Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

What blows my mind traveling around the country is that, on the ground, Iowa or Texas are egalitarian paradise compared to NYC or SF. I can’t stand to be in those cities these days because of the yawing wealth and racial divides.

I really wonder how much of the progressive drama results from these highly educated folks working in overwhelmingly white/Asian industries and living in places like SF or NYC where nearly all the Black or brown people they meet are working service jobs for them.

View on HN

There's been a lot of articles lately talking about how all those previously easy to live areas have become less livable due to... well people moving there.

The root cause is demand > supply. That's it. Everything gets more expensive, and those who can get paid a lot do, and everyone else has to make do.

Texas yes, but tell me about Austin... and how it has all the same problems of the bay area now, entirely because people moved there.

Do you think it is people moving or do you think it is people moving and then voting in people to enact the same policies as the location they moved from?

If person A leaves a location because of crap/idiotic policies/laws, moves to a new location, then votes in people that will institute those same crap/idiotic policies/laws the just fled again, is person A not the problem?

could you point to some examples of this happening?

Off the top of my head, Texas. Texas was a majority solid red for a long time. Now a massive influx of has made multiple seats that historically have been safely red, competitive, or even flip to blue.

Look at the places people are moving to in Texas then look at those locations elections.

I understand that there is a demographic shift in urban centers outside of the coasts. I meant: can you point to any policy changes after these demographic shifts which have lead to an up-tick of NIMBY/anti-housing regulations in these areas like what is seen in SF?

I honestly don't pay close attention to NIMBY/anti-house regulations anywhere outside northern California to notice. I should have been more clear I was not specifically talking about that.

In this case I was thinking primarily of crime and some of the DA in Texas's big cities. Dallas in particular I remember a DA was elected that pissed off a lot of people on the right by stopping prosecution of lesser offences and setting low bails. The right argues that leads to more crime until its a common place.

>Texas yes, but tell me about Austin... and how it has all the same problems of the bay area now, entirely because people moved there.

Austin you say? Now just where did all those people in Austin come from one wonders...

The root cause is demand > supply. But the important part is supply not demand.

Austin is liberal like SF and is known for restricting housing supply.

2.3 million people live in Houston, and only a million live in Austin yet Houston is far cheaper to live in than Austin.

The equation has two terms: supply and demand. So it’s not just “people moving there” (demand), but also how easy it is to create housing (supply). Texas makes it much cheaper and easier to create housing than does California. If it was demand alone then California housing prices should be going down because people are moving from California to Texas.

It’s also about what kind of industries each state chooses to cultivate. Economies based on knowledge work magnify class and racial disparities because they have high barriers to entry and tend to produce winner-take-all stratification. That directly produces the highly stratified and segregated environment you see in SF and NYC.

You just compared two of the most expensive cities in the world against two entire states.

I’m thinking specifically about Des Moines and Dallas but you can pick any city in those states.

The median home price in Dallas is comparable to most cities outside of LA and SF in California, and higher than that of Chicago. Austin? Don't even bother looking it up. You should have said Houston. :)

The fact remains that Dallas and it’s surrounding suburbs is a vastly more egalitarian and less stratified place than SF or NYC. It has tons of affordable areas near the city. A key problem is that the industries powering NYC and SF (tech and finance) are massive drivers of inequality. They create a huge upper middle class that just sucks up all the resources. That’s exacerbated by the difficulty of building housing, but both sides of the equation are the problem. Northern Virginia where I grew up is a place where it’s easier to build housing, but has a similar problem. The middle class has been driven out as knowledge industries have taken over.

Iowa is even better lovely because there is basically no upper middle class. Even the farmers who might have tens of millions in land are pretty cash poor.

New York is bad. California is pretty rough too. But Louisiana and Mississippi both have higher Gini coefficients than California. It's not tech and finance that made Louisiana and Mississippi the 2nd and 3rd least equal states in the country.

Further: if you dig into Gini by cities, your hypothesis gets even weaker: one ranking I found goes:

    1. San Juan
    2. Atlanta
    3. Miami
    4. New Orleans
    5. New York
    6. Cleveland
    7. Cincinatti
    8. Dallas
    9. Tampa
    10. Chicago

(I'm playing with the actual ACS data from Census.gov now, but haven't figured out how to get it broken out by major city; if you do by "places", which include every city no matter how small, the leaderboard is dominated by small rural cities).

No California city even appears in the top 10, and the list is dominated by non-finance-centers in red states.

As a resident of New Orleans thanks for posting this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com