Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In fact, the only mention of younger college graduates is in a wiggle phrase with no attached statistic:
> Younger educated workers were at first a bulwark against that trend, but have increasingly migrated away from these regions, too.
(The same can be said for the article's statistics -- it's misleading, at best, to limit the analysis to 2020 and 2021.)
As you say, the increase in some urban populations relative to a couple decades ago was mostly driven by new college grads, many of whom previously did not live in the city after undergrad, in part, because many of the jobs that weren't in finance were out in the suburbs/exurbs.
Right -- I didn't highlight it specifically, but that's another part of the article I found misleading: NYC has historically had large outflows because, every summer, hundreds of thousands of undergraduates and graduates complete their studies and leave. And similarly with young families: those who stay for over a decade are likely to remain, but many come to the city while they're young, stay to date and work, and decamp for the suburbs once they've had their fill.
Both of these demographics and their historical trends are conflated with the post-COVID numbers (again, ending at 2020/1) for unstated reasons.
That trend hasn't been happening "forever". It's only a few decades old, and it's a direct function of the broad changes in housing and social policies that were made between the 1960s-1980s.
Young folks get to take advantage of wage arbitrage. Midwestern towns gutted by 40 years of foreign slave wages get an influx of new blood and a revitalized service sector. Two, seemingly warring, demographics get to cross pollinate and empathize with each other while collectively giving the middle finger to an unholy Government/Big Corp alliance trying to corral everyone in a few big geographical regions.
Plea to young knowledge workers... Don't give in on remote work, take advantage of it.
I think that is what is most galling about the fight against remote work. It is the way for knowledge workers to have quality of life (versus heading to a coast to save up before you have to leave because the COL is unsustainable into parenthood or retirement) while also providing a sustainable economic base for smaller towns that would otherwise be hallowed out. You don't want to cater to companies (who can play jurisdictions against each other for tax breaks and if they leave, can cause outsized impact to the tax base and local economy), you want to cater to remote workers [1] [2] (who will settle down and anchor themselves to your community, hopefully).
[1] https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/13-u-s-cities-incentivizin...
[2] https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#relocatio...
Meh, what you gain in square footage of your house moving in the Midwest, which is what I think you meant by "quality of life", you loose in career opportunities , weather / outdoor activities, quality of food, and cultural enrichment for your children.
> (who will settle down and anchor themselves to your community, hopefully).
Folks with 4-5x the median income coming into a county is more likely to create resentment than anything too, if they end up staying.
Strongly disagree on virtually every point, and this seems to be a common refrain I hear from those seemingly trying to convince themselves as much as anyone why the sky-high cost of living in certain areas of the country is worth paying. Yes, it's true there is more to eat and go do in many HCOL areas in the country, but there are diminishing returns. Perhaps 20 years ago the gap was significant enough to matter. But these days, even in medium sized Midwestern cities there is typically more variety in cuisine, entertainment, and cultural options than the average person can actually utilize. Weather can also be a driving factor, but even some places that are particularly expensive like Seattle or NYC don't have particularly great weather. And with global warming, the Midwest is generally getting less cold in the winter, while HCOL areas like those out west are getting regular wildfires, record breaking floods, and extreme heat waves, so even on this front the gap is diminishing. As for careers opportunity, that seems to be rapidly disappearing with the advent of remote work.
I'm not making the claim that Michigan or Wisconsin are toppling NYC or LA as top destinations for tourism. But there is a difference between a vacation destination and a place to make a living, and it's getting hard to see how some of these HCOL areas in the country make sense given the other options these days, given the cost difference.
I'd argue on the cost of living front that you'd be better off being in a expensive area, because you can always downgrade COL, rarely upgrade :).
> But these days, even in medium sized Midwestern cities there is typically more variety in cuisine, entertainment, and cultural options than the average person can actually utilize
Frankly, you need to spend more time in the Bay Area / LA or the NYC area with people who like food. The food scene is just incomparable to anywhere else in the US (or my native France).
> And with global warming, the Midwest is generally getting less cold in the winter, while HCOL areas like those out west are getting regular wildfires, record breaking floods, and extreme heat waves
Those things happen for less than a month a year. Compare that with the climate of the midwest, where it goes from "super cold" to "unbearably hot", with a few months of nice spring/fall if you're lucky. Super obvious if you look at https://weatherspark.com/y/557/Average-Weather-in-San-Franci... vs say https://weatherspark.com/y/12083/Average-Weather-in-St.-Loui... . Not to mention the mosquitos.
If you never go outside (which frankly is a thing a lot of suburban Americans do), it doesn't matter, but if you're into hiking, sailing, surfing, skiing, or just eating outside on your patio, California just can't be beat. There's a reason you see folks from all over the world moving here and not to Missouri.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/05/03/why-americans-are-le... (Control-F "On the move from big cities to rural communities" and "On where Americans want to live now")
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/metr...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Enjoy the city if that's your jam, genuinely! Lots of options for everyone to live their best life.
Hehe, this generalization is way off the mark. It's ok to live in a coastal/urban/whatever area simply because you like it - no need to tell yourself stories to justify it. :)
"career opportunities , weather / outdoor activities, quality of food, and cultural enrichment for your children".
It's hard to beat the career opportunities (so far), the weather / outdoor activities ( https://weatherspark.com is awesome weather wise, and a trip to google maps will easily tell you the range of outdoor activities), the quality of food (that you'll have to discover by yourself), and the diversity of cultural enrichment activities for you and your children (same).
It'll cost you plenty of money to live in the bay area for sure, but there's a reason for that.
That sounds like a fantasy that's misrepresenting the effects that are already happening. You don't get the cross-pollination, you get more and different resentment, because the "new blood" may "revitalize" the physical area, but they don't revitalize the original residents. Those people get driven out through gentrification, and you end up with a little colony full of coastal colonizers.
(This isn't your fault for misunderstanding that -- the article's phrasing goes to lengths to imply otherwise.)
This is maybe the ... 15th? person I know who's said something like this. I think people literally don't know how nice a lot of America is.
Or fight to the death, like the European far left and far right in 1930s Berlin, Madrid etc. Proximity sometimes breeds understanding, sometimes explosion.
Lots of people are quick to blame Californians but it actually seems a small percentage overall, but it’s a convenient bogeyman.
Doesn't need to be this way either. We've come up with a number of ways to lower real estate prices on this very board that simply aren't being implemented by local communities. I have to believe that 2024 is going to be a massive turning point for a lot of US cities.
There really aren't.
The upward pressure caused by the need to keep property values increasing will always, in the long run, outweigh any other policy that you can use to attempt to reign in cost-of-living. You can play tricks to delay the effects or slow them down, but adding drag resistance doesn't stop a falling leaf from trending downwards.
Mathematically, you cannot lower cost-of-living while also insisting that the price of the single largest living cost (housing) keep increasing.
The only alternative is to lower the price of housing, but you can't do that without lowering real estate values for existing landed property owners, so they fight that tooth and nail, in nearly every locality across the board.
> The overall migration rate in America today is historically low, and mobility has fallen since the 1980s for all kinds of demographic groups.
Or am I thinking wrong here. The hurdle is not the physical move, but like losing close access to friends and family?
* I'm assuming that when you were a student, you didn't have a lot of possessions to move, didn't have a family and kids to move too, didn't have a house to sell.
* You generally need to acquire a place to live before you can move, otherwise you'll be homeless when you get there. This will probably involve putting down a significant deposit on a new apartment, before you get the deposit back on your current apartment, if you live in an apartment. And many apartments require income verification to apply, which makes it difficult to move to find a new job; you have to already acquire a new job in the new place before you move. And of course travel is expensive to find/acquire a new job/home in a new place.
* Moving can be very time consuming, especially if it's long distance. Which means time off from work, which may lower your income even more.
* Of course losing access to friends and family, as you said.
Also, this can be a big economic hit for "low wage workers" (to use the GGP's term), since they often rely on their friends and family to provide a economic safety net and needed services at low cost (e.g. it's a lot cheaper for grandma to watch her grand-kids while you're at work than pay for daycare).
It's also an issue where the "ideological sorting hat" hasn't lumped it into a partisan category, yet. Montana just passed a bipartisan housing deal that's really good: https://www.sightline.org/2023/05/09/montanas-big-bipartisan...
Groups like https://yimbyaction.org/2021/ and https://welcomingneighbors.us/ are a great way to get involved.
Nearly every single economic disadvantage the "not rich" endures always goes back to Reagan.
No one who understands what out-of-control inflation is like wants that.
Central banks, in particular, don't want that.
That's just free-market dogma. People already can't support themselves on minimum wage, and it's not going to do anyone (besides exploitative employers) any good to have them paid even less.
But now that I’m in Oregon I’ve noticed small businesses can’t compete with corporations here at all on price. It’s honestly crazy how much worse it is to get food at a small business. It’s definitely partially because of the overhead high minimum wage creates.
Only small businesses that I see who can compete are entirely within a family so they probably have family members helping out without expecting $22 an hour or whatever it is here.
Point is minimum wage laws aren’t black and white.
I disagree, on the basis that a poorly-paid job is better than no job at all in the long run for the employee.
A price floor causes a surplus, in this case of labor, meaning unemployed people; the people for whom the economic value of their labor is less than the minimum wage. You can call this free-market dogma if you'd like, but it's a well-established phenomenon.
The second-order effect is that those unemployed people become less and less employable over time, since they lose out on the experience, skill-learning, and relationship-building that they would have gotten on the job, poorly-paid though it may have been. They become further less competitive than the lucky ones who made the cut above minimum wage and were employed, and runs the risk of being a permanently unemployable underclass.
Countries like Norway and Singapore do quite well with no legally-mandated minimum wage.
California with 10% more houses is not 10% cheaper. It is slightly more expensive.
And installing a water main in a rural area is a lot cheaper than installing one in downtown NYC... and your water main needs to be bigger now too.
Same for fire, except now you have a new problem. When a house in New Jacksonville burns, one option is to let it control burn. The home is a loss, but this is a safe and viable option.
You can't do that in our manhattan. The entire city will be on fire.
And fighting a fire on a one floor residential house is easy. Fighting a fire on a 40 floor condo structure is complicated and takes many, many more trucks - and now instead of one home being lost, we are looking at ten or more homes, even if we are successful.
Water distribution to a bunch of little houses is easy if sort of requiring some piping. Distributing to a 40 floor condo building is an expert task requiring a whole mess more of complexity.
It's always funny to see "the free market works itself out" used in contexts where markets are anything but free, due to intense regulation, high barriers to entry, and inelastic demand.
After national defense and healthcare, it's hard to think of a market that is less free - by economists' definition of "free" - than housing.
I mean, yeah, they're not going to be the cheapest places ever, but there could be a lot more housing if we allowed it to be built.
1980 vs. Now
I'm looking at homes today and to enter the market for a house is 1.4 million. Our family has a good income so that's actually achievable. The vast majority will never earn enough.
When real estate is perceived as a better investment than equities, society is doomed.
Condon is a nimby plain and simple, obfuscating with all sorts of horse shit his clear desire keep everyone out and keep his leafy west side home the way it always has been.
I am now in Italy. Rome is the capital, but the center of Italian economic activity is Milan. Northern Italian businesspeople and politicians hate or at least despise "thieving Rome" and there was/is a significant secessionist movement.
As of now, within the structures of the EU, an actual split of Italy is logistically impossible, but the country seems to owe some part of its dysfunctionality to the physical distance between seats of power and wealth.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spendi...
> Trust me, everyone in London has an equal amount of loathing for the parasitic gammons outside the London area who could not survive without the handouts we provide but still bitch and moan about every pound they get.
Congrats on your life in the dirty money capital of the world. I would like to see how long you survive in London if the surrounding areas of the country decided not to provide you with food on your table and energy for your home.