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…
There is flight from major metropolitan cities right now. All the problems are the same across these cities. While I'm in the honeymoon phase of my recent move from the city I love and grew up in. I was tired of many of the things you listed.
> First, people have been leaving large, dense, expensive urban cores for smaller, less-dense cities and suburbs. Second, people and companies have been moving to warm, low-tax states in the South and Southwest. Seems like there could be a convergence of the demographic trend of millennial family formation with pandemic related increase in people's perception of the value of square footage that is pushing people towa…
> also could be a sign that, despite similar square footage, people don't see townhouses/apt housing product as the same sort of value as a detached house, and they are willing to make remarkable life changes to own a fee simple house proper. That seems unlikely since townhouses and the like have been quite popular in places outside the U.S. where they're reasonably common. Detached single homes are incompatible with…
Until communities embrace mixed-use zoning everywhere in their cities little will change. My suburb is chock full of duplexes, townhomes and apartments. Pretty much all of them lie a mile or more away from shops and employment centers which are located on very bike/ped unfriendly roads. The result is that every adult needs a car and parking becomes a nightmare for everyone in those areas since the city will waive parking requirements to encourge "density" but does nothing to change the mix of development types. This problem is not unique to my town.
It's always crazy to hear that suburbs are cheaper. Dense living inherently requires less infrastructure and less transportation, so it should be considerably cheaper. It's only through the subsidisation of suburbia and the low supply/high demand of high density urban areas that this is the case. Car centric suburbs aren't just terrible for the environment, terrible for safety and terrible for transportation; they're…
> Dense living inherently requires less infrastructure and less transportation Not really. Firstly, it costs a lot more per square foot to build a high rise than a single family home. Secondly, it costs a lot more to maintain it (elevators need constant maintenance, you can't just run to Home Depot to get replacement drain parts, etc.). And the infrastructure costs more to maintain -- running power to a high rise req…
Roads alone cost $2-3M/mile and last 30 years. Amortized, that's on the order of $100k/yr/mile.
In a city, that would be $100k / 10 city blocks, probably 100 parcels with 100-1000 low-to-mid rise housing units. In a rural area it might be just 10 housing units, at the cost of $10k/yr/parcel. And productivity in rural areas is 2-3x lower, so it's even higher as a percentage of per-capita GDP.
Add on top of that electric grids, water supply, sewage, emergency services, hospitals, etc. Bottom line: rural areas only survive due to subsidies from productive and overtaxed urban Americans.
I'm currently in the process of buying my wife's grandpa's house in rural Louisiana. It isn't on a lot of land (only 1.5 acres), but he's selling it to us "at cost" and that was how much it cost him to build it 20 years ago. We haven't decided if we want to live there full time and give up all the niceties we currently enjoy (a target within 10 minutes vs 2.5 hours, every type of ethnic food you can imagine, etc)., b…
>every type of ethnic food you can imagine I know it's hard to believe, but the only difference between a major metropolis and bum-fuck nowhere is the lack of ethnic food, and less stressful traffic. Almost all modern-niceties have been commodified to even the outer regions of the hills.
>Almost all modern-niceties have been commodified to even the outer regions of the hills.
It's hard to commodify a large economy of local businesses like you'd find in a large city. I can't imagine anything worse than being beholden to a handful of chain stores or the amazon catalog for all my wants and wishes. I've been doing all my shopping lately with local businesses, hard to do that in smaller areas that lack the customer base needed to support all these different businesses locally.
I've been thinking about what gives big cities their edge. Why some even become global hubs for particular industries. Two reasons are clearer to me now than they were in the past: - Lifestyle advantages of living amongst specialists: people can outsource various chores/tasks/jobs/errands to local specialists who can complete them much more efficiently. For instance imagine if your village doesn't have a plumber and…
I think your specialist comment here rings very true. Talk to anyone who grew up on a farm in a small town. Those people are often their own plumber, electrician, construction worker, mechanic, etc on top of their normal jobs! There was a discussion societally around millennials (men in particular) not being as "handy" as their parents, but specialization of those parents is largely the reason. Sure, my dad might hav…
There's channels that will even let you call them dad, e.g. the "dad, how do I..." with 3m+ subscribers
I lived in a walkable city for 7 years and since moving to a 1950s style neighborhood do not really miss it. You can only have so many trips to the bakery, the coffee shop or the local bookstore until eventually its just your normal life and no more exciting than driving 5 min to the same thing. Plus a lot of the local places closed because of high rents and only chains or overpriced places tend to stick around.
I grew up in a rural town around 4 hours from St. Lois. I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID! A short list of things I disliked: - Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads. - Conservative values. My paren…
This rings true to my experience as well. Growing up in a conservative Christian county where I was the only queer kid drove me to attempt suicide twice in my teens before I promptly ran as fast as possible to a large university and never go back except for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It’s swear it’s so much worse because of the boredom. School got out around 3pm and most days I had to stay inside with a sympathetic teacher until my parents got off work because a group of kids would just hang around waiting for me to walk home.
Thank god for the internet, not sure I would have made it out without it.
> 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 entr…
...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
The people I know who have pulled their kids from public schools are either homeschooling or enrolling in online charter schools. This allows for a great degree of autonomy, and basically lets kids learn via whatever platform works for them. I've heard about people using informal platforms like Outschool and more formalized courses from Beast Academy or Potter.
Online school can be a boon for the right type of student, especially if they have strong parental support. It can also be the end of the line for students who don't have that. My district has historically used the "online academy" as the dumping ground for kids they need to keep on the enrollment roster but that they don't want on campus or know won't bother showing. I don't know how things have changed since they quintupled enrollment this year with students wishing to avoid the mask mandates and other on-campus distractions. Hopefully it will become a positive element in our district rather than the last-chance lounge.
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…
What areas don't have political and ideology homogeny anymore? There are two Americas. I would enjoy an area with better tolerance to the other side's ideals, but it seems that's in short supply everywhere. There's a real viciousness for the other side at the national level, but I can't understand it at the individual human being level or the community level. Your neighbor may not share your politics, but it also doe…
Every us state has liberal and conservative chunks within it - i feel like best bet is to find one of those in the opposite of whatever your state is. Those places I feel like are better balanced and don’t suffer from the excesses of extremism