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As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

reuters.com

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Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#61

Post by bufordsharkley »

appleshore wrote: post #24
pm90 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bad take. You're assuming that incoming folks won't change the politics of funding decisions of the city. In most cases, they do change them, and change cities for the better.

Do you have an example of that? Perhaps I’m biased being in LA and SF but those city budgets seem irreplaceable broken. Infinite amounts to pensions while no one can propose viable fixes to problems.

The existence of Prop 13, coupled with pyramid-scheme-style approaches to financing municipal pensions, have led to disasters of financing.

One can imagine a better world in which pension programs are effectively time-independent w.r.t financing (neutral for growth or shrinking), and more financing comes from sources that are likely agnostic to growth or reduction (like Land Value Tax), but the politics here... are not trivial.

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#62

Post by throwaway5752 »

hash872 wrote: post #52
ajross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, how is meeting pension obligations "irreplaceable broken"? They hired people for years with the promise of retirement pensions. It's a debt, not a budget item.

Cities & states frequently offer absurdly generous pensions to public sector workers for political payoff or corrupt reasons. State workers can sometimes retire in their 50s with a lifetime of absurd benefits. Or, the infamous '13th check' where some innumerate officials mail pensioners one extra check in a given year when the pension does especially well financially- literally robbing from the fund's future. Many st…

First, you are overstating how generous public pensions are (and grossly overstating the differential in administration of private and public pensions).

Second you think private sector pension planning is better. It is not. Pension funding reduces earnings (and bonuses) and companies will use overly optimistic pension fund growth projections to reduce current contributions, resulting in underfunded private sector pension plans. A great example of how this is handled is Patriot Coal (pension obligation spinoff of Peabody) and Magnum Coal (similar spinoff of Arch, acquired by Patriot). Those were spun off basically insolvent, with all pension obligations, and when the declared bankruptcy the retirees took haircuts and the remaining obligations were socialized with the PBGC (which I suggest you look into if you are interested in public and private defined benefit plan administration analysis).

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#63

Post by futureastronaut »

nostrademons wrote: post #37
throwaway5752 wrote: post #16

Don't forget cities that have influxes of young population so have increasing tax receipts but much lower legacy costs (retirees, infrastructure maintenance, stable growth rate education costs per capita). Most of those cities will mismanage the growth and 20-40 years from now you'll be reading about Nashville and how it was gutted when the software jobs dried up. These come in cycles and cities that have some sort o…

A lot of those geographic reasons to exist will probably cease to exist in the next 50 years, as global warming opens up new shipping lines, makes previously verdant areas uninhabitable, makes uninhabitable deserts verdant, changes ocean currents, remakes national borders, and prompts large & powerful cities to divert rivers away from weaker and wetter ones. Containerization already led to large shifts in the fortune…

> makes uninhabitable deserts verdant

Is that likely? I wasn't aware of any predicted reversal of desertification. It may render some tundra provinces verdant however.

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#64

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #37
throwaway5752 wrote: post #16

Don't forget cities that have influxes of young population so have increasing tax receipts but much lower legacy costs (retirees, infrastructure maintenance, stable growth rate education costs per capita). Most of those cities will mismanage the growth and 20-40 years from now you'll be reading about Nashville and how it was gutted when the software jobs dried up. These come in cycles and cities that have some sort o…

A lot of those geographic reasons to exist will probably cease to exist in the next 50 years, as global warming opens up new shipping lines, makes previously verdant areas uninhabitable, makes uninhabitable deserts verdant, changes ocean currents, remakes national borders, and prompts large & powerful cities to divert rivers away from weaker and wetter ones. Containerization already led to large shifts in the fortune…

[deleted]

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#65

Post by nostrademons »

futureastronaut wrote: post #63
nostrademons wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those geographic reasons to exist will probably cease to exist in the next 50 years, as global warming opens up new shipping lines, makes previously verdant areas uninhabitable, makes uninhabitable deserts verdant, changes ocean currents, remakes national borders, and prompts large & powerful cities to divert rivers away from weaker and wetter ones. Containerization already led to large shifts in the fortune…

> makes uninhabitable deserts verdant Is that likely? I wasn't aware of any predicted reversal of desertification. It may render some tundra provinces verdant however.

The Sahara's greening:

https://www.independent.com/2019/01/10/greening-sahara/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170608073356.h...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/climate-change-is-making-deser...

Apparently the Kalahari is too.

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#66

Post by liveoneggs »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #16

Don't forget cities that have influxes of young population so have increasing tax receipts but much lower legacy costs (retirees, infrastructure maintenance, stable growth rate education costs per capita). Most of those cities will mismanage the growth and 20-40 years from now you'll be reading about Nashville and how it was gutted when the software jobs dried up. These come in cycles and cities that have some sort o…

Nashville does have a reason to exist- country music, no-state-taxes-in-TN, not Memphis!.

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#67

Post by liveoneggs »

nostrademons wrote: post #37
throwaway5752 wrote: post #16

Don't forget cities that have influxes of young population so have increasing tax receipts but much lower legacy costs (retirees, infrastructure maintenance, stable growth rate education costs per capita). Most of those cities will mismanage the growth and 20-40 years from now you'll be reading about Nashville and how it was gutted when the software jobs dried up. These come in cycles and cities that have some sort o…

A lot of those geographic reasons to exist will probably cease to exist in the next 50 years, as global warming opens up new shipping lines, makes previously verdant areas uninhabitable, makes uninhabitable deserts verdant, changes ocean currents, remakes national borders, and prompts large & powerful cities to divert rivers away from weaker and wetter ones. Containerization already led to large shifts in the fortune…

TN gets tons and tons of rain. High elevation areas, although somewhat hot, will be climate change winners. Nashville is about as far away from desert or flooding as you can get.

Although NYT told me Duluth, MN was the big climate change winner :) (fyi- I've been there; it's cold af)

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#68

Post by futureastronaut »

nostrademons wrote: post #65
futureastronaut wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes uninhabitable deserts verdant Is that likely? I wasn't aware of any predicted reversal of desertification. It may render some tundra provinces verdant however.

The Sahara's greening: https://www.independent.com/2019/01/10/greening-sahara/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170608073356.h... https://www.thedailybeast.com/climate-change-is-making-deser... Apparently the Kalahari is too.

That's cherry-picking though. The Gobi desert is expanding very quickly, as is the Sahara into Sudan. The Chihuaha desert also is expanding in Texas, I'm sure there are many other examples. Maybe deserts will in general become greener, but for human aspirations they still seem to be deserts. The greening is problematic because it raises dew points and makes theses areas less habitable for humans.

Re: As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind

#69

Post by wlesieutre »

ajross wrote: post #50
wlesieutre wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not include debt payments in your budget planning?

Not as an optional item to be ejected because of "better planning", no. Absent any budgetary concerns, there are hundreds of thousands of people who worked careers for these cities with the expectation that they could skip retirement savings because there was a pension. Throwing that out at the behest of a 20-something on HN who's fully funding a 401k with a tech salary isn't "responsible government", it's just selfi…

Nobody said anything about ejecting it, just that the city budgets are screwed. They’re welcome to address that in whatever other way they’d like.
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