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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

There's plenty of truth in that article, but I can't help but think that this trend is almost purely a product of demographic changes. People wait longer to get married and have children, so there way more 25-30 year olds who worry more about living within walking distance to a bar and less about a backyard and a nice school.

Many of the urban Gen Y the article talks about will move back to the suburbs when they have children.

A 1-2 bedroom apartment is fine for 2 people, but apartment living gets rather cramped when you have 4 or 5 people living there.

Atlanta Public schools are pretty horrible, I can't imagine many of my friends who currently live in the city staying there when they have kids who are school age.

Additionally the rise of the self driving car is going to completely torpedo 90% of the advantages of living in a city.

View on HN

It isn't entirely the having to manually drive that people don't like about driving. It's also the time and cost to run, park, insure, maintain, etc. Driverless cars won't help most of this.

No matter who is doing the driving, walking a few blocks is more convenient than driving a mile. And anyway, walking is more fun.

I grew up in suburbs, and the article described my experience perfectly. I may someday move away from the urban core, but I don't forsee myself ever living more than a block or two from a few cafes and a market.

>It's also the time and cost to run, park, insure, maintain, etc. Driverless cars won't help most of this.

Driverless cars will help almost all of those. Think how much more viable zip cars would become if you didn't have to get to the car in the first place. If you could just call a car with a smartphone app and it would show up.

Parking is a non issue because it drops you off at the door, and it can go park wherever is cheapest or just head off to another customer and you can call another one later.

>walking a few blocks is more convenient than driving a mile.

That's true if you live somewhere with a climate similar to Southern California, but there are plenty of places where I definitely do not want to walk a few blocks during most of the year.

>Driverless cars will help almost all of those. Think how much more viable zip cars would become if you didn't have to get to the car in the first place. If you could just call a car with a smartphone app and it would show up.

Congratulations: You've just described taxi cabs.

Taxis are expensive and severely supply side limited. Interesting things happen when things that were previously limited become much less so. People had "internet" when they dialed it at 56kbits, but things like youtube were impossible. I'd guess that self driving zip-cars would be at least as big a paradigm shift.

What about driverless cars will make them inherently cheaper than taxis?

The lack of a driver. You need at least 5 employees to drive a cab 24/7 year round. Say around 40k a year per once you add in benefits, taxes, and insurance. That's works out to $200K a year.

That's around 10 times the cost of a car, and a quick google search shows that the average taxi in San Francisco uses $20,000 per year in gas (down to only 7k for hybrid taxis).

So in short, the largest cost (other than in places like New York where it cost a million for a taxi license) is labor, which driverless cars remove.

It's around 10 times the cost of a car with a driver.

Driverless cars will not be as cheap as cars which require drivers.

There will be ongoing operational and maintenance costs which cars with drivers do not have.

Liability insurance will likely be lower for driverless cars, but damage and theft insurance will likely be higher.

Not every cab needs to be operated 24/7, there are clear peak and non-peak times which allow for fewer than #Cabs x 5 drivers for full practical coverage.

And, of course, there's no guarantee that any savings in operation would be passed on to the consumer (see electronic publishing).

So I don't think it's automatic to say driverless cars will result in cheaper transportation costs. It's possible , but it's far from guaranteed.

Labor is by far the largest cost here.

I have a pretty fair knowledge of the Google car and the Stanford cars that came before it. The equipment at scale isn't really that expensive and can be fairly easily retrofitted onto existing cars.

Even if it ends up costing 50k and an extra 20k per year in maintenance (which is probably too high for a computer and a few actuators and sensors) taking driver labor out of the equation results will result in vast cost savings as a percentage of total operation costs.

>theft insurance will likely be higher

Theft will be nearly impossible for an average criminal. Remove human controls and you've instantly defeated 99% of car thieves.

But as I mentioned, 5 drivers per car is overestimating considerably the actual number of drivers you need for practical coverage. You don't need your full fleet 24/7, the demand just isn't there for it around the clock.

Call it three drivers for practical coverage. Now we're at $120k for labor (3 x40k). But we've added 50k to operations in other areas. So now we're saving 70k in overall costs. Which is good, but a long way from 200k.

If you just needed 1 driver for the car, then there's a net loss with the driverless version (with these theoretical numbers anyway).

Perhaps the most efficient method would be a base fleet of driverless cars that operated 24/7, with peak times adding in cheaper cars with human drivers....

>And, of course, there's no guarantee that any savings in operation would be passed on to the consumer (see electronic publishing).

In this case it's likely that they would be. Book publishing is a rather unique case in that it's a million natural monopolies; if you want to read The Hunger Games, you're not going to be satisfied with a close substitute. Taxi services are fairly commoditized- excluding medallions, pretty much any automated taxi to show up at your door and bring you where you need to go is going to be acceptable. Thus you've got a much higher elasticity of demand thanks to this substitutability, so consumers capture more of the surplus. There's a low barrier to entry, so consumers can and will just switch to any cheaper option that comes along.

There's no reason to assume the number of driverless cars won't be artificially restricted by regulation in the same way that taxi medallions are now.

Maybe so, but I'm struggling to imagine a scenario where that comes true. As we generally think of them now, they're for the suburban commuter to replace their current car. As such, they can't be limited much, lest only a tiny elite be able to purchase them- probably not tenable politically. Furthermore, politicians don't seem farsighted enough to even set quotas if they wanted to; any limits set would likely be at something resembling estimated real-world demand, and since we're talking about a shift that would radically reduce the total number of cars in service, politicians would likely overestimate the need.

Plus, driverless cars can't form taxi associations with reasonably large voter blocs.

Yeah, I don't mean driverless cars as personal property would be limited. Rather driverless cars as a service will likely be regulated much like taxis are now. Corporations owning the cars and transporting people for money, that will be regulated and restricted.

Well, there's no driver, which reduces the labor costs involved.

Taxis are expensive only for individuals. Share a cab with 2-3 other people and the costs plummet. Mix in some government subsidies and better integration with existing public transportation systems and you have a perfectly adequate cost-effective solution right now. Without any fancy robots.

There's already Internet carpool services. I'm wondering why none have taken off like Zipcars have.

Someone needs to pay for the fuel. Someone needs to pay for the insurance. Someone needs to pay for parking, the technical development, the maintenance, and the infrastructure. Guess who that someone is? You. In the fees you pay for this service (or in taxes that subsidize it).

No matter how much tech you throw at it, walking down to the corner market for vegetables is more efficient (in a purely value/cost sense) than driving the same amount of time.

My wife and I lived in New York for several years. We walked a few blocks to the grocery nearly every day. Was it awesome every time? Honestly, no. Winters can be brutal.

But it was better than trying to hail a cab and wasting 10 bucks. And in the end, it felt good. Walking a little every day is good for you.

I think driverless cars will eventually revolutionize longer trips, but I don't see it competing with living in urban cores much. Many people want to be able to walk or ride a bicycle as part of their daily routine. Many people want to be in close physical proximity to other people. Driverless cars don't reduce any of these desires.

>Someone needs to pay for the fuel. Someone needs to pay for the insurance. Someone needs to pay for parking, the technical development, the maintenance, and the infrastructure.

Of course they do. But the average car is only driven a few hours a day. If you take the total fixed costs of a car and divide it amongst dozens of people, it's much cheaper than ownership.

I also expect insurance prices to drop dramatically for self driving cars, given that over 90% of accidents are caused by human error.

Additionally I don't think parking will be a problem with all of the now empty driveways of former car owners. Just give a discount for zip car service to customers in exchange for using their driveways to park downtime cars.

>But it was better than trying to hail a cab and wasting 10 bucks. And in the end, it felt good. Walking a little every day is good for you.

>Many people want to be able to walk or ride a bicycle as part of their daily routine. Many people want to be in close physical proximity to other people.

All of those are true and I think given demographic shifts--people marrying and having kids later, resulting in more single or childless 20-30 year olds--we will definitely see growth in urban centers.

However, I think it's almost purely a result of demographic shifts not some new desire to live in cities. Young childless people have always wanted to live in the city, we just have more of them than we used to.

> Of course they do. But the average car is only driven a few hours a day. If you take the total fixed costs of a car and divide it amongst dozens of people, it's much cheaper than ownership.

OK, without the actual numbers it's hard to debate the details here. Maintenance will obviously be higher, and depending on the competition and regulation, cost could vary dramatically.

But we're getting off topic. Earlier, you said:

> the rise of the self driving car is going to completely torpedo 90% of the advantages of living in a city.

Saving money on car ownership is not 90% of the value of urban life for me, and never has been.

> However, I think it's almost purely a result of demographic shifts not some new desire to live in cities. Young childless people have always wanted to live in the city, we just have more of them than we used to.

I don't believe this either, and it's what I was getting at earlier. I don't foresee myself every living outside of walking distance from essentials, especially once I have children. I hear the same from my peers, but I guess time will tell.

> there are plenty of places where I definitely do not want to walk a few blocks during most of the year

The climate issue can easily be addressed with a good coat and maybe a decent pair of snow boots. I really can't express how lazy and decadent this argument sounds to me--if it's not a clear, sunny day, you have to ferry yourself around in a thousand pounds of steel?

Just so you know I'm not talking shit, whenever I could, I'd walk 10, 20, 30 minutes across campus and across town in anywhere from 0 to 100 degree weather, in snow, rain, hail, anything you could name. I had insulated canvas grocery bags so my ice cream wouldn't melt in the summer and my milk wouldn't spoil in the summer. And I'm a pretty lazy and spoiled person when it comes to physical comfort.

It's not a question of whether we're capable of doing it. It's whether given alternative will we choose to do it.

You'd save money and it would be better for the environment if you took cold showers, but are you going to? Are many other people going to? Or are you going to buy a hot water heater and continue paying maintenance and energy costs for it. (I experimented with taking only cold showers--in the winter--for a few months btw)

If automobile travel and suburban sprawl were no longer subsidized and the externalities were priced into the decision--yes, people would put on a damn coat and walk a few blocks. People do that all the time. It's not even that uncomfortable; nothing at all like a cold shower. Cold showers were exactly what I was thinking about when I said I was a lazy and spoiled person when it comes to physical comfort.

And if you compare the climate of Los Angeles to New York, Boston, Portland, or Vancouver--empirically, it turns out climate isn't a determining factor.

The self-driving car will still need energy to run. Suburbs are built on the principle that energy is cheap. That is no longer the case.

The self driving car will be much more energy efficient, especially if they can communicate with each other to optimize traffic flow

Improving traffic flow is a win, but only a small win. Lugging around the mass of the car and yourself is still by far and away the biggest energy cost of operating a car, not sitting at a stoplight or getting stuck in stop-and-go.

Clearing up 1 mile of stop-and-go is not going to make up for the 9 miles from your house to the city streets on your 10-mile commute.

The self-driving car will (eventually) be only one part of a larger ecosystem. A scheduled trip on your rent-a-car share may well take you to a dynamically-scheduled bus that will aggregate many people's trips. Also, the car you call will be only as powerful as it needs to be, so you won't be routinely driving around in an SUV when all you need is an efficient sedan for a given trip. Electric cars work much better in this environment, because they can easily either go charge up or do battery exchange on a commercial-fleet scale instead of at a neighborhood gas station.

Personally, I'm also pretty sure the net effect of self-driving cars will also be to spread out the suburbs even more too. Most people imagine self-driving cars that are still owned by you and have single-owner use patterns, but the economics of that don't work; in nothing flat owners start renting their car out during their off times, AirBnB style, and it's a short hop from there to simply providing cars as a service. Somebody is going to get very rich being the somebody who wins on the network effects and creates "the" transportation-as-a-service company. It's going to be an enormous change, and I find it unlikely it's going to play to the city's advantages in terms of people actually moving there.

But most of a car's energy is spent accelerating, with the rest spent fighting wind resistance. Improved traffic flow helps with both -- no stop and go means no energy wasted to braking, and automated car trains will allow cars to take turns drafting off one another for a significant reduction in drag.

Notice that cars have markedly different highway vs. city mileage ratings. The old BMW I used to drive would get better than 26 (not great by today's standards) on an open freeway, but 17-18 in city traffic due to repeated acceleration and idling. Algorithmically optimized traffic flow would allow cars to spend more time in the highway range.

On a freeway drive, I assure you, energy spent maintaining speed is the primary investment by great lengths.

This is an over-generalization. Yes, city mileage is generally lower than highway, and yes, it is because of stop-and-go. But markedly different? My old car got 32 freeway, 29 city. My current car gets 27 freeway, 25 city. Cars with a large difference, like your BMW, suffer either from poor aerodynamics or engine configuration. (That is to say, the particular engine setup operates very inefficiently when accelerating from a stop) Now, the most damning evidence of all- the Prius gets 40 freeway, 44 city.

Automating drafting is an interesting suggestion, but anecdotal evidence from hypermilers suggests that even when drafting close behind a big-rig, you typically only net a few percent. In addition, to get any kind of measurable improvements from drafting behind a regular car, you'd basically have to ride their bumper. It seems unlikely we will permit computers to try this any time soon.

In the end, my point is not that improved traffic flow is worthless- it is a win in nearly every aspect- but that it is a small, incremental win. It is not going to reduce our energy consumption enough as to obviate our dependence on cheap energy, which ties back in to the earlier point this discussion spawned from:

Suburbs are built on the principle that energy is cheap. That is no longer the case.

Poor aerodynamics would make the difference smaller, not larger.

We can drastically increase fuel efficiency by making our cars out of carbon fibre, and it doesn't have to be more expensive or less safe. Check out Amory Lovin's concept car for one example.

We believe lighter = less safe, despite evidence to the contrary (in reality it's smaller = less safe, lighter = safer). Perhaps computer controlled cars will allow us to stop feeling the need to fortify our cars more and more, making the road less safe for everyone.

Poor aerodynamics would make the difference smaller, not larger.

Whoops, you're right, that is a silly mistake on my part.

The Prius benefits from regenerative braking in city driving.

You're using 2500 pounds of steel to carry a 200 pound human. Even if you assume 100% efficiency and power it with pixie dust that's too energy intensive. You're also using a 6 foot by 12 foot cage to convey that human being, which isn't scalable regardless of how much you optimize traffic flow.

And that's if you're driving a Mini Cooper.

Not sure what I said wrong here. If someone could explain so I can improve I'd appreciate it.

Gas prices have gone up, but adjusted for inflation not outrageously so.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasolin...

Additionally gasoline isn't the only energy source. Once solar power reaches grid parity and electric cars are popular gas prices won't mean much.

You're right that energy is finite and if we stay on the current energy consumption growth curve, energy will continue to get more expensive.

However by that logic--extrapolating the decrease in time it takes me to run a mile each week--I'll be able to teleport in a few months.

Population growth slows when a country becomes developed and at some point we will reach an equilibrium.

Gas prices have gone up, but adjusted for inflation not outrageously so.

But gas prices are themselves a big (maybe even the largest?) drivers of inflation, since they are not only counted themselves as they result in price raises for a lot of other products, like food.

You can look at gas prices as a percent of personal expenditures to see gasolines direct cost to the consumer. You'll see a similar curve.

http://jerrykhachoyan.com/gas-expenditures-as-a-percent-of-p...

Yes other components of personal expenditure are affected by gas prices which affects the percentage, but when an individual is considering where to live the only component of gas price that matters is it's direct cost.

You mean indicator of inflation. Inflation is the cause.

It is the case. Natural gas spot prices are at a low.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/natural-gas-prices-fa...

As fracking takes off globally they'll probably decline even further.

Cars can run on natural gas. Many, perhaps even the majority of taxis do in Australia.

When people get self-driving cars whatever is most economic, natural gas, petroleum or electric power will be used.

I agree. As an "underdeveloped" (ie no impending plans to escape to the suburbs with a newly betrothed spouse) 22 year old I have no desire to be in the suburbs because they seem boring and lack the nightlife and women that currently interest me.

As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, not all cities are created equal. I spent a decade or so in Atlanta (ages 18-28), and I agree that if I were to have kids there I'd almost certainly move out to the suburbs (probably Decatur, certainly not something like Roswell or Alpharetta). Now I live in Seattle, though, and here I'm likely to stay in the city. Everything here feels denser, and there are a number of nice neighborhoods within the city where you can buy a nice (albeit obscenely expensive) home. I hear the schools aren't bad either. I see a lot of families around town made up of people that seem a lot like me. I never saw that in Atlanta.

>Atlanta Public schools are pretty horrible

What do you mean? APS mostly gets issues with disparity of performance (aka, the children of the rich people far outperform the children of everyone else).

Sure, there are bad ones. But don't live there:

http://www.atlantapublicschools.us/site/default.aspx?PageTyp...

This explains why you may think the schools are bad: http://midtown.patch.com/articles/grady-high-school-one-step...

RE Grady (and others): "Focus schools are either for graduation rates lower than 60% or achievement gaps in achievement or graduation rate between the highest performing subgroup and the lowest performing subgroup. They are on it because of the gap on graduation rate between their highest subgroup and their lowest subgroup."

Basically, lots of child performance in school is based on who your parents are, not what your school does.

I was mainly talking about things like the recent widespread systemic cheating.

44 out of 56 schools were cheating on the CRCT.

Edit: by things like that, I mean an environment where that large a percentage of schools feel pressured to cheat.

I'm aware that state and federal rules and standardized tests are responsible for some of the pressure, but none of the other school systems in the metro-atlanta area had such wide spread cheating even though they were under the same state and federal pressures. I'm going to say there is something wrong with the way the school district is ran if 44/56 schools are cheating.

It was shown in the governers report to be Barbra Hall and the principals doing the pressure. People who are quitting/being fired/etc right now.

http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-1-of-special-1000798.html

http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-2volume-2-of-special-1000571....

http://www.ajc.com/news/volume-3volume-3-conclusions-why-100...

It's actually a pretty interesting read, with testimony and specific allegations.

Top Atlanta public schools' average SAT scores (http://www.city-data.com/forum/atlanta/1382712-top-10-metro-..., http://www.ajc.com/news/top-25-georgia-high-123297.html) top out below the level where top public schools for major California metropolitan areas start (http://projects.latimes.com/schools/sat-scores/ranking/page/...).

You're saying "Atlanta" and meaning the "Metro Atlanta Area". He's saying "Atlanta" and meaning 'The City Limits of Atlanta where you can live in an walkable urban setting and not worry about driving everywhere'.

Mean scores aren't as high for the APS schools: http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/domain/104

>Additionally the rise of the self driving car is going to completely torpedo 90% of the advantages of living in a city.

The rise of what? We've seen some experimental designs, but I don't see the "rise" coming any time soon. Plus, the price of oil is more important factor --as for them "coordinating with other vehicles to increase efficiency" (as someone writes in a comment below), well, that seems marginal, especially since we are discussing driving OUTSIDE of the city.

>but I don't see the "rise" coming any time soon.

Nevada already implemented regulations to allow companies to test drive self driving cars on its roads, and all it will take for the rest of the nation to follow is for Google get California on board.

The technology is already here. It's all about regulation and politics now, and there is so much money to made that it's just a question of when not if.

If I can't buy a self-driving car in 10 years, I'm going to build my own.

I've only seen tests on highways; afaik Google's car can't yet technologically manage the process of showing up to a random spot you want it to. For example, it can drive on 280, but it can't exit 280 into SF, navigate surface streets, and pull up to the curb where you're waiting.

I don't think that's true. See this article (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?page...):

----------

During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley.

It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment.

The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice. This same pleasant voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system detected anything amiss with the various sensors.

The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first.

----------

Also, the Wikipedia page indicates the same: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car

I've seen it, it can do this. I've seen it first-hand navigate it's way around the Google campus, go into a left turn lane, turn left into one of the Google buildings. The entrance has a prominent bump, and the car slowed down so as not to hit it hard.

Of course, it may have been pre-programmed, but I don't believe so. What I don't think it can yet do is navigate arbitrary systems like drive-thrus.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE

The technology is already here.

The current state of the technology is really impressive, but there are still real technical problems to solve before it is something that is ready for you to buy. As far as I know, nobody has successfully driven a driverless car in snow, for example.

>As far as I know, nobody has successfully driven a driverless car in snow, for example.

Snow is really the last technological problem left. Rain is fine, but heavy snow completely blocks almost all visual indicators.

That being said, it's not an insurmountable problem and there are plenty of places where snow is almost never a problem.

If you look at the DARPA grand challenge. In 2004 the farthest anyone got was 7 miles. Yet one year later 5 vehicles successfully completed the 150 mile course, and all but one of the 23 finalists surpassed the 7 mile best from the previous year.

If California said that beginning in 2015 it would be legal for private citizens to own and operate a self driving car, I have no doubt there would be several companies with commercial products the first day they were legal.

The obstacles are almost totally political at this point.

EXACTLY. This notion that gen y is some sort of elightend urban dweller is ridiculous. Gen y is the most immature gen ever in American history. They treat college like a party, an excuse to extend childish behavior, and just throw the bill on some low interest student loans. No wonder they all rent, their credit is terrible. And then they don't get that 80k job handed to them, so they still work at Starbucks at 26yrs old with a BA in pyschology or poli sci, which they took because the classes were easy.

I agree, its all about having kids and growing up. Once your children become your priority, your school district becomes important, and every major urban center in the USA has a school system somewhere between bad and god-awful. Watch the movies Waiting For Superman and The Cartel if you want to see what a mess that situation is. I don't see it getting resolved in the next 5-10 years, which is when gen y will start having kids.

I am certain "having kids" is not a prerequisite for maturity. I know a lot of younger people that are from said gen y age and they aren't one group that can be defined by any of what you postulate. Projecting the errors of past generations on the adapting younger generations isn't very helpful in general. That is the sort of ego stroke that brought us to this point. One of many.

Contact your legislators for any solve-all plan you have that will "fix" the costly inept educational system. As for your impositions or projections on others path through life, save them, it looks like they generate a lot of passive aggressiveness in you already.

Sorry, I downvoted you by mistake:|

While I agree there are schools that are terrible, student success is not solely the responsibly of the school. A child that is in a stable home environment that values education and exploration can probably do just as much as a good school can.

Now we tend to self segregate and choose to live in places with people like us. As professionals choose to live in cities instead of suburbs, schools around them will likely be better funded.

Once you're a parent, you'll worry about two things with regards to school choices:

1) Curriculum 2) Safety

It's one thing to make the argument that most public schools are mediocre and the parents need to be more involved in their kids lives to make sure they stay focused and do well. But it's quite another to willingly send your kids to a school with drugs, gang violence, and an abundance of teen pregnancies just because you don't want to commute to work every day.

There's nothing inherently placing good schools in the suburbs and bad ones in the urban areas, though. These things historically have shifted in many cities, in respond to a wide range of things like housing stock.

For example, in NYC the center has gentrified; most of the slummy areas of Manhattan are now desirable to live in. While areas that used to be quiet and suburban in Queens and the Bronx have ended up being sketchy, in a sort of inversion. In most of Europe that's also happened; if you can help it, you don't want to send your kid to a school district in the Paris suburbs, if there's any way you can manage to get them into a good urban district.

As a different example, Houston is developing into a strange multiple-rings shape. The city center is gentrifying (medical center, Rice area, downtown), while the inner suburbs are going downhill as the housing stock gets older (60s/70s-construction suburban neighborhoods aren't looking so good anymore), and then really far away suburbs with newer construction (20+ miles, 1990s-present housing stock) are upscale again.

You sound like you're describing the LA area (with the exception of the city center gentrifying).

It seems that what has happened is that, for the majority of American cities, they grew as an either/or option: you're either in the city, or you're in the suburbs, and the car enabled that in cities where it could. The cities which were geographically constrained, such as NYC or SF, were unable to sprawl outwards, and have commutes within reason, so the middle-classes stayed. That means things like good schools are able to exist because the demand was always there from the middle classes that didn't leave.

Yeah, I think that's the correct analysis. Having lived in Houston a few years, one thing that I think happens is that without geographical constraints, and with the way things are currently funded, it's easier to just keep moving out. Where I lived in the 1990s was a "new" suburban area of Houston, but already by the 2000s there were abandoned stores, because if a store moved out of a building, sometimes another store moved in, but often it was easier to just build a new to-order building another mile south on the freeway, instead of renovating an existing one. With no constraints, you can just keep moving out another mile every year for decades. Same with suburbs; why renovate a 1970s house if you can just move another mile down the freeway and build a new one? Especially given the cheap construction that's been used for the last 50 years...

Part of that I think is also because some of the costs that incurs aren't properly charged. There was a proposal in Houston to charge developers for the cost of new infrastructure. For every 10,000 new homes built in a new suburb, for example, you can estimate what new capital infrastructure they'll need: on average 1 elementary school, 0.5 high schools, 1 fire station, 1 police station, X miles of roads, X miles of sewers, etc. (whatever the real numbers are). Add the estimated cost of that up, divide by 10,000, and charge that as a per-house assessment on new developments. That proposal failed, though, so new developments' indirect capital costs are subsidized by homeowners in the older areas of the city.

We've got nearly the same problem in Dallas. For decades the development has moved further north into the Ex-burbs and bedroom communities.

The interesting component is how the development gets financed in a Ponzi-esque scheme. Suburbs are built out with municipal bonds, which subsidize the build outs of services (schools, police, fire stations, roads) while keeping property taxes low. Once the suburb is completely built out, the taxes double or triple to pay back the bonds. Then the next suburb just north or south of it is built with more new bonds and the cycle continues.

LA is its own weird beast where geology plays a role.

There's a stripe running east west through the center, following the hills and the area immediately south of the hills, from Santa Monica to Griffith Park. That stripe is notably higher priced, with prices within the stripe generally increasing towards the ocean.

Then there's a ring around that stripe where prices decrease for a while, and then move up again to be sort of traditionally suburban in pricing.

And then there's the strange outer regions like Topanga / Calabasas / Malibu, where you move waaaay up the scale again.

LA is hard to figure out. I was around Long Beach a few weeks ago, and it looked like a pretty nice street, but about 5-6 blocks over was another main street that looked like a real ghetto. Also, I was in Pasadena a few months ago, on Lake Avenue south of the 210 it seemed pretty fancy, but as soon as you go over the freeway, still on Lake Avenue, North, you feel like you may not live very long.

Well, I can think of nothing better than responding to some lazy stereotyping in one direction with some lazy stereotyping in the other direction...

They treat college like a party, an excuse to extend childish behavior

Are you sure this is a recent phenomenon? Just two examples I'm aware of:

1978: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/

1985: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/

Pointless addendum: Animal House was made in 1978, but set in 1961.

Rolling Stone recently ran an article on the fratboy culture at Dartmouth: (the university "Faber College" was based on) http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-i...

"The Real Animal House" [1] is also worth a read--it's about the Dartmouth fraternity experiences of one of the authors of Animal House. Somehow it makes the recreational vomiting seem more fun than the Rolling Stone article.

(It was amazing and disturbing how many of the "traditions" described in the book are mentioned in the Rolling Stone article, 50 years later...)

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Real-Animal-House-Fraternity/dp/B0...

Can you back up any of this with statistics?

My anecdotal, local information shows people highly motivated to do things outside of the University and heading to upper 5 or 6 figure salaries at tech start ups, financial firms, and established software and engineering companies.

I also see students pursuing advanced degrees in Physics, Math, and other sciences who truly want to do research that expands our understanding of the world.

Do I think we're "some sort of elightend [sic] urban dweller"? No. But I certainly am skeptical that we any more immature than the generations before us, of the generations to come.

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