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Comment by ken-far | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so. This quote is key: “I now say that brainy youngsters are trending urban and urbane, away from your grandfather’s office parks.”

Real estate analysis is showing that for the first time since it's been measuring more people are looking for housing in denser, more urban environments than in the traditional suburbs.

An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars. Comparing these quiet & dull campuses to a vibrant city really makes it hard to imagine working in them any more.

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>An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars.

Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children.

The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.

> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children.

I think it might be simpler than this. They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up. On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids.

As someone a bit over 30; exactly this.

The numbers do NOT add up and haven't at any point in my life. Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job?

None of our social structures (including laws and tax incentives/disincentives) or market valuations reflect the necessary liquidity imposed by current job market.

I happen to think that more nicely constructed MDUs are a good housing option (insulation could always be better).

>Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years?

I can't help but feel that you're describing some mythical ideal that never really existed for most people. Yes, for a long time, a lot of manufacturing jobs were pretty stable and people worked for IBM for a long time. But, even in that case, even if the jobs were stable, people tended to move around the company a lot. The military, which has always been a large employer, is an even more extreme example of jobs being relatively stable but mobile.

By the way, according to this Economist article from a couple years back, US workforce mobility has actually gone down significantly to a degree not explained by demographics: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-m...

>Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job?

And what happened when there was more typically one worker and he (the common case) lost his job?

But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs.

Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional.

I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today.

Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing.

So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.

>They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up.

That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Raising a family was always tough - when I was young my parents scrimped and saved in a way that I've never seen among millennials. Everybody did, and it was considered just part of parenthood, especially in the beginning.

It's not that younger people can't raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents, it's that either they don't realize how tough it was back then or they're just not interested in making the same sacrifices.

>On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids.

Sure, but it's far cheaper to rent a small apartment in the suburbs and commute than it is to rent in the city.

Yes, commuting sucks. But it sucked in the 20th century as well. My dad spent more than an hour on the road each way. Every day. That't the kind of sacrifice I'm talking about. In addition to the commute my dad brown bagged his lunch every day, made his own coffee (Folgers), drank PBR non-ironically, did his own plumbing, painted what needed painting, mowed his own lawn, and fixed the family car himself when it broke down. If you live that kind of lifestyle today you can afford a family in the same way my parents did.

I'm not making a moral judgement on the other peoples' procreation choices. All I'm saying is family was a priority for previous generations in a way that it isn't today. It was part of being an adult.

>...in a way that it isn't today.

I submit that you're comparing unmarried and childless people of today with married and child-bearing people of yesteryear.

Do the other comparisons and you'll find that you are off base -- people today do make enormous sacrifices to start families at a young age, and people in the 50s to 80s who were single with no children did live lavish lifestyles.

To the extent that there are differences between the primary peer comparison -- married couples raising children -- it's mostly a byproduct of the fact that people wait longer and have smaller families.

Waiting longer is some combination of less social pressure to pop out kids (a good thing! Having kids because of an obnoxious parent's pestering is how you end up with broken families, divorced or otherwise) and a better understanding of fertility/access to medical care (also a good thing).

Smaller family sizes are, IMO and as someone who grew up in a large family, a good thing as well. Keeping the size of one's family manageable means having the time to both build up a career and also heavily invest in the upbringing of each child.

I think that's far more commendable than the "pop 'em out, pay for shit, parent on the weekends and leave wifey in the kitchen the rest of the time" mentality of a huge portion of the baby boom generation. And also more commendable than leaving yourself penniless and jobless in old age for your children to take care of you.

It's possible to raise one or two or maybe three kids well. Doing a good job at raising five or six means someone has to give up a career, and even then you're probably just barely keeping up (i.e., not doing the best possible job at fostering intellectual and emotional health.)

>Do the other comparisons and you'll find that you are off base -- people today do make enormous sacrifices to start families at a young age, and people in the 50s to 80s who were single with no children did live lavish lifestyles.

... which was my point. People in their 20s today have it no harder than their parents and grandparents. They're simply choosing not to have families in larger numbers.

The quoted comment does not contain the concession you seem to think it does. On the contrary, the quoted section of my previous comment simply states that people in their 20s today have it at least as hard as their parents and grandparents. I'm silent (here) on the question of whether it's harder today.

> They're simply choosing not to have families in larger numbers.

This is only meaningfully entailed by the data if you believe that, historically, everyone who had kids "chose" to do so. I don't think that's accurate, especially if we go back past 1970-1980 or so.

Remember that birth control has only been universally legal in the US for barely a half century. And normalized for a far shorter period of time. In fact, I'd argue that in a huge portion of the country, it's still something of a dirty secret in that you wouldn't necessarily want your employer or extended family to know about it (and we've recently had a supreme court case about this...)

Birth control was readily available by 1970. Presumably you've heard about "free love" and all that?

> Birth control was readily available by 1970.

1. Singling out access to birth control is a red herring. Mainstream gender norms and mainstream social pressure to have a family have changed a lot since the 1970s. Especially in more conservative parts of the country.

2. Birth control was fully legalized in the US in 1964 by Supreme Court mandate; 2015 - 1964 = 51 years (barely a half century, exactly as I stated above...).

3. There's a difference between legal and available.

4. There's a difference between available and socially acceptable. Although things have gotten significantly better over time, stigma and conservative views on sex outside of marriage continues to prevent contraceptive use among significant populations (most significantly anyone under 18 with conservative parents, but IME even married people into their 20s who had a conservative upbringing). In many ways, we are STILL fighting the battle against stigma associated with use of contraceptives. See the debate surrounding contraceptives and the ACA, or sex education in public schools. Or ask a Catholic priest.

Again, things have improved significantly and continue to improve. But assuming that 1964 or the wave in the 1970s were watershed events across the country is a bit niave.

5. Again, singling out birth control is a red herring. It is no doubt an important contributing factor in both the time to first child and the size of families. But the social norms surrounding women -- especially in conservative parts of the country -- have changed significantly since the 1970s, and that's also an important contributing factor.

Concretely, I'm not sure that "subjected to coercive social pressure and not provided with a college education because they're already married and that's the point" exactly counts as "choice". That might not have been common in the Chicago suburbs in the 1970s, but it definitely was in rural Georgia...

I think a lot of people are REALLY underestimating the 'access to birth control' part of the equation. People wait longer today to have kids because they can CHOOSE to wait.

Indeed! That's (part of) what I meant by access to medical care. I think that people also tend to not view having a child in your mid 30s as unnecessarily risky, which I think 20,30,40 years ago was a more common belief/concern.

The combination of the ability to choose to wait and the belief that you can wait and still have a family is, I think, a potent one.

> That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Raising a family was always tough.

I'm not saying it wasn't tough, but housing prices were much lower relative to incomes in the 50s and 60s, even in a place like San Francisco. Several of my relatives own million dollar homes there, and none of them are college educated or had spectacular careers or anything. Their only advantage is they were part of previous generations. Not a single one of them could hope to buy their current homes if they were starting their career from scratch today. Relative to housing costs, they enjoyed incomes that today would be in the range of a $300k+ base salary.

We look back on their lives and don't see them as particularly posh because we're blinded by the astounding pace of technological growth. You could make a million dollars a year but you couldn't have a microwave oven before it was invented.

> Yes, commuting sucks. But it sucked in the 20th century as well.

Sure it did, but it's a lot worse today because traffic congestion has progressed to unprecedented levels. It's not just about time spent commuting -- it's also about how stressful the commute itself is. Whenever my dad visits here in Houston, who used to do a big city commute in the 70s and 80s in Dallas with no problem, he freaks out because of how bad the traffic is.

relative to housing costs, they enjoyed incomes that today would be in the range of a $300k+ base salary.

Do you have a source for that? I can believe it in certain cities (like SF), but then again, SF wasn't as desirable a place to live either (SF population was dropping in the 60's and 70's).

>I'm not saying it wasn't tough, but housing prices were much lower relative to incomes in the 50s and 60s, even in a place like San Francisco.

What do you mean even? San Francisco has to be in the top five in terms of growth in the value of property over that time period. There's no way incomes could keep up. But that's an outlier. Housing in the East Bay is very affordable.

>Sure it did, but it's a lot worse today because traffic congestion has progressed to unprecedented levels.

That's kind of an uneven thing. As I pointed out in another comment, the traffic in Southern California is better today than it was in the '70s. Texas has gotten the lion's share of the country's growth in recent years - I'm not surprised Houston is bad.

>The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago.

While it's not universal, there are large areas of major coastal cities (among others) that middle-class+ people would have hesitated or flat-out typically not have lived in 30 years ago that are now considered highly desirable.

That said, it's easy to overstate the US Millennials want to all live in the city trend. FiveThirtyEight had a piece a while back that basically concluded the urbanization trend is largely exaggerated. The more accurate statement is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to live in a handful of particularly dense urban locations (think Brooklyn).[1]

In fact, they say that, among all adults 25-34 the percentage in urban locations overall has actually declined a little. The data is complicated to interpret but their bottom line was that: "Millennials overall, therefore, are not increasingly living in urban neighborhoods. Rather, the most educated one-third of young adults are increasingly likely to live in the densest urban neighborhoods. That’s great news for cities trying to attract young graduates and a sign that urban neighborhoods have become more desirable for those who can afford them. But the presence of more smart young things in Brooklyn is not evidence that millennials are a more urban generation."

There are a lot of trends going on in parallel that make it hard to draw clear non-anecdotal conclusions about where people prefer to live. I also think a lot of people on this board probably find it easier to work remotely or to cherry-pick a job in easy commuting distance (whatever their preferred mode of commuting) than is the norm. Furthermore, in many cases, preferences for dense cities, suburbs, and the country are sufficiently deep-rooted that a lot of folks have trouble understanding how anyone could see things differently.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...

> Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars.

Actually, many of them did. Talk to some old people in the US suburbs about what life was like when they were young in the '50s and '60s. Most grew up in a dense city and then voluntarily left it for the suburbs. Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. When cars went mass-market as America suburbanized, densely built urban areas and the use of public transport were increasingly associated with poverty and being trapped in the archaic past.

If you lived in the suburbs and commuted by car, it was prestigious, it was modern; it meant you were doing well for yourself financially, and were forward-looking to a brighter future with new and better ways of doing things. It was the 1950s cultural equivalent of working at a startup and living in a gentrifying hipster neighborhood in San Francisco today.

No doubt someone will reply that these perceptions was all manufactured merely due to General Motors malfeasance and marketing campaigns. That may be true, but that's entirely beside the point. Those campaigns worked because many young people then actually did agree with their content, and were very happy to drive everywhere.

>Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success.

You're overstating that quite a bit. Sure, driving for twenty minutes beats taking public transportation. But sitting in stop and go traffic for a couple hours every day is awful and people always realized it.

How much stop and go traffic was there in the 50s?

I don't know about the 50s, but by the sixties traffic was as bad in some places as it is today. Traffic in Southern California, where I grew up, is actually better today than it was in the 70s.

That's about when it started getting bad. The term "Sig Alert", for an unplanned lane closure, originated in LA in 1955. It takes its name from Loyd C. "Sig" Sigmon, who created a radio-based notification system for the California Highway Patrol:

Sigmon developed a specialized radio receiver and reel-to-reel tape recorder. When the receiver picked up a particular tone, it would record the subsequent bulletin. The device cost about $600. The LAPD's chief, William H. Parker, was interested, though skeptical, warning the inventor, "We're going to name this damn thing Sigalert." More practically, he refused to use it unless the receivers were made available to all Los Angeles radio stations — it could not be a KMPC monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sig_Alert#The_origin_of_the_Si...

Bad traffic was mostly limited to a few large cities such as LA then. In most of the US, it was not nearly as bad.

It was also believed that traffic was a fairly minor infrastructure problem that could easily be resolved by widening the highways, adding a few more lanes here and there. (Turns out that when you add lanes, it just causes that many more people to drive on that road, but this was not yet widely apparent at the time.)

>In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.

Thank you Obama and HUD. My nice, small city has had several gang-related murders in the last few years, all within subsidized housing.

Yeah sure. The real story is that the younger kids have lousier paying jobs and items like cars are prohibitively expensive.

My dad had a loaded up Mustang that cost like $2500 in the late 60s, at 19 or 20, paid for by bartending. The equivalent car today is probably 2x-2.5x more in real terms.

The city is coming back because it's the undervalued and people are priced out of the newer suburbs. People end up reproducing, so the permanent underclass and garbage schools will probably send most of these folks to the older suburbs.

I remember paying over a dollar a minute in the '80s for a phone call to my sister in the same state. Air fare was crazy expensive compared to today, as was anything electronic.

Some things have gotten more expensive, and other things have gotten cheaper. Overall it's a wash. If it seems like life is more expensive it's because people buy a lot of things today that we didn't have back then. Things you don't really need, like cable TV and $5 coffee.

It's not "a wash". Housing and education are dramatically more expensive than they were a few generations ago. Gone are the days of paying for your degree waiting tables with enough left over to put a down payment on a house. Now you can look forward to a mountain of debt for an education and mortgage that you might never pay off in your life time.

It might be "a wash". Housing and education are more expensive, but food and entertainment costs are way lower. The cost of most things inside your home, like appliances and televisions is cheaper. Tools, hardware, and common home repairs are also cheaper.

It's very hard to get an exact 1:1 ratio, as many of us spend hundreds of dollars on cell phones that didn't exist back then, or thousands on computers, but naming two economic things that have gotten more expensive doesn't invalidate the myriad of things that have gotten commensurately cheaper.

For the bottom 50% of earners, real wages are more or less the same now as they were in 1970. They went up for a bit from the 90s to 08, but they are back at 1970 levels now. Because wages have recently fallen, people in this group feel very poor right now.

For the top 50% of earners (increasing the closer to the top you get), real wages have increased a lot since the 1970s.

Between 1940 and 1985, most people were able to save about 5% of their income. Between 1985 and 2012, this decreased to become negative (i.e. most people live on debt).

Medical care, education, and energy have increased in cost several times over since 1970, and these costs are not captured in the real wages I quoted. It may be these costs explain why people have a lower disposable income, demonstrated by decreased savings rate.

> Housing and education are more expensive, but food and entertainment costs are way lower.

While that's true, it's certainly not "a wash." Housing and education are probably people's two biggest lifetime expenses. Even if housing prices doubled and food prices were cut by two thirds, the outcome would be higher overall expenses.

Personally, rent in a small apartment is more than all my other expenses combined.

The problem is that, based on the factual numbers, this isn't true -- it's not a wash.

Housing, Education, and Healthcare (things everyone bought "back then") have gotten dramatically more expensive, far more than the other categories have dropped. It's not a wash, and the numbers back that up :

"The current average family of four spends: - 21% less on clothing - 44% less on major appliances - 69% more on housing - 90% more on health care Than the average family spent in 1970's.

http://www.yale.edu/law/leo/052005/papers/Warren.pdf (these numbers are graphed on page 16)

Things like education, health care, and rent are all baked into the inflation numbers. If inflation and income growth are relatively constant (and they have been) then, yes, it is a wash. All she's proving here is people have more money to spend on the things that matter to them.

> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families

Do you have any evidence to support that, or are you just engaged in standard Millennial-bashing?

Most people in my peer group certainly plan to raise a family in the future, they're just being responsible and waiting to have kids until they are at a good place career-wise.

There are two factors that determine how much money you have. Being "at a good place career-wise" is only half the equation. Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent.

> Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent.

There's no requirement that you stay in the same place which made your career.

My personal plan is to work in NYC for the next ten years and then take the accumulated savings to buy a house outright in a nice town.

A few years ago, I was quite surprised by the number of younger co-workers who lived in the city instead of the burbs.

Anyway, it didn't last. In every case except one (confirmed bachelor), they moved out to the burbs as soon as they our spouse got mugged or were going to have kids and realized they needed to be in a district with decent schools.

Would they still prefer the burbs if those issues weren't issues? They're just the hipsters who jumped ship (I mean no disrespect; they selflessly gave up the city life they otherwise wanted) before it got cool (and conditions improved).

While I don't doubt your story, here in Brisbane living in Fortitude Valley is safe, close to everything, and quite fun all things considered. Multiple new residential apartment buildings have gone up or are going up (driving my rent down, which is brilliant for me), and there are numerous families that live here too, interestingly.

Everything I just said actually agrees with your main point however, as the best schools are just up the road from here, and it's much safer than I've heard a lot of big cities in the US are. It's interesting to see so many people move into this area now, as I've been here for years and love it; it's great for me, more development of better facilities have seen this grow by leaps and bounds.

People follow the jobs, jobs don't follow people. A more likely scenario is that those jobs are just gone, not that they moved downtown to catch the special snowflakes. Or downtown addresses have replaced campuses whenever executives get together to dick wave.

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