Modnote: And this is Great Debates and not the Pit. Can you please try to remember the rule, attack the post and not the poster. With a recent warning for this, this one was close to a warning.
I have a number of friends with college degrees, and they generally do get well above inflation numbers in raises every year. Some are discussing how things are going to play out this year with well above average inflation, and are a bit worried that they will not have an increased purchasing power next year, as they have had the last couple decades.
I also have friends who do not have college degrees, and they typically don’t get raises at all, much less enough to keep up with inflation.
Then why have millions upon millions of people over the decades moved to another states for work? Here is ONE out of MANY examples. It’s a pity that you weren’t around to tell those people how foolish they were.
Uh, because they really needed to? You’re talking about people who were escaping literal tyrannical oppression and generational poverty, which made moving halfway across a continent a highly tolerable alternative. From your link:
This is not the sort of situation that sparked Exapno_Mapcase’s and Miller’s disagreement:
Obviously it’s ridiculous to treat someone like Miller as though he were in the same sort of situation as a “Great Migration” African-American fleeing Jim Crow in the US South.
It’s not unreasonable for a gainfully employed middle-class person in a community where they like living to wish for a wider range of housing options. It doesn’t make sense to expect them to adopt the mindset of economic/political refugees needing to flee an impossible situation to build a new life from scratch in an unfamiliar location that has nothing that they want except affordability.
A reasonable range of housing options for middle-class (and working-class, for that matter) people in congenial locations near the work and people that they love should not be sneered at as an obviously impossible pipe dream. Such options exist for millions of people in many cities in Europe, for example.
Very often, in American culture, people get “intrinsic economic impossibility that only stupid entitled idiots would expect” mixed up with “alternative approach that would be unpopular with the economic elites who disproportionately benefit from the current approach”.
American plutocratic capitalism seems to attract more than its fair share of “white knights” eager to lecture dissatisfied detractors that anything that the system isn’t already successfully doing simply can’t be done and only a fool would expect otherwise.
I wonder how many people here have heard about The New Urbanism. The core book is Suburban Nation. Although the book is from 2000 (the link goes to the anniversary edition), it summarizes years of effort from progressive planners to create better housing, friendlier neighborhoods, and improved urban design. The intention is part of a thread dating from classics like Jane Jacob’s 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Reading Suburban Nation will give you great insight into why center cities and suburbs are the way they are in America and a hundred ways they can be improved. A base requirement is working with governments to change zoning laws to provide denser and more affordable housing with a mix of walkable retail and small businesses.
Here’s one other insight the authors don’t include: In the length of time it takes you to read the book, another 100,000 people will have moved into suburbia and extended commutes by another half-hour each way.
Sure that number is hyperbole, but the suburban population has increased about 2,000,000 per year since 1950. In the 52 largest metro areas, suburban population increased about 25% in the 21st century, according to Pew Research. An infinitesimal percentage went in cheap congenial housing near jobs.
What’s is deliberately not talked about is usually as important as what is. The word Walmart is not mentioned in the book. The entirety of suburban retail as we know it - malls, strip centers, and big box stores - are banned in new urbanist neighborhoods. Only by looking past the text would a reader find that many of the neighborhoods they tout are located in upscale, if not wildly wealthy, areas, planned and controlled by a single developer. How would the 10,000 suburbs in America manage to do without their Walmarts? They don’t say. They can’t. Creating such an America would require a complete and total conspiracy of every government in the country to instantly and simultaneously alter their mindsets. Otherwise, the money would just move over to the nearest place that would have them. Which, in our real world, is everywhere.
Solving the problem of housing in America is essentially identical to solving the problem of work in America. Small changes do not and can not work. An entire reset of capitalism itself is the needed starting point. I emphasize starting because even in a revised capitalist system other huge aspects of standard Americana, like its automobile culture, would have to be erased at the same time.
Am I disillusioned and cynical? Well, I worked for local government in the 1980s while watching my city crumble around me. The problems and the solutions were already well known by then (see Jacobs, 1961). Governments instead bowed to money, as they always have. Money seeks quick returns; urbanism requires a generation. That the hellhole that was Brooklyn in 1980 could turn into a destination paradise of hip multi-million dollar homes 40 years later was unimaginable. It’s also hyperlocal and not replicable in many other places.
Maybe the capitalist revolution will happen soon and we can all shout “up against the wall motherfuckers.” I don’t see it happening. Trends like online shopping and work from home may continue to increase demand from convenient shops and restaurants. That doesn’t aid school districts, perhaps the main driver of where people locate. The five room starter home that I bought in 1981 is now worth half again what my eight room much bigger house in a much nicer neighborhood even closer to a grade school is worth. The sole reason is that I now live inside city limits and no parent able to do so will make the choice of that school system over that of the one in the suburb I had lived in.
Lots of things that seem reasonable, even obvious, turn out not to be, frustrating as that is. Just like climate change, undoing the millions of small decisions that led us into the abyss will take as long and as many new decisions to get us even partway to our goal of a better world. And every step of the way will need to be fought against the interests of those “economic elites.” Good luck.
I mean… yes, exactly. This is what millennials are ranting about. Everything you describe. Maybe it starts with zoning laws, sure, but it ultimately comes down to the basic problems of capitalist exploitation of resources and a government that has been beholden to the monied class for its entire existence. This is the problem people are bitching about when they say they can’t find a house – capitalism isn’t providing the housing options people want and need in order to fight climate change and our governments don’t seem to care. Which is why it seems so tone deaf to just be telling those people to stop being so picky or to move the rust belt.a
At least I’m every town I have lived in, it is the Republicans who are opposed to liberalizing zoning restrictions. Heck they are always pressing the town to BUY up land around their tony properties and “preserve” it. They seem to see no irony in this as they hammer away at health and safety regulations, employee rights, etc as government overreach.
IME Republicans will openly cater to the capitalist class, and Democrats will talk about how they’re going to fight back and then never do. Most big cities are run by Democrats and most big cities are doing bupkis to address these issues because money makes the machine go round.
Leaving aside the communist revolution people are hinting at that will make “money” a quaint concept from a bygone age (and even that changes nothing about the fact people still have to live somewhere), it requires a lot of money and political will to generate public housing in New York, Chicago, or wherever you live. It is crazy corrupt if the city is buying “tony properties”. I figure real estate for non-profit or city-owned housing is typically generated from (still corrupt, but maybe only “normal” levels) slum clearances and other renovations of dilapidated housing that one can get for cheap. And how much of it can you get?
Another path is to design social conditions so that quality of life is still reasonable even though the median monthly income in, e.g., Paris is much less that in New York, while rent there is hardly cheap. It’s a smaller city and there are still bad neighborhoods, etc., but there are still alternative models to study once you are not completely beholden to local interests.
You could also give people money to cover high food and rent, aka subsidized housing, but that won’t work if it instantly disappears as someone’s profit.
Fundamentally the question is whether or not people want to live in that sort of denser, more affordable mixed-use development. I’d guess most don’t, once they get out of their twenties and start families.
This new urbanism/city planning seems to have a very top-down feel to it- what’s the draw for the populace?
Actually the mixed use, townhouse & retail version is getting pretty popular and common in NJ at least. Towns with downtowns went up in value faster than suburban sprawl. It seems to heavily appeal to young buyers and those (like us) whose kids are down with High School.
So there is a demand in some places at least. Probably varies a lot by region.
There’s two arguments. One is basically top-down, yes – we’re destroying the planet with climate change and we need to figure out a way to live more sustainably, personal preference be damned.
The other is that the “choice” people make to live in less-dense suburbs with 3 car garages and riding lawnmowers has not actually been a choice at all due to decades of lobbying by industry. Cars, for instance, which make suburban living possible, are heavily subsidized. If car owners had to bear more of the financial burden for infrastructure (not an easy ask given how we all need roads, I get it) and fuel wasn’t subsidized, there would be a free market incentive to live in denser communities. And this is one of many examples of ways that a big house in the suburbs has been artificially made more cost competitive.
They seem popular here among the young post-college set, but no more so than other areas full of apartments popular among that crowd.
And they all seem to move away to nest in the suburbs once they couple up and start having kids.
All I’m getting at is that from what I’ve read, it seems very top-down and centrally planned, not something that’s going to entice people to go live there. Almost as if the idea that it needs to be attractive to potential residents is a secondary concern vs. all the other wonderful properties of this movement.
Well the evidence is that people who live in dense, walkable cities in Europe tend to love it. So either they’re all just a bunch of weirdos who can’t see the obvious benefits of suburban living, or America has done urban planning badly.
Where have you read that new, denser developments are centrally planned?
All I’ve read is that housing prices and commute times have spiraled out of control, and developers are responding to that need. In fact, if they want to build the developments that the market really wants, they have to fight hard against incumbent centrally-planned regulations. Parking minimums, boundary setbacks, other policies that ceased to be useful 50 years ago.
Not all of them, but that’s where you have the mix of still marginally affordable houses plus decent schools. Closer in, you usually have to choose one or the other. This leads to some crackdowns on making sure apartment dwellers actually live there - schools being funded by property taxes and all.
I know a fair number of people in the suburbs who probably would choose to live closer in except for that issue. And it leads to some interesting school board situations - out here in my part of Fort Bend county, the suggestion to re-zone a neighborhood because a new elementary school needs to be built or changing the high school a neighborhood is assigned to is going to be a long, exhausting process because parents made deliberate choices on their real estate purchases because they wanted their kids going to particular schools. Same for more affluent friends of mine who chose very deliberately so their kids would be zoned to Bellaire High in Houston, despite flooding risk and high cost.
It’s a failure of the state not to take charge of funding all the public schools. Why would you leave it up to randomly drawn-up neighborhoods of possibly wildly varying means and competence?
Of course it is.
That’s why the believe the movement to the suburbs is driven by the some kind of market based choice on the part of these young families is mistaking effect for cause. The desirability of suburban over centralized city life may have been true at one point, but it’s less true now. It’s now almost a requirement if one cares for one’s children but is not making a lot of money.
That said, the state of Texas had a sort of Robin Hood plan to try to re-allocate money to smaller schools. But the plan was doomed from the start (it pulled money from inner city schools!) and was implemented poorly. There’s no halfway decent policy concept that the Texas Lege can’t screw up.
I also knew several people whose parents fudged HISD residence so their kids could go to Bellaire under some sort of magnet program (we all lived and went to elementary/middle school in Alief ISD). Kind of the opposite situation- live further out, send kids in for school.
I think that it’s really dependent on what people value. I know that a LOT of people my age basically lived in-town in Houston or Dallas when they were young, but then migrated outward for more stability, safety and better schools.
Schools are a HUGE driver on where people with young children live. Probably second only to absolute affordability, and people will make sacrifices on behalf of putting kids in the school they want.
I’m talking about reading articles on New Urbanism, which is a city planning movement that seems to be driven more by ideology than market forces.
I never said anyone was a fool for moving to escape an intolerable circumstance. I said that telling people in an intolerable circumstance that they should stop whining and just move was foolish advice.
Also, comparing young professionals trying to find affordable rent to African Americans fleeing a racist, terrorist regime is not a great comparison.