a particular ethnic concentration and the small market survives by focussing on the unique demands of that ethnic community in a way that the larger store with a wider catchment area doesn't have any real incentive to.
Its not that there aren't enough small markets opened in areas of single-family homes to see this trend; you can't fix it with zoning, at least not in the manner you describe. (You can by driving density to transport capacity to the point where driving to the large grocery is impractical, of course, but that tends to be beyond allowing medium density, mixed use development.)
High enough density to have a locals within ~1/2 mile, and or a location where people stop on their way to or from work are how you keep prices reasonable. It’s never directly competitive with Walmart etc but being much closer is a real advantage.
Wiley St. Co-op and Jenifer St. Market are both relatively small grocery stores in the Marquette neighborhood of Madison, WI. The co-op is a bit larger, but less densely stocked and has no alcohol. Jenifer St. is packed to the gills, and sells alcohol. Both are surrounded by primarily single-family homes, with a few apartment buildings within walking distance. Neither are "ethnic" food stores, and neither sell much in the way of junk food, and neither sells tobacco.
I've been visiting them both for about 20 years whenever we visit relatives in Madison. I've always found them both remarkable, even given their placement in probably one of the most suitable locations in the USA for this sort of thing.
Of course, were I to comment on my own comment, I'd probably say "Yep, the exception(s) that prove the rule".
So I know this problem is solvable because it is solved in places that are not the US
It would take me 3 minutes just to walk out of my apartment complex, and another 5 to get to the supermarket right next door to the apartments.
What you have as a supermarket in your country must be different than what we have here in the US: Kroger, Albertson's, SafeWay, Von's, etc... These are very large buildings that take up a lot of property.
Taking a different friend's address in the suburbs, he has 3 supermarkets within a 10 minute walk (800m).
In the city centre, there are 10 supermarkets within a 5 minute walk.
The supermarkets in the city centre are smaller, and have a relatively limited range, although in practise I do 95% of my shopping at one. You choose a different supermarket if you need an upmarket/wider selection, but it doesn't matter as it's so close by (exception: if I really need something like a particular lactose free cheese for a recipe, I'll just go to an inner city supermarket rather than checking 3-4 shops in the centre). There is no parking.
In the inner city, perhaps 20% of them are large enough to be selling clothes, a few toys etc. There might be parking for 0-6 cars. Not having to walk across a ginormous car park saves a lot of distance.
You'll need to travel further (on average) to buy a barbecue, tent, etc. I think I remember the large American supermarkets selling this sort of thing — in Denmark, you'll need to go to the DIY / sports / etc shop. This will have a car park.
Example, though you could zoom into any European city and search "supermarket" on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket+in+Herlev/@55... -- Coop 365, Netto, Fakta, Føtex, Lidl and Rema 1000 are normal supermarkets.
And that's if you don't get it delivered. And even so that is when you use the car (hence why Europeans have a lot of hatchbacks). Not driving to a grocery store a quarter mile away to get a bag of chips that you forgot for a party. The energy expenditure for that is crazy. It's no wonder America has such high resource consumption.
> The supermarkets in the city centre are smaller
Then maybe they are not actually supermarkets, instead small markets or grocery stores?
Otherwise, I am not sure where to draw the line between a grocery and a supermarket.
It used to be that groceries were smaller shops with fewer categories of goods and less range within those categories -- they didn't sell toiletries, or light bulbs, or paper plates, or socks. Rice came in white and brown.
But around 10 years ago the large supermarkets started to take over shops this size, except with the same building they can use more floor space for retail. Their well-run logistics means they can deliver to them every day or two, so the smaller shop doesn't need a large stock room to maintain a wide range. Therefore, the smaller/independent general grocery businesses have mostly gone, but I can choose from perhaps 8-10 kinds of rice, compared to the 16-20 they have at the largest stores. The 8-10 kinds will be varied according to the area.
I do 80% of my shopping at one of these shops, 15% at another one (when I fancy a change, or walk home a different way), and less than 5% at a supermarket large enough to sell toasters, toys, televisions and t-shirts.
As for the rest of it, I'm not arguing that the suburbs is a good choice. It's just the one people do choose and they choose it because of space and cost of living.
If the urban areas have more expensive housing for a given unit size, that would imply it is actually preferred.
It’s like saying nobody drives because there is too much traffic. Or sporting events always sell out so nobody goes.
But to the point of the person you are replying to, the price of a house in almost any reasonable case I can think of reflects desirability for one reason or another. If you see that suburban homes are cheaper than a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood (the kind that everybody visits and take pictures of) that would indicate that the preference is for that. Though I guess you can argue that due to lack of supply that the cost is increased.
The broader point I am trying to make is that if the main appeal of suburban living is lower cost (rather than the actual suburban lifestyle) this is addressable not necessarily by expanding suburbs but by addressing the costs of urban living. In fact that would be better if it were really true that urban living is preferred.
In practice though I am sure many people would choose suburban living even if costs were equal to an urban environment. But the price difference does indicate that one (urban environments) is in higher demand than the other (suburban environments)
Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
This is contradicted by this:
> But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
It is not overpriced, it is prices according to its supply and demand.
The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.
They are not expensive. The price is comparable or the same as any other bread.
The DC metro, which I used to ride, is extremely well funded. It’s actually regressed since it was built in the late 1970s, with the automated train control (which used to provide a smooth ride) having to be shut down due to poor maintenance. Headways are now 33% longer than they were a decade ago. (Well even longer now due to covid related collapse.) Trip times are slower—everything takes 10-20% more time than advertised.
Or look at Biden’s build back better plan. Amtrak would get $30 billion and build nothing: https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-...
> Because as Henry Grabar points out, while $30 billion should be a game-changing investment in the Northeast Corridor, the actual plan from Amtrak is to spend about $30 billion on one tunnel under the Hudson River.
Americans are not as dumb as Europeans think. If we could build light rail for $30 million/mile like Germany, instead of $350 million per mile, that stupid 16 mile light rail could be a 160 mile network all around the Maryland suburbs. That would be a totally different value proposition. The high costs mean that
I live in a suburban master planned development now that oriented itself around the residential-commercial interface.
Having previously lived in an urban core, it's not too much of a downgrade. Sure, you inevitably trade local for chain (boo!), because that's who the anchor tenants originally were. But over the decades the smaller spaces have filled out with organic stuff.
And the fact that re-building cities is really expensive and hard and we're (somewhat) stuck with what we have.
There's a kind of exurban suburb that was built in the 1990s that has an outsized influence on our conception of suburban living. But there are lots of older "suburbs" that are actually quite pleasant.
That seems mostly the norm in my experience. These HN threads always talk about suburbs where you need to drive 10 minutes on a highway to get to the nearest store but to be honest I don't know where those are, I don't think I've seen areas like that.
These neighbourhoods are denser than American suburbs of course; houses come in rows, and you get a front and back yard, but not an entire plot of land around your home. But that also means plenty of kids to play with. In the street, because often cars are required to drive at walking pace and playing kids have right of way.
I grew up in a street like that. I hated it, and preferred a real city, but it's pretty comfortable living.
Lots to dislike, but I love Paris human side ^^
I want to also note there is a lot in between a dense neighborhood and having no people around.
When your kids move away after college, does that change the calculation much for you? Both of my kids are away at college and so I'm looking at where I live and what kind of life I want and am leaning more and more to moving further out of the city (I'm already in the suburbs).
The ideal suburbanite is an upper-middle-class person in their 30s–50s in good health who really likes driving their large car and has hobbies they can do individually from inside their own home (e.g. woodworking, gardening), and doesn’t mind that life is miserable* there for their kids. Everyone else is more or less a second-class citizen.
* Edit: suburbs are unpleasant for kids because anyone who can’t drive is completely dependent on someone else (for kids, usually a parent) for transportation: few destinations are within walking/cycling distance, buses are few and infrequent, in general non-car transportation is discouraged by the urban design. Everything is harder to get to, and there are far fewer resources available for people with particular interests.
At the same time, I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment, having no yard to play in, etc.
This disdain for suburbs is quite tacky and out of touch. It's okay to think differently. I'm glad you enjoy living in the city! Luckily, this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
The disdain (at least for me) comes when you do the math and realized how absurdly subsidized the suburban lifestyle is.
This is not representative of suburbs in general. Many suburbs, especially older ones whose infrastructure construction (but not maintenance) was heavily state-subsidized, are struggling and financially unsustainable, leaving their (less wealthy) residents in deep trouble in the long term.
It's also out of touch to assume every family in "the city" lives in a 2 bedroom apartment with no yard. Lots of families in my city (Chicago) live in 3 story walk-ups, duplex-downs or even single family homes which all have yards.
Perhaps we could all be a little more open-minded about how other people live.
Based on what metric?
Here [1] is a three-bedroom apartment in one of Chicago's nicest areas (Ravenswood/Lincoln Square), with heat/water included, right by the Brown Line for $2,100/month.
Find me the large house in the suburbs that will run you $2,100/month. Don't forget to include the 20% down payment, on-going maintenance, utilities, and an additional car.
[1] https://www.apartments.com/4742-n-oakley-ave-chicago-il/4d99...
Have you yourself been a child growing up in places of different density? I personally did (my time spent mostly in one of the nicest suburbs in southern California, but alternating for a couple months every year with a walkable small Mexican city), and then since then have been in cities (where my small kids are now growing up).
Are you sure I am the “out of touch” one here? Have you ever tried living with kids in a 2-bedroom apartment? It’s really not a big deal (though note, there are also plenty of larger apartments/condos and single-family houses in cities, and plenty of cities around the world without outrageous housing prices). In the city you might not play in your yard, but you can play at the nearby playground or park with the many neighborhood kids.
A lot of people ended up in the suburbs because of their kids, not in spite of them. Proximity to other kids, organized sports, good schools, after-school activities, etc... It can be very car-centric as you pointed out, but when there are other families on your block going to the same things, you quickly figure out how to car pool to share the burden.
There's more than one way to live a great life with kids.
> I can't imagine that they would enjoy living in 2 bedroom apartment
OK but that's a problem with a limited imagination, not how your kids would actually feel. Do you know that 90% of families in the world live in close quarters, in places like 2 bedroom apartments (or -- gasp! -- smaller)? Do you think all these kids really hate their lives because of the size of their apartments? Do you think young kids even realize that they "should" prefer a 3000sqft house to an apartment?
> this country is big and there's enough space for all of us!
Sure there's space, but space isn't really the issue. The negative social and environmental impact of a suburban lifestyle is unsustainable. Future generations are going to look back on our settlement patterns and think we were truly insane, hundreds of millions of people each with multiple personal cars spread out from each other such that cars are necessary to do even the most minor tasks. It's taken some incredibly opaque collective blinders for us to have ended up thinking suburbs are a responsible way of living.
Suburbs have higher median personal income than urban cores; so that individual suburbanites consume more resources isn't surprising.
These people would also consume more resources if they lived in urban cores.
Only if you examine the problem so superficially you can't think of any other cost of personal vehicles than burning gas.
Cars burning gasoline isn't the only or even the smallest problem with everyone needing to own a car. Think of the supply chain required to produce, deliver, and dispose of personal vehicles for everyone. Think of the civil infrastructure required to enable everyone to have a personal car. Think of the human cost that humans being terrible, irresponsible drivers takes on society. For starters.
> There are things called towns that exist in suburbia and can be reached easily by bike or walking.
There is a thing called weather in much of the US and world that makes this unrealistic. Further it's disingenuous to claim it's feasible to walk to a town to do your groceries from a suburb. You're going to need to walk at least 2-3 miles (best case) to a grocery store and you're not going to be able to carry more than a couple days' worth of stuff, less for a full family.
The suburban way of life is going to crash and burn, spectacularly. It is running on credit it can never pay back. At least 2 generations have covered their eyes and ears and yelled "naaa naaa we don't believe it". It's time to acknowledge that we can't carry on that "tradition'. Either we voluntarily adapt, or our surroundings will force the change.
I still live in the DC suburbs, but picked an area with a lot more walkability. Walkable grocery store (plus pharmacy, coffee, dining). Schools are walkable. Bike paths and walking trails everywhere. Golf course out my back door. Walk to work. Walk to Metro. But, the median home price is higher here than my parents' area, and that's in an area that's already expensive.
We also happened to have a weekend/summer cottage in the suburbs. It was near the beach and had a yard and bikes and all those wonderful suburban pleasures.
He absolutely begged us every weekend to let him stay in the city where he could see his friends by subway/walking, didn't need us to drive him anywhere, had freedom etc.
You don't need a yard as much when you have parks :-)
Or neighborhood play areas, where they can play with class mates.
I certainly don't think we put our child's mental health second. I'm not sure how to quantify that for a stranger on the internet, nor do I feel the need to... I am in the 30-50 range, though.
The thought of living in Seattle, personally, is abysmal. It smells of piss, all of the time. The homeless have taken over and there are no decent programs to help them out, nor do there seem to be any effective programs on the horizon. City corruption seems to take care of that. Business is taking a nose dive. There are no grocery stores. Food deserts are a very real thing. Rent is unimaginable. You can buy in the suburbs for a fraction of the cost of renting in downtown, easily. People in the area are not the most outgoing in the first place (the colloquialism is the Seattle Freeze), but add into that the normal distance of city dwelling and you are almost robotic to each other. While public transport is lacking (to say the least), it is there and available from these horrible suburbs you have warned us about.
The dream of city living seems, honestly, to be for the VERY rich or the young and naive, to be honest =/
EDIT: spelling
You're operating on some limited/different definition of suburb.
We stay in the suburb precisely because my kid has multiple friends within walking distance.
Yes, we could afford to have a lot more space that we personally own if we lived in a less dense area. But no, I don't miss it. I don't feel cooped up in a small space where I live right now. Nor did I feel cooped up living in a college dormitory, for that matter.
I do feel cooped up in a small space when I'm staying with friends and family who have palatial homes out in the suburbs for any length of time. My sense of how much space I have at my disposal changes drastically when I'm in an environment where the only space I'm allowed to use freely is space I'm personally owning or renting.
It hits my kids even worse. For them, one backyard, even a big one, is simply not enough room to run.
It's a very different mindset that I thought I'd hate but now that I'm here I couldn't imagine it any other way.
In the suburbs you typically have both. We have a yard to play in (not huge, but a good yard with a few trees to climb, a treehouse, etc) and we have a large park about 1 minute away on foot. It's not only the major cities that have parks.
However, there are separate but related trends which the articles points out:
- The south's quality of living has drastically increased over the last 20~30 years
- People aren't seeing state localized benefits from high state taxes (IMHO Illinois might the worst tax:benefit ratio in the country)
- Work from home acceleration has accelerated lower cost of living with high quality of life centers (see -> the south)
I always think this, and then I leave Illinois and immediately notice that the infrastructure in neighboring states (Indiana and Missouri, namely) is abhorrent. I think it's just all relative.
+1 on school within walking distance. Walking to-and-from each day with my son has been an amazing experience. A big surprise for us has been the sense of community within our neighborhood and school.
This does not make sense. Yes, moving to the suburbs and not using a car would lose much of freedom, but it is not how you live in the suburbs...
When you live the suburbs (with a car or multiple cars), you have way more choices to grocery stores, doctor's offices, friends' houses, public parks, lakes, etc.
I will say, if anybody cares a lot about freedom, would want to live in the suburbs. The whole idea of prioritizing walkability is against freedom.
Walkability means limiting choices, not expanding choices. You are basically shrinking the area of 15 min driving distance (radius of eight miles) to the area of 15 min walking distance (radius of three-quarters of a mile). No matter how dense you set in the area of 15 min walking distance, it will never be comparable to the area of 15 min driving distance (around x100 area space).
In addition, you gain more freedom when you live in the suburbs with a backyard and a garage (or a shed in the backyard). You have lots of things you can do (like home lab, wood workshop, etc.) which aren't available to you if you live in a small house or apartment in the city.
If you chose not to own a car, that's a totally separate topic.
Walkability doesn't strictly limit choices, especially if you consider walking+biking+transit since they go hand-in-hand. E.g. compared to a car-oriented suburb, personally I certainly have more food options within an X-minute accessible radius, but I don't have as many nature options. It's a tradeoff.
I also don't need to drive, which is probably the freedom OP was talking about, and one that both of us value even if some others like yourself don't. I like that having a no-car option means it's easier to be healthy and active when walking and biking are practical choices for day-to-day errands, that I don't have to think about parking or traffic for popular events, that I'm more likely to bump into friends on the street, and that I don't have to think about designed drivers when alcohol is involved. You may not value any of that, but some people do, and so they prefer living somewhere with that choice.
It's fine if you prefer living with a car, but it's rather silly to say it "does not make sense" to consider it freeing to live in a place that doesn't require one given that many people make that choice.
Also, your thinking reflects a typical young person live alone on this forum. Not much need to be said.
Yes I did, but if that's your counter-point, then I fear you've misunderstood this thread: it was about how where you live, not whether to have a car. Buying a car when you don't have one clearly adds options, and avoiding having a car when you need one clearly restricts your options. But that's obvious, and nobody was claiming otherwise. The point is you can't live without a car anywhere, and there exist people who are not you who prefer the freedom of living in places where they don't need a car (even if do have a car!).
> Also, your thinking reflects a typical young person live alone on this forum. Not much need to be said.
Yikes, "I suspect you belong to a specific demographic" should never be a reason to dismiss someone's opinion out of hand. I hope you see how disrespectful that is, and how it closes the door on mutual understanding. (Your assumption isn't even right, BTW.) Otherwise, I suppose our discussion ends here.
[1] https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-tha...
Also not a lot of undeveloped cities either to try it out.
For what its worth, something similar (but less dramatic in scale) was already tried before [1]. People tended to not like it. The park space made it a lot harder to get around. You lose the "its ony three block away" nature of cities when you add lots of dead space, and things like rain cover along sidewalks become a problem.
One of the major things that make city streets "walkable" and enjoyable is stuff happening on the street frontage. The complexity of various shops, eateries and city amenities abutting the sidewalk mean there is reason to be there and things to do. You lose that when you recess a building.
I think a much better approach is just to cede some land to be in-city-grid parks, and take over some minor roads and alleys as green-walks where the road is reduced (eg. curved to force slow traffic) or removed, and theres lots of trees and gardens and walkways. Basically get that green space from incremental reclamation, and protection of existing opens spaces. Leave actual city structure as it is.
There aren't many walkable or bikeable areas in the US, and those that exist are in a handful of large cities. Many US cities aren't very walkable, e.g. Los Angeles (the second largest US city).
I used to be very pro-transit and walking (didn't even learn to drive till 30), and even as I was not walking as much just before COVID, I reflexively remained so. When most things closed nearby (so we went out less and finally discovered food delivery), I realized I don't really need to walk places - I don't miss them. With spotty reopenings, when some places were indoors and some outdoor-only in bad weather, we drove to go out and turns out it's much better (unless you plan to drink a lot). With more grocery shopping, walking to groceries was out of the question and turns out, even in a dense city, driving for the same amount of time to get groceries is so much more convenient. Etc.
I can see benefits of a park nearby, but that's about it... and then again, in overall less walkable areas parks are less crowded, larger, and also cleaner/nicer.
EDIT: reading other comments I guess I can see benefits for kids, although only with more old-style parenting. I could take a subway by myself when I was 10 or so, and walk around everywhere obviously, so that gives a lot of independence you cannot have in suburbs.
Traffic, noise pollution, air quality, and auto accidents are all things the unfortunate city dweller is forced to live with because cars are given free reign on streets.
Cities need to convert their freeways to toll roads and limit the registration of vehicles to what the infrastructure can actually handle.
* Kid's school is technically walking distance, bike ride more reasonably
* Walking distance from grocery store, doctor's office, dentist
* Kid can walk to friends' house
* Can ride my bike to a conservation area with camping
* Lakes are all around, but not really fair since I live in FL
* Multiple outdoor parks within walking/biking distance
* Neighborhood/community swimming pool
* Walking distance to gym
* Extremely low crime rate
I'm not saying you should move, especially because of the close to family bit. Nor am I suggesting most of suburbia is like where I live. But if you seek out suburban areas that are designed to be in proximity to things, you will find them.
* People on that show always needs a shit load of space. Especially in the kitchens, for some reason. Sometimes they are a couple without kids or maybe have one kid but they want 2 ovens? And a huge island is a must. Most of the kitchens in those shows are bigger than the average living room in my country.
* Houses made out of wood and walls that you can punch through. This is a different matter though.
Even without kids, my partner and I try to cook often. We have a decent-sized kitchen by urban US standards (it would probably be considered on the small side if we lived in the suburbs), but could still stand to have more counter space for food prep (and cabinet space for storage). Agree that 2 ovens is a bit much, but a huge island can be incredibly useful.
And even though kitchens are way smaller than in the US (or at least the average one in those shows), another difference is that we have the washer in the kitchen (almost no one has a drier though, and after using one in London I wonder why anyone would use one for anything other than sheets and towels, those things destroy clothes) and usually the kitchen was a separate room (due to the smell, I guess?), but nowadays an “open plan” has grown a lot in demand.
Houses in Britain with enough space will put it a different room, often called a utility room, scullery or laundry room. That would be difficult to find in London.
(Apartments in Denmark will put it in the bathroom, since the building regulations require a floor drain in case of leaks.)
I do know a European with two ovens. It's very unusual, but they really like cooking. Even so, they only use the second oven rarely -- perhaps roasting meat in one, and baking in the other. The additional oven was installed after seeing two ovens in a kitchen on a trip to the USA.
- $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment.
- Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment.
- Smells like urine on many sidewalks.
- Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown).
- Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings.
- Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your head low if you aren’t progressive.
- We’ve reached $4.99 per gallon for gasoline.
- I’ve experienced two car break-ins.
- Trash everywhere.
- High taxes.
- Crummy roads.
I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what? My standard of living is low. I’m leaving for Texas or Florida. Hopefully either of these two states provide me something better.
If you have the opportunity it's good to look at the entire country, sometimes even the world (though for tech the US is by far the best option) for the best value.
Still expensive, though.
Your other complaints are complaints you often hear from conservatives about San Francisco. I took my bike on the train to SF not long ago and spotted no feces and smelled no urine as I rode around The City.
Homelessness is a problem in San Jose and SF, but no worse than in many other cities I've been in.
I have often thought if lights were better optimized, we could save on gas usage in cars.
No, it's worse. Every time I have to drive in Santa Clara County, I get the impression that the traffic engineers they hired are sociopaths.
The traffic lights on El Camino are perfectly timed to force you to stop at every. single. damn. one. That is, unless you drive 20+mph over the speed limit. I initially thought this might be to encourage walking and cycling, but you run into the exact same problem on a bike. The infrastructure isn't very ped-friendly, either.
I just don't get it. The stoplights are timed to make travel excruciating no matter how you do it. The problem with El Camino light timing ends when you cross into San Mateo county, btw.
It's the polar opposite of LA, where you can drive 10's of miles (late at night) on surface streets with the cruise control set right at the speed limit, never touching the gas or breaks. Cycling in the valley or on LA's west side, you can usually hit 3-5 greens before needing to stop (and then only briefly).
Edit: formatting
I was born in San Francisco a long time ago and it used to actually be a pretty cheap city to live in California once. A lot of LA based law firms would open up offices in San Francisco because it was cheaper to live there then lots of parts of Los Angeles and lots of people thought the city was charming. That's hard to imagine now. To me the charm was hollowed out by it becoming so expensive. So now SF is a boring like Manhattan and Oakland is the Brooklyn of the region.
The only reason anyone pays $2700 for an 500 sq ft apartment in San Jose is because they have a great job near by. I don't want to say anything bad about San Jose but IMO it has always been pretty far down the list of places you want to live in California. You shouldn't have to suffer that much for a job, and it seems like the way things are going you won't have to.
Guess I'm just hoping that controversy appears bigger than it is, and most people still do know how to get along and respect each other.
There isn't better tolerance on either side. You're mistaking agreeing with group think for tolerance. What is tolerated is just a different set of behaviors, but intolerance is high regardless for behaviors outside that set. You just don't see the intolerance when you agree with the majority.
These are just city problems.
On the other hand, my mortgage, insurance, and property taxes are $2,500 a month for a 3,000 square foot, 4-story townhome with a private rooftop deck with a downtown skyline view, so there's that.
In think crime and homeless depends a lot on the area in Dallas. A lot of new apartments and townhomes are in “transitional” neighborhoods.
The weather. The high cost of living in the bay area and California is largely about the weather. People come to California for the dream and stay for the sun.
It should simply be obvious that judging the state from a narrow sampling of life in San Jose is an extreme case of wearing the SV rat-race blinders and utterly failing to take advantage of what the region has to offer.
This is my general thinking as well, and it happens to fit with my current life experience.
I'm unconvinced that there has been, generally speaking, a fundamental change in the preferred environment people wish to live in; instead it seems more likely that traditionally popular American urban areas are just too expensive and offer relatively little (compared to other parts of the world) in terms of services to justify living there... Even for those that might otherwise choose to.
I prefer they keep “forgetting”.
> My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
Of course prices (and price movements) will always be the objective measure of desirability across a large population.
All of which are experiencing house prices in the last 5 years to shoot through the roof from what those people originally had. That said, Texas is huge so I'm really talking about Austin and 2 hour surrounding cities.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Also, as others have pointed out, most of the TX influx has been in/around Austin, so it's not like people are moving from SF to the middle of nowhere in TX, and having no impact on the local communities. Real estate prices in Austin are skyrocketing, as would be expected, in the few areas where people are moving to.
I moved to a larger city in the midwest and it's great. Yes, winter is a drag but that's about the only negative that bothers me. Tech salaries go a long way, public schools are high quality and plentiful, politics are generally more balanced (than Florida or Texas), religion isn't a constant presence, crime is low and people are mostly friendly.
I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID!
A short list of things I disliked:
- Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads.
- Conservative values. My parents are solidly blue voters, but growing up in that environment surrounded by racism, you learn a lot of bad stuff that you have to unlearn, or else sink deeper and deeper into the bad stuff.
- Our house became worthless. The community is dying, and the house my family owned is reasonable and has been sitting in the market for years. Nobody wants to move or live there.
- Lack of culture. My parents, up until this year, had never eaten Indian food, real ramen, or a huge number of other commonplace things you get in a city. There weren't any "garage bands" or other artists or coders to collaborate with as a kid. They are getting older now and they are realizing how empty and boring the place they have chosen to live is. My dad is getting really into video poker. There is NOTHING ELSE FOR THEM THERE.
- Bad schools. I had the same teachers as my parents, who graduated 20 years before I did. We had HUGE behavioral problems. Students who fell behind were sent to another school 45 minutes away... until that school filled up and could no longer take the overflow. It was constant triage and if you were a little clever you were BORED. A lot of students their senior year just sat in study hall for 6 hours a day because they didn't have the rooms and the teachers to teach higher level classes. I didn't even know what AP classes were until I got to college.
- Bad hospitals. We had to close ours down because we couldn't play doctors enough to move to our town.
- Total lack of community. You think "less people == people are closer". No. There is nowhere to gather, the only land you can use is the land you own. There are not enough people to support hobbies or meetups. Most of the people get a degree or a trade job and get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
Of course cost of living is cheap in rural America, demand is low and supply is high for land far from modern conveniences.
It’s swear it’s so much worse because of the boredom. School got out around 3pm and most days I had to stay inside with a sympathetic teacher until my parents got off work because a group of kids would just hang around waiting for me to walk home.
Thank god for the internet, not sure I would have made it out without it.
I think it will rebound a bit (but not much), as moving from urban to suburban is a very difficult transition, but its even harder going the other way once you've adjusted.
I miss living in NYC, but I'm actually looking to retire in the next few years, and pick up some remote land that I can settle with Starlink, and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years. My retirement will look vastly different from my parents, as I will still work (building web apps, games, furniture, whatever tickles my fancy), just not for anyone but myself.
Btw, big fan of your blog posts.
I actually tried retiring this year. I paid to go to university in the UK in a very cheap place to live, but we had a few people in our family pass, and we decided while everyone is aging, we should stick around.
>big fan of your blog posts.
That is so kind of you to say. I'm a big fan of writing them... once or twice a year when I finally remember a story worthy of writing.
Yuck
How do subsidies help then?
And people like you are a fantastic political talking point for why the social safety net routinely gets defunded.
I live in a suburb of an 8000 person city (town?) and med care is top notch. I do believe that anywhere one chooses to live there are compromises. Those compromises, if you do your homework, are up to you.
We have zero violent crime, and no fear of our neighbors. However, there are raccoons.
Restaurants exist, but they are exceptionally mediocre. We have grocery stores, however, and one learns to cook.
A car is indeed a necessity. The terrain is hilly and a bike riding is exhausting.
Children are free roaming. Bicycle gangs of laughing children invade day napping.
The unstated pressure to maintain one's lawn is intense, ridiculous and mildly fascist. I comply grudgingly.
One has fish and game on speed dial in the event wild animals misbehave.
Strangers may wave at you from their cars if you are walking. It is unsettling.
There is a smaller pool of craftsmen and tradesmen to fix your shit and they will stick it to you.
People would rather talk about weather than politics. It is difficult to identify those who deserve to be politically shunned, so one must instead judge their diligence regarding lawn care.
One can lead a life of quiet desperation, or enjoyment, in either the city or the country.
Being near a level 1 trauma center can make a big difference in extreme circumstances.
Not that it is objectively worth giving up whatever benefits not being near a level 1 trauma center bring, but it does provide a material difference in the level of healthcare and hence probability of outcomes you can expect.
I recommend it, playing farmer-cowboy-houseboateer in Kentucky/Tennessee is a magnitude cheaper than out west, even if you fail, you are out less money than simply living elsewhere.
Your neighbors will be from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, and they won't sound any more southern than their efforts.
That's generally true now and previously, but I wonder about the next decade+ as relocation shifts into higher gear. My historical impression has been that locals are usually okay with a few outsiders... but when it turns into a deluge, and everyone who moves there is wealthier than them...
Well, better to be nondescript than driving around east TN or KY with a CA or NY plate.
I live in Houston, TX now (and grew up here), and couldn't tell you whether we have any Californians here since we've always been a super diverse city.
Having drove to Knoxville last week, the stroads have too many cars.
That being said, check out Market Square for a bite to eat or KnoxDevs for a pretty cool dev community.
Most of Nashville Metro and surrounding counties are actually transplants or children of transplants. Once you go to a county that doesn't border metro Nashville the culture and accent change tremendously.
Everyone in the area is aware of "outsiders" and resents it to some degree.
I'm a young SWE from TN. I can't compete with SWE's from the coasts who have immense savings up on me and they're buying up all the homes.
SWE's who are 40+ in the area immediately bought brick 4 bed homes in the burbs in the nicest part of town when they got hired 10+ years ago. SWE's closer to 30 who are local are just able to buy an apartment if single income.
However it's a huge tide, this money coming in, the issue is most locals don't have ships to ride it.
In other words, you'll go to those small towns to teach those hicks some manners. No wonder they're not that keen on seeing refugees from "more humane and well thought out" places settle in their towns and villages.
If that is your message to your new neighbours may I suggest you go somewhere more welcoming of those "humane and well thought out" policies? It is a sad thing that those places tend to be the ones people are moving away from but that means there should be lots of vacancies.
> those places tend to be the ones people are moving away from but that means there should be lots of vacancies.
People have been moving away from those small towns for generations, and I feel like this speaks for itself.
Employment is a policy failure. Likely "not well thought out" if it didn't work as intended :)
California and its policies have created an ton of jobs. So many jobs that theres not enough space to put the people who work those jobs. Much of Silicon Valley in the 50s was farmland. Why hasn't every other rural town transformed into the economic powerhouse of the 21st century? Could it be (partially) policy decisions?
> Bruce Springsteen touched this
Not the authority on human migratory patterns i'd expect.
Of course not. The policies which gave California those jobs you mentioned are not the policies enacted by the current crop of Californian politicos. This can be seen by the population stats for the state which for the first time ever (?) see a downward trend [1] due to the number of people fleeing the place. Where California used to enact policies which made people flock to the place they now do the opposite. Maybe California was not the best example to give, seeing as how it is currently melting down in more than one way? Power failures, skyrocketing crime, rampant homelessness, tell me something which they're doing right...
As to Springsteen not being "the authority" on "human migratory patterns"... really? Why does it take an "authority" to see jobs disappearing from your town/county/state? You forgot to mention Chris Rea, is he more of "an authority"? Of course he isn't and of course he is since this whole "authority" spiel is just that. Both Springsteen and Rea made songs about things they saw happening around them, both of them involve rivers, both saw the jobs disappearing. Rea noticed that there are salmon swimming in Steel River, Springsteen thinks back to better times. They're artists, not "authorities".
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/californias-population-f...
Yes.
Obviously its a little glib to be an arm-chair critic and just handwave all externatilities and decisions away, but yes i think the rust belt was (partially) a policy failure. eg. Cleveland was once one of the richest cities in america, but did nothing to protect or incubate the next generation of businesses there. I used to live near Cleveland's millionaire row. The mansions are now homeless shelters and frat houses, and the rich are gone. A strong policy for employment is to push diversity of the work - lots of different industries, and new ventures so economic cycles don't affect the whole region. Today, that same strip of road is being re-imagined as the "Health-Tech Corridor", is being outfit with a massive fiber line, and encouraging peering between institutions to share medical data for research purposes. I think this is a step in the right direction: instead of waiting for stardard oil to move back, invent your own future. They say a nearby hospital and university collab on medical research, and the gov paid for infra to attract lots of new orgs to the area (its working so far at attracting orgs). Who knows if it'll revitalize the area in 20 years, but it was pretty cheap and paid for by grants, so why not?
California proved for years (but maybe flew too close to the sun recently) that you could charge high taxes and high regulation and people would still go, and still start businesses, if you made it worth it. How many "Bumfuck and Podunk"'s are raising taxes to generate more revenue for the locality to offer more for their citizens?
Protect workers (humane) and give them affordances to start new ventures (good policy). Bring in (and welcome!) outsiders (humane+policy) who will offer new perspectives and start new businesses, and bring new needs to be met with economic growth.
Speaking of outsiders, this whole conversation could be avoided if these podunk places (or those that speak on their behalf?) weren't fearful of outsiders coming in and doing things differently. Be open to outsiders! Be open to change! Just because outsiders are different and not like you doesn't mean they're bad, or wrong, or will make your life worse. Maybe what "podunk" needs the most is some west coast open-mindedness.
> The policies which gave California those jobs you mentioned are not the policies enacted by the current crop of Californian politicos.
What is the difference between then and now? Genuine question besides obviously politicians come/go and get different string of names on a ballot.
> Power failures, skyrocketing crime, rampant homelessness,
to be clear, power failure isn't texas-style "our grid is poorly managed" power failure, they turn it off to avoid starting fires at key moments. Still means you don't have electricity, of course, so something needs to be done - and they're actively trying to fix it.
The homelessness is a huge policy failure of CA. I agree. NY/MA handle it way better on a policy level (which is more humane too).
> tell me something which they're doing right...
They have great worker protections. Eg. they don't honor non-competes, a huge requirement for entrepreneurial activity.
They are one of a few states to enact privacy laws. This is great for forcing companies to respect users, instead of the state respecting businesses.
They are one of a handful states that offer strong LGBT protections in the workplace. A very "humane" law thats missing from most "bumfuck" areas.
They have/had strong gun controls and protections.
The legalization of cannabis was huge for reducing "crime" and giving people more freedom.
Their push for EV and renewable power on the grid is one of the strongest in the country. Driving an EV in cali is easy because of all the chargers, and so many other cars are EV that it creates positive feedback loop.
Maybe people didn't leave because of the policies, but because of their position relative to them. I mean, people who aren't legacy homeowners and find California too expensive but otherwise like it might well prefer to become a homeowner and then have the place they are in become like California.
Since basic economics still applies, prices get inflated, some of the people don't like the economics of what they voted for so they decide to move to Arizona or Texas or Florida and then once they've "got theirs" they smugly vote for more of the same policies that always apply to "someone else". Hence where the acronym NIMBYism comes from.
Most efficiency standards actually lower monthly housing costs, including your two examples of solar panels and natural gas bans. Note that the solar can be built offsite, and solar + electric is a natural (hah) combination.
Silicon Valley types haven’t been in the state long enough to have voted for those polices, and are (in my experience) strongly against them.
There is some really dumb stuff happening now in the name of progressives (like a state mandate that all cities reduce the number of commuter miles the road infrastructure supports), but they’re thinly-veiled NIMBY regulations that prop up property values for our landed gentry.
Silicon Valley types leaving the state typically don’t hold their dynastic wealth by hoarding California housing.
I know it's hard to believe, but the only difference between a major metropolis and bum-fuck nowhere is the lack of ethnic food, and less stressful traffic.
Almost all modern-niceties have been commodified to even the outer regions of the hills.
What is funny though is once we close on it, he's loading up his 5th wheel and driving it to an even more remote property his friend owns out in Colorado. They are fully off-grid.
It's hard to commodify a large economy of local businesses like you'd find in a large city. I can't imagine anything worse than being beholden to a handful of chain stores or the amazon catalog for all my wants and wishes. I've been doing all my shopping lately with local businesses, hard to do that in smaller areas that lack the customer base needed to support all these different businesses locally.
Do you mind sharing how much?
I'm curious why most people seem to think $1M is somehow not enough money to retire modestly on. If previous trends continue, you could easily live on >$4K after taxes per month indefinitely. That's almost 50% higher than median wage (after taxes). Median wage = ~$41,000. Even with $0 state tax, just after federal tax, you're at ~$30,000. At this income, you likely can't deduct more than the standard deduction...
It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
Even at $500k - you can draw down the same amount for ~10 years, and then rely on SS (which would be much more modest - although, obviously still completely doable considering almost half the senior population does it).
Also - a lot of people still do something that makes money in retirement...
The current (November 31) valuation of my assets is almost $200k. That isn't counting debts (which are small, but still exist), and that isn't counting the assets or value of my consulting company (which unaudited is around $50k).
I'm hoping to stash away another $150-200k over the next couple of years to really make my retirement last.
But either way, it isn't THAT hard to have a working retirement on < $500k. You aren't rich, but you are financially secure enough to chose what you want to do.
You can still live on $3,333/month, (especially since this person plans to keep working and there is likely some social security after age 67) but wanted to add some context.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-4-rule-is-being-debate...
For me, I think a 4% safe-withdraw-rate feels about right. Some argue for 3.5%. Others for 5 or 6%. Each of those has an impact on the cashflow in retirement, but $1M is probably not going to provide a replacement income for the typical folks who accumulated $1M. (Median household income in my state is $87K/yr before taxes.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233170/median-household-...
I also assume many people won't have paid-off homes, so they're stuck paying rent or mortgage. Cars aren't cheap to keep running. Medical expenses are insane in the US.
My personal health insurance is a crappy plan that's $250/mo (it's going up to $280 for next year) -- I don't plan on actually using it and I have an HSA fund from my last job that will cover 1-2 years of hitting the out-of-pocket max if something does happen. Depending on the something, and its chronic nature, that may force me to change my situation, but top of the list of likely doable changes is to just go back to work (either to afford a better plan that'll cover something I need or get with the group plan the company has). If being "retired" young doesn't work out so well in the first few years, it's not that rough to become un-retired, compared to being in your 60s or 70s, and hopefully at least you had a fun break.
Additionally - due to our tax code being based solely on income and not wealth - you might be able to qualify for a lot of government benefits.
>It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
It is because they have a different definition of modest than you. I know I can live on even less than median wage. I grew up with far less. But my family did not have access to healthcare and good schools or being able to help out family members if they needed support. We were always 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined.
Is living 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined modest? That is a personal opinion. I aim to cover the legal and health risks for me and my family members, so $1M is nothing where I live. I also predict that I need quite a big buffer the way the population pyramid is shaping up, because labor is going to get more and more expensive, along with devaluation of the dollar.
I also think either me or at least my kids (years 2050 to 2100) is going to have to contend with problems due to climate change and access to clean water and air that have yet to materialize, so need buffer for that too.
Of all the things I have planned, this is the only variable I don’t have an answer for because Medicare kicks in at 65.
The market-based plans are either useless (few hundred dollars a month); or expensive (a couple of thousand per month).
I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this.
Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/no-sp...
Walking distance to two grocery stores, several restaurants, and two malls. Affordable utilities and rent.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/edina-carjacking-v...
The circumstances are particularly shocking. A violent carjacking in broad daylight at an upscale grocery? The perpetrators must be a special brand of stupid.
Robberies are something I do watch because the victims are pretty much random.
I occasionally see people in Portland cite 2019’s crime stats as proof that things are fine and that you’re just bigoted against homeless people or whatever.
Portland didn’t get the 2020 numbers from the FBI until late September 2021, which at that point showed an 80% increase.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-2021-homicid...
Now we’re at nearly 80 homicides (if we haven’t crossed that, it will likely be this weekend) so far in 2021, breaking the 90s record.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-2021-homicid...
For a while the narrative as that crime was much less serious than is being portrayed in the news. In major American cities, that trend has reversed.
Doesn't have the same ring, you know?
"Defund the police" was very easy to interpret as "abolish the police." It was a gift to the other side of the argument, and to that side's candidates in the 2020 election. Overall it looks like it backfired as a slogan politically, and no major police departments have actually been reformed.
If all your slogan achieves is making your own side feel better, while it alienates moderates and gives easy talking points to your opponents, it's a bad slogan and you shouldn't be proud of it.
Look at the marches(if you can, they're rarely shown on any kind of media) every time a 5 year old is murdered from a stray drive by shooting bullet in chicago...thousands of people in the community come out against it, and...nothing happens.
Also worth noting that MPD engaged in a work stoppage last summer, which may have had an impact on crime. https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...
128's kind of funny, though. Unless you live in one of a handful of nearby streets, you need a car to get there. And you're at the Boston line (the suburban, single family and industrial park part of Boston, but still.)
I know personally, I've seen a lot of hiring shifting to Latin America in the last 2 years. I don't think this is going to be the midwestern/southern renascence that people think it's going to be.
Unluckily for First-World countries, the politicians seems to be focused on the symptoms rather than the disease itself. This will not change course of what will happen, of course.
It’s about a general trend of existing US residents across many industries relocating to the affordable, low tax, business friendly suburbs of cities where people do things besides converting funding into JSON.
- Lifestyle advantages of living amongst specialists: people can outsource various chores/tasks/jobs/errands to local specialists who can complete them much more efficiently. For instance imagine if your village doesn't have a plumber and you have to spend much of your own time fixing pipes, rather than focussing on activities where you have comparative advantage.
- Poaching. Modern companies struggle to maintain a competitive advantage since their employees can leave and join their competitors. But key employees will usually have roots in a particular place, so competitors can only hope to lure them away if they co-locate their offices in the same city. So almost all of them do.
That seems rather harsh. A big reason why "city dwellers" can't do home maintenance is because cities have more renters then owners. When you rent a property, you're strongly encouraged to offload all home maintenance onto your landlord. Not only is the landlord obligated to cover maintenance costs, but they can withhold a deposit (or even outright fine) for any damages done if maintenance is done incorrectly.
Our society thrives because of specialization. It's what allows a person to focus on what they're best at to have the greatest chance at innovation.
There was a discussion societally around millennials (men in particular) not being as "handy" as their parents, but specialization of those parents is largely the reason. Sure, my dad might have learned how to use a table saw as a teenager in shop class or how to change his car oil from my grandpa, but I only had an art elective available (no shop class option) and my parents were too busy to justify changing oil at home for our econobox cars when the jiffy lube down the street would do it for $40.
Now is that a problem for society? That has yet to be proven, especially when you factor in the rise of online teaching through mediums like YouTube. My dad might not have taught me anything handy, but my internet "dads" on YT have taught me many things beyond even what my own father knows. It's a trade off and I don't see us reverting as a society anytime soon.
When we lived in the suburbs, in an in-between space, we probably had the highest car use, and life required two vehicles.
So, it's not either-or. There's a spectrum. You can't expect to maintain the same habits and lifestyle in a rural location as you do in a dense urban environment, etc.
Expanding rural access to electric vehicle infrastructure, and re-investing in regional rail would be transformational for these communities, though.
Car centric suburbs aren't just terrible for the environment, terrible for safety and terrible for transportation; they're also incredibly costly.
Having 24/7 access to their own vehicle sounds like the opposite of being locked inside.
In my 50's it's the reverse. I know who I am and what I like and the things that make me get up and be excited about the new day are now mostly internal. Being around a lot of people drains me. I've spent decades figuring out what I love and my home contains the stuff that makes me happier than anything outside (with the exception of really great restaurants).
I hate saying it because I know it was really hard on a lot of people, but during the COVID lockdown days, I was happier than I've been for a long time.
Personally, I very much prefer country living where I can go to many hiking trails and campsites, have clean air, a quiet environment, and not be beholden to my neighbours for enjoyment of my own property.
Can you elaborate on the subsidisation of suburbia? Are there tax provisions that advantage them?
So the town slowly dies, and another municipality starts to raise a bond issue ...
The town was subsidised by a bond issue against National creditworthiness, against a building project with no long term revenue plan and the people living there did not pay for full long term cost of utilities (although to be fair that's the case for most utilities as they all chronically under invest)
Is this less likely to happen in smaller towns?
Maintaining your own home ain't trivial, cheap, quick thing
It's often illegal, through zoning or otherwise, to build those kinds of places.
Low supply due to underbuilding.
High costs due to difficulty in getting housing approved and forced BMR units.
More expensive land price.
Not needing to own a car saves you money.
And, most importantly, proximity to jobs and services. Living in a dense urban area saves you the time of driving and commuting, and has more amenities, restaurants, and things to do within a given X minutes. Buying time is expensive and a luxury good. This is where a lot of the demand comes from.
The problem is not just subsidization. Urban (especially “ultra-urban” in dense areas like Manhattan, non-suburban SF, central Boston or DC, Brickell, etc) residences have low supply and high demand.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
I think the discrepancy between this and what I said is that I was mentioning extremely dense areas and this probably has a much broader criteria for what constitutes as urban. For example the city of Houston may be urban but there is nothing walkable about it. There are markedly few areas in the US that are mega-dense. Check out the individual places I mentioned
Man I really hope EVs keep dropping in price because they still seem like a virtue signal for the wealthy at their current prices.
A lot of the prices in the suburbs near me seem to depend on how good the schools are supposed to be, what types are jobs are nearby, and, maybe ironically given the discussion, how easy it is to access the city.
This is a myth espoused by cityfolk. Oregon trail settlers didn't need subways. Those in Alaska and that live in the woods do just fine without your "help".
Many people have ranches, like to hunt, and enjoy nature.
Some city thinkers like to prescribe ways for others to live, but these people should look inwardly first. City air is toxic and is killing your pulmonary system. Zoning is NIMBY and school funding shows even the most liberal prefer to protect their own.
Live your life and stop telling others they are wrong in their lifestyle. It's like nails on a chalkboard. Elitist, and will contribute to a Republican win in 2022 and 2024.
(I'm a social liberal, fwiw. I think most of us are doing this wrong and are increasing polarization.)
With globalization and automation, the US pretty quickly turned into a mostly-service economy and shed tons of manufacturing and agriculture jobs. Service and other white-collar jobs mean working either for or with others, so they concentrate in cities. Manufacturing and ag jobs are where the raw materials, shipping, or farmland is, so tend to be more spread out.
The result is that jobs in small towns and cities evaporated and most opportunity became concentrated in large metro areas. People go where the jobs are, but the cities couldn't grow fast enough to keep up.
So, yes, even though cities are more economically efficient, they are still more expensive simply because the demand grew much faster than the supply.
Not really. Firstly, it costs a lot more per square foot to build a high rise than a single family home. Secondly, it costs a lot more to maintain it (elevators need constant maintenance, you can't just run to Home Depot to get replacement drain parts, etc.).
And the infrastructure costs more to maintain -- running power to a high rise requires a lot of specialized commercial electric equipment that can handle the high loads and variability. Same with water -- you need special pumps and extra big boilers. Sure you can gain some efficiency by sharing those resources, but at the end of the day the costs per person are roughly the same.
The main impact comes from needing less transport of goods and people, which is an environmental plus, but not something priced into the cost of living.
Wouldn't this be addressed by economies of scale? If you have 400 people living in a building, even if the complexity of the infrastructure is greater, isn't it more efficient than having 400 single family homes? Not that one can directly replace another, but I'm talking about the number of people being the constant.
> The main impact comes from needing less transport of goods and people, which is an environmental plus, but not something priced into the cost of living.
Transportation I think is especially huge, but I imagine there are other efficiencies of living in a dense urban area. And I think that regardless of whether or not external costs are priced in, they should be counted towards efficiency of infrastructure.
It would seem not. It's hard to find data, but a good proxy is condo fees for high rise condos vs low rise condos. Typically the high rise condo fees are higher than the low rise condos in similar areas, when the offer similar amenities. And usually condo fees are true cost representations, because the residents control the spending of their own money, so it's not a profit area for the owner, like the rent is.
Which means by proxy it's more expensive to maintain a high rise than a low rise complex.
Just to clarify: High density doesn't mean high rises. It means traditional developments at 2-5 stories. No elevator, water pump, special power, etc. These places are significantly cheaper than single family homes and provide dense walkable living.
In a city, that would be $100k / 10 city blocks, probably 100 parcels with 100-1000 low-to-mid rise housing units. In a rural area it might be just 10 housing units, at the cost of $10k/yr/parcel. And productivity in rural areas is 2-3x lower, so it's even higher as a percentage of per-capita GDP.
Add on top of that electric grids, water supply, sewage, emergency services, hospitals, etc. Bottom line: rural areas only survive due to subsidies from productive and overtaxed urban Americans.
Do you have a cite for that? I believe that figure for new roads, but you generally don't have to rebuild the entire road, including roadbed, after 30 years, just repave, which is a lot cheaper.
Rural areas also consume goods and services from urban areas, but nonetheless they supported the SALT rollback for "fairness."
That new suburb is of course in no way economically sustainable.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
I don't think the city is fixable for people who don't want to live in a city.
With covid / the great reset, I've seen so many leave the bay area now that they can work remote. It's occured to me that SV / SF will need to reinvent itself and be in a rough patch for a couple years. The benefit to the rest of the americans is that all those high paying jobs and new ways of doing business are being dispersed throughout the rest of the USA which is better for all of us in the end.
1. Many great workers either won't or don't want to live in SV. I've known a bunch of them, over the years. Moving more development to where these folks are brings them in to the fold.
2. The people in SV don't represent and aren't regularly interacting with most of America or the world. They are in a different bubble. The majority is part of the out group to them. Hiring people in distributed places means you hire people who are more likely to interact and relate to the majority. Relating to people that will use technology is useful when building solutions.
There is not a single soul in Omaha who would make that statement.
If by “people’s lives” you mean specifics “the lives of people in Omaha”, plausibly.
Otherwise, no, not really.
It’s going to be a rich continent for many generations to come.
Given thoughts like Individuals Matter [1], my speculation is that these companies are currently losing a lot of valuable individuals who can command more flexibility. There are plenty of remote first companies paying competitive salaries.
This is misinformation: https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...
>A smaller subset of states reported on hospitalizations and mortality by age; the available data indicate that COVID-19-associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children.
Here's a more accurate representation -
https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...
Now, go look up how many of those kids were already immuno-compromised.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e4.htm?s_cid=mm...
That's just one report that mentions 75% with an underlying medical condition.
When people say it doesn't kill kids they're generalizing, flagging it as misinformation is completely silly. By percentages and how we react to every other virus this is NOT something we should be scared of when it comes to children. We certainly shouldn't be subjecting children to measures that may cause psychological and developmental harm for something that's VERY unlikely to be a threat to them.
Of course, with omicron, who knows...
The psychological “trauma” of wearing a mask is nothing compared to what these kids will feel when they give grandma covid over Christmas.
It’s not about them.
>Among states reporting, children were 0.00%-0.27% of all COVID-19 deaths, and 6 states reported zero child deaths
>In states reporting, 0.00%-0.03% of all child COVID-19 cases resulted in death
So how is what I said "misinformation"?
While the numbers are low, it is not 0. This is, sadly, categorically untrue.
The percentages still don't pan out to having such massive restrictions on children that young.
Do yourself a favor and look up leading causes of child death.
Can you assert that without them getting covid, they would have died as quickly?
> The percentages still don't pan out to having such massive restrictions on children that young.
Which was never my assertion.
I was merely pointing out that "it does not kill kids" is just not true, which it isn't.
FWIW our district is considering removing the mask mandate at school as soon as we reach 80% vax rate among the students, so hopefully your nightmare of making your child wear a piece of cloth will end soon.
Ever since the vaccine came out our county has said that mandates will go away as soon as we hit 80% vaxxed and community transmission is low, as defined by the CDC. The goalposts haven't moved. We're almost there too -- we have 79.4% of all residents vaxxed, but transmission is still "substantial".
> thanks to parents with enough common sense not to inoculate their kids with something they don't need.
That's not how vaccines work. You get vaccinated to protect both yourself and others. We still vaccinate for polio even though it's basically been eradicated, because if we didn't, it would come back.
Luckily I live in an area where people are mostly educated and believe in science, so our child vax rate is already at 64% fully vaxxed for the county, despite the fact that you could only be fully vaxxed as of last Thursday.
Also, I did receive my shots, and I "believe in science" (whatever that means) by actually reading the studies (such as those listed under the parent comment) showing that children have a greater chance of being stuck by lightning than becoming seriously ill from this virus. Believing in science... that doesn't mean anything.
I hope no one in your county's kids get any heart problems as a result of this decision. After two of my friends' kids had to go to the hospital due to chest pain, with no history of cardiac issues, and with Twitter actively suppressing stories highlighting "myocarditis", my bullshit detector, developed from long years of life under the Iron Curtain, simply went ballistic.
Of course, since the beginning of time, our kids could transmit the influenza virus to "vulnerable family members" too, but we were wise enough not to subject them to humiliating practices such as having lunch by sitting in PNW winter-temperatures and barring socializing.
People can agree 100% on the “science” and still disagree on the risk-reward tradeoff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_frontier
PS: the risk tolerance varies by issue. E.g. blue cities seem to have a lot of risk appetite when it comes to lenient treatment of crime. Or gun-use in other parts of the country.
The few factors for us :
* Is the neighborhood family / kid-friendly ? * Is it comfortable ? * Does it have space ? * Does it have some of the conveniences of a city (not a cut-off remote suburb)
We moved to TX to be closer to family and it checked all of these boxes. That being said, I don't think we have it in us to do another relocation unless forced. It was painful to execute and I can only imagine it gets harder when you have deeper ties in the neighborhood/city with kids/family
I was so very jealous of my friends who lived in more urban areas who could walk home from school and do things independently of their parents at 12 rather than 16+.
One of the big stressors in hyper-growth cities has been that the infrastructure doesn't scale quickly enough and the waitlists for somethings can run months, if not years
E.g. daycare signups in parts of Austin
I certainly don't want to be on the hook to drive them everywhere like my parents were!
Seems like there could be a convergence of the demographic trend of millennial family formation with pandemic related increase in people's perception of the value of square footage that is pushing people toward that classic Single Family Home housing product.
Problem being of course is that they're not distributed in the right places.
Of course the era of normal people without incredible levels of wealth owning a detached home in cities like SF, Seattle, etc is long over. There will only ever be less and less SFHs as these cities urbanize further.
The market urbanist solution to this issue has been to build more housing, and more apartments, townhomes and duplexes with larger footprints that are suitable for a family, so that one wouldn't need a detached home for a larger family to affordably live in one of these big cities.
That we're seeing people abandon certain urban places may be a sign of the failure of those governments to actually get any of that product sufficiently built, but it also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper.
That seems unlikely since townhouses and the like have been quite popular in places outside the U.S. where they're reasonably common. Detached single homes are incompatible with dense urban living, and this will always limit their popularity.
I think it's should be pretty apparent that the US is fairly unique among other western democracies. I think a combination of "protestant work ethic" and "frontier spirit" are deeply ingrained in the culture here and have a lot of knock-on effects.
Having a "homestead" is a product of that.
Zoning in Seattle is not a problem for families. They want single family housing. Demolishing beautiful old pre war neighborhoods for developers isn’t going to entice families away from the nearby suburb with big yards.
I suspect that "abandon" is way overstating the case. Where I live, in the Twin Cities, the most growth in the state is in the cities themselves, while rural areas are continuing their decades-long decrease[1]. The enormous cities (SF, NYC) may be seeing a bit of a decrease in population, but I don't think it generalizes beyond those specific ones to urban areas across the country.
[1] https://www.fox9.com/news/twin-cities-fuel-minnesotas-popula...
Of course, all things (including location and sq footage) being equal, it seems logical most people would prefer SFH. No shared walls, nobody living above you, no/less-influential HOA, potentially large upside of land appreciation. However that is a false dichotomy because prices are higher (because land prices are likely to be high anywhere a SFH is near large condos). So what really matters is the demand curve for SFH vs MFH - MFH may be an “inferior good” in the economic sense but it is not so inferior that, for example, rich techies are buying $500k SFH in Richmond, CA rather than $800k condos in SF.
The whole narrative of a mass exodus is pretty suspect in general anyway. There is not a huge amount of vacant housing in most cities - the carrying and opportunity costs are too high, though IMO they should be higher. For every person leaving an urban area, on average, someone is replacing them.
So far, though, evidence is that people will still pay a pretty high price to live in denser housing in SF, Seattle, etc.
Cost of living is rising dramatically with YoY housing prices hitting 20-30% (even in middle of nowhere) it just doesn't make sense financially if you arent established to stay.
I'm all for traveling and experiencing different cultures but there's a lot more than money that comes into play when you're considering a move to a developing country.
Though of course it depends on the country, your goals and ideas, etc.
Parents who pay tens of thousands of dollars in property tax — largely for access to 'great schools' — are now able to move anywhere they want and access online options that are in many ways better than their tony suburban schools. Many of these parents are allowed to WFH now, which makes moving to rural areas possible, for the first time ever.
I imagine there will be some people who move away, realize the grass isn't always greener, and then move back. But overall I think WFH and remote schooling will unlock regions to a huge pool of families who never previously thought of living away from urban/suburban centers.
For example, a family may well be able to live off of one salary in their new location, freeing up the second parent to spend more time with/educating kids.
Qualitatively, as a patient, I'd say the biggest difference with Kaiser is that you engage something more like a government bureaucracy. You do not get complicated billing adventures when you go to your Kaiser clinics, hospitals, etc. But, you do get some long waits, occasional referral limbo, and sometimes indifferent treatment from overworked nurses or clerical staff. Of course, there are still individuals involved in each care event. I have seen two different family members have different levels of satisfaction and frustration from the same facilities, and my take is that the personalities of the patients had more to do with the different experiences than the facility or staff.
I liken Kaiser to going to the DMV for treatment. This is most true as a young to middle-aged person, where your common care needs might be for unplanned, urgent care rather than periodic checkups or predictable chronic care. I know others who have used Kaiser in the same regions for more chronic and acute conditions including psychiatric, metabolic, and geriatric care. I have been reasonably impressed and would like to keep myself in the same system when I retire and grow old.
I may be biased by having known the system since I was a child, but I prefer this to the non-HMO US experience I know mostly second hand. Instead of the DMV, I've had friends and relatives liken their healthcare to engaging a car dealership or some boutique investment firm, with every interaction transactionalized and tinged with financial worry.
Kaiser has strengths and weaknesses, which is unsurprising in healthcare.
Dermatology is garage-level bad. Cardiac care is world class. Reconstructive surgery for joints is amazing. Pediatrics has always been great, since that's what Kaiser started with. Psych is mainly pharmacological, if you can be purely medicated it's great. If you have anything very exotic like McCune-Albright syndrome, they can't do anything but medicate you (which Kaiser is very liberal about). Yeah, Kaiser GenPrac are pretty low rent, but that's true everywhere for General Pracitioners.
My family (all Kaiser), my coworkers, and ofc myself, have had a lot of time with Kaiser. Yeah you can get better cardiac care at the NIH or neurological treatment at UCLA, but Kaiser will make the recommendation for you and you can get that treatment if you want.
Anyone who thinks Kaiser is categorically bad, doesn't know what they are talking about, imo. Go see an independent that has Blue Shield/Cigna/etc and it's not even a question.
My recent experience had me paying zero USD and dealing with almost zero paperwork. For a physical and the resulting outpatient surgery.
It's still a miserable experience compared to what I was used to in Europe. So much bureaucracy and paperwork and it takes forever to get appointments.
Connecting through a corporate VPN to the corporate network wouldn't shield your location, and I'm not aware of any company that lets employees connect using their own VPNs? With corporate VPN connections, it's usually pretty easy to trace back to the geographic area of the connecting IP, and IT generally keeps logs of these.
While most companies are cool with short term remote work in other countries (especially for employees who do not work on revenue-generating products or services), undisclosed long term remote work is generally grounds for for-cause termination.
As an employer I have to fill out a lot of extra forms for someone outside the USA. But there are companies popping up to solve this -- they take care of all the paperwork for you, for a fee. Usually you negotiate with the employee to reduce their paycheck by however much the fee is, and everyone wins because they are going somewhere with a much lower cost of living (or you just eat the cost to keep a good employee).
And that one is able to choose which standards by which one evaluates one’s living.
Humans are very resilient.
Honestly, the barriers are not so great, and definitely finances are not at the top of the list of things to overcome. Without giving any numbers it's not clear what is required to be secure, but it also depends a lot on where you live.
That being said, I'd say language acquisition is more important than having a lot of money. Once you have enough money to reach escape velocity - again, this is personal, so I couldn't say what it is - more money doesn't really matter and just makes it more likely that you'd lose it because it's an easy button.
Language acquisition and learning how to meet new people are far more important, but fortunately they're free! (almost)
Europe is hard with the pandemic because it’s crowded in the main towns and cities, and a little colder than the USA. In smaller places the virus is much much less severe than you think.
That being said, I think the impact of the virus will diminish with the combination of vaccines as well as the virus continuing to mutate and compete against other variants.
Probably it will eventually become endemic and not so life threatening and reach an equilibrium, but that’s just what I think. It’s probably not great for the virus and it’s babies to kill lots of people and then suffer massive human led reactions like vaccines and quarantine measures. Maybe the cold or flu thousands of years ago were much more deadly.
Anyway, speculation aside, there’s also quality of life to consider. A lot of other places in the world really emphasize this.
The big picture is it’s an amazing world with cool people, and it couldn’t hurt for those of us who are without families and with some savings to explore it.
Ok feel free to give me some. I'd like to know the COL in these places as well.
A lot people here tend to complain about the US but are living in ridiculous high cost coastal areas and are unaware of more affordable options. Most of them are willingly sacrificing QOL because they refuse to change their attitudes.
Infrastructure, transparency, and just shit working is really amazing in the USA. Plus, access to USA markets is incredible. Being able to have same day delivery of groceries is mind blowing to people abroad. So, I really consider all of it, not just roads and bridges, as part of our 'infrastructure' and it's really good in the USA.
That being said, there are a lot of things that money can't buy, and culture is one of those things that's virtually priceless. It just takes time to develop. I don't mean to imply the USA doesn't have culture, of course it does, but it doesn't have X, or Y, or Z country's cultures.
I stayed in Mexico for about 11 months for example and I can honestly say I just 'felt' happier. Yes, sometimes I was super pissed because everything was broken: sometimes there's not water, power is constantly browning out (I really mean on a continuous basis), and the government in the south of mexico can be a mess. These kinds of things get perpetuated and affect the citizens as well over generations... yet still, Mexican culture was amazing and I enjoyed my quality of life there.
This is unfortunately something that's hard to put into numbers, but obviously there are proxies for it like the numbeo list in this thread. It's a personal subject though ultimately, because it's a qualitative assessment, so that's why I hesitated to "speculate", but thanks for asking :-)
That being said, I'm now in Italy and I got to say I like it even more here. Northern Italy in so many ways has the best that all of Europe has to offer. You can basically drink the alps on tap, any where you go, people are super duper smart, kind, hilarious, passionate, and then there's the food and all that other stuff. It's a lot more expensive here (for reference one could live easily in the south of mexico, like Oaxaca City, for about $500 USD if they wanted or $800 USD if they didn't feel like messing around with finding an affordable place), but it's also much cheaper than living in San Francisco was, and again the quality of life is much higher.
I actually think in general professionals will reach a point in the USA where they'll start spreading out, just like this article says, but it won't be limited to domestic destinations. Other countries, with aging populations, will start to attract these people, and they'll go abroad and start businesses and families. This is how the world has always worked. Italy for example was the pinnacle of the world now 2 times in history, they're kind of used to it, but the USA is just beginning its journey.
Sorry, that was probably a little meandering, bear with me, but hopefully that's satisfactory? I'm totally happy to talk more, I'm just not sure what people are interested in hearing, if anything haha. Ok have a nice day everyone.
This trend is going to make reducing CO2 emissions even harder.
That would require these areas to be zoned for mixed business/residential, which very few suburbs are.
Take, for example, these comments, which are full of people who have left NYC, a place where you can function entirely without a car, and moved to places like Texas and Florida, where you, for the most part, cannot. Sure they might not be commuting anymore (which was likely by public transit anyway), but they are now driving several times a day, likely relatively far distances, when they were not before.
> Even "essentially no access to services" is closer access to services than the common exurban commuting distance.
Okay... But it's not a one-to-one replacement... A single two-way commute might be replaced by significant drives to the grocery store, restaurants, schools, after-school activities, etc...
Honestly, despite all of this discussion, I think the idea that commutes will be broadly eliminated long-term is the bigger assumption than general suburban driving being a net positive compared to commuting or vice versa.
Homes in NJ are around $400k. In Michigan I bought a duplex for $160k. I could rent out the other side of the house, but instead we had our friends move in. We are 4 blocks from main street in a tiny town and enjoy the peace and quiet without obscene NJ traffic.
This is an easier decision since I have a life partner and am not trying to meet new people or see new things. It's especially easier since we do not intend to have kids.
I am baffled that some of my friends choose to live in Seattle where, if they buy a house, they would spend most of their working lives paying it off. While they would miss out on some big-city amenities if they moved out, they instead could have the ability to retire a few decades early.
I can't help but wonder whether the people with the means to flee California were partially responsible for its poor state of political affairs, consistently voting for more progressive candidates and policies. They left a mess of their own creation. Just as Mike Tyson famously said, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face."
https://www.clevelandfed.org/newsroom-and-events/publication...
There is a lot of data and a lot of charts.
This study has a data table that just makes me confused about the Economist article:
> V. Change in Gross and Net Flows for Metro Areas with Populations Greater Than 500,000
However, the advantages still offset the disadvantages for me.
I mean my brother in laws mixed-Asian kids get bullied on the bus in SF, but hey, we’re in a Blue State (tm) do no problem there.
move and accelerate the process
I’ve spent some time in Nashville and visited Brentwood, Franklin, Nolensville, and further east towards Murfreesboro and Smyrna. In a week, I felt like there’s a restaurant metric you’d measure in some metric like restaurants per square mile. There’s just food everywhere, and even on a Monday night, restaurants are packed.
No disagreement at all obviously on the politics. IMO, Seattle is too liberal for me (you committed a crime? It’s okay. You’re actually the victim) while in TN they’re maybe an extreme on the other end. I will say though that politics aside, people in and around the Nashville are are waaayyyy more friendly. It’s not even a comparison.
I do see tons and tons of new construction in Nashville and surrounding areas. On the other hand, the liberal, equal rights and affordable housing/healthcare/childcare crowd is drowning in NIMBYism.
In the new world of the web, they seem to be trying too hard to amplify conventional opinions. Chasing clicks, in other words. Long after a trend has started up and enough people have heard of it (moving out of expensive areas, in this case), they jump on it.
They've always been, fairly overtly, about amplifying a narrow range or neoliberal viewpoints. At the height of the UK/US neoliberal consensus of the late 1980s and 1990s, that may have been less obvious since that narrow range basically spanned the entire Overton Window.
When I got my first vaccine dose, it was difficult to impossible to get an appointment in the Chicago area. I managed to find one in Urbana. I drove down on a Sunday to get my shot. Along the way, I stopped at a McDonald's to use the bathroom. Coming out, I had someone berate me for wearing a mask and declare mask wearing to be selfishness (I would later discover from reading a blog post that he was mirroring language he'd heard on Fox News).
I do not wish to live somewhere that my neighbors would be brainwashed by Fox News and engage in behaviors/have attitudes that would kill me. It may cost more to live in an urban liberal environment, but it's worth every penny.
Black/Hispanic people have generally been priced out of cities by gentrification, and have been forced to move to places that are even farther from jobs and services than the previously neglected urban areas that they came from, and this started when millennials moved into the cities from the suburbs. Black people in particular have had a Southern migration because Northern black people are often only two or three generations from the South anyway, so they have family who can help with shared housing, childcare, and leads on employment.
This could be easily shown by showing rates of outmigration by group over time. Chicago's black population was dropping while its white population was rising. It would also be shown by individual attention to the suburbs that are being moved to, not only would you find that they were very segregated, but you might notice that plenty of them are hellish and poverty-ridden compared to the cities that people moved from.
I might as well quote the entire discussion of ethnicity, which occupied the body of a paragraph with nearly unrelated first, second, and final sentences. Maybe the word "urbanizing suburbs" in the context of an increase in amenities worked as a subconscious trigger to discuss black people moving to suburbs.
"The allure of suburbs has been a trend more than a half-century in the making, but covid-19 offered an additional boost. “Urbanising suburbs”, as Mr Clark them, are gaining amenities but keeping their characteristic sprawl. Contrary to the stereotype of identical white homes with white occupants, today’s suburbs are ethnically diverse. Wendell Cox of Demographia, a consultancy, estimates that 86% of the population of major metro areas live in the suburbs or exurbs. That includes 90% of whites, 83% of Latinos, 81% of Asians and 76% of African-Americans. Latinos, in particular, have been relocating to suburbs at greater rates in the past two decades: since 2000 their number has risen more than 50%, compared with a 20% rise for African-Americans and Asians and just 1.3% for whites. Ross Perot, Jr., a real-estate developer, says he’s “never seen as many people moving into Dallas. It’s shocking.” But far more people are going to the suburbs surrounding the city."
Note: a 20 year trend for non-whites, and a statistically insignificant blip for whites. Yet the article paints everyone as young upper middle class urban professionals trying to dodge taxes and city government.
If you look at the demographics of these cities, it's obvious whose POV is being used to characterize this migration. In the case of Austin, in particular, the story has been about the shrinking of the black population while the city was growing, and the bleaching of neighborhoods that black people have lived in for a couple hundred years.
https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/african-americans-are...
Where I live has just the right level of density -- you see people around at all times of day, but it's still peaceful at night. And almost everything I do is walkable.
Personally, I’d find my daily life more affected by feces on the sidewalk than I would the existential dread of sea level rising half a meter in the next hundred years. Frankly if you want to be scared of natural disaster over that time period, it’s probably more dangerous to live on the fault line in San Francisco than it is to live on the beach in Miami (sudden catastrophe with no warning vs. decades of observably rising sea levels).
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I can tell you for sure that it has nothing to do with which political side anybody is on (Anyone with the stamina and bad judgment it would take to read through enough of my tedious moderation comments should easily be able to satisfy themselves of that.) Actually, I don't even know which political side a lot of users (you, for example) are on—my brain pattern matches for other things after doing this hundreds of thousands of times.
That's beside the point, though. The point is that you broke the site guidelines badly (specifically in the first sentence of your post), and we've already had to warn you about this. Users, including you, need to follow the site guidelines regardless of how badly any other user is behaving. Pointing the finger at someone else isn't a good move, and there's a deep reason why: it always feels like the other person started it and did worse. Since everyone always feels that way, everyone always feels justified in whatever they do. That's no basis for conduct; it leads straight to a downward spiral. We're trying to avoid that. Therefore we have a set of principles that everyone needs to follow.
I can't speak for all of Texas, but my water district has high quality water standards. I look at the reports published from time to time, they're well below EPA and TCEQ limits for contaminates. Perfectly clean water here. Sure, there's areas of pollution in the state but there's pollution that happens in the Northeast as well.
> if the power will stay on
I forgot the fact power failures only happen in Texas, literally the entire rest of the United States has never experienced a single power failure, ever. Good luck assuming you'll never experience a power outage.
> Hurricanes and rising sea levels will bankrupt TX and FL each in this century
The Northeast is also very affected by rising sea levels. Which states will be more affected by sea level rise: New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, or Texas?
The entire Eastern seaboard seems to be having trouble responding to the challenges of stronger and more common hurricanes.
Don't get me wrong the Northeast is a great place to live but don't bury your head in the sand thinking that the Northeast never has water quality issues, never has power outages, never gets hurricanes, and is immune to sea level rise.
On water: living in a place where it is on-brand to not investigate public health disasters is not great. You've heard of Flint, but not Piney Point.
No, but only Texas repeatedly ignored federal advice to fix their power grid which directly resulted in children literally freezing to death.
Texas's state government is too focused on insane abortion laws and locking down a ruling white minority class through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and empowering election officials to throw out election results.
I do agree with you though about the priorities of the Texas government. I don't agree with and vote against a lot of those idiots.
Weather-wise, Central East Texas is perfect if you survive August and September.
Austin (suburban outskirts) and Dallas (Plano & Frisco) are nice. Houston is way too humid.
North East US is way too cold, I like a 70F winter.
Yeah it's 50s in the winter frequently, but the same week it can be 70-80s haha.
Allows you to eventually go outside instead of the whole season being cold and miserable.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29541695.
It’s easily Googled; ~30 million people move each year.
The CEO of Upwork is engaging in SEO.
An academic in Canada is calling normal behavior a “great unmooring.” Then bail on any other discussion they had with said academic.
Suburban developers with data from Mar 2020-2021 ignoring easily Googled fall 2021 data showing a reverse in the urban exodus.
This article is SEO spam, ostensibly about a big deal, but their data is normal movement of the population, and outdated sampling, wrapped in grand language.
They talk about "the environment" but no one wants to talk about how my wife has to dodge human feces getting on and off public transportation.
"It's just part of living in a vibrant city".... Give me a break.
Your city (and country) does not need to have a massive homeless problem. This is something the city and state government can fix. Housing, mental health support, drug treatment support and better community policing are all possible, and proven to work.
How to get the city and state (and national) governments to fix this problem is another issue.
If the homeless people got the support and resources (eg, healthcare, a secure job, and a reasonably priced place to live) they needed somewhere they were familiar with, far fewer would be leaving to head to a city to try and survive.
I don't know a single city, liberal, moderate, or conservative, that has solved it.
I am just a single citizen, I pay out the ass for taxes, and nothing is being done to help these people.
At this point is appears there is no political will to do anything. Instead everyone walks in circles while funneling the money into porkbarrel spending, the police force, and roads.
A remarkably simple and cost-effective answer. Essentially it states “get people housing and then it’s way easier to treat the things making them homeless” plop someone in a home and then it’s easier to get medication to them and they stop showing up in the ER 4x a month. Get people housing and then you know where they are to check in on how dependency treatment is going. Psychiatric condition? Way easier to treat if they have a roof, heat, an address to send medication. It is actually cheaper than just doing nothing and allowing people to remain homeless.
But then they stopped funding it in 2015. “Man this remarkable looking approach stopped working!” “Oh? When?” “Right after we stopped funding it!” “Huh, weird.”
The arguments for housing-first homeless solutions align neatly with Universal Basic Income.
It's unhealthy to escape to be where "your tribe" is. I love my city and I did feel represented with moderate voices winning this election cycle.
1. Look for areas that have a long history of growth. You don’t want to invest in a fad.
2. Look for areas that aren’t too rural. Many of the most rural areas are actually losing population as people leave services like grocery stories and doctors leave and thus drive out more people. Look at rural Kansas as an example of this, places 100 miles away from a city had a population peak with the baby boomers.
3. Look for a diverse local economy. Oil/Factory/Company towns exist and they tend to disappear when fortunes change for the host. You need more than remote workers to run a local economy.
4. Consider climate change. Almost everywhere in the US will be effected for the worst, but Miami is probably more risky than Nashville.
5. Do your homework and invest in what you know. I’ve picked the locations of my property very carefully. I usually can find deals when the market undervalues one particular property short term for various things reasons. Maybe I’m the first solid offer to a motivated seller (this may become more common again soon). Maybe it’s a home that needs some renovations. Maybe it’s in a neighborhood whose gentrification isn’t widely recognized yet.
My niche is residential realestate in a single mid-sized metropolitan area. About 50% of my investment portfolio is real estate. I actively manage these properties, while working full time as an engineer.
I want to move back to Asia where there are less diversity and society is less complex. I value harmony more than diversity.
> It’s the fact that they can live their daily life and send kids to school with minimal restrictions.
I completely disagree with this. This is the number one reason why I will not move away from a science believing/respecting area. I don't want the headache of people with lack of basic common sense on top of everything life throws at you. If the pandemic has taught us anything trusting science is amazing and that many people are willing to blatantly abuse it.
I wonder if there is a downside to people self-segregating based on belief systems so vehemently because of intolerance?
These reasons are not convincing anymore. It’s a self perpetuating degradation of living standards.
I am currently looking for a job in Colorado, Texas, NC, etc.
If I had a choice to be homeless here or homeless in the Bay Area, it's not even close. The weather here is terrifically worse than anywhere near the water in CA.
The tricky is they had an expansive definition of "local": they were measuring where people most recently became homeless, which means almost any housing in SF for almost any amount of time meant they counted as local.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
This article is several years old but does a good job illustrating where people are moving to and from. It's also not any local government policy to bus homeless people to other cities. Most of the time it's family and friends buying them tickets.
> 70% from San Francisco
22% from rest of California
8% from out of state
I think the source is from this study: https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...
[1] https://www.lahsa.org/news?article=726-2020-greater-los-ange...
In 2018, the LA Times ran a series of articles on the homeless situation, and had reporters accompany county social workers. More than half of the homeless were from out-of-state, with Texas being the largest single source of homeless in LA. More than 3/4 of LA's homeless weren't local to LA.
That is an uncommon acronym.
Moving to Portland in 2022.
Portland isn't any better. I recommend going to a centrist or even Red state. Arizona is great.
> In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to 66th out of 80.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/06/12/portland-...
Not sure which applies more.
Serious question, have you actually been to Syria? Can you cite some sources that can prove this comparison?
That said I have no idea why people cannot separate the Bay Area from a state larger than many countries. So be it. I'd rather live in Fresno with its easy access to the Sierras than anywhere in the South.
What bothers me most is that when I talk about this with people there the reaction is somewhere between "good riddance" or reducing my complaints down to cost of living. But I distinctly remember talking to a mayoral candidate in Berkeley canvassing for the election last year and discussing things like solar mandates. He seemed baffled that I asked why the city couldn't keep my street clean or do something about the number of brush fires and assaults at the nearby homeless encampment.
The Easy Bay could be great, but they're lacking basic municipal function and acting like the weather, mountains, and liberalism make up for it.
I can walk four blocks and buy, like, 19 different lattes. I can walk two blocks and get on a train that takes me to downtown SF in 18 minutes. In a 10-minute drive I can get to literally any cuisine the world has to offer, and it's fucking delicious. These are not amenities available in third-world countries (or, I might add, in many cities in the U.S., at least not at this density and quality).
Do I see homeless people on the way? Yeah. I live in the Bay Area, an area going through a horrifyingly serious homelessness crisis. Parks are bad. The encampments under and along the highways are massively depressing.
But there's not rubble in the streets. Families are not starving to death in their homes. People are not being gunned down against walls.
Shit is bad right now, and I am afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better. But let's not pretend it's a third-world country. That helps neither your cause nor mine.
Food is amazing in a lot of big cities. There is no objective measure. New Yorkers say the same and so do people in Portland.
You don't seem to know what Syria looks like and "aesthetics" can't make something into the third world anyway. Not looking like a wealthy Swiss town or Japanese metropolis doesn't make anything third world.
Gov Rick Perry used to brag on national TV that Texas' solution to the homeless problem was to buy them tickets to California. And their director of health services recently admitted that they still do that. Texas didn't solve their homeless problem, they simply made it someone else's problem to deal with.
Yes, they are. SF’s own research on the homeless population identified that 70% lived in SF immediately before becoming homeless, 55% for over 10 years; the 30% who did not live in SF include 22% from elsewhere in CA and 8% from other states.
Migration and dumping from other states happens, but it's not the main source of homelessness.
Temperature is very subjective and Montreal might be very harsh to someone that grew up some place warmer.
How does Denver fit in with the other two? I currently live in Denver, and have also lived in NYC and Jersey City. The latter seem like completely different worlds from Denver.