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Americans are rethinking where they want to live

economist.com

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Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#321

Post by hunterb123 »

ericmay wrote: post #299
treis wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/…

> Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity f…

Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended).

The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc.

Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#322

Post by more_corn »

foofoo4u wrote: post #91

I sure am. I live in San Jose (which resides in the Bay Area). Here’s why I am leaving. - $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment. - Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment. - Smells like urine on many sidewalks. - Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown). - Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings. - Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your…

I’m convinced

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#323

Post by CountDrewku »

anarchy8 wrote: post #133
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #121

And part of it is what public schools are doing to our kids. My 6 year old is required to sit outdoors to eat her lunch in 40ish degree (F) weather, and is not allowed to socialized. My 5 year old has to wear a mask 7 hours a day against an illness that doesn't kill kids. I'm at my wit's end with these school administrators. Hoping to be in Wyoming in 6 months' time.

> My 5 year old has to wear a mask 7 hours a day against an illness that doesn't kill kids This is misinformation: https://www.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19...

Maybe you ought to pay more attention to what it actually says instead of getting upset at what is obviously a generalization about the overreaction to COVID when it comes to young children-

>A smaller subset of states reported on hospitalizations and mortality by age; the available data indicate that COVID-19-associated hospitalization and death is uncommon in children.

Here's a more accurate representation -

https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Deaths-by-Sex-Ages-0-18-years/xa4b...

Now, go look up how many of those kids were already immuno-compromised.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e4.htm?s_cid=mm...

That's just one report that mentions 75% with an underlying medical condition.

When people say it doesn't kill kids they're generalizing, flagging it as misinformation is completely silly. By percentages and how we react to every other virus this is NOT something we should be scared of when it comes to children. We certainly shouldn't be subjecting children to measures that may cause psychological and developmental harm for something that's VERY unlikely to be a threat to them.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#324

Post by saltcured »

sanderjd wrote: post #115
dekhn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people who have kaiser hate it but after I understood the what and why of Kaiser I concluded its model was far better than the alternatives.

And yet people hate it. I agree that it seems good in theory. In practice, it seems quite bad (because again, people hate it). This is one of the things that makes me less convinced about universal healthcare proposals than I innately would be. They also seem much better on paper, but if in practice people would hate it, then that would be a bad outcome.

What I've seen from others and what I've read in attempted quantitative reviews is that Kaiser quality, perhaps not surprisingly, varies by region and facility. I don't know if anybody has invented a management strategy which can truly remove this variance.

Qualitatively, as a patient, I'd say the biggest difference with Kaiser is that you engage something more like a government bureaucracy. You do not get complicated billing adventures when you go to your Kaiser clinics, hospitals, etc. But, you do get some long waits, occasional referral limbo, and sometimes indifferent treatment from overworked nurses or clerical staff. Of course, there are still individuals involved in each care event. I have seen two different family members have different levels of satisfaction and frustration from the same facilities, and my take is that the personalities of the patients had more to do with the different experiences than the facility or staff.

I liken Kaiser to going to the DMV for treatment. This is most true as a young to middle-aged person, where your common care needs might be for unplanned, urgent care rather than periodic checkups or predictable chronic care. I know others who have used Kaiser in the same regions for more chronic and acute conditions including psychiatric, metabolic, and geriatric care. I have been reasonably impressed and would like to keep myself in the same system when I retire and grow old.

I may be biased by having known the system since I was a child, but I prefer this to the non-HMO US experience I know mostly second hand. Instead of the DMV, I've had friends and relatives liken their healthcare to engaging a car dealership or some boutique investment firm, with every interaction transactionalized and tinged with financial worry.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#325

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

trevyn wrote: post #177
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only it didn't require an incredibly privileged position to be be a reasonable thing to do, I might.

It’s easier than you think, the barriers are actually all in your own mind.

Pretty sure they're mostly in the wallet.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#326

Post by mrsuprawsm »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #234
lotsofpulp wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do those smaller downtowns thrive? The few I know usually have rich populations that do not mind spending more than what Costco/Target/Walmart/big grocery stores sell at. All it takes is the big box stores to setup camp 10 minutes outside of town and almost everyone with a car will opt to save money and shop there.

In Europe many smaller stores are competitive by aiming for high turnaround. The cut down on the selection to the things that get sold fast. German Lidl and Aldi are based on these principles and known to have very low prices. In fact I think they outcompeted wall-mart when it tried to setup shop in Germany. I remember quite good prices in the Netherlands as well which is quite densely populated and where people shop…

In many European cities, at least NL where I live, there isn't such a big distinction between the downtown and the neighbourhoods where people live.

Sure, if you want a big electronics store, you go to the centre of the city (10m biking), but for groceries, coffee, takeaways, restaurants, doctors, DIY stores, pharmacies, etc there's tons of these scattered around the city. It's quite multi-polar, there are many shopping streets, for these kinds of needs you're rarely more than 10 min walk or 2-3 minutes cycle away from those.

Where I live, for example, there's even 2 branches of the same chain of supermarket within about 400m, so <5 min walk, about 1 min on a bike. (Handy on the rare occasion that one of them is out of something!)

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#327

Post by cbHXBY1D »

hardtke wrote: post #92
dmode wrote: post #32

This article and similar ones have been written at least a 1000 times for the last decade with a clear political tinge. The poster child is always around how people want to move to Florida and Texas. But somehow it forgets to include Washington and Seattle which has probably seen the biggest tech migration and grown into the second biggest tech hub in the country, far greater than Austin or Miami (hyped up constantly…

The San Francisco Chronicle has done some analyses of the Bay Area exodus, and the majority are not moving to Texas but instead to places like San Joaquin and Madera county (counties that border the Bay Area). People want the bigger house, but they also want to be able to visit their friends and family.

This is accurate in my anecdotal experience. I'm from the Bay Area (5th generation or so) and so I have a lot of cousins, aunts, and uncles here and the general trend for friends/family has been to move to cheaper areas in the exurbs: Stockton, Tracey, Antioch, Fairfield, Vacaville, Modesto, etc. This is where the working class are getting pushed out to as they can no longer afford to live in the inner Bay Area.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#328

Post by jermaustin1 »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #315
jermaustin1 wrote: post #28

I've heard this brought up as a kind of second round of white flight. The middle- and upper-class (primarily) white population is once again moving out of urban centers because telecommuting is something that these high-salary jobs afford them. I think it will rebound a bit (but not much), as moving from urban to suburban is a very difficult transition, but its even harder going the other way once you've adjusted. I…

How do you manage medical care? Of all the things I have planned, this is the only variable I don’t have an answer for because Medicare kicks in at 65. The market-based plans are either useless (few hundred dollars a month); or expensive (a couple of thousand per month).

Currently, it is by paying $850/mo for health insurance for my wife and I. In the future I hope that my CoL expenses drop enough that the cost is fine while I continue to work for a lot less income, or if not, that my wife and I would qualify for subsidies on the marketplace.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#329

Post by [deleted] »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #121

And part of it is what public schools are doing to our kids. My 6 year old is required to sit outdoors to eat her lunch in 40ish degree (F) weather, and is not allowed to socialized. My 5 year old has to wear a mask 7 hours a day against an illness that doesn't kill kids. I'm at my wit's end with these school administrators. Hoping to be in Wyoming in 6 months' time.

[deleted]

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#330

Post by CountDrewku »

asimpletune wrote: post #39

I'm also sure a small percentage of people from the USA may even rethink living there.

What are the other options? After seeing how Europe and other western nations have responded to COVID in the last 2 years I'm less likely to consider moving there. It was actually something I'd considered before all of this.
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