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Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

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Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#81

Post by ak217 »

gte910h wrote: post #9
learc83 wrote: post #5

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

>Atlanta Public schools are pretty horrible What do you mean? APS mostly gets issues with disparity of performance (aka, the children of the rich people far outperform the children of everyone else). Sure, there are bad ones. But don't live there: http://www.atlantapublicschools.us/site/default.aspx?PageTyp... This explains why you may think the schools are bad: http://midtown.patch.com/articles/grady-high-school-one…

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#82

Post by Lewisham »

_delirium wrote: post #61
hkarthik wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you're a parent, you'll worry about two things with regards to school choices: 1) Curriculum 2) Safety It's one thing to make the argument that most public schools are mediocre and the parents need to be more involved in their kids lives to make sure they stay focused and do well. But it's quite another to willingly send your kids to a school with drugs, gang violence, and an abundance of teen pregnancies just b…

There's nothing inherently placing good schools in the suburbs and bad ones in the urban areas, though. These things historically have shifted in many cities, in respond to a wide range of things like housing stock. For example, in NYC the center has gentrified; most of the slummy areas of Manhattan are now desirable to live in. While areas that used to be quiet and suburban in Queens and the Bronx have ended up bein…

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

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#83

Post by [deleted] »

ryanhuff wrote: post #10
rayiner wrote: post #2

Article describes me to a T. Grew up in the suburbs of DC, and after having moved to progressively bigger cities over the last 10 years (Atlanta, Chicago, and soon New York), I can't imagine ever again living in a place where finding you're out of contact lens solution involves a 45 minute car trip to the nearest CVS.

Having lived in suburban communities all of my life, I have never lived further than 10 minutes away from a CVS type of store. Perhaps your experience is more rural than suburban?

[deleted]

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#84

Post by rayiner »

ryanhuff wrote: post #26
thejteam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty familiar with the DC suburbs and between normal daytime traffic(not even considering morning or afternoon rush hour), traffic lights, and the time to get to a main road from you community(very slow speed limits) a half hour wouldn't surprise me at all and 45 minutes is very possible.

I am in southern California, and perhaps the suburbs here are more concentrated than suburbs elsewhere. I have three pharmacies, three grocery stores, and a Walmart all within 10 minutes. It does require taking a car, though.

45 minutes round-trip: 20 minutes there, 20 minutes back, 5 minutes at the store. With only moderate traffic, of course, rush hour (which in the DC suburbs extends from noon to 9 pm) can easily extend this to an hour.

Compare to Chicago where running out of contact solution means taking the elevator down 28 floors to the 7-11 in my building.

And I don't know about So-Cal, but Nor-Cal "suburbs" are far denser than in DC. People call Silicon Valley a bunch of suburbs, but as far as I can tell its a series of small urban centers connected by a highway.

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#85

Post by waterlesscloud »

noonespecial wrote: post #71
gradstudent wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#86

Post by _delirium »

Lewisham wrote: post #82
_delirium wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing inherently placing good schools in the suburbs and bad ones in the urban areas, though. These things historically have shifted in many cities, in respond to a wide range of things like housing stock. For example, in NYC the center has gentrified; most of the slummy areas of Manhattan are now desirable to live in. While areas that used to be quiet and suburban in Queens and the Bronx have ended up bein…

You sound like you're describing the LA area (with the exception of the city center gentrifying). It seems that what has happened is that, for the majority of American cities, they grew as an either/or option: you're either in the city, or you're in the suburbs, and the car enabled that in cities where it could. The cities which were geographically constrained, such as NYC or SF, were unable to sprawl outwards, and h…

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

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#87

Post by waterlesscloud »

Lewisham wrote: post #82
_delirium wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing inherently placing good schools in the suburbs and bad ones in the urban areas, though. These things historically have shifted in many cities, in respond to a wide range of things like housing stock. For example, in NYC the center has gentrified; most of the slummy areas of Manhattan are now desirable to live in. While areas that used to be quiet and suburban in Queens and the Bronx have ended up bein…

You sound like you're describing the LA area (with the exception of the city center gentrifying). It seems that what has happened is that, for the majority of American cities, they grew as an either/or option: you're either in the city, or you're in the suburbs, and the car enabled that in cities where it could. The cities which were geographically constrained, such as NYC or SF, were unable to sprawl outwards, and h…

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

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

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

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#88

Post by learc83 »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #85
noonespecial wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#89

Post by philwelch »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #85
noonespecial wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Why Generation Y Is Causing The Great Migration Of The 21st Century

#90

Post by JVIDEL »

Funny, nowhere in the article I see a mention of the widening income gap (more like a canyon these days) that means most of YGens wont be able to afford the same "luxuries" than their parents had.

In fact most will struggle to keep their place in the socio-economic scale, some will go down from middle class, and it's not "the future", it's already happening.

But I guess is far more "positive" to say YGens just "don't like suburbs anymore" rather than admitting that if suburbs were indeed still cool most wouldn't be able to afford a house there anyway.

Let's be honest, even many boomers and XGens had to get into massive debt to buy a house in those places, and some are living under a tarp now.

Not talking about the problem doesn't make it go away...

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