As usual, the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it.
Softening rents? That’s because you have a limited resource of people willing and able to pay $3000 to $5000 for a single bedroom apartment. It doesn’t take much construction to saturate that market.
The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. There are far more people who can pay $1000 for 1 bedroom, or $3000 for 4 bedrooms (roommates, typically), and it would be insane to ignore that market. But abusive zoning laws and the capricious permit process ensure that that price of housing would be unprofitable. So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction.
We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.
> The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco.
What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live.
NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.
What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.
> We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.
To add some more concrete numbers, in 2015 there were 14,357 units completed in New York. Permits were issued for 56,528 units. (Only 20,000 permits were issued in 2014. They were down 65% in Q1 2016.)
For a city of over 8 million people, I would expect 50,000 units/year to be the sustainable level. 20,000/year seems quite low.
In a place like NYC, don't they have to tear down an existing building to put up a new one? That is, what you're really interested in is net adds, and completed units is only half the equation.
In Manhattan they almost never tear down, but rather do extreme gut renovations on the framework of older buildings. As a result additional units don't get added (by building up for example), the existing units are just upgraded.
The reason for this is new buildings have to follow modern regulations which drops the usable square footage of properties considerably (for example, having the building X feet back from the street etc). In Manhattan where every square foot counts this is of course unacceptable. Old buildings are grandfathered into older, less restrictive, regulations.
Although it's a densely populated city it's not without its surface parking lots. They're just smaller than in other cities where half the downtown core seems to be parking lots. You can squeeze in a bit of development here and there without necessarily having to raze buildings.
There's also opportunities to upgrade old industrial space to residential, no net loss in housing.
Anyone that claims one easy fix to a complex problem is most likely talking out of their ass. Just like with anything else in life, the answer is way more complicated than the zealots on both sides would have you believe.
Like you pointed out, NYC is the most dense city in the US, followed by SF. Naturally, building shit will be difficult in these cities. SF and NYC suffer from a unique set of problems, well not totally unique, but these problems are magnified in these cities:
Space constraints
Very desirable places to live
Neighborhoods with world famous character
Large amount of wealthy people willing to pay high prices
Boom & bust industries constantly changing the rate of population migration and also the wealth of the population
Pretending that everyone else is so dumb that they don't understand supply/demand or there is some evil conspiracy to prevent building doesn't help anyone. There are actual difficulties here with no easy solution. Building in these cities used to be difficult, it's difficult today, and it will continue to be difficult. There is no fix that will magically make these problems go away.
Poster said city; that list is any incorporated area with >10000/sqmi. The top incorporated area on that list is physically smaller than Google's main campus.
If you restrict it to the saner list of cities with more than 100,000 people, San Francisco is indeed second.
Your list is the best representation of the true density of South Florida, though. It is carved up into so many independent towns that just using total populations doesn't show the true picture.
The difference in cost between building a $1000/mo apartment and a $3000/mo apartment is negligible to the builder. Stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, granite countertops, etc are practically free compared to the cost of the land and erecting the basic structure. If you have a chance to substantially increase your future revenue with minimal additional cost, how could you not?
Add to that, most of these projects are going to be financed by debt of some sort, and lenders are not going to be keen on seeing that you could pursue a higher profit margin and choose not to.
This is fine because a 10 year old apartment with chipped granite countertops, dingy hardwood floors, and aging appliances will rent out for cheaper. Apartments in wealthy cities are always "trickle down" more than "build cheap."
It would be pretty exceptional for a landlord to knock 2/3 off of the rent for an apartment just because its getting run down. It would have to be a real renters market for a good long while to push prices down that far.
My point was that an increase in supply of new luxury apartments does almost as much to generate a renters market as an oversupply of new modest apartments, and it's way easier to get builders to do the former than the latter.
Trickle down housing actually works though because real estate gets used (in high demand areas). Developers build at the high end for the most profit. When those that can afford it move into new fancy digs their vacated units become available to others for less.
This is fine for new construction. Building more at the high end puts downward pressure on prices in the middle, which in turn puts downward pressure on prices in the affordable housing space. This is called "filtering" and it's been shown to work.
A relevant quote from City Observatory summarizing research and implications:
But very little private housing in the United States was originally built for low-income people. Instead, homes built for the middle or even upper classes gradually became cheaper as they aged, as people with high purchasing power moved into trendier, more modern homes in “better” neighborhoods. As higher income households move on, the now somewhat older homes or apartments they formerly occupied are sold or rented to people with more modest incomes.
This process is called “filtering.” While the evidence that filtering is a real phenomenon has been around for a long time—the core of nearly every American city contains neighborhoods with once-luxurious homes now occupied by people of modest incomes—the first study to provide a rigorous measure of how it happens was published only in 2013. In it, Stuart Rosenthal of Syracuse University uses nearly 40 years of data from the American Housing Survey to figure out the average pace of filtering across the country, and what makes housing filter more quickly in some places than others. [1]
There's no question about that. And it definitely is an issue that nearly everything new is luxury, or semi-quasi-luxury at least. With that said there are lower income requirements usually as part of the tax packages for these new projects, and also the glut of somewhat higher end studios and one bedrooms clearly puts downward pricing pressure on all the second-tier and older units nearby as well.
As mentioned, NYC isn't perfect but it has a reasonably functioning democratically elected city government that at least tries to deal with major urban issues and occasionally succeeds. Which I've heard anecdotally at least makes it a little different from San Francisco.
>The difference in cost between building a $1000/mo apartment and a $3000/mo apartment is negligible to the builder.
So you decrease the square footage from 1400 to 700.
You have to have customers willing to buy your product, and there are only so many $3000/month apartments you can make before you run out of people willing to pay that much. Either large numbers of last year's luxury places are moving downmarket or you won't be able to sell the building for what you expected.
It is difficult to build in NYC from a zoning and building regulation perspective, but not nearly as difficult as SF. That people conflate the two is a mystery.
That's not even remotely representative of the general climate for development in the area, and wasn't one of the projects I was talking about. That was a huge and high profile project to reshape the busiest street and transit hub in a borough of 2.5 million people involving the relocation of a pro sports franchise, building over railroad tracks, etc.
It was bound to be complicated, and it's worth noting that it got built anyways. I've lived walking distance from the neighborhood in question for 17 years, and that project has nothing to do with a developer wanting to put up a regular old high rise rental apartment building or three, which seems to happen nearly daily around here. The Fulton/Flatbush corridors have been transformed literally in a matter of months.
Hmmmm having lived in the UWS I can say this is definitely not the case. Have you been to a CB meeting in New York? Just as much NIMBYism and obstructionism (look at what happened with that bike lane opposition from rich old people near prospect park). The difference is the laws on the books in New York vs the bay.
Indeed. And downtown Brooklyn, and LIC, and Industry City, and so on and so on. NYC is capable of adding a dense "downtown" that would dwarf the entire CBD of most American cities every year or three. There's really no comparison at all in this country at least.
> We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.
There's a group working hard to do this every day. Consider joining SF Yimby: https://sfyimby.org
Alternatively, you can donate to Carla, basically the legal wing of SF Yimby. They are also a nonprofit & tax deductible. They sue Bay Area cities that are not meeting building targets under the Housing Accountability Act. If they win and set precedent it will be very high leverage / make a big difference, since most municipalities here are nowhere close to meeting their housing targets today.
Construction costs for housing are pretty non-negligible in these cities, I spent a few hours reading about the situation in NYC; this article (based on a private report) puts average costs in Manhattan of $400-600 per square foot: https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cr...
I couldn't figure out if this included the cost of land, but I saw other estimates put the hard construction cost (i.e. not including insurance, etc) at ~$330/sqft in NYC (not just Manhattan).
With those sorts of prices, it's clear why people are building luxury condos.
I spent some time looking at prefab construction costs for sky scrapers to see if they could be part of the solution, and in NYC they were targeting cost reductions in the 20% range (even with union concessions), but ended with huge cost overruns and ended construction at ~60% of the planned height.
So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing.
A lot of that might end up as making people want to spread out, by building more transit (which also needs to get cheaper) or convincing people that they should spread out and build their own communities; they don't have to look like the suburbs, Brooklyn certainly doesn't.
600k seems like a best case estimate here. Given that $400 is the low end of Manhattan construction and these projects are definitely not risk free. Even at 600k per apartment, you're not going to solve housing for everyone, you're still only hitting a price point that is good for the upper middle class.
I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.
There is an absolute ton of open land on Manhattan island, waiting to be built on. It's the hilariously-too-wide streets and especially our Avenues. We should infill these like crazy, leaving little ten-foot wide streets basically where the current sidewalks are.
This would have the effect of 1) reducing rents, 2) giving us Really Narrow Streets (tm), an excellent idea I stole from [0], and 3) sending property tax revenue through the roof while reducing road-maintenance expenditures so we can spend more money on subways.
Density doesn't have to mean expensive vertical construction. Instead we could just make better use of our existing land by not wasting so much of it on low-bandwidth automobile transit infrastructure. (Side rant: Have you ever counted how many humans in cars get through a crosstown intersection in one traffic light cycle? It's literally ones or tens of people, a pathetically low number).
NYC just built the most expensive few miles of subway in the upper east side, the next mile or two will be even more expensive. I'm sort of hoping that we get on-demand self-driving buses at some point and add a toll on vehicles driving into lower Manhattan, but I don't know if that will be enough. Bus tunnels also seem interesting, particularly when the buses are self-driving, but I don't know if they'd be any cheaper to build for us.
As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive.
I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient.
I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.
>So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing.
I don't disagree but I think people will object to "cheap" based on aesthetics. The closest thing I can think of is Soviet Union I know they used prefabricated elements in their building construction. People love to complain about the ugliness of Soviet style architecture.
Prefabricated doesn't have to mean ugly, it doesn't have to mean it's made out of concrete. It doesn't mean that everything has to look the same either.
I think the industry prefers the term "modular" due to the stigma, but they're the same thing.
While I'm not a huge fan of how this turned out, here's a recent modular high-rise in Manhattan that doesn't look hideous: http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/
This doesn't really argue against your soviet comments either, but you can see that you can do a lot with the idea (though the complicated form lead and uilders' inexperience to pretty high costs): http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homel...
But you can stick whatever facade you want onto this. I've read quite a few comments about sticking brick veneer onto these to make them look just like regular buildings.
Using modules means you can build the modules off-site in a factory, rather than on a construction site, and maybe we can eventually bring some automation into how those modules are built.
"We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing."
But why do we tend to create such restrictive zoning and approval processes? I think it's inescapable to conclude that this is a rational response to the low holding cost we currently impose on holding land.
If you're a landowner equipped with the power of zoning, why would you want to allow more development elsewhere? In the immediate reaction (common to NIMBYs), one has everything to gain and nothing to lose.
In a more market-driven situation, the landowner would weigh the desire for lower density against a real cost-- that is, the rising value of land would create more of a tax burden. (This would be the case in California if not for the anti-market behavior of Prop 13.) In an ideal situation, the burden of additional development nearby (congestion, shadows, etc), would be perfectly balanced against a drop in a tax burden.
So I'll just conclude that you're correct, but not looking deeply enough. All things eventually go back to the taxation policy on land and other natural resources.
I can't recommend enough the book by William Fischel, "The Economics of Zoning Laws"[0] (later published in a revised edition as "Zoning Rules!") to see the rationality of all actors in the current paradigm.
I think that in CA the biggest factor you can point at is Prop 13. Current residential landowners are getting the benefits of rising values without the costs of higher taxes. NIMBY or otherwise, the incentives are pretty clear when framed this way. And I think the costs trickle down to things like lot-rental prices for mobile home parks rise just like rents do.
With any luck, millennials won't leave the city like their predecessors. If they stay long enough, they'll grow frustrated, and get active within city government. If they have the numbers, and the organization, we COULD see changes to restrictive housing policies in places like SF and NY.
The focus was mostly on quality of life for existing residents - liquor license approvals, art installations and cultural activities. These are important things and people should care about them, but it's striking that those groups had meetings while the following didn't:
- Transportation and Public Safety
- Land Use, Zoning, Public and Private Housing
- Public Housing and Section 8 Housing
I'm going to spend the next couple of months attending these meetings to figure out how it all works.
I should caveat however that I'm atypical in this attitude. Because I spent the entirety of my childhood in dense urban environments - Dhaka and New York - I'm attached to city living. Most of my millennial friends are planning to take make the suburban trek.
You hit the nail on the head with that one. Chicago is seeing this. New housing is being built all arround me. However it's 1.5k for a studio. That's the cheapest it goes. 2 rooms goes for 2.6k starting.
Nobody is building modest housing options. They're all going luxory in Logan Square. That's incredibly unreasonable. I kind of hope that some of these developers are going to go belly up over this.
The new luxury apartments are demonstrating that a higher price point is achievable in the area. Older housing pretty much is most of the market. But the newer high rises are replacing them.
New affordable housing is needed as that the demand is high. (Chicago has had a very liquidable market for housing in the last few years)
I realize this is super unpopular as an opinion, but why is it always a given that everyone should be able to live everywhere? What's inherently wrong with high rent in San Francisco?
I'm sure we can talk about lots of bad reasons why rent is high, but the mere fact of high rent isn't itself bad, right? Why do we need to reform?
Some people paying high rent is fine. You are rich, you get to spend a lot of money. Usually, I don't care.
Cities are important for too many reasons for me to enumerate right now. Basically, if we can't keep cities healthy, then our civilization will collapse, and we won't be able to rebuild.
We have a problem when the option to spend less is not available. Then, to have access to the jobs and opportunities of the city, the workers have to spend inordinate amounts of money on expensive rents and time on commuting, which reduces the social benefit of having jobs.
It also reduces the real wealth, as value is diverted to past landowners (and tenants taking advantage of abusive laws, which are why I never supported the San Francisco Tenants Union) and not to the city as a whole. The Bay Area schools can't even hire teachers for all of their classrooms. We are awash in money, but experiencing poverty.
If it were a "real" poverty experience, house values would drop, wouldn't they?
Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet.
I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably.
If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?
Not everyone is driven into poverty at the same price point.
With a tech salary it's possible to float above the rising prices, but everyone else gets driven out.
Housing prices will not "balance" because demand is extremely high and much of that demand has high salaries, and supply is extremely restricted (by NIMBY's and the laws they support).
A lot of people are mad because the rents are much higher due to the constrained supply of apartments. Many current homeowners in the Bay Area try their hardest to prevent new apartment developments form getting built in their neighborhoods. Renters get stuck paying extra rent to effectively prop up the real estate prices for homeowners. Desirable places to live will always have higher rent. But, desirable places to live with NIMBY attitudes have extra high rents.
1. Cities have lots of jobs (especially San Francisco), and if city rents are unaffordable, people can't move there to take jobs. The means less opportunity for people who need it, and it means rising prices for everything that depends on lower paying jobs (such as restaurants).
2. The money goes nowhere. It gets captured by landlords, and plowed into making real estate more expensive, instead of buying goods and rewarding productivity, or buying entertainment and rewarding people.
3. You're talking about barring the less well off from an entire city. Are you surprised that this is an unpopular opinion?
> What's inherently wrong with high rent in San Francisco?
Beyond ethics, a few things you may not have considered:
1. High rent is a systematic, generational wealth transfer from the young to the old (property owners); this is not good for society (eg, funding social security or even social stability).
2. It is an enormous drag on economic output and productivity for a variety of reasons.
3. High rents (coupled with rent control) result in really crazy inefficiencies.
> why is it always a given that everyone should be able to live everywhere?
I don't want to live everywhere. Unfortunately, my occupation has chosen to highly concentrate a ridiculous fraction of the jobs here. So I'm here. Moving is not impossible, but it's got a considerable "barrier to entry" if you will, and as someone still fairly new with the whole being-an-adult-with-a-job thing, it's not as simple as just getting up and going. Aside from the actual logistics of it, I've been with employers who look at resumes and think short gaps between jobs == bad, and so that means I can really only look if I manage to have held onto something long enough. There's also the fact that I might like my current work; finding a job that isn't soul-sucking (and isn't a startup with no hope of success) turns out to be tricky when it seems like 70% of the offerings boil down to "we sell ads".
For example, in my searches it appears that the Boston area has ~10% of the jobs that the Bay does.
Thankfully, I'm in a high-paying role. But surely the Bay Area needs janitors, transit workers, teachers, retail clerks, etc.? How are they to afford rent, let alone a home? Is the answer for them "sorry, you're priced out; commute 15-20 hours weekly?"
And, I know you're asking honestly, but when people out here say "high" w.r.t. housing in the Bay Area, they don't mean "it's above average", it means "it's literally insane". My father's current house was probably ~3 yrs of his salary; small houses are selling for ~$1.5M; an engineer making ~$100k (~starting salary) would need 15-16 years, and a very senior salary of ~$200k would still be ~8yr.
You can be an engineer and have tons of money to afford cool gadgets, but you'll never own a home.
True, but why is that relevant? The economy doesn't owe everyone the right to live where they want. (I want to vacation a number of places where I can't; I cannot in honesty say that's a genuine problem.)
To clarify, I'm not saying that it's just fine. I'm saying that your argument doesn't work without something more - either a reason why those people not being able to live there is a problem, or is morally wrong, or something.
Because people who want to live there, who can't afford a house, will try to get the rents to go down, so they can afford to live there.
What people want is pretty much the only thing that matters when it comes to politics (although there are limitations based in what's possible and what's not).
Density should enable walking which changes everything.
A farmer in the middle of nowhere (US or Canada - other countries have different situations that I cannot comment on) is looking at more than 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store if he drives. To walk would be 10 hours each way.
As we go down we hit the suburbs - 10 minutes to the store, but still 2 hours to walk. (if you took the same route as the car it would be about an hour, but that means walking on a busy road with no sidewalks, so you end up having to take a much longer route)
High density allows stores and restaurants to exist just to serve the people within a couple blocks. You take the elevator downstairs, and within a couple blocks is everything you need to buy, and the job you need to earn money to buy it with. When this is the world you rarely drive anywhere so you are not adding to congestion.
Now there is still congestion all those stores/business need to be provided with goods to sell. However a truck that takes up 4 cars worth of space is bringing enough goods to last 400 people for the day, where the cars in the other examples where for 1 person (all facts in this sentence were made up - they seem reasonable but I don't know how to find the right ones). This limits how dense we can get with just surface streets.
Note that the above is a should. Zoning laws often put high density far enough away from stores that you have to drive anyway - this makes congestion worse.
Ideally you get to mixed use buildings. Ground and maybe first floor dedicated to businesses (shops, offices, gyms, etc.), everything above is residences. Not for every building, you'll still have highrise office buildings (because you need that density of workspaces still, and their ground and first floor will be their local restaurants and gyms and such). But now the average person can get to a small grocery within 100-200m, and a larger one within 500m. Busses can be more effective for transporting people between regions of high residential density to areas of higher office/industrial or shopping density (primarily used by shops carrying non-daily purchase items or requiring more space).
> Density should enable walking which changes everything.
That's pipe dream. There is a problem in NY and SF because people want to go the same place. That's the appeal of big cities: lot of job or activities in a limited space.
I have all of that in the shit area I live in London. I have a variety of restaurant, a street market 3 times a week, loads of shops ( food mostly ) all within 5 min walk. All good, except for work. That's all in the City or Canary Warf, you still need to get there. Despite being shit, the area is still expensive because the connection to the City is not bad.
You can get all of that in a lot of place but the price only become affordable once you can't commute with the City anymore.
I've never lived in a dense city so I don't know how this is done.
I doubt I could carry a week of groceries for my modest family (2 adults, 2 children) 1 block, let alone several. Do you maybe use personal carts or what?
Family of 3, our supermarket was in the groundfloor of our apartment so it was sometimes easier to just run downstairs and grab it then to search through the pantry. You'd be amazed what you can carry once you start doing it regularly. I also, proudly, walked around with those little carts you see little old ladies carry. Damn things are super useful even with a car. Carries 2 cases of beer and produce on top ;-)
The other grocer in our neighbordhood does deliveries. Go shopping as you normally do, at checkout groceries are loaded into a big plastic tote instead of a grocery bag. It's delivered to your door within the hour.
I grew up outside the cities (denser, working class suburbs, not mcmansion-style suburbs) and after city living most of my adult life I can't realistically go back.
Short answer, you don't make weekly trips because the grocery store is down the street. I walked by two good grocery stores on my way home from the subway when I lived in NYC, I'd just buy what I needed for that night.
Or you buy your own cart, you see them all over in NYC, for groceries and laundry.
Father of family of three here who regularly walks; I use a large backpack and a pair of large reusable bags that I throw over each shoulder. Heavy stuff (milk, canned goods, bags of apples, etc.) go in the backpack.
Invariably, I forget something so I usually have a smaller midweek trip for things I forgot. The walk to Trader Joe's is about 20min each way.
It's a different perspective if you've never had to do it; I used to live across the street from a small grocery (Fresh & Easy). When the grocery store is across the street, you don't bother with a week's worth of groceries.
You just run over to get some things for dinner or for a couple of days. You can fit a surprising amount of food in a single grocery bag.
When the grocery store is just five minutes away on foot, you don't have to shop for the whole week. It essentially acts as an extension of your cupboard/fridge/pantry.
And long lines at the grocery store are an artifact of the city.
The walk to my grocery store is under 5 minutes. I shop every other day because I can shop before 7AM. But if I had to shop later than 7AM, I would only go once a week, because the lines grow too long.
It's also the case (though less true of families) that a lot of New Yorkers basically don't cook. Kitchens are generally tiny and there are a ton of restaurant/takeout options. (Plus lots of activities that many would prefer to spend their time doing rather than cooking.)
No. Because increased density goes with less reliance on individual cars. The majority of people (by far) in NY or SF don't have a car already. Traffic is not bad in the densest cities of the western world, because we have much more efficient ways of moving people around: public transit.
But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic.
Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.
About 30% of households in San Francisco do not own cars.[1] That's not the majority "by far." NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of households do not own a car (~56%). But "by far" still only really applies to Manhattan.
To be fair, of those in the outer boroughs of NY that do have a car, (anecdotally) they don't commute with it. From what I've seen, the car is for trips out of the city or occasionally getting something big home, or used as part of their job (Taxi, Contractor truck/van, etc).
In the most dense part of NYC, Manhattan, 73% of people don't have access to a car[1], which supports the idea that with more density comes less car dependence/ownership.
That doesn't surprise me much. A disproportionate percentage of new grads moving to Cambridge or Boston to live probably have a job there. Someone working out at 495 would maybe prefer to live in the city but they'd just as soon not have an hour commute each way every day.
Furthermore, recent students are used to dealing with not having cars in many cases--even if it can be inconvenient at times. In addition, Zipcar and Uber/Lyft/etc. absolutely make a difference at the margins if you don't need a car on a day-to-day basis.
But the biggest cities in the world have problems with foot traffic and subway traffic.
I'm not sure that they still employ "pushers" in Tokyo but they very well might.
And that's with the benefit of Japanese culture where people are generally clean and polite. Japanese density plus American social problems sounds hellish.
Yeah all this pro density hype comes off as coming from newbies to big dense cities. High density sucks for quality of life really quickly. Especially peak hours on the subway! I've learned I prefer medium density: walk to a shopping precinct for a commuter train to CBD and essential amenities. Weekends a small car to get about to social stuff, run errands, larger shopping trips, etc. You can have this even in suburban settings by planning well and keeping lot sizes smaller. Hardly exists in the US though.
To each their own I guess. I find being crammed in like that horribly uncomfortable and claustrophobic, to the point where I would rather walk than take a subway I know is going to be a sardine can.
I'm going to guess that you are male. Being female and stuffed into trains like that carries disadvantages when males feel free to pinch your rear. Females learn to hold their briefcase behind them while standing on the train.
I'm male, but I know it happens, regularly. When we were in a group, we always tried to put the females in the middle.
Long commutes and rush hour also sucks in low density suburban america too. I think a lot of the bad sides of high density living for people are unwanted solicitors, bad/old non-soundproofed housing and insecure shipping receiving.
> Long commutes and rush hour also sucks in low density suburban america too.
Depends on where you want to live. I lived in Dallas for just over 14 years and never had a commute that was over 30 minutes each way. Half the time I was there it was 15 minutes door-to-desk.
Now that I'm in the NYC area it's 1+ hour each way and I'm beholden to a bus or train schedule. I could cut it at the expense of increased rent and less space, but that is not a trade-off my wife and I are willing to make.
I don't follow. We don't need two cars here, but my monthly public transit outlay is a small car payment in itself. Were it not for the significant drop in car insurance rates, I would still be paying more for transportation than I did in Dallas (since the car I sold had been paid off for close to seven years).
I wouldn't project your preferences onto everyone. For instance, I vastly prefer being able to do stuff on my phone, even standing in a crowded bus, to driving behind the wheel not being able to do anything.
I can't imagine there wouldn't be, which is why a sane transit policy is also required. It's a slightly over-simplified but fairly-explanatory model to say that every mile traveled in a car is a failure of transit policy.
No because the size of roads in urban areas is fixed. Traffic will reach the carrying capacity of the roads and the incentives to drive get worse and worse and people will choose alternatives to driving.
If roads and highways are expanded then traffic will increase.
> So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction.
Seems likely that housing market insanity also puts political pressure on the zoning and permitting process to be more lenient with exceptions and approvals.
> the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it.
True but remember that the NYT, like any publication, isn't academic research or journal. It isn't 'graded' and doesn't succeed or fail on facts and accuracy. Almost the only job it has is in making interesting enough reading that will help them sell advertising. It's entertainment. Nobody (or at least no professional) is using it to make investment decisions. (Although actually I am sure that is perhaps the case but that's not the paper's responsibility).
NYT also has reputation. If they publish too many stories that are false/inaccurate their reputation falls and people with stop reading it. How low can they go before this happens is a question.
Reputation for facts and accuracy is the lifeblood for mainstream newspapers, because it attracts a specific demographic that they can charge a premium for the ad space. Degrading newspapers to the point of 'entertainment' is just fallacious
Agree, it's absurd that housing costs in these cities have been growing many times faster than GDP, wages, you name it for 20-30 years.
Now the second that the housing markets soften a bit and we might actually have a chance of catching up a little to where we should have been in terms of keeping cities affordable to more people, they're acting like we should just forget about the whole thing.
In this debate, we should look to cities in other countries. As I understand it, Paris/ Vancouver/ London/ Tokyo etc have never been subject to the "rule" that young couples move to the suburbs once they are ready to raise families. Nor are they subject to the rule that cities are dangerous and have bad schools. If we can fix schools and crime, like other civilized nations, then there is no reason to believe people will move out of cities once they reach a certain age.
Wow, this is a very categorical view that does not provide any additional data or useful information.
As somebody who a few years ago was looking to move to London and was getting depressed reading all sorts of alarmist comments I feel the need to respond. This place is wonderful!
Concrete data:
* I pay a bit over 1/8 of my salary (_excluding_ stock, I consider that extra) on rent. I live in a nice two bedroom apartment in zone 1 and share a room with my GF; the second bedroom is rented by a friend of ours.
* I walk to work; pay nothing for transport unless I want to go visit something. I don't own a car and don't need it.
* The culture is awesome. For example, I like music a lot and I constantly find stuff I love that I can see live. I go to at least one concert a month. I don't think there's another city that tops London on music (at least for the genres I like).
* The food is awesome, quality is way, _way_ better than anything I've had in the US. Super varied and affordable - there are plenty of street markets selling delicious food for £5-8 / portion during lunchtime in the week. I don't have catered food at work, but I think I would still prefer the street food.
* I didn't realise how _green_ the city is. There are a lot of trees, parks and nice places to walk around.
* The weather's nice enough that I can run outside a few days a week for the duration of the year. The summer's lovely and there are loads of places to spend time outside.
* I don't have kids and am not interested, in the short term at least.
* I was lucky enough not to need any medical assistance / GP services so can't comment on that.
Please stop with these baseless categorizations. I lived in Slough for almost a year so I understand that there are places less than perfect here but let's try and base the discussion on objective facts.
Median London salary is ~£35,000, or £2,247.27/month after tax - 1/8th of which is £280. Most people are paying a lot more than that, even for a room share, way outside of Zone 1. I would suggest yours isn't a representative financial situation.
> 1 bedroom apartment in bad areas where your car insurance will be at the highest cause of thefts etc costs around £250k.
> Towards central London you are looking at around £750-900k for an 1 bedroom apartment.
GBP 250 == USD 312
GBP 750 == USD 938
GBP 900 == USD 1124
Man, apparently rent is a LOT cheaper in the UK. Cause I'm positive you can't get a one-bedroom apartment in even the _worst_ parts of NYC or SF for $310 (not a single one I bet), and $900-$1100 for a one bedroom would be considered a deal in even the _worst_ parts of NYC or SF. (exceptions for long-time tenants with rent control)
A one-bedroom in NYC or SF is like $2000 and up. Way way up. A new construction-ish one-bedroom is going to start at $3000 (if you're 'lucky') and go way up.
Indeed, these rental prices are not typical of other US cities, just as I'm sure London is untypically high rent for the UK.
So my main takeaway is, woah, I had no idea rent was so cheap in London!
And I'm not sure people who don't live there (especially who live overseas) realize quite what we're talking about when we talk about how expensive rent has gotten in NYC or SF.
I believe he is talking about buying condos; those prices are in thousands of dollars. Based on friends of mine living in London, my understanding is that rent is much more expensive that that (and more or less in line with NYC rental prices).
Japan is pretty famous for having almost no crime. I doubt they're debating crime-fighting. Their main problems as a society seem to be workaholism and a lack of children, not crime or school quality.
Here in the US, crime has been falling steadily for decades now, and no one's really sure why. One big theory is that the elimination of leaded gasoline had a big effect: our population was suffering from low-level lead poisoning from all the lead in the air and environment. But crime here is of course still much, much worse than Japan. Crime in England is probably significantly worse, with the main difference being that you don't have to worry much about getting shot over there, but you have to worry a lot more about being mugged or knifed.
What's the reason, then? Looking at Appalachia and southern Italy, I don't see any reason to believe that ethnic/racial/cultural homogeneity is a magic bullet.
It's definitely not, proven by the examples you cited.
Where you get ultra-low crime is when you combine that homogeneity with good public education. Take a look at the education systems and levels in places like Japan or Norway, and then compare to Appalachia or Sicily or various middle eastern nations. Also look at the levels of religiosity.
But if good public education and low religiosity were the magic bullets, the Soviet Union would never have fallen; if homogeneity was necessary, Singapore wouldn't work and the Ottoman Empire would always have been dysfunctional; if high religiosity was bad in itself, Bavaria would be a hellhole. Some religions get in the way, others don't -- and some actively help to enrich their societies. (Zoroastrianism should come to mind. Rice was the staple crop of Persia before it was the staple of China, thanks to pious Zoroastrian agricultural research; and building an aqueduct or draining a swamp was a fast path to paradise. Down to the present, the Zoroastrians do pretty well for themselves -- the Parsis of India are the main population of Zoroastrians today -- and some of their habits of mind seem to still be present in Iran today.)
I've come to believe that the potential to rise in social position is what matters most, except possibly in Zoroastrian societies. Appalachia, Sicily (including lower-class parts of Boston), and the Middle East all agree that where you were born is where you'll stay, and that ambition is ridiculous or contemptible; while the healthiest societies are the ones where talent can bubble to the top even if you're not the judge's son.
My favorite example of the vitality that social mobility brings is the Ibo of Nigeria -- "the Jews of Africa", the most successful and energetic of West African peoples. Also look at the dynamic nature of the early Islamic world, compared compared to the stagnant nature of the modern one. And what's true of the Islamic world is equally true of the Iberian one; Brazil and West Virginia have the same basic problem. And back in the Middle Ages, too, it was the most fluid societies -- Lombardy, England, the Low Countries, and the Iberian states -- that were the most successful ones.
You make some great points, but for your Soviet Union point I'd like to counter that indoctrination does not equal "good public education". Good public education teaches you to question authority and to think critically. That kind of education is notably absent in authoritarian regimes.
Also, I never said that religiosity by itself would result in downfall of a society. Lots of religious societies have done well in history, but they also had relatively good education. The early Islamic world you mention I think qualifies here. It's when you combine religiosity with terrible education that you're really doomed. The education serves as a check against the religiosity getting out of control and turning into theocracy, or whatever you call the wackiness we're seeing in the right-wing here in America today.
The Soviets really did do a good job in some important areas. No one had taken the basic skills, the "three Rs", seriously in Russia before them; science and engineering were also pretty good (apart from Lysenko in biology), and while 20th-century culture was closed off, 19th-century was certainly accessible. (Hugo and Dumas were a big part of Soviet popular culture, not in the sense of "what the state sponsored" but in the sense of "what people actually read.") Insofar as critical thinking is a subset of logic, science and math taught at least a little of it, too. Understand that I'm not defending the Soviets as a whole -- I think they were mostly cancer, and that the historical record backs me up on that -- but deserve credit where credit's due.
I think that the American right is a unique sort of society, and that patterns drawn from their behavior can't be relied on in most other contexts. Their religions look like Christianity but act like non-syncretistic paganism ("worshiping oneself in the guise of worshiping God"), and their hostility to an awful lot of scholarship seems to originate in not wanting to be taken for a ride -- and in the confidence of many peoples, especially relatively backwards ones, that they already know everything that's necessary in order to live well. (The Persians told Chardin as much in the 1500s, as mentioned in The Structures of Everyday Life.)
Have you read Albion's Seed? If not (and it's about 600 pages of historical scholarship, so I won't blame you), look up Slate Star Codex's review, which makes the book's essential points in reduced (and maybe slightly caricatured) form.
Pretty much all the crime in rural areas is a side effect of drugs. There isn't enough anonymity in those areas to actually be a career criminal (other than dealing drugs).
These societies' problems are certainly not recent, and they're not just due to drugs. For Appalachia, read _Albion's Seed_ or at least Slate Star Codex's review ("the sensibility is positively Orcish"); for Sicily, read Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_ (watch for the section on "asabiyya black holes"), and probably _The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society_. Both of these societies have been absolutely awful for centuries.
It depends what you mean by "diverse". You could say Switzerland is diverse, they speak 3 languages there, but there is an essential Swissness that everyone generally agrees on. I believe the same is true of Japan. Maybe the word I actually wanted was somewhere between homogeneous and harmonious.
Um, no. It's FAR safer than the US, but not nearly as safe as Japan (but then, what is)? Comparing crime statistics is notoriously difficult due to differences in methodologies and reporting rates, but "homicide" is one statistic that has sufficiently uniform categorisation and reporting rate as to enable a comparison. Doing that, you can see that the US is about 4 times worse than the UK, and 13 times worse than Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Edit: perhaps the grandparent comment meant that crime in England was "a lot worse" than in Japan? If so, then yes that's true.
As you said, it's hard to compare because of methodology and such. Yes, the US looks bad when you average everything together, but that ignores that some places are very different from others. Basically, if you stay out of blighted urban districts ("ghettos"), you're far less likely to suffer from violent crime. Many of the homicides here are because of gang violence, something that really only affects gang members and people living around them.
If you take out areas with high crime in any country then of course the statistics look better.
Similarly of course it's possible to find areas in one country that are safer than areas in another country if you want to.
You're ignoring the fact that there's a huge racial division in the US. If you're a white person, gang warfare in the black or hispanic ghettos simply does not present a danger to you the way it does to those minorities. (Note I'm not saying these problems shouldn't be dealt with or that these minorities should be ignored or that the deserve it, just that this is the reality on the ground.)
From what I can tell, in European countries the divide isn't so stark and middle-class-and-up people are more likely to be victims of petty and street crime like muggings. Here, if you're a white suburban dweller, you just don't have to worry about being victimized in a mugging or carjacking very much, while in the ghettos you definitely do.
Moving students around schools in an attempt to equalize race and poverty levels isn't a new concept and it's been tried before (and possibly still done in some states/cities).
They tried forced busing of students to schools across the cities in Ohio back in the 70s and 80s to equalize school demographics. Parents moved in droves to the suburbs and Ohio cities only started recovering in the past 10 years after the program was ended in the 90s. No one wanted their children to go to a school 40 minutes away when there was a perfectly good one within walking distance.
If one still thinks this is a viable solution, how is it going to going to avoid the mistakes of previous attempts? Last thing the cities here need is a mass migration back to the suburbs when the cities have just started turning around.
You're absolutely correct - the average American theoretically believes that every child is entitled to a high quality, equal education, but in reality only if it doesn't cost them anything.
In light of that, there's very little that the state can do to force middle class families to stay in integrated school districts, and that issue destroyed integration efforts in the '70s and '80s in most of the northeast.
The real solution to the larger problem is probably a completely different education system, but the solution to this particular problem is to expand busing to the suburbs. If desegregation is the only solution to highly unequal educational outcomes, we simply need to pursue to greater lengths.
As you mentioned, I think the option of being able to move to districts that weren't integrated and combined the way many districts tend to be funded (via property taxes) ended up being a net loss more than a net gain. If the integration experiment showed positive results as some have mentioned, families could still move elsewhere and they did. Even if integration had been enforced statewide, one could still move to a small district with only a few schools.
Some districts like Columbus lost around 1/3 of their students over the 20 years they forced school integration. Ohio schools are funded by property taxes (not the best of ideas, but that's what the state decided), so Columbus was also forced to close many schools, cut back spending and likely hurt schools even further. It definitely hurt the city, since tons of buildings were left empty for years and no one had much of a reason to visit the city after 5pm.
> Moving students around schools in an attempt to equalize race and poverty levels isn't a new concept and it's been tried before (and possibly still done in some states/cities).
San Francisco assigns students to schools via a lottery. The result looks a lot like this.
Reintegration is a great plan for areas where a relatively few number of minorities live somewhat near middle income or better areas.
But in many major cities, the majority of children are already minorities. The white children who do live there are part of the upper middle class and their parents won't accept the downsides of re-integration. I see this in DC, parents either put their kids into private school, try to get a charter school, or leave the district for suburbia.
You could try to bus the kids to suburbia, but the logistics are tough. The suburban cities don't want it and fill fight it.
>You could try to bus the kids to suburbia, but the logistics are tough.
Well that's pretty hard to do in DC because now you're talking about crossing state lines. DC is a federal district, totally separate from Maryland and Virginia where the suburbs are. That's a lot harder than just busing kids from one school to another in the same district within the same state.
Fighting crime is not that much of a discussion topic in the "other civilized nations", because it is not as big a problem there. The US debate about crime might even be counter-productive as it bars the option to do things that have been shown to work (rehabilitation instead of punishment, reduction of poverty/inequality)
That's simply not true - there are a lot of people talking about rehabilitation over retribution and the role of poverty and inequality in crime. It's not barred by any means.
Also in e.g. Europe if you ask people how to better prevent crime many people probably would say to be tougher on criminals. The difference I guess is that crime is not really an issue often discussed in regards to politics.
One thing other civilized nations seem to do is fund schools/police at the state/nation level rather than the local level. Funding at the local level entrenches inequality.
I raised my kids in Tokyo for a year and it was painful (there are upsides too). One of the things I struggled with the most was that living in an apartment building made it very difficult to let my children run free. They'd have to head down 30 floors in an elevator and walk out to a busy street with nothing but concrete around. Living right outside Seattle now my kids open the door and are able to run in around in the neighborhood without us.
Not to mention, we had a 750 sqft, 2 bedroom apartment that cost $3,000 a month. It was a quality of life downgrade compared to living in the Seattle suburbs.
This is in very stark contrast to what I've heard that Tokyo is a city where children maintain a lot more freedom than western countries (especially the US) have moved away from[1].
When I visited it seemed true: lots of rather young kids walking around the streets on their own, tons of tiny mixed use roads for kids to freely and safely walk around in, etc. Heck, culturally they even have that Kid Tasks[1] show. It seemed a lot better for kids than NYC (where I live now), Silicon Valley (where I used to live), or small suburban towns in the south (where I grew up).
I'm also surprised you lived in a lived in a high-rise, famously uncharacteristic of Tokyo housing, which may imply you lived in a less family friendly district than the typical Tokyo resident.
Sure, when they are closer to 10 instead of being closer to 5 years old. My children were 5 and 6. They need to be 7 to take the train alone.
And yeah, I lived in Shinjuku 5 minutes walking from the largest subway in the world in terms of people going through and it and physical size. It was a busy area.
What were the locals doing in Tokyo? I think you may have been experiencing more an issue of being an outsider (and possibly being shunned a bit for that) than of actually experiencing an insurmountable issue.
They were doing the same as us with children who were around 5 years old -- going to to parks, playgrounds, and other organized activities -- it was all organized and controlled. Many locals complained to me about how exhausting it was to have kids in Tokyo and didn't enjoy it.
I never felt like an outsider at all, that wasn't an issue. The issue was that you have to make a daily effort to get your kids outside whereas in the suburbs here in Seattle, they can just go outside when they want. That's not an issue once your kids get older, but at 5 and 6 it's a little early to let them run around Shinjuku. It would have been easier if we lived outside the Tokyo center.
Seattlite here. I know people who have moved here and left because they couldn't deal with the darkness, people who are here and the darkness doesn't bother them, and people (like me) who actually love the climate including the large amount of dark days.
The dark is a real thing. It is not just the rain. It's more the large number of overcast days plus the very short days during winter months.
Whether or not it bothers you is a different matter. As far as I can tell, it's practically a biological thing. The lack of light just gets under some people's skin while others aren't bothered by it. Ask yourself, do you find gloomy days draining: oppressive clouds looming overhead, color washed out of everything, can't go outside, cold, wet? Or do you find them energizing: turbulent sky looking different every day, you snuggly in the warm light inside, doing creative stuff on a rainy day at home, or bundling up and getting refreshed by the cool breeze and rain spray?
If you're more the former, Seattle will suck your soul out and drown it in Puget Sound. If the latter, you'll love it.
Personally, it's a great fit for me. I love the contrast in weather between the summer and winter months. When it's miserable out, I love nothing more than settling in under warm lamplight and reading or coding. I can't imagine living somewhere arid. I would dry out like a frog on a hot windshield.
If you're considering moving here, I would suggest renting for a year. If you make it a full 12 months and don't feel oppressed by the climate at all, you should be fine.
Can confirm the darkenss is more of a thing than rain. Rain is easy to fix, you throw on a wind breaker. Also rain is easier to deal with than snow that other places have. The darkness on the other hand, especially if you work can be hard. Sun up at like 8:15 and down by 4:30 can be easy to miss if you spend your time in an office. Then you live the summer months and you think: "This place is perfect".
The winter is Seattle is best spent hopping from coffee shop to coffee shop and getting snug with blankets.
I have no issue with it. We get an amazing summer each year, several months of straight sunshine. I like that the weather changes and we have a variety of weather. 30 minutes from my home to snow skiing in the winter. My only issue is that it's never really warm enough to swim, though you can if you don't mind cold water.
>My only issue is that it's never really warm enough to swim, though you can if you don't mind cold water
Surely there's indoor swimming pools you can go to. In that climate, it seems to be stupid to even bother building an outdoor swimming pool.
Of course, if you're talking about the ocean/sound, there's not much you can do there, but I never hear people in the Northeast complaining about it rarely being warm enough to swim at the beach. I doubt the water's ever warm in Maine either.
If you like open water swimming, invest in a wetsuit. I lived in Seattle for 7 years - a 2mm or 3mm thick wetsuit should make the water quite comfortable.
It's a matter of preference. Wetsuits keep you warm when the water is cold. I find them more enjoyable for that reason, but if you're the type that likes cold water then you'll probably find them restrictive.
It depends on the season. Sunny weather sucks in the winter. When it is cloudy in the winter the weather is nice and mild, when it is sunny it gets bitterly cold. I would take cloudy over sunny any day during the winter. Of course, I'm someone who prefers it to be overcast. The worst part of the year, for me, is the summer when it is hot (80s and 90s) and sunny for months on end. That sucks. The best seasons are the fall and spring when the temperatures are warm and it is partly cloudy.
I remember somebody once posted a weather map of the country here, where he defined an ideal day and counted the number for each area. Seattle actually did pretty well, though this is coming from a Maine resident, so pretty much everyone else wins.
They very much do in London these days. Unless you are a banker or a lawyer you aren't going to be owning a family size home in London. London has good train links to the surrounding counties so 30 somethings have been fleeing the capital to setting down along the commute routes.
With a couple of notable exceptions schools and crime aren't really problems in most American cities. NYC, for example, is one of the safest places in the world and has very good schools. People leave when they have families because of the cost of housing.
Other OECD countries do not have Gen Y that is as big as US, looking at other countries may not help that much beyond a point.
>>>If we can fix schools and crime, like other civilized nations, then there is no reason to believe people will move out of cities once they reach a certain age.
If it was an easy prop, it would have been achieved, may be you should see "The Wire Season 4" to get an idea!
What is hard is getting people to admit they're wrong. It's so very easy to see that there's rotten stuff in US society, but nobody wants to face it, that's it. The data is clear, european social democracies are better socially developed than the US is(and I don't mean it like I think have it all figured out and they're awesome, just that they've been able to do some sensible stuff, shit that should be just common sense not the saint graal for fucks sake), they have absurdly lower crime and misery rates, are better educated, this is a fact. IMHO it's not the matter of being "easy/hard", it's the matter of "political will", if there were will, it would be easy, since there is not, it becomes "impossible".
It is very common for Vancouverites to move to the suburbs when them want to raise children. The public schools are definitely better in many of the suburbs, and the crime is much lower in the wealthy suburbs than near the city's center.
Vancouver definitely does this. Young couples looking to start families cannot afford to live in the downtown core now, and move to areas like Victoria or Kelowna instead.
Vancouver isn't a good example. Families are fleeing the city for several reasons, ranging from impossibly high cost of living, the low probability of finding a 2+ bedroom apartment, and the unavailability of childcare.
Incidentally, Vancouver also used to be a city where people would flee to the suburbs when starting a family. At least, it was before the suburbs became just as comically unaffordable as the city.
The criminality in Paris and surroundings is 2x to 3x the average of the country (including Paris).
Also rent in cities like Paris is prohibitive for most families. There is also the problem that in Paris, as in smaller-but-still-large cities, large apartments have been divided into several smaller ones to make more profit for the landlords. So it is even more difficult to just find a large apartment, supposing you could afford it.
Even in the US, it isn't the rule. Basically the baby boomers did it and that's it. I guess that could be expected of their unsustainable IGMFY generation, but go one generation in either direction and you'll find plenty of aging people who have stayed in their cities. Suburbanization was a trend that peaked at McMansions and has been returning to normalcy ever since.
He says "exurb" like it's a McMansion ultra-suburb, but then the words "town center" "walk around" "business" come up, so isn't it actually a small city?
Living with roommates and living in small quarters as well as spending half of your money on housing is okay when you are single and having fun exploring your self and your potential and direction --but once people have children equations change and living in the city becomes less possible --mostly because of the lack of "family-centric" housing stock --whether detached units or multi-bedroom condos and apartment units along with city amenities for kids as well as good school systems. In SF, for example, bad school districts is a very big reason for people to leave for better districts --some parents of means will remain but put their kids in private schools, obviously that does not scale.
When you say bad school districts in SF, you mean the one district, right? SF school assignment is a (failed social experiment) lottery system where your kids can be assigned anywhere in the city, regardless of the fact that you live a block from a school.
Most parents leave SF because they don't want their kids being part of a failed social experiment. The SF USD has been playing social scientist since the 1970s with disastrous results.
Want to make it better? Kick the DINKs off the school board and make having an enrolled child a requirement for being on the board.
Yes, the lottery system which can land your kid who lives one block away from their preferred school but gets assigned to a school on the other side of town and 45 mins away in traffic is one big red flashing migraine for many parents.
Yet another good reason to not bother having kids.
Honestly, if I found a partner who wanted kids, I'd be looking really hard at finding a job in another country because this country (US) is a terrible place to raise a kid.
California is notorious for having poorly run schools. For good schools look in Massachusetts. If you look at the BOS metro area they tend towards the top of the school systems nation-wide. It's hard to find poorly run schools in the BOS metro area --occasionally you get a few complaints from people unhappy with blue-collar[1] pupils getting pushed into regional schools in good districts.
[1] mostly white but from non-professional families.
That may be, but in many states (probably any place urban or suburban), you still have to worry about getting arrested if you let your kid walk to school or play outside by himself.
> they don't want their kids being part of a failed social experiment.
Indeed. You don't see much investigation on the consequences of these experiments; the state is rarely introspective. If there was any bigger accelerant to the white flight phenomena in the 70's than the `integration' experiment I've never heard of it. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and when it was decided that Detroit (and therefore many other big urban school districts) couldn't force surrounding suburbs to participate in the experiment (Milliken v. Bradley) the fate of that city and many others was sealed.
"SF school assignment is a (failed social experiment) lottery system where your kids can be assigned anywhere in the city, regardless of the fact that you live a block from a school."
I am well aware of this policy and have been for a long time.
AND YET, I still get mortified and upset every time I am reminded of it. It's mind-bogglingly bad policy. My children are not in SFUSD but even still, I feel like I should work politically against this policy just to make the world a (much) better place.
Don't live in SF, but I fail to see how that's inherently bad. It is inconvenient, for sure. But if the school a block from you was terrible and the school your child was randomly assigned to was amazing there would be no problems, right? Doesn't this system simply incentivize all schools to become good?
I do bet, though, that this experiment stemmed from people taking over the areas where the good schools were. You'd just be switching problems, though, by allowing people to go to schools they're geographically adjacent to. See school district boundaries.
When the school is on the other side of town the parents get involved in the students life and education less. They drop them off and pick them up and that's about as far as the interaction goes --they don't go to school functions, PTA activities, or other activities. There is more involvement from parents of kids who live close to the schools and they demand more from the system.
I still think you'd just be trading one problem for another. In the case that you have to live close then you would have to be wealthy enough to live close to a school that has activities and after school functions, etc, worth going to. The only people who'd be OK with that are obviously the people who either (a) already live close, or (b) can easily afford to move close to the better schools (of course the rich can always just send their kids to private schools, as well).
Poor people would prefer randomness since they're unlikely to get a top tier education for their kids anyway. Randomness gives them a chance. People wealthy enough to care but not wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools, on the other hand obviously won't like this: they'd prefer to guarantee their kids educational security via money.
Poor people also prefer schools nearby, or some place you don’t need 90 minutes and 2 bus transfers to go to school.
What has been improving San Francisco schools (e.g. Balboa High School) was Asians taking over. Which is not a preferable mechanism, in many ways.
What would make San Francisco schools even better is to be able to afford to hire more teachers. The naive approach is to pump more money into the district, and we really should reform Proposition 13 of 1978, but a more practical approach would be to legalize housing construction, so teachers wouldn’t have to compete so much for non-luxury housing with firemen and nurses and service workers and homeless crackheads.
>would be to legalize housing construction, so teachers wouldn’t have to compete so much for non-luxury housing with firemen and nurses and service workers and homeless crackheads.
Serious question here: Why do teachers, firemen, and nurses need non-luxury housing? Why do they need housing at all in fact? If they can't afford to live in SanFran, wouldn't it make more sense for them to just stay out, and go live somewhere else?
For getting people to do those jobs, then places in SF would then need to pay them a princely sum to endure a long commute from other nearby cities. Or if that's too much, SF can simply go without firemen, teachers, and nurses and many other service workers. Surely that would quickly fix the housing problem in SF.
Not directly answering your question, but Lowell HS[1] is the only high performing public HS in SF. Its admission is performance-based and is mostly Asian (56+%).
You end up with universally bad schools instead of good and bad schools. Most parents would see that as a bad thing and the very rich pull their kids out and send them to private schools (which cost $30k+/year). So now you're left with bad schools and the rich have exercised their escape option. The result is a high school population where 80% of students live in public housing. I'm not a classist, but that's not the diversity most parents look for.
To balance it out, you would need some sort of region wide tax on private school attendance. If you want to opt out, you gotta pay. That would never happen so...back to the drawing board.
> To balance it out, you would need some sort of region wide tax on private school attendance. If you want to opt out, you gotta pay. That would never happen so...back to the drawing board.
I don't understand this. That tax already exists; everyone [0] pays for public schools regardless of whether they have children in the system. If you send your children to private school, you are paying for both public and private school. If you don't have children at all, you are still paying for public school.
[0] Of course, "everyone" likely means "every property owner", as school taxes are usually property taxes.
Money isn't the problem (sans disastrous allocation policies like No Child Left Behind). There are dozens of compounding network effects that can make or break a school district and having students with wealthy families is an important one that benefits all students. Wealthy families have more money and time to get involved with the teachers, district governance, PTAs, fund raisers, and extracurricular activities that benefit all students, rich or poor. A large number (maybe even majority) of Catholic private schools, for example, make less per student than public schools but they're often leaps and bounds better than most public schools.
When my public high school in a wealthy LA suburb faced steep budget cuts in the million of dollars during 2009-10, the booster club diverted more than half of the $5 million dollars that they had just raised from donors (families and alumni) for a new fake grass football and baseball field. This saved dozens of teachers, extracurriculars, and even some AP/IB programs. When the music program was cut district wide, dozens of stay at home and working parents got together and saved it by writing grants and running fundraisers (which they have to do every year now). Despite being low-middle class and having single parents who worked all the time, many of my classmates and I were able to participate in anything we wanted to because we could get second hand sports equipment and donations to cover expenses from team members' families. We always had a classmate who had a car or a parent with free time to drive us around, take us to college visits, and help us with science fair projects or model rocketry competitions. Even a few wealthy students can drastically change the support and infrastructure poorer students have access to and it makes a big differences (it certainly did for me).
Which is why we need to fight the concept of "school vouchers" - the idea that if you don't go to public school you should get your share of the public school cash to help pay for private school.
Funnily enough this is already done in Sweden, since a long time ago. A social-democrat country, would you believe it!
It is also the same for health care and elderly homes. It is going to be one of the biggest election questions next year because the social-democrat will try to go for a "profit cap" on private companies in these sectors, because they are founded with tax money.
Why fight it? It seems only fair that poor people get the same option to choose good schools for their children that rich people get. I honestly don't see what possible argument there is against it.
The idea is that public schools should be made good, the government should not be reducing the use of public schools. A good public schooling system is incredibly important for a functioning democracy, because a functioning democracy relies on a well educated citizenry.
> A good public schooling system is incredibly important for a functioning democracy, because a functioning democracy relies on a well educated citizenry.
A good schooling system is necessary, but must it be public?
It's important that it be affordable to everyone, regardless of wealth. If it's private with public funding and a profit motive, that messes things up pretty hard - see what's been happening with college tuitions and unlimited lines of public credit.
> It's important that it be affordable to everyone, regardless of wealth.
That's the whole point of giving each child's parents that child's share of public-education funds.
> If it's private with public funding and a profit motive, that messes things up pretty hard - see what's been happening with college tuitions and unlimited lines of public credit.
Teachers' and administrators' salaries are private profits from public funding, too.
You are, of course, correct that private schools would see the voucher amount as a price floor.
I think that there are bigger issues with collegiate funding, which have to do that people borrow from their futures (backed by public funds) in order to pay for near-term benefits for themselves. I'd have lived much more frugally in college had I internalised that I'd be paying those funds back.
There are plenty of good public schools. If everyone deserves a good school, then we need to make all schools good, not drain everyone away from one system and into another.
It wouldn't be draining money, since public schools would get money per-student just like private schools do (conversely, why does the local public school get to count private-school students in its catchment area?). And you're assuming that it's possible to make all public schools good, which from what I can tell is roughly impossible to do given American political realities.
Vouchers could also be said to be a mechanism for letting lower class families receive the same private school education that the rich can already buy.
They won't cover it. For example California pays about 10k per student per year on public education. Private schools in California cost 20 to 30k per student per year.
How come? The tax base rate resets at the time of the transaction, and California real estate market is very robust with both new construction and resales. Many California markets have not (or have barely) recovered to pre-2008 levels, if you look at San Bernardino, Modesto or Fresno counties, also anywhere east of Sacramento and parts of Central California where property value is derived from agricultural land value, which did not do well under drought.
The only people who are freeloading under Prop 13 are those who owned their property for 20+ years, and they are freeloading in a very special way where they have been paying those property taxes for 20+ years to build those neighborhoods into desirable areas.
Except that the exemption can be inherited by descendants indefinitely, creating an ever-increasing windfall for (what amounts to) a tax-privileged bloodline.
When Prop 13 reached the Supreme Court, one justice noted the feudal character:
"These disparities are aggravated by § 2 of Proposition 13, which exempts from reappraisal a property owner's home and up to $1 million of other real property when that property is transferred to a child of the owner. This exemption can be invoked repeatedly and indefinitely, allowing the Proposition 13 windfall to be passed from generation to generation. ...
"Such a law establishes a privilege of a medieval character: Two families with equal needs and equal resources are treated differently solely because of their different heritage."
I am too young to remember the pro- and con- arguments concerning this proposition, but it's a little surprise 75.7% of the voters approved.
Looking at a larger picture, cash-starved municipalities are not that exciting to live in, with their dilapidated roads, aging infrastructure, poor public service coverage as far as police, firefighting, libraries and parks, as well as underfunded (and probably underperforming) school districts.
So isn't the issue self-correcting long-term? Places with a larger proportion of Prop 58 exemptions eventually run themselves into the ground, while places with tons of new construction and healthy resale market tax themselves into a nice school district and well-paved roads?
The answer is not as clear-cut as the article makes it to be, as commercial real estate is divided into roughly three groups - residential, commercial proper (e.g. shopping centers, office buildings, entertainment parks, hospitals) and industrial.
The residential owners probably would have no problem with losing Prop 13 protections, as any increases can be passed on to the willing renters. They are likely to lobby for small things, such as delaying assessments by a few months in order to raise rents and process vacancies properly. (Current California law stipulates 30- and 60-day notices for rent increases, so the timing on property tax increases and rent increases needs to be synchronized in some manner).
Things get trickier with commercial and industrial tenants. The big guys know of their power to change the attractiveness and commercial viability of entire plazas and neighborhoods. Therefore if you come out to Costco or Whole Foods or Simon Malls or Wal-Mart and ask them to build out presence in a major way, they would not want to be victims of their own success. From their point of view the value of the area increased only due to a significant long-term investment from their wallet, and they should not be penalized for it.
If the municipality doesn't like it, they're welcome to either build out the facilities themselves or just attempt to raise property taxes on the gas station, laundromat and a liquor store that are the current active tenants of the blighted area.
Yep, I was driving at that. Cities have very little leverage in dealing with commercial operators (I suppose the bigger the city is and the smaller the vendor is, the greater the leverage), therefore no city councilman spends their time fretting over potential revenue losses from commercial property taxes.
It's far easier and time-efficient for the city to chase sales tax revenue (by attracting large retailers), residential property tax revenues (by building denser housing) and revenue from various licensing and permitting activites.
I agree with your point there, particularly that cities will look for regressive sales tax rather than property tax.
But the effective elimination of property tax on commercial real estate vs. residential real estate also has the problem of hugely distorting the market. When I was looking for office space for my startup around ~2010, there was enough empty commercial space to for every resident to have 200 sq. ft.!
Meanwhile, residential housing stock is so low that the rental market is largely driven by personal acquaintances. I remember calling numbers for 30 ads, and only getting a response from one, because they were like "hey I know that guy!"
This is also a zoning issue. But commercial real estate acts like an investment, and if empty commercial real estate is profitable to hold on to because rents are low and taxes are low, it makes it impossible for a market to properly switch between the two, even when all that commercial real estate can be zoned as acceptable for residential use.
In any case, I see no reason why commercial real estate should be taxed less than residential real estate, unless it would be desirable to distort the market in that way. (And depending on other forces it definitely could be. I just know that Prop 13 is a really bad deal for my county's economy, and don't know why the State should have the power to override the county or city on this.)
i agree with you, and it should be pointed out that prop 13 essentially prevents the state from literally kicking out everyone who can't afford to pay taxes on a home that's now valued at 5-10x what they bought it for, i.e. pretty much everyone that was here before the year 2000.
> [0] Of course, "everyone" likely means "every property owner", as school taxes are usually property taxes.
everyone pays property taxes, but only property owners pay it directly. for everyone else it is hidden in the costs of goods and services that required real estate.
The winning bid for a house is from someone who can afford to pay $1000/mo, and there are no property taxes. The house sells at whatever mortgage $1000/mo buys.
Now, add $200/mo of property taxes. The winning bidder now pays whatever mortgage $800/mo buys, since there's nobody who wants to pay $1001/mo overall for it (otherwise they'd have won the other bid).
Taxes on the unimproved value of land are pretty much equivalent to seizing ground rents. That doesn't really make things more expensive.
Indeed, but if you send your kids to private school (or your social peer group does), then you have a counter incentive against supporting the public schools with your tax money and your political empowerment.
This happens with daycare (which is mostly private) and higher education (with private universities having a massive presence), and the society has yet to collapse.
The idea that it's perfectly fine to go to a a private institution years 0-6 and years 18-22+, but the 6-18 range is categorically and unequivocally better served by public institutions has not really been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
I don't think that I made any such claims. But to note a difference between those age groups, 6-18 is the only one for which we've declared a right to access for everybody at the present time. (At the very least, it's in the constitution of some states). The only way I can think of to ensure available capacity is to provide a public option. So I'm interested in how the public schools are managed.
I agree access is important, and it's interesting to see public school unions fight against charter, magnet and private schools in order to restrict that access.
With that said, notice how the distribution of private schools per capita drops significantly in highly-rated public school districts. There's simply no demand for them.
The private-vs-public battle only plays out in low-rated school districts, with one party holding the distinct advantage of being un-fireable.
I'm not sure how this is related to my comment. With that said, I suspect that religion dwarfs any other factor driving the demand for private schools.
In my state, the union definitely does not oppose private schools, and the magnet high school in my district is a union shop. The union opposes the state's growing voucher school program, but proponents of vouchers talk in "access" terms while promoting a barely concealed sectarian agenda. So once again, religion is a driving factor. Meanwhile, the union has been barred from collective bargaining on "working conditions" that include things like tenure. So, the ways that public school teachers can be fired, is at the mercy of the state legislature right now.
So far the voucher schools have under-performed public schools in the same districts, despite being given advantages such as more latitude in hiring and firing, and the ability to reject handicapped kids.
In my opinion, "involved" parents means educated, empowered parents. We are in a sense the guardians of the school system, and when we vanish, the schools go downhill.
It's not just helping out in the classroom and joining committees. Educated parents know what good education looks like (or at least, we have an opinion in the matter). We know when to demand better. We know when we need to thwart a pedagogical fad. My hometown school eventually adopted algebra in 8th grade, and calculus in high school, because a few parents hounded the school board. Simply by being around, we see what's going on. To be fair, we also support school programs when they work. And we also know how to demand resources, for instance by supporting funding referenda at the local level.
The problem with schools in the US could be expressed by saying that somebody has to stand in as the guardian of the schools, but we don't know who or how.
IMHO, it's because bad students are like bad apples: they spoil the entire barrel. Randomly mixing your students ensures that every school has a fine selection of each of the types of bad students, with the expected result that every good student's education is negatively impacted.
Selective schools, OTOH, can attempt to select against bad & disruptive students.
Lack of parent investment and activity in school functions because the school is 40 minutes across town (in a city that is hostile to car use). Oh and if you have multiple kids, they can be sent to different schools.
If the parents are upset, they won't be involved and you get bad schools.
Also the (working) parents are tired and drained after work -all they want to do is pick the kids up and take them back home. They have little energy for any Parent-teacher meetings, functions, fund-raisers, etc.
Crosstown assignments are detrimental to parental involvement in education.
Interesting. I thought the assignments were random, though? Assuming a normal distribution most parents shouldn't have a 40 minute across town commute.
I don't understand why this would be the case either. Even if all the rich people send their kids to private school, there is still a middle class population who will not be able to spend $30k a year to send their kids to private school. Plus, not all kids will get selected to go to school across the city from where they live. Some portion will randomly be selected to go to school nearby, so their parents can attend events. I am not saying the random selective policy is good or bad, I just think universally bad schools has to be the product of something else. Perhaps just general bad management of the school by the superintendent?
> Since all of the jobs are in the city, they are optimizing commute times
I find that funny, because in Texas, the jobs are all in the suburbs and are rapidly moving farther out into the suburbs and even the exurbs.
I live in the suburbs of Dallas, and of the four jobs I've had, I've commuted further out into the suburbs for three of them. Only one of my jobs was in the city. And the number of jobs in the suburbs are growing: we've had some big-name companies relocate their headquarters from other states to Dallas suburbs like Plano and Frisco, and one big-name company that used to be headquartered in Downtown Dallas just moved their headquarters to Irving, another suburb of Dallas.
Also, my current employer is based in an inner-ring suburb (Plano) and there's been talk of how we're probably going to outgrow our office in a couple of years, and from what I've heard we're very likely to relocate to an exurb.
> The burbs housing stock are all 40+ year old homes that need significant system updates
This doesn't apply to Texas either. Most of the suburbs, and especially the exurbs, were built in the last 30 years or so, and a good amount of them were built in the last 10-20 years (e.g. everything in Prosper and Celina is very new development). Most of what's now suburb and exurb was farmland when I was a kid, and I'm only 32.
The same is true of Phoenix. A lot of large employers like Intel and Wells Fargo and startups like Infusionsoft have campuses in what is typically considered a suburb, like Scottsdale or Chandler. I'd personally much rather live in a suburb then a "cool" city center. I've done both and I enjoy the peace, quiet and space more than being able to walk to buy groceries.
I agree, I recently moved from Seattle to the suburbs. It's nice to be able to go places and get groceries without it being a production that takes a bunch of planning.
Boston is really a mix. There are some startups and, increasingly, satellite offices in Boston/Cambridge of both local and west coast companies. Plus biotech/pharma in Kendall Square of course. But the main offices of a lot of the local tech and tech-related employers are still out on the 128 and 495 corridors as they've been for decades.
Austin is no different from the rest of Texas. I have friends in Austin; the way they describe Pflugerville, it sounds exactly like Plano or Richardson. Dell's corporate campus is in Round Rock, too.
Yeah, the city center is full of hipsters, but the suburbs are indistinguishable from those of Dallas and Houston.
Same in almost every city in France. Sometimes a small pole of office buildings has been built near the main railway station, but everything else is in the close suburbs because land and thus office surface is cheap there, and that's all what matters for companies. So everybody spends hours commuting from the city to the suburb, or from a suburb to another suburb.
> mostly because of the lack of "family-centric" housing stock --whether detached units or multi-bedroom condos and apartment units
So...what kind of housing stock accommodates people living with roommates? The exact same 2/3/4 bedroom apartments that young single people share are the ones that families need. If the issue is that 4 single people with jobs can outcompete a couple with 3 kids, then the problem is with the total quantity of housing stock, not the mix.
If you look at the new housing stock coming on-line there is a dearth of "family" housing stock --most units have DINKs in mind. they have bikes in mind, not strollers. Yoga space, not daycare, an open floor plan with no child's room, etc.
New families don't have the income to pay what 3/4/five professionals can pool together to afford that 2/3/4 bedroom flat.
The last time I went searching for apartments in the Seattle metro area there were /mostly/ 2 bedroom units. Even the nicer unit I'm currently in is a failure as far as sound-proofing goes.
Some market regulation, like with fire codes, would really help with improving quality of life by raising privacy and encouraging larger unit-plan apartments.
Please no. Regulations should exist for safety and dealing with externalities. Regulating sound-proofing is neither of those and would expand government overreach without enough benefit.
The idea there would be that it's one of those things that's hard for consumers to evaluate in the time they have to evaluate it, because a walkthrough doesn't provide a representative sample. For example, you probably won't know how frequently ambulances take the road next to that apartment in the middle of the night.
Dealing with information asymmetry is one of the big functions of consumer protections laws, and is one of the useful functions of government.
The externality is on the customer who didn't factor the noise into their value calculation, because it's hard to judge before you live there for a while. So because they don't bear the cost of inadequate soundproofing, developers will tend towards the cheapest option.
I'm still not convinced by this or either of the other replies. Safety issues I should be protected from by the government. "It's loud" is something I should walk away from after my lease is up without the government ever being involved. Some people appreciate cheaper options even if they are louder and there isn't a good reason to have the government prevent them from being allowed to take those options.
I wouldn't object to some kind of noise rating system instead. The point is just that soundproofing is not something people can judge effectively during viewings, so it doesn't get priced effectively by the free market. Maybe a noisier property will have slightly higher turnover, but the rental price will probably not be noticeably affected.
Codes mandate minimum insulation levels and fireproofing between neighboring units already, and the same measures for both also tend to reduce sound transmission. Requiring insulation between neighboring units isn't much of a stretch.
> mostly because of the lack of "family-centric" housing stock
An interesting anecdote: I live in Little Rock, AR, which, as I'm sure you're thinking, is just a booming urban metropolis. I don't know what is different about the city here, but every single apartment, townhouse, etc. is very clearly built with a family in mind. There's always a master bedroom and a child bedroom. (It was very frustrating when apartment hunting with a friend since neither of us were ever pleased with the child room.)
If I had to speculate, it's likely that the vast majority of people who can afford to live downtown are older. The city has a growing tech scene, but most of its employees are middle aged.
There's no rule that says that rich cities will continue to have bad schools. To take one counter example, there are plenty of well-off parents in NYC who send their kids to public schools because New York has built a number of public schools that are good (not enough, to be fair, but enough that there are plenty of families here). The same could happen in San Francisco.
It could, but who is going to push for this change? SF has an extremely low proportion of families (fewest children of any major city). Are single millennials and DINKs going to make this a priority?
Of course, but given that in the SF example, at least, the proportion of the pop under 18yoa is very low, so that more or less will result in fewer resources dedicated to education. If the proportion under 18yoa of people were increasing we'd see an investment for the future --but given the characteristics of housing stock in SF, we're not likely to see the proportion of under 18yoa increase significantly in the near future.
Why is it that suburban living is so much cheaper? It's never been clear to me why that should be the case (from first principles).
With the greater density (3x according to [1]), you'd expect lower utilities, transportation, etc. costs. "Shelter" (i.e., housing minus utilities, furniture, etc.) is typically only a bit more than transportation as a category of spend, and about 1/5 of total annual expenditures.[2]
I've read claims that suburban property taxes are artificially low (mainly on articles on HN, but can't seem to find any right now) and obviously funding highways and commuter rail out of general taxes subsidizes sprawl.
I wonder how this cost comparison would look from a balance of system perspective as is, and then what a higher land tax would do. Has anyone seen or done anything like this?
It's not cheaper. It's just that people don't factor in the dramatically increased transportation costs.
Metro Vancouver studied this and found that when transportation costs were factored in, car reliant outer suburbs became more expensive than "pricy" downtown and inner suburbs.
That study assumes a lot (suddenly you have a 2 car household if you live in the suburbs vs 0 cars in the city?), looks at averages, analyzes two things that people spend money on, and only considers Vancouver and its suburbs.
That's not quite enough to support the blanket statement "living in the suburbs is not cheaper than living in a city."
As someone who's in this situation right now, I can guarantee you that moving out of my city is the frugal option.
The article mentions two car household etc but the actual data comes from the national census where people simply report how much they spend on transportation. There's no assumptions made about what people's commutes are or what their transportation mode is. People just spend more on transport in the suburbs.
The reason is for this is because many of these suburbs are wholly designed for the car and that's the only viable transportation option for anything and the car is the most expensive form of transportation.
I think that depends on how well the transportation is in the city. Me and my wife would have no reason to have cars in New York City, but we lived in Atlanta for a few years and public transportation is not a viable option unless you are willing to take an hour or two to get anywhere not directly on one of the few train lines so transportation costs are less than $100 more for the gas to go into town from the burbs.
Anecdotally: I moved from Midwest suburbs into a coastal major city. I sold off my car when I did so. Even with the raised prices on things like rent, food, etc, I still couldn't figure out why I had so much money left over. I thought I was forgetting to pay a bill. Turns out, owning a car was much more expensive than I'd realized. I ended up saving quite a bit more by living in the "expensive" city.
But most of the major cities that I've been to in the US don't have a decent public transportation system. If they would fix this, then people could become less reliant on cars.
Well, sure, but supply of what and demand of what? Housing? Like I said, that's only about 20% of the average American's spending. But why does demand outpace supply so much in cities? Is it that building apartments and condos is so much more expensive than building suburban homes? And if so, by how much (seeing as it's only 20% of the total)
>But why does demand outpace supply so much in cities?
Some cities. (And, more specifically, some parts of some cities.) I'm sure it's not hard to find inexpensive housing in many areas of Detroit, to give one example.
It really boils down to demand and land value, which is a particular problem in cities that can't just spread out further.
You can devise the cost of real estate based on two main factors outside of square footage in the US. The average income of nearby employment and quality of schools.
Suburbs are much, much, much cheaper than urban areas when they are not near high income employment or have quality school districts. Suburbs near(meaning commute time) high income employment and quality schools are as expensive, if not more expensive as urban areas when controlled for square footage.
Is transportation really less? If you can take public transit (including walking) it is. However most people live with some sort of family (traditionally husband and wife and 2.5 kids). That means dad and mom both needs to have jobs accessible by public transit, and the schools need to be good enough. If any of the above fails your transit is more expensive: you have to pay for parking for your personal car(s) which is not cheap.
> Why is it that suburban living is so much cheaper?
Because density costs a lot of money.
Density raises land values, which costs residents more money. Density requires better construction and better construction materials, which costs residents more money. Density allows for better serviced neighborhoods (closer to retail, closer to public services, closer to amenities), which are more desirable, which costs residents more money. Transportation becomes more expensive (once you factor in opportunity cost) which costs more money. Taxes are higher, to support extra services suburbs don't have or need, which costs residents more money.
Density has lots and lots of great positive benefits, in terms of land use and environment and such. But it has a huge cost drawback, that most people ignore, and which drives much of the development of sprawl.
It's not that suburban living is cheap. It's just way cheaper than urban living, which is crazy expensive (even in "low-cost-of-living" Midwest cities, urban living is usually 2x to 3x the cost of the suburbs).
We could make living far out in the burbs less attractive by making commuting more expensive. However, at least here in Germany, people get tax breaks for commuting. I find that weird.
Transportation (highways) is highly subsidized. In some places; sewer/property taxes are less because they are built to never be dense. (ie septic instead of swer)
The problem is the American ideal of what a home looks like - detached from other buildings, front lawn, backyard, large kitchen, large living room.
Given the density in cities that you mention, properties like that simply don't exist or are outside of the reach of most people. Arguably, that's how it should be - most people shouldn't be able to live in expansive homes and work in urban environments, but that's the baseline we've setup for two generations now.
Several of my friends are considering moving from SF and other popular places on the peninsula to Half Moon Bay (or somewhere like it). When rent for your 2 bedroom apartment goes over $3,000, you notice that you are basically paying the equivalent of the monthly mortgage payment on a $750,000 house. Then, you realize you may be having kids in a few years and will probably want a small yard and no shared walls. Of course, you then must start saving like mad so you can get the ~$100k needed for the down payment on your $800k fixer upper.
Half Moon Bay seems like a good idea, until everyone starts having the same "good idea" as you and then the tiny back country roads coming into and out of Half Moon Bay turn a 45min commute into a 1h30min commute and you're back at square one.
These 'clever hacks' are not sustainable solutions to the bigger problem at hand.
>When rent for your 2 bedroom apartment goes over $3,000, you notice that you are basically paying the equivalent of the monthly mortgage payment on a $750,000 house.
Jesus Christ. It would be very difficult to even spend that much money on a house or apartment near where I live, outside Charlotte, NC.
True, it's not THAT much cheaper, but it's a place where can actually find a 3 bedroom / 2 bathroom standalone home for <$1M in the bay area that is within 45 minutes of most jobs. When you can only afford a $800k mortgage, your options are severely limited.
I find it interesting that people in this thread are quick to point out that you might not save much money when you move to the suburbs because of transit and extra time costs. I think people are failing to realize a large people do (and I plan to soon) move to the 'burbs is because they can OWN a house. Even if owning won't save money over renting, there's a lot to be said for having something that big to call your own. Something you can create your own lasting memories in.
My cousin (born in 1980; just barely on the Gen-X side of the line between Xers and Millennials) lives in Manhattan and has two kids. She told me not too long ago that she's planning on moving out to the suburbs pretty soon because they just don't have enough room. Their apartment is one of the smallest two-bedrooms I've seen, and it took some creative work to stick two cribs in the kids' room.
I doubt they'll still be living in the city by the end of this year.
Allow me to explain in plain English. People born in 1981-1999 are getting older and moving out of cities. Thus reversing a trend that was never meant to be ever-increasing.
On the surface, I agree with the author's reasoning that eventually many millennials will "grow-up" and want suburban homes for their kids with better schools. And this makes sense because it would follow trends in the past.
However the author is missing a couple key components that lead me to believe the future will not be like the past. For example...
1.) In the past there were suburbs to move to. For example, in the 80s and 90s, Contra Costa (Walnut Creek, Danville, etc) were being developed as a viable suburb to SF. However, as far as I know there are no new suburbs being developed that provide a reasonable commute time or distance from SF.
2.) Of the suburbs that exists, those that are a reasonable commute time from major hubs are still pretty expensive. Again Walnut Creek maintains its value quite well. So it's not really a "cheaper option" from the city.
3.) Baby Boomers are living longer and staying in their suburb homes longer, which doesn't give an opportunity for millennials looking to start a family to move in. I've long since thought that instead of building new suburbs, we should be looking for options to move empty-nesters from their 4-bedroom homes that they don't need anymore. All of my friends parents still live in their suburban homes because they have no other options for the most part.
4.) Author assumes all millennials are waiting to have kids. (They're not.)
5.) We have plain old population growth to rely on. Cities collapsed in the past because there were places for people to go and a relatively smaller population. I strongly feel that we've exhausted a lot of those options while our population continues to grow strongly (at least in the US). Therefore, cities will remain full simply because of lack of other options and population growth (both by birth and immigration).
>Here’s one thing we know: People get older. Another is that people’s tolerance for entry-level jobs and small urban apartments is highest when they are young adults.
I'm not clear on why they think entry level jobs result in city living. If anything, the cost of living makes it seem like it would be the opposite.
The history of America is a series of migrations from rural/suburban to city centers and back again.
Businesses and good jobs start to concentrate in urban downtowns, then the city gets too dense or polluted or expensive, people migrate for a better life to raise kids in a commutable distance based on the tech available (street cars, railways, cars), they go too far for the kids to find a job nearby when they are of working age, and then the kids move back to the city.. and the cycle restarts anew.
I live/work near two small towns with efforts to "revitalize" their small downtowns. They're doing a lot of the right things to attract young professionals, but both of them are investing in small 1-, maybe 2-bedroom apartments and not apartments large enough for families.
If the numbers are similar even for larger cities then I'm not surprised why people move out to the burbs - a 1 bedroom apartment gets very cramped with kids - especially when you don't live somewhere like NYC/SF with enough parks/amenities around.
> Millennials were born 1982-2004
What source are you getting this from? Looking at wikipedia, a lot of them put the beginning of Gen Z at ~1995-98. As someone fitting into this bracket (I don't remember 9/11), I'd say it's accurate to loosely define the cutoff for Millennials as somebody who remembered 9/11, was in the labor force during the great recession, or was socially active during Web 1.0. Gen Z doesn't remember life without the internet, grew up on Facebook/Instagram (vs. primarily chatrooms, forums, etc.), and didn't have as much experience with desktop computers for leisure in leu of phones.
This is just my observation as someone who has seen and is currently engaging with a spectrum of youth in the school system. Thoughts?
It comes from Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. Strauss and Howe coined the term "Millennial", so I'll take them at their word for the size of the cohort. Here's a table from Neil Howe's website:
> "No one knows who will name the next generation," says Neil Howe, who, along with his deceased co-author and business partner, William Strauss, is widely credited with naming the Millennials, a generation he figures spans from about 1982 to 2004.
... Because their kids are grown and moved out. So they no longer need the space suburbs provide and can move closer to the employment and entertainment available in the city.
Not in the Bay Area they won't unless you mean maybe East Bay. The Peninsula is quite often more expensive for housing. And you need to drive everywhere.
Big cities are going to die. For decades, they voted themselves nonexistent money to prop up corrupt politicians, greedy unions, and provide corporate welfare. Now it's coming home to roost and the rest of us don't care.
One big datapoint here is the most recent election: Trump won several thousand counties to Clinton's several hundred. This was mimiced up- and down the ballot and was almost perfectly divided as a cities vs. everyone else thing.
You cannot escape economic reality no matter what the vote buyers think.
There are more people in the urban counties than the sparsely-populated rural counties. Cities are growing and are expected to continue growing. Meanwhile, rural areas are dying.[0] What reality do you think people are trying to escape?
A few decades from now I can see the trend reversing. If automation makes living in small to medium sized towns in the country more convenient, lots of people who currently flock to cities out of economic necessity will prefer a less crowded life.
I'm not picturing post-scarcity or a hyper centralized form of automation. It's a possible path for automation to reach a point where it becomes feasible to allow semi-skilled folks in suburban or rural areas to run a farm, manufacturing plant, energy, mining or foresting outfit of their own for low startup and maintenance costs. Especially if human-level AI and human-level dextrous robotics does not exist yet.
Laborers would have a role to play with exoskeletons, being the eyes on the ground, and directing the robotic labor. Technicians would maintain the systems, and managers would organize logistics and resources. And as long as there is industry, there will be all the other types of supplementary businesses and jobs that come with a town.
When people are young, they may be a fair share of desire into moving to a city; but when they "grow up", most of them would like to get out of there and they only stay there because of the job.
When I say "most", I am not kidding. A few studies tell that something between 70% and 80% of people living in Paris would like to move away! That's huge.
Cities have more balanced budgets because they produce value, so they actually have something to tax.
Residential-only suburbs were built with free money to create the road network, but produce no value, so they're running on loans but can't actually pay for anything. That's why many of had to start using speed traps for income.
Softening rents? That’s because you have a limited resource of people willing and able to pay $3000 to $5000 for a single bedroom apartment. It doesn’t take much construction to saturate that market.
The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. There are far more people who can pay $1000 for 1 bedroom, or $3000 for 4 bedrooms (roommates, typically), and it would be insane to ignore that market. But abusive zoning laws and the capricious permit process ensure that that price of housing would be unprofitable. So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction.
We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.