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Americans are rethinking where they want to live

economist.com

391–400 of 645 posts

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think human feces in public is a problem worth leaving for then try living in a place where you don't know if the water is poisoned, if the power will stay on, or the ground will literally crumble under your home. The local governments are neither equipped nor interested in making those places habitable. It's getting worse and will continue to. Hurricanes and rising sea levels will bankrupt TX and FL each in t…

So basically you’re upset about Florida and Texas for a different set of hysterical political reasons. Personally, I’d find my daily life more affected by feces on the sidewalk than I would the existential dread of sea level rising half a meter in the next hundred years. Frankly if you want to be scared of natural disaster over that time period, it’s probably more dangerous to live on the fault line in San Francisco…

A sudden catastrophe such as a highrise you live in collapsing, a sinkhole swallowing your house, the power in your region being off for an indeterminate amount of time while it is below freezing, or a hurricane wiping your city off the map? Wanting to live isn't hysteria and knowing how to survive is not a political stance.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#392
post #77

I live just west of Minneapolis with my wife in a house that's been in my family for generations. I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this. Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.

Oversimplified, inflammatory statements like "defund the police" and "ACAB" gain a lot more traction composted to more measured statements like, "We believe in maintaining a secure society for everyone and not just certain preferred communities, which isn't possible with the current policing and social care system. We need massive, decisive, and prompt reform that doesn't involve funneling more and more of the city b…

How exactly is a community going to police itself?

Look at the marches(if you can, they're rarely shown on any kind of media) every time a 5 year old is murdered from a stray drive by shooting bullet in chicago...thousands of people in the community come out against it, and...nothing happens.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they can be more humane and well thought out than whatever that town had to start. In other words, you'll go to those small towns to teach those hicks some manners. No wonder they're not that keen on seeing refugees from "more humane and well thought out" places settle in their towns and villages. If that is your message to your new neighbours may I suggest you go somewhere more welcoming of those "humane and well…

> may I suggest you go somewhere more welcoming of those "humane and well thought out" policies? > those places tend to be the ones people are moving away from but that means there should be lots of vacancies. People have been moving away from those small towns for generations, and I feel like this speaks for itself.

They did not move because of "inhumane and not well thought out" policies, they moved because there was no employment to be had - Bruce Springsteen touched this in "The River", Chris Rea in "Steel River". Industry closed down, production moved overseas, people moved to what they hoped were greener pastures but found them to be gray and inhospitable. Now that employment can be had through a network connection people are moving back.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#394

If people on HN really want the urban life style to make any sense in America they need to start tackling the mental health / homeless problem. They talk about "the environment" but no one wants to talk about how my wife has to dodge human feces getting on and off public transportation. "It's just part of living in a vibrant city".... Give me a break.

This is just not true. Everyone is talking about the homeless problem all the time. NOBODY is happy about the homeless situation in our major cities. I don't know a single city, liberal, moderate, or conservative, that has solved it. I am just a single citizen, I pay out the ass for taxes, and nothing is being done to help these people. At this point is appears there is no political will to do anything. Instead every…

Cities are just police departments that happen to provide some other services

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some details on why it is hell?

If you think human feces in public is a problem worth leaving for then try living in a place where you don't know if the water is poisoned, if the power will stay on, or the ground will literally crumble under your home. The local governments are neither equipped nor interested in making those places habitable. It's getting worse and will continue to. Hurricanes and rising sea levels will bankrupt TX and FL each in t…

> you don't know if the water is poisoned

I can't speak for all of Texas, but my water district has high quality water standards. I look at the reports published from time to time, they're well below EPA and TCEQ limits for contaminates. Perfectly clean water here. Sure, there's areas of pollution in the state but there's pollution that happens in the Northeast as well.

> if the power will stay on

I forgot the fact power failures only happen in Texas, literally the entire rest of the United States has never experienced a single power failure, ever. Good luck assuming you'll never experience a power outage.

> Hurricanes and rising sea levels will bankrupt TX and FL each in this century

The Northeast is also very affected by rising sea levels. Which states will be more affected by sea level rise: New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, or Texas?

The entire Eastern seaboard seems to be having trouble responding to the challenges of stronger and more common hurricanes.

Don't get me wrong the Northeast is a great place to live but don't bury your head in the sand thinking that the Northeast never has water quality issues, never has power outages, never gets hurricanes, and is immune to sea level rise.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how subjective experience can be so different. I live in East San Jose a mile from downtown. I'm very happy with it. I love riding my electric bike around town and my only complaint is that for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized. I can't related to most of your other complaints. Your other complaints are complaints you often hear from conservatives abou…

> for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized No, it's worse. Every time I have to drive in Santa Clara County, I get the impression that the traffic engineers they hired are sociopaths. The traffic lights on El Camino are perfectly timed to force you to stop at every. single. damn. one. That is, unless you drive 20+mph over the speed limit. I initially thought this mi…

I used to drive Uber and I agree that El Camino is the worst. It's so bad somebody should lose their job for incompentantly managing traffic. Santa Clara Ave through San Jose isn't any better. It's maddening and I agree, it doesn't matter if you bike or car. The irony is San Jose is near the top of the lists for IOT smart cities. Ok, but your traffic lights say different.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also don't vote for the policies which made you pick up your bags and leave the place you came from or your new place of residence will eventually start to look like the one you left.

> Also don't vote for the policies which made you pick up your bags and leave the place you came from or your new place of residence will eventually start to look like the one you left. Maybe people didn't leave because of the policies, but because of their position relative to them. I mean, people who aren't legacy homeowners and find California too expensive but otherwise like it might well prefer to become a homeo…

People leave because of second-order effects to policies that they voted for. California is expensive because of decades of policy that make it hard to build housing, some of the more ridiculous ones I've heard are banning natural gas in new homes and mandating photovoltaic panels on all new constructions.

Since basic economics still applies, prices get inflated, some of the people don't like the economics of what they voted for so they decide to move to Arizona or Texas or Florida and then once they've "got theirs" they smugly vote for more of the same policies that always apply to "someone else". Hence where the acronym NIMBYism comes from.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#398
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of living in a broken city. Your city (and country) does not need to have a massive homeless problem. This is something the city and state government can fix. Housing, mental health support, drug treatment support and better community policing are all possible, and proven to work. How to get the city and state (and national) governments to fix this problem is another issue.

Ah yes blame the "city" and not the various municipalities sending their homeless to said city. Most of the homeless are not from the cities they are in. They just end up there and then the city has to pay for it for some reason.

We’ve created the lawless environment that attracted them to our cities. They weren’t coerced to come here, we enticed them to come here.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#399

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. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity f…

> Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. Except everyone with a reliable car still drives to the large grocery store and with a wide selection which has lower prices and better selection on basics but makes it up with lower volume, high margin luxuries that the small market c doesn't have floor space for, and the small market,…

Suburban 7-11’s for example get a lot of foot traffic in the US. Much of it is from teens, but where available people end up including a stop while walking their dogs or doing other kinds of exercise.

High enough density to have a locals within ~1/2 mile, and or a location where people stop on their way to or from work are how you keep prices reasonable. It’s never directly competitive with Walmart etc but being much closer is a real advantage.

Re: Americans are rethinking where they want to live

#400
There's a bit of racial cheating going on here by assuming the reasons that black/hispanic people are leaving cities are identical to the reasons wealthy whites are leaving cities, and that the trend started at the same time, follows the same lines, or ends up in the same suburbs. It's all glossed over by calling suburbs diverse by citing demographic percentages of all people who live in any suburb.

Black/Hispanic people have generally been priced out of cities by gentrification, and have been forced to move to places that are even farther from jobs and services than the previously neglected urban areas that they came from, and this started when millennials moved into the cities from the suburbs. Black people in particular have had a Southern migration because Northern black people are often only two or three generations from the South anyway, so they have family who can help with shared housing, childcare, and leads on employment.

This could be easily shown by showing rates of outmigration by group over time. Chicago's black population was dropping while its white population was rising. It would also be shown by individual attention to the suburbs that are being moved to, not only would you find that they were very segregated, but you might notice that plenty of them are hellish and poverty-ridden compared to the cities that people moved from.

I might as well quote the entire discussion of ethnicity, which occupied the body of a paragraph with nearly unrelated first, second, and final sentences. Maybe the word "urbanizing suburbs" in the context of an increase in amenities worked as a subconscious trigger to discuss black people moving to suburbs.

"The allure of suburbs has been a trend more than a half-century in the making, but covid-19 offered an additional boost. “Urbanising suburbs”, as Mr Clark them, are gaining amenities but keeping their characteristic sprawl. Contrary to the stereotype of identical white homes with white occupants, today’s suburbs are ethnically diverse. Wendell Cox of Demographia, a consultancy, estimates that 86% of the population of major metro areas live in the suburbs or exurbs. That includes 90% of whites, 83% of Latinos, 81% of Asians and 76% of African-Americans. Latinos, in particular, have been relocating to suburbs at greater rates in the past two decades: since 2000 their number has risen more than 50%, compared with a 20% rise for African-Americans and Asians and just 1.3% for whites. Ross Perot, Jr., a real-estate developer, says he’s “never seen as many people moving into Dallas. It’s shocking.” But far more people are going to the suburbs surrounding the city."

Note: a 20 year trend for non-whites, and a statistically insignificant blip for whites. Yet the article paints everyone as young upper middle class urban professionals trying to dodge taxes and city government.

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