Yeah, I'm surprised this proxy-variable explanation wasn't mentioned earlier. The small town I grew up in didn't even have a __movie theatre__, or almost any big chain stores outside of basic necessities like grocery. This improved over time as an influx of rich retirees/tourists changed the demographics (and also drove out a lot of poors, whose fishing and farm labour are what founded the town to begin with...) But even today, for so many bog-standard amenities that most medium+ towns or cities have...those all require going to a magical place called "Over The Hill". Mountain pass to the north, mountain pass to the east. (South is a flat exit, but leads to more rural stuff, not less.)
Like it didn't really hit me until I was an adult, how __weird__ it was that every year's back-to-school shopping for clothing, supplies, etc. took place in some other city. Because there simply weren't any of those kinds of shops at home. Not outside the tiny expensive local boutiques which survived by selling to outsiders, not supplying locals. There were a few years, in fact, where freak weather events effectively stranded the town via rockslides and such. It's just different living in a place like that...a pervading sense of insularity and smallness. Which is fine if one's already comfortable, but deeply stifling otherwise. There's a reason most kids who leave for college never really come back. Once you've gotten a taste of life's possibilities outside the bubble...
Realistically, I can't afford and don't even like a lot of the amenities on offer in SF...but many people do, and the collective effect of concentrating so many like-minded aesthetes together makes an overall nicer place. Not at all a hardcore urbanist - there's many things I miss about small-town life. But the fact remains, I mainly left home because it was __boring__, both in its people (the anti-intellectual currents are still strong there) and its things to do. Might be a worthwhile place to retire to in the future, but I wouldn't want to spend the intervening decades commuting. (The local jobs situation is, uh, poor.) Not to mention it's a strongly car-designed town, and I don't drive, so...yeah. I'm sure symphonies also correlate with dense walkable design, too. No one builds opera houses in strip malls or whatever.
>Re: 21, a symphony is nice to go to sometimes, but it’s also a marker for having a critical mass of the kind of people who go to symphonies.
Absolutely, places with great museums and symphonies tend to have tons of whatever, and more of the people who are into whatever, than other cities.
'Nightlife' can be a little distinct, but probably still correlates somewhat with other activities. College towns probably score extremely high on nightlife AND MTG tournaments for example, but not every place with nightlife does.
It's actually worse because the bust involves a run up in which the people with gains sold their house and possibly downsized and stayed in the area but more likely given the limited amount of cheap housing moved and now there are lots of people with negative equity.
The housing bust also hits anyone who works on construction. When house prices are going up, more people are willing to spend on remodeling and new construction. When housing prices are going down, demand for that kind of labor dries up.
Yeah I think that's more the point. There are actually a lot of people involved in real-estate transactions: not just builders, but contractors (no more common time for major house fixups then just before or after a sale), painters, real estate agents, appraisers, termite people, escrow firms, banks and underwriters, insurance agents. When the housing market tanks alll these local people are affected as well.
Construction was what really drove the latter half of the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland, and when the housing bubble burst, that knocked everything sideways (the banks take a huge share of the blame, too, but they were riding high on the property boom as well):
"The return of the boom in 2004 was claimed to be primarily the result of the large construction sector's catching up with the demand caused by the first boom. The construction sector represented nearly 12% of GDP and a large proportion of employment among young, unskilled men. A number of sources, including The Economist, warned of excessive Irish property values. 2004 saw the construction of 80,000 new homes, compared to the UK's 160,000 – a nation that has 15 times Ireland's population. House prices doubled between 2000 and 2006; tax incentives were a key driver of this price rise, and the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government subsequently received substantial criticism for these policies."
There could have also, perhaps, been a bigger hit in a given area based on the number of adjustable-rate mortgages held.
I was more speaking to the sentiment I heard at the time in my comment, but I looked up a few statistics. Unemployment in a few key cities in the valley went up about 2.5x during the great recession whereas in a smattering of other cities around the country I looked into it was closer to 2x. Unemployment also tended to start at a higher rate, and I suspect there's a greater demoralizing effect if the rate goes from 8 to 18% compared to if it goes from 4 to 8%
Yes, and also people who buy a house they can just barely afford, possibly with a second mortgage or going interest-only. They buy a $600k home, end up with $600k in mortgage with payments they can barely afford, house drops to $300l in value so there is no ability to sell or to take home equity loans for emergencies.
Any financial surprise at all leads to foreclosure... which drives down nearby property values as the bank won't sit on the property and will sell it for $300k and eat the loss.
This was my initial thought when seeing's Scott's question. Most people don't plan to stay in their home forever, and with pricing skyrocketing in the early 2000s, it seemed like a great investment to buy a house that might stretch your budget in order to sell in a few years when you plan to move. If you lost half of the value you paid for the house, you are stuck underwater and may be better off just walking away than trying to sell out from under a mortgage you could barely afford in the first place. If you put a decent down payment on it, then you're screwed even more.
Plus some bought homes they *couldn't* afford, expecting to sell it to some big-city commuter as the prices kept going up. Real estate agents collaborated in faking income data to get commissions. Once the market goes down the buyer is bankrupt. They walk away. The bank takes a loss. The house may be resold or just left empty. If empty, it's going to be ruined by lack of maintenance (or possibly squatters). Worst case, meth lab.
Property tax percentages are an epiphenomenon. The taxing authority sets its budget and the assesses tax *amounts* proportional to property values. If every property saw its value drop by a quarter, they'd all still owe the same number of dollars, which would be a higher percentage of the now-lower property value.
Prop 13 certainly screwed California up in a lot of ways, but a widespread drop in property values could actually make the effects smaller since the capped values wouldn't be as much lower than reality.
Not sure what you're driving at here. The taxing authority neccessarily sets its budget according to assessed value, not market value, and in California those can differ widely because of Prop 13 -- and they change little when the housing market surges or plummets. They can never go up more than 2% and the assessor is very unwilling to lower them in a downturn for obvious reasons (because busts follow booms).
My house, for example, has an assessed value that is 1/3 of its market value, because I've lived here a while. I knew a colleague whose house had an assessed value that was about 1/20 of its market value.
Busts don't have nearly the same effect on the disparity as does the time of residence, because of the accumulation over years.
I also don't think Prop 13 screwed California up at all -- rather the reverse. It's a damn crude hammer, but it had the welcome effect of short-circuiting in part the ability of the citizens to vote themselves bread and circuses at the expense of "the rich" (mostly their future selves), so that's a very good thing. I regret the death of the 2/3 majority required to raise taxes for the same reason, this is all part of the slow metamorphosis of what was once a great state into the disastrous New York/Illinois model, which consists of massive cities that are dysfunctional for anyone other than the fabulously rich, alienated outlands, and sky-high levels of corruption, political cynicism, and influence buying. Screw that.
I didn't realize that CA assessors wouldn't drop the assessed values in a downturn, although it makes sense now that you point it out.
The main point I was trying to make is that even in not-CA, a widespread drop in property values wouldn't affect property taxes assessed, so Prop 13 isn't uniquely salient.
The wisdom/value of Prop 13 is somewhat beside the point of this thread, so I won't go into my (relatively uninformed, due to not living in CA) thoughts on it further.
Ha ha yes, one interesting aspect of California property taxes is that if you bought at the top of the market, and then the value plunges, you have to *petitition* the assessor to lower your assessed value to its market value (the assessed value automatically gets set to the sales price when the house changes hands) -- and so far as I know the assessor is under no obligation to comply. Part of why California real estate is a real adventure.
“I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?”
Yes, I would expect so. University of Georgia school that is pretty much centered around 1) their football team and 2) partying about football. Athens GA has the most bars per square mile in the US. A lot of students clearly choose to go here for the football/nightlife, and it drives important demographics in the city.
I’m not claiming it’s purely about nightlife here (did I mention people care about football?) But I think it is clear that here in a medium-sized city, such considerations can drive demographics. I don’t know if we’d have as much of an impact on a city the size of, say, Chicago
I would argue that "having a symphony" doesn't draw much of anyone to anywhere, but "having something" is the only thing that matters.
I live on Long Island. What a town has determines its character, who hangs out there, who lives there, how much money it pulls in. Northport was always a nice, sleepy, well-off town. But I'd never visited until the Engeman Theatre opened. It's great, with terrific productions, and some high-end restaurants around it. We only go once or twice a year for it, sure, but lots of people go once or twice a year now, where before it was zero. And having it there is a draw to move to LI in general.
I definitely get Scott's (and the OP's) point - I lived in NYC for 20 years, and went to the opera once, saw a ballet, museums or galleries twice a year, maybe. But getting hung up on "who other than kids move somewhere for the nightlife? Who goes somewhere for symphonies?" misses the point. You move to a place because it has stuff, and all the urban stuff often comes in a package. When it doesn't, sure, it doesn't make people move there (though it makes people visit). The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra has not caused an influx of new residents eager to hit Powell Hall three times a week. But "culture and nightlife" keep people in New York, because there's a lot of it, and it makes everything else fun and vibrant.
Yes! Specifically phrasing the question as being about a symphony is helpful because *symphonies require physical space,* and that space isn't always in use by the symphony. Your local culture is going to be shaped by *everything else using that space.* They symphony may play on Friday nights, the local LARP group uses the space every third Saturday, the local indie music acts play throughout the week, there's a fall craft show the first weekend in November, etc.
Having the physical spaces for this kind of thing makes culture-building possible in the first place--to go back to Mystik's original comment, UGA/Athens probably has a pretty good music scene and a decent food scene because *the culture is centered around tailgates and bars, both of which are conducive to good live music and a fair bit of food experimentation.*
You’re pretty dead on. Athens is known for having a lot of great bands come out of it, and our restauraunt scene is pretty solid for the size of the city
> Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard?
Uh, a big part of the deal with the 2008 housing crisis is that many people couldn't make their mortgage payments. The Wikipedia article on it is entitled "Subprime mortgage crisis", where "subprime" means "issued to lenders who are likely to fail to make their payments".
Falling housing prices don’t by themselves make it harder to pay your mortgage. Housing prices might be falling as part of the same crisis in which you are also losing income.
A lot of the mortgages were adjustable-rate, so the monthly price literally went up. But yes, surrounding economic conditions also made it harder for people to repay their mortgages.
Not just adjustable rate, many were balloon mortgages or interest only mortgages or other products that involved very low payments for the first few years that then climbed rapidly. Idea being that the owner would sell, refinance, or be materially better off and able to afford the mortgages then. All three of which were torpedoed by the 2008 recession.
But how does that fit with the claims about how unaffordable property has become there? I mean sure, Detroit bounced backed some but it's got enough housing stock as a result to remain relatively affordable.
What strikes me about this discussion is this mismatch between what the CV offers and what some ppl who live there want it to offer. And I wonder if it's not some kind of cultural mismatch that's causing some of the issue.
There are certainly rural areas in the US that lack the kind of culture many ppl complaining about the CV seem to want and it's not even particularly poor in terms of per county average income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties_by_per_capita_income?wprov=sfti1). However, my sense is that those rural areas have many fewer people who want that kind of culture and the poorer areas of the country either have lower costs of living or the people there aren't as likely to expect more.
Having spent time with family in rural parts of the country I was struck by the huge role that religion often played in those areas. No microbrews but church picnics with baked goods and friends. As an proto-atheist I resented being dragged along to the church but the community role it played was undeniable.
I kinda wonder if there isn't some kind of mismatch thing going on here where the CV isn't so alien as to keep out us costal elites entirely and somehow a bit too dense and too cosmopolitan to develop the kind of religious community that often works in rural areas but too rural and too close to places like SF to develop enough of a culture for godless coastal elites.
Having lived in rural areas of several states and loving it, I often feel somewhat attacked by people complaining about a lack of "culture" or places to go. Family especially, but also close friends and religious gatherings, are a key and important part of living in such communities. I get the impression that many city-dwellers don't have a lot of close family, so the idea that you'll build your social network out of family members is probably completely alien to them.
"It used to be that Calif. Senators were elected on a scheme that gave each county a representation proportional to its land area." To clarify, no Senate seat could include more than one county and none could include less than one county; as a result, Los Angeles County, with 40% of the state's population in 1960, had only 1 of the 40 State Senate seats.
I thought the OP was missing any direct comparison of the economic conditions of the central valley to the economic conditions of other parts of the US that have equivalent ruralness and test scores. So I'm not really sure there's any anomaly that needs explaining.
I highly doubt it. I have lived in plenty of "nightlife" cities where I've walked home at 2:30am and learned in the morning somebody got shot at 2:45am on a block I walked by.
But it would be a neat little trend-line you could throw together real quick to determine if there's any correlation.
Ha ha I'd say almost the reverse. The city I knew with the most enduring and lively nightlife was Chicago (although I've never lived in New Orleans), and it's also the place with the scariest levels of nighttime crime I know. Places that roll up the sidewalks at 8 tend to have low levels of street crime.
I don't think the culture and nightlife point is really about literal culture and nightlife. There's a more-or-less universal perception now that's hard to put into words, but basically it's that there are proper world-tier cities with real culture and nightlife, and where what happens is general is in some sense actually important, and then there are provincial towns/cities with their own crappy versions and which don't matter. By important, I mean in the sense that if San Francisco was destroyed by a tsumani it would be a way bigger deal than if a population-equivalent chunk of the Central Valley was destroyed by a tornado or whatever.
It's really status and signalling - if you think that whatever restaurant is the hip new thing in Bakersfield is cool, then you're a provincial hick. If you think that the hip new restaurant in San Francisco is cool, then that's fine. You can always get status points by looking down at the Bakersfield restaurant, so everyone does, whereas doing that with the New York one is harder to pull off (it's the difference between saying How I Met Your Mother is crap and saying Shakespeare is crap - people who say the latter just seem like they're too thick to get it). Importantly, this is mostly independent of the quality of the restaurant (like a really good HIMYM episode vs Titus Andronicus).
This bleeds into everything, and the result is that there are a few places which people can accept are actually worth living in, and everywhere else becomes viewed as minor-league; to use another metaphor, the Sacramento Philharmonic is Walmart Sugar Flakes to the SF Philharmonic being Frosted Flakes. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as talent flows up a prestige gradient, and you end up living in that town where the restaurant critic reviewed an Olive Garden.
Ironically, I'd guess the reason this is happening now is the internet/social media making it impossible to sustain being an actual provincial hick who looks at the big city with fear and wonderment, so now everyone views their home town as being in competition with it. The development of provincial inferiority complexes isn't a specific Central Valley problem though - it's way worse in the UK, where London is threatening to suck in the whole country like a black hole.
It's really not. It's the 17th largest city in America by population, BEFORE you count the other 6 million people living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
That seems like an urban viewpoint. People I know who live out in the sticks look at the city with contempt, not envy or wonderment. They don't see themselves as hicks, they see the city mice as pretentious courtiers of Louis XIV who know absolutely everything about the latest court fashion or mannerisms, but who if their car slid off the road in a snowstorm would just die, helpless -- meaning they are lacking in what the country mice consider basic adulting skills.
Growing up in the woods, on the outskirts of a hamlet of 300 people or so, once or twice a year we would drive to the “big city” to go to a museum or the like. Seeing the skyscrapers and whatever thing we had come to experience was always a bit awe inspiring: but experiencing the bad traffic, noise, trash, crowds, and lack of space would always have us saying “it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
For lack of a "like" button, I'll comment that this has definitely been my experience. Visit a few times a year at most, get some enjoyment out of whatever purpose we were there for, and be very thankful we didn't have to live in a place like that.
People who live in the country aren't really the comparators though; Bakersfield's population is just shy of 400,000. It's the second- and third-tier towns and cities that have the worst of both worlds - an urban lifestyle (employment at a single indoor workplace, walking to amenities, multiple bar/restaurant options) whilst being painfully aware that all they get to experience are the court fashions of some random squire no-one cares about.
I probably need to caveat this that I'm aware most of the US doesn't really do villages, but I don't think this would start to bite anywhere with a population under about 50,000. In other words, big enough to have lower-tier versions of the amenities that SF/LA have.
Geez I wonder where you've lived, then. I've lived in a farmhouse with the closest neighbor 2 miles down the road, and in small towns with 50,000 people, in the outer suburbs of a major city, and right in the heart of cities ranging from about the size of Miami to the size of Chicago.
In each of these places I would say almost all people I knew were pretty content, and preferred living where they did. The people in the sticks liked the dark skies, the space and nature, being self-reliant, and the quiet. The people in the small towns liked the small-town friendliness and mutual assistance, being on a first-name basis with the cops, the slower pace. The people in the 'burbs liked the family-orientation and good schools and the lower pollution. The people in the urban core loved the rich and rapid flow of events and the ability to do all kinds of things at any hour.
I'm pretty surprised that you found any significant region, at least in the United States, where people were mostly unhappy and wanted to live elsewhere. Not my experience at all. There was always a small minority who were in transition, to be sure. Kids who couldn't wait to get out of school so they could hit the big lights, people who'd lost their jobs or marriages and were figuring out how they could start over somewhere better, people trapped in ugly commutes and cramped apartment living who were working on their escape, stuff like that. But these people were always only small fraction of everybody.
"walking to amenities, multiple bar/restaurant options" doesn't sound like the *worst* of both worlds to me! But then I chose to move from a big city to a smaller one where I can meet up with my friends without putting an event in the calendar for a month hence and then spending hours packed into the Tube in both directions.
What do you mean by "most of the US doesn't really do villages"? Geographically, most of the US is rural, and that means little towns of 1-5,000 people, with little hamlets of 1-500 scattered around them. Plus the occasional ghost town that hasn't quite died yet with a population of 12. I grew up in a hamlet of 300 people: the nearest communities were a town of 1,100 about 12 miles south, and a thorp of 46 people about 5 miles north. Then there was a village about 6 miles east of that, around 400 people, and in between the two of them was a ghost town where the only sign left of it is the old Lion's Club hall. North of the thorp is a village of 200 that is just the remnants of a larger village that was flooded when they put in a hydroelectric dam, and a village of 88 about 3 miles past that. Then you get to the big town: 3,000 people! They even have their own high school.
It's true that if you keep going north you eventually hit the edge of the suburban sprawl, and the deeper you go the denser it gets, but particularly in the West there are large geographic regions where it's pretty much nothing but small towns and villages.
The USA, outside of New England, doesn't do traditional villages in the sense of the usual human pattern. In England and Europe, rural farmers didn't live on independent plots of land, a half mile or more from their neighbors. Instead they lived *right next to* their neighbors - small houses, very small lots- and walked from the central village out to the fields. This pattern yields much smaller and tighter communities, each with its own baker, coffee house, tavern (maybe), dry goods shop, a weekly open air market ( much less common), church, etc.
In the US, to the extent that we have these, it is a small set of shops serving a much wider geographic area, with far less daily interaction and community between the people.
That was the historical pattern in the Middle Ages, but nowadays you can find plenty of isolated farmhouses in the UK. No doubt less isolated than you could find in the US, though.
It's the second-tier cities that have the worst case of envy; they feel their provincial status keenly and are always comparing themselves to the Joneses.
This was my predominant view of Dublin (from my small town mousehole) in my 20s-40s; the wannabe thought leaders and influencers and media constantly comparing Dublin and Ireland unfavourably to London and New York, constantly wanting to be as good as their masters, constantly wanting the rest of the country to change because we were embarrassing them in front of the neighbours for being so provincial.
Myself, I have always thought that the most provincial thing of all is to be wearing the hand-me-downs of the big city next door and always being a year or more behind the fashions. Better to be a country mouse with a culture of your own, than a city mouse always scrabbling for crumbs dropped off the plate of those you clearly consider your betters.
This happens even between small and large cities. I live in Edinburgh, which is a smallish city with both nightlife and high culture (but not a professional symphony - that's an hour's train ride away in Glasgow). On my last visit to London I was amazed at how *impractically* people dressed - as if the need to keep out the weather was not a constraint.
I'm just up visiting Edinburgh to potentially move here. It feels like a bit of an outlier of a place with both beautiful natural surroundings whilst being technically the most educated city in the UK (Proportion of working age population with NVQ4 or higher according to https://www.centreforcities.org/data-tool/su/21686f92), beating both Cambridge and Oxford yet being 4x the size of either (is that due to demographic differences, i.e number of families/children?). People are quite friendly and there's a town-like relaxed feel, and then the massive Holyrood park right in the centre with a huge crag overlooking everything, also access to the Cairngorms only 1:30hr drive away.
City vs Country is quite strong in my mind here as I've come up from a very rural area in Cornwall (I'm not a local I was there working for a couple of years) - Well-off Londoners buying up second-homes has created a housing affordability crisis (massive over simplification) and driven resentment levels high. This has been going on for years.
I agree with the root comment that London is a Black Hole, it's so much bigger than everything else that it really warps everything around it - have a look at its GDP and Population vs the rest of the UK's cities, nowhere else comes close: https://www.centreforcities.org/data-tool/su/0f3b3dbc
I'd be interested in seeing comparative data for other countries, is this unusual for similar size countries in Europe?
I don't know for sure, but I believe London is unusually dominant (though it depends a bit on where you draw city boundaries). And I'd recommend Edinburgh as a place to live - lots going on, small enough that you run into your friends randomly on the street, relatively handy for the countryside (though less so than Glasgow - I think 1.5 hours to the Cairngorms is optimistic unless you're talking about the southernmost edge). Housing is expensive compared to the rest of Scotland, but still cheap compared to London and the South-East.
Most smart conservatives who live in the country (who tend not to be FROM the country) look at city dwelling liberals as mindless NPCs who would be thrilled to live in a shoe box, if the shoe box happened to be located in a closet in a fashionable major city.
I'm reasonably confident that Shakespeare did indeed write plenty of crap, but he wrote so many different types of things that people usually end up both liking and hating at least one. Since you mentioned Titus Andronicus, well, it's basically a gory horror story that wouldn't be out of place next to "torture porn" films such as Hostel, and a lot of people *really* aren't into that kind of thing...
I think the thing about symphonies and nightclubs is less about the thing itself and more about "how safe do people feel going to events at night? How closely connected and active the networks of human capital and friendship?" etc.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower?"
Some of the loans (maybe a lot?) were loans with balloon payments. One variant was an "interest-only" loan where you made ONLY the interest payments and then, in a few years, the entire balance was due because of the balloon payment.. If you house had gone up in price, then all was well and you'd refinance. But if the value of the house had gone down then you *couldn't* refinance as no bank would loan you the money you'd need (because the assessed value of the house was now too low).
This happened, and once people started defaulting on the loans they could not make then the value of the surrounding houses dropped and the spiral was well under way.
Some people could not even make the payments "as-is." 103% loan-to-value was a thing where the bank would loan you 103% of the sales price of the house. This buys you some time for (a) the house to go up in value, and (b) maybe get a new loan. The banks' models said this was okay historically. But there was a selection bias because banks hadn't handed out these sorts of loans in the past.
"Liar loans" were loans made on the basis of people's claimed incomes with the bank NOT verifying. Pair this with a 103% loan-to-value interest only ARM and you have a problem if anything goes wrong. The term "liar loan" was one used within the mortgage industry ... which suggests that the folks making the loans may have had a slight idea that the loans were less than good.
I'm a Canadian, so I don't have any experience with this.
What did bring this home to me though was the TV series "Heroes". There was a couple where the woman was working (at least at first) as a casino dealer and the man was unemployed (might have been a felon)- but they could afford a three (or so) bedroom detached house in a nice neighborhood.
When people think this is normal, there is trouble ahead.
I've never believed TV or movie descriptions of what allegedly working-class or lower-income houses were like, though. I've seen too many where I went "there is no way a single woman on an hourly wage could afford that kind of house".
That's why the "Roseanne" series was really convincing in the kind of house the Barr family lived in and the kind of neighbourhood.
Yes, Hollywood is bad at this stuff. I think it's partly because many of them are filmed on sets which must have room for cameras and crew so they are implausibly large and uncrowded.
Most of them don't go into as much detail about the characters' finances as Heroes did with this one, which is why that particular bit stayed with me.
I do think it's an oversight that nobody mentioned NAFTA.
NAFTA happened in the 90s and it had an enormous impact on the lives of Mexican farmers. It drove millions of farmers off their land because they couldn't compete with American farms, which were subsidized and more modern.
Impoverished Mexican small farmers had less opportunity in Mexico, so migration was basically a required to survive, whereas before many had migrated seasonally to make some extra cash.
Tightening of immigration also made it difficult for migrants to return home at the end of the season, so many were forced to stay in the US.
"Farmers said that entire towns are emptying because thousands of small farms have gone out of business. As many as 2 million farm workers have lost their jobs — the vast majority headed north across the U.S. border looking for better pay."
One big effect of the housing crash was that it immediately followed a huge housing boom.
So you had armies of construction workers and tradesmen that became unemployed overnight. Housing companies and real estate investors that went bust. Half finished housing developments and subdivisions left to rot because they had no hope of filling in. Restaurants and strip malls that had cropped up to serve these growing suburbs failed and went vacant.
Basically, towns that were hit hard by the crash were the sprawly towns that benefitted most from the preceding housing boom, and there was a huge chunk of the local economy dependent on this continual growth.
Surely it's a thing that changes, often, with life stage? I grew up mostly in the boonies, and couldn't wait to hit the big city when I left home at 17. I lived in cities, right downtown if I could, from then until the end of my 20s, and I loved it. Big rich slice of life, so much going on, so many different kinds of people, so many stories, I pitied the country mice who were missing out on all this lively experience.
But then I had kids, and it became no longer merely mildly annoying to contemplate the wild twentysomethings next door cranking up the Pink Floyd[1] at 2am when the baby had finally gone to sleep and I had to be at work by 8am. I got sick of planning for parking like I was a German staff officer planning the invasion of the Soviet Union -- and schlepping an infant and a toddler to the pediatrician by subway or bus is a nonstarter unless you're too poor to avoid it. So I moved out to the burbs, and got myself a boring old 4BR SFR with a yard and quiet neighbors, not a bar or club within five miles but I can accidentally leave my car or front door unlocked and nothing happens -- and where we can put two cars in the garage and the teenage kids could put another in the driveway or street. Got myself a table saw and set up a bench so I could make some shelves and furniture and not entirely forget what it means to work with your hands. Great decision, never looked back.
And now that I see retirement heaving over the horizon I am liking the idea of the country more all the time. I'm much less interested in rubbing elbows with random generic humanity -- sorry, but most of you[2] are tedious when you're not dangerous -- and much more interested in being surrounded by trees, grass, birds, animals, stuff that is now the way it was in 800,000 BC and will be the same in AD 800,000.
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[1] I realize this name makes everyone under 50 laugh, but I have no idea what younger generations would consider edgy late teen music.
[2] Except my friends, of course, but I get choosier about those the older I get.
As an edgy 20 something, I can confirm the pink Floyd does come on occasionally, but mostly kinda as a meme when we're doing psychedelics. I think the next generation will have forgotten the association.
We do listen to "hyperpop" but not much, though I'm in the especially group that's mostly nostalgia-ing for 90s and early 2000s alternative and punk. But to be honest at 26 I and my friends already feel like we're behind on the music trends which apparently seem to target 16-22? Idk.
So if I went up to the attic and dug out the turntable -- a Technics direct-drive with the little quartz strobe so you can tweak the speed that was first-rate for college students in the late Pleistocene -- and it actually still worked, I could put my "Wish You Were Here" LP on and passing Gen Zers might nod their heads in recognition at the ethereal slow fade-in of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"?
I find that weirdly cheering. Not everything less gargantuan than the Great Pyramid or Plato's conversations just turns to dust. A small human blow against entropy, huzzah.
Few things have made me laugh as much as the renaissance of vinyl, when we were assured back in the day that CDs were The Future and would be forever because they were so much superior.
And those people were absolutely right--before CDs were also made obsolete by superior technology. The number of young people who have ever listened to vinyl pales in comparison to the number who listen in to music via the Internet.
Well, they kind of are, at least in ordinary commecial quality, but MP3 and streaming are considerably inferior to both (vinyl and CD), so if all you're used to is MP3s through your AirPods then experiencing a high-quality LP or CD with a good stereo system can be exciting. I dunno if I totally believe the people who say they can detect a difference in high quality LP versus CD -- they remind me of those people who claimed they could tell the difference between a tube and transistor final in the amp, and claimed the tubes gave a "warmer" feeling. But maybe my hearing is not good enough ha ha.
What I find interesting is the shift in obsession from quality to quantity in the music-loving young. When I was a kid, we spend beaucoup on high-quality stereo equipment and recordings, so we could reproduce our favorite pieces in a quality (and volume) that was satisfying. To go back to Pink Floyd again, when that first deep base note strikes in "Time", you wanted to feel it in your bones (as well as have the windows rattle) without the false cramped sound of the overdriven final, this was Nirvana.
But now it seems the obsession is with quantity: audiophiles require thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pieces on tap. My grown Millenial kids sniff in amused disdain because in 25-odd years I have accumulated maybe a thousand MP3s I can pipe through the earphones when working late. If they were limited to that, they'd feel impoversihed, I guess. Hence (I assume) the popularity of streaming services, where they can run through thousands of songs a month -- maybe a week, for all I know.
It's such a strong contrast to my own youth, where we might wait with anticipatory pleasure for a new album for months, then play those 8-10 songs over and over again for more months. My first year in college, my roommate had an awesome stereo system, and I went to sleep each night for my entire freshman year listening to the same side of a certain album which a desire not to be laughed at prevents me from actually naming. But what kid these days would listen to the same 5 songs in a row every day for months?
I find the public transport point interesting; I live in London, and it's actually a major bonus to be able to get kids around in the excellent public transport (and people are actually really helpful, offering seats or to help with the pram). It's much more pleasant than driving, as I can feed or play with them as we go.
That said, I saw more concerning incidents on the New York subway in two weeks than I have in London on the tube in eight years, so that might be a factor.
I think New York is going through one of its periodic shithole phases. It did this in the 70s, too. By and by citizens get sick of it and hire a Sergeant Koch to clean it up, and it gets pretty livable. Then their attention wanders (or something) and the place gets Dinkinized and starts to evolve into Mexico City del Norte again.
I don't think it's just life stage per-se but also the life stage of everybody else, leading to network effects. If you had no preference except that the local population has plenty of people who are roughly the same age as you, you'd still find yourself drawn to the city in your 20s and the countryside in your 50s.
Oh and I think the counterculture has fragmented into subcultures so the edgy kids these days might listen to hyperpop or hip-hop or minimalist funk or even modern prog like KGLW. Possibly all of the above.
That's an interesting point, and I can definitely see it for young people. When you're 19-25, pretty much everyone not within +/- 5 years is pretty incomprehensible, being at a very different life stage, so it makes loads of sense that you want to seek out your own tribe and hang with them. (Maybe this is part of why young people will ultimately always want "the college experience" regardless of the educational quality of any alternative.)
I dunno about past middle age, though, that one seems more iffy. I don't really especially identify with or give a damn about what others my age think or what they like. I identify more with people who have similar life trajectories, or similar values, similar attitudes, and they come in a wide range of ages, I guess from about 30 to 80 or so, and don't constitute the majority of any age group -- certainly not my own.
So if it was just a question of finding sympatico neighbors, I would be less interested in the fact that they are close to my age and more interested in whatever life experiences I could infer from their choice in location that brought them to similar character. (Exempli gratia, I have a difficult time relating to anybody who has never reared children.)
Anyway, my vague attraction for the country has nothing to do with seeking sympatico neighbors. To the extent it's socially driven at all, I think it's more a desire to get away from people -- to be left alone -- on account of I find people per se increasingly tiresome: all their tribal squabbling, fascination with social heirarchy and signaling, a bunch of localized (in time) minutiae that mean approximately squat in the face of eternity. I do appreciate those relative few who ponder stuff that can match in its scale the scale of a trillion-year universe, of course, but mostly I want to be left alone by the remainder who see TG-v-TERF or blue-v-red or No Nukes! -v- Decarbonize Now! as Manichaean struggles which brook no Geneva Conventions.
Adding to this: when you're a teenager in the suburbs, you don't really care about the square footage of the whole house, because the footage that's yours is your bedroom. You care about public transport (you either can't drive unsupervised or you can't afford the petrol or you have to negotiate when to use the car AND can't afford the petrol and you get saddled with chores when you do use the car).
So the advantages of suburbs (big houses, your own garden, car accessible amenities) are almost all lost on you.
Cities are super attractive - better public transport, proximity to stuff you care about (jobs, shopping, takeaway and nightclubs as opposed to supermarkets, daycares and chiropractors).
Add to the fact that when you're young, you don't tend to have a lot of Stuff. You accumulate stuff (clothes, cooking equipment, furniture, nice homegoods, gadgets, hobbyware, etc) and suddenly you're 30 and you're annoyed that your shoebox apartment feels super cramped. This wasn't a problem when you were 20 because you moved in with literally a suitcase and a laptop.
As an ex California resident, I'm not offended by your take on the Central Valley. But I do politely request that you do a corresponding piece, "Why is San Francisco So Bad?". Or at least "Perceived As Bad".
It's a real issue, that *so many* ex Bay Area and ex SF residents in particular have such negative feelings about SF.
Although I lived in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose, with just a small amount of living in SF, you can definitely add me to that list.
Santa Clara's in the middle for property crime and near the bottom for violent crime, despite half of it being the million people in San Jose. I think it should be a major sub-component of the SF story that there's this other full sized city nearby that gets a lot of flak for being boring and suburban but has basically no violent crime by comparison.
[And this is coming from a Palo Altan who tells anecdotes like "the time someone snapped a metal file in my girlfriend's car door lock in San Jose" and "the time a vagrant set fire to my wife's condo property in San Jose" and "the time a vagrant overdosed in my daughter's park in San Jose" and "the time a man passed out in my apartment building hallway and scared the crap out of my female neighbor in San Jose". These things seem bad until I remember that my share of SF stories includes a violent crime, a knife chase, and some naked people injecting things into each other's thighs. And I'm not even including Golden Gate Park stories.]
I visited San Fran and Seattle on school trips and I will never be going back to the West Coast. Atlanta was a better experience by far--I didn't get chased for 4 city blocks by a man who was jerkin' it and screaming things *I'm glad my underage brain did not hold on to* in Atlanta.
Per the article, most of the central valley and the border with Oregon are the only parts of the state turning into a rust belt. The Bay Area, the LA area, San Diego, Sacramento, the fancy little tourist areas, the small coastal communities, and the small mountain communities are all economically and culturally vibrant. Certain skilled people can go to California *right now* and make piles of money doing interesting work, and a lot of them can probably tell themselves it's worthwhile.
LA really is a culture trendsetter and the grey/tech tribe in the Bay Area really are the closest thing we have to thought leaders in the world of the 2020s.
Also, the land, aside from being too dry for civilization, is amazing. Fertile when you water it, beautiful, weather always good.
*But*. Moral fibre is low across the board. People are sharky, or dangerously weird, or stonery. They will cheerfully take from you and tell themselves they're perfectly decent people while they do it. Not just money or time. A female friend of mine once said she would ride around SF on the bus, wearing her wedding ring as a necklace, and far from being dissuaded, people would take it like "oh, you have a functioning relationship? cool, would you like to have another one with me?". She later became a polyamorist, I think not without causing some pain, but certainly without the guilt.
*And*, second class citizens of all kinds are treated very poorly at a systemic level. From the day I set foot in the Bay Area to the day I left, I noticed that Mexican and other Latin American immigrants had markedly worse positions and got worse treatment than supposedly backwards Texas. In Texas, it's not at *all* uncommon that your dentist is Mexican. Somewhat ditto Los Angeles. But in the Bay, Mexican immigrants are housekeepers, poorly paid, the whole stereotype. Similarly, native born non-elite workers are as described above and in other comments: commuting for hours from worse places, barely able to make ends meet, erased from discourse and power. From where I sit, it looks way worse to be a lower middle class White or Black person in California than most of what's east of the rockies. For example: San Francisco was 20% black in ~ 1980. It was already ~ 7% black in 2009. At 700k population, that's *ninety thousand* black people who were priced out of their homes in a 30 year period.
*And*, the homeless and drug problems are the worst in the developed world. Everyone says this about their local area, but, see epistemic disclaimer below, I've lived in a lot of places, and from that standpoint, the west coast is 2x as bad as anywhere else and urban California is 2x as bad as the rest of the west coast.
I think it's very easy to live in and enjoy California if you are good at seeing the dark parts of the world and telling yourself it's fine, you're fine, you deserve your nice spot. If the dark parts throw you or cause you to doubt your validity, California is not easy.
[Epistemic disclaimer: I'm a military doctor's kid, an academic, a programmer, and a white American guy with a Chinese born but very culturally fluent wife. My parents are from New Jersey. I've lived in Texas, California, Washington state, Oregon, Georgia, South Carolina, England, and Germany, and I consider this kind of epistemic disclaimer important for letting you assess my biases in discussions about places.]
Yeah. I've never been to the CV, but to my ears both the people attacking it and people defending it are saying "It's kind of like a worse version of a rural area or small-to-mid-sized city in the Midwest." It shares some of the advantages of those places over the hive cities on the coasts, but fewer of them. And it has some of the same disadvantages, but more of them. So I don't really understand why you would live there.
Central Valley cities are very much like rust belt cities with significantly higher open drug use, and, somehow, significantly lower opioid crisis deaths... maybe it's different drugs.
Addendum 2: I would like to second what Ragged Clown said about commuting.
> When I lived in San Jose, almost every construction worker, gardener or cleaner I spoke to commuted in from Lodi or Tracy or Stockton or Modesto etc because they couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area.
Yes, this. The roads from the east bay to the central valley are huge, and they're nightmarishly choked for a wide range of hours. This is the true cost of having restaurant and construction workers in the Bay Area: such people are basically commuter servants, their lives are bad in ways they can't control, *and* if the environmental cost of this commute was even partially factored into the ratings of Bay Area cities, most of them would drop rather dramatically off of environmental friendliness lists. Your town may be green, but you effective force your policeman and your CalTrain worker to burn *hours* of daily time and *gallons* of gasoline to serve you.
Uhh... I feel like we already spent almost a year talking about almost nothing other than why San Francisco is so bad. A quick look through the archives, and you will see the piece you were talking about, except it's more like 8 different pieces, all talking about homelessness and addiction and construction malaise and Western civilization's lack of ability to manage its cities, etc
I can only speak from my experience, but it's most US states, almost all US cities in their own size-dependent and politics-dependent ways, the entire US government, many UK areas, and the entire UK government. I'd say Scotland seems cool, but it's only really functional at the national government level, not all the local communities. I feel *relatively* good about living in the outskirts of north Austin Texas (I don't like suburbs, especially American ones, but I find there's a local maximum that avoids the problems of the city and the problems of the rural areas). But it's not great. I miss Germany. I wish China would return to communist-capitalist-one-party without a cult of personality. I think civilizational inadequacy is developing at different speeds and being staved off to differing degrees but it's a consistent first world pattern.
An important question is whether you've ridden the American public transit. Have you ridden the American public transit?
In Europe, and in New York, it's for everybody, rich and poor, functional and dysfunctional. This is not true in most of America. It didn't catch on the right way. That's partly down to attitude, but it's also partly down to distance. The car was just too valuable, and the transit system stratified to some degree, so public transit is a *somewhat* dysfunctional strata, and the negative implications of new transit are *real*, as well as the positive ones.
Also SFers are HODLing pretty hard. You should see the internal email threads of a company like Google or Twitter whenever something happens that meaningfully threatens rising SF house prices. Again, I can only speak to my experience, but there's a practical violence in the tone of those discussions that doesn't quite exist in the housing discussions in other places I've lived. If you've ever seen pictures of Los Angeles Koreatown rooftop guys in the LA riots, it rather feels like that mentality.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower?"
This and all the replies to it (as of the writing of this comment) miss the mark and misunderstand what is happening here. Getting a stable, fixed-rate mortgage is how upper-middle-class people buy their upper-middle-class homes. If someone is in a position to be "hit hard" by an economic crisis, we're not talking about those people.
Poor people scrape together enough to buy a home with a small down payment on an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), once they can make the payments given the introductory ("teaser") rate. When that runs out after a few years, the rate gets adjusted upwards, unless they can refinance under a new ARM with a new introductory rate. Which they can do, as long as they still have enough equity that the bank is willing to grant the terms. But if their equity has dropped below what they'd need for a down payment, and they can't refinance, then their monthly payment explodes along with the rate, and they can no longer afford their house.
Honestly, the movie The Big Short did a decent job of explaining it. Ignore the set dressing (mild nudity) for a decent explanation: https://youtu.be/iDcbUAh731s
"oor people scrape together enough to buy a home with a small down payment on an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), once they can make the payments given the introductory ("teaser") rate."
> I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?
My little brother used to go out to drink with friends at least 3 times a week, and often 4 or 5, and then doing something else on the weekend. I go out to drink on average once or twice a year, and never really enjoy those moments, I'm always dragged by other people that insist. I do spend time face to face with people, but it's in small groups (~5 people), in a private place (usually my appartment), and we mostly talk or watch movies.
At least according to my personal experience, nightlife can matter a lot to some people, and not at all for others. This is probably the same with culture. In 10 years in a relatively big city, I've gone once to the theater. I go to the movie theater more often, I'd say around once a month, but if I wasn't in a big city, I could invest part of the difference in rent in a nice home theater system, and rarely feel the need to go out.
I've found the REKOM Night Index at https://rekom.uk/late-night-index/, that surveyed 2,358 18+ year olds between 15/03/22 and 21/03/22 in the UK. Some interesting data:
- Almost half (49.9%) of respondents go out at least once a week, and of those, 26.8% go out weekly, 14.4% go out 2-3 times a week and 6.5% go out 4-6 days a week. The mean is at 1.17 times per week.
- The most popular reason for going on a night out is to spend time with friends (64.9%). Almost a quarter (23.6%) go out to relieve day to day pressures and stress. This figure rises to 28.7% for 25-34 year olds.
- The top factors respondents anticipate being the most important when deciding where to go on a late night out are: Distance from home or ease of getting there (20.4%), Type of music (19.0%), Most affordable pricing (17.6%), Quality of the venue and brand (15.6%).
- The average cost of a night out is 68 pounds. The average duration of a night out is 4 hours and 17 minutes.
I think with that we can estimate the "weight"/"space" that going out takes for people that go out a lot, with the caveat that there may some correlation that haven't been explicited here. For example, what's the impact of the number of time you go out on the average cost of a night out, or the average duration.
With that in mind, we can create a rough estimate for people that go out 2-3 times a week. Let's multiply that by 4.33 to get a monthly number: 8.7-13. That would mean between 592 and 884 pounds a month. As for the time, between 36 and 54 hours.
As for the people that go out 4 to 6 times a week, we can just multiply by 2 our previous findings: between 1184 and 1768 pounds a month, and between 72 to 108 hours. Salary/earnings can be complex and correlated to a lot of other elements that we have, but fortunately hours are the same for everyone, we all get 730 of them in a month. The 2-3 person spends between 5% and 7% of his time going out, the 4-6 person between 10% and 14%. Adjusted for waking hours (1/3 of your time, so multiply everything by 1.5), that's between 7.5% and 10.5% for the 2-3, and between 15% and 21% for the 4-6.
Having written all of that, I'd say that now if my little brother tells me he wants to move somewhere else to have a more active nightlife, I would be able to empathize with his decision. And that it's safe for me to ignore everything nightlife and most things culture related when deciding where to live. Maybe it's the same for art and high-culture and there are people out there spending 15% or more of their waking life engaging with this? All I can say is that I have nobody like that in my bubble.
I care about nightlife despite not enjoying clubbing because it's usually correlated with the availability of cheap takeaway food. Places that have a nightlife usually also have more restaurants which open for longer on most days. This is very important for me because I very often find myself too tired to cook and clean. I need to be able to find meals at 8 or 9pm and that tends to correlate to being in places that see a lot of drunk people.
>Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower?
A couple big things. 1) Adjustable rate mortgages and mortgages made out to people who couldn't atcually afford them.
So you have a bunch of people who put what little savings they could scrape together into purchasing assets that had wildly inflated prices. When those assets collapsed, they were left with debts on properties they had to let the bank take back, and no savings.
2) In the meantime because they were on paper wealthy, people overspent their income even more. So someone mkaing $40k a year with $35k in expenses, puts $5k down on a $500k home. Home needs $15k in debt payments each year, which they cannot afford, but is also going up in value $50k/year so who cares. Then they also run up the credit card a bit because they have an "extra" money in term sof home equity.
Then this is working out so well they buy a second house. Then the value of it all collapses and they have no savings, big credit card debts, and no place to live.
3) The construction and real estate sectors were eating up a lot of marginal/unskilled labor. So you had depressed former rust belt communities turn into meccas of cabin flipping and lake homes and second homes, and a lot of the former paper mill workers spent summers working constuction or selling homes/doing appraisals whatever. Then when all that activity stops, none of those people have jobs. So you have communities with already chronic terrible unemployment ~13-14%, suddenly skyrocket to 25% unemployment. Which is a major crisis.
Smart people would leave such economically depresed areas, but people are always slower to move such areas than is rational.
I have to say, I found the anecdote about the laptop bag not being stolen pretty depressing. That’s a very low bar to pass for a city to be regarded as relatively crime-free.
>I’m grateful to them for putting this into words - I hear a lot of discussion seemingly predicated on that fact that you need to have a certain number of museums and symphonies to be a liveable city. But I basically never go to either and I think most people are probably pretty similar. I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?
Yeah I have never understood this.
I grew up in a mid-sized rustbelt city (~100,000 people). Ok not a super happening place, though we would get acts like Metallica/Guns N' Roses or whatever sometimes, it wasn't a total wasteland. Had a symphony too, and D1 college sports!
A lot of the more "sophisticates" at my HS ended up in Minneapolis/St. Paul as adults. But what I just don't get is of the few who eventually lived in Chiacgo/NY/LA for a bit, about halfl suddenly act like living in Nashville or Minneapolis or Atlanta is some kind of death sentence. Maybe these places don't have doctors or basic services? Like maybe there aren't actually good resturants in Dallas and you might just starve to death if you moved there? That sounds as though an am exaggerating, but I assure you I am not. Do the people in Raleigh just DIE of boredom? How can they survive knowing they could be living in Philadephia instead?!?!?!
These are well educated professional people, who know better since they grew up in a mid-sized rustbelt city. I point out I travel all over the country for work, and it is very samey. The type of restuarant an upper middle class lawyer or whatever is going to go to just aren't that different from major metro to major metro. No you can't get a $1000/plate meal in Phoenix, but who the fuck wants/needs that anyway.
The best meal I can remember in the last 5 years was in Jackson MS and cost $40. I tend to think once you get above "middle class" prices, there just isn't really any improvement and it is all down to taste. At that point you are just paying for status and who the fuck cares?
And yes they have a slightly better art museum in Chicago than Minneapolis, but hardly to a noticable extent. And how often are they going to the art museum anyway, once a year? Twice? And for that your house is twice as much? And yes you can take a 40 minute trainride into work insetad of a 35 minute commute, that is somewhat an improvment! Unless, you know, since housing is cheaper in Minneapolis you can just buy a house in Minneapolis and have a 12 minute commute.
Anyway Chicago is great I don't resent anyone living there or NY. But they definitely have their downsides, and a good half their residents seem to have some sort of threshold for livability where city with an MSA of 8 million is eden, but one with an MSA of 4 million might as well be rural Alabama (which honestly is kind of nice too if you are in the right spots).
Anyway, my theory is that there is so much that is unpleasant and expensive about living in the truly giant metros, that people either really really like them, or convince themselves they do as part of a rationalization of their lifestyle.
I agree that most people who boast about their city’s museums, symphony and culture are going at most once a year and don’t actually give a shit, but I think these types of things can serve as a proxy for the overall cultural environment in the city. A city with a ton of art museums, is going to attract more artists, and this in turn is going to effect the quality of art on the walls of the restaurant you’re eating at.
For example, a city such as Detroit, because of the amount of musical innovation that has happened there, is more likely to have better musicians and DJs playing at the bar/block party than a similar sized city such as Baltimore, which lacks the music tradition.
I mean, it all depends what you’re into, and of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t talented people giving quality entertainment everywhere. Small cities and towns have a ton of benefits. But I think it’s less about the museums themselves than it is the tradition that placed them there. You don’t hAve to ever visit to enjoy the effects of their existence.
...it's possible that many people don't want a party on their block, regardless of the alleged quality of the very loud music.
( not saying this is you particularly, but...it is interesting to me that many people talk about wanting to get out of the sticks because 'the intellectual discourse is better in the city' and yet spend so much time at concerts and clubs where the music is so loud one cannot think let alone talk.)
I mean, i get your point but even dense major cities have quiet parts, and except in occasional block parties I don’t think most music takes place outside lol. But I get what you’re saying some people just want peace and quiet and that’s OK too!
I’ve never heard anyone say that about “intellectual discourse” lol. I think you can have great, valuable conversations anywhere. But you can go to a nightclub on Friday and still have intellectual conversations the other 6 days of the week. Plus there’s a ton of bars that are more geared toward conversation than partying, these are definitely the types of places I prefer.
Specifically with regard to the food scene, larger cities tend to have more specialized / authentic restaurant offerings, likely because the larger population center supports more niche offerings. I moved from Los Angeles to Denver several years ago, and its there's maybe one restaurant that has yakitori made with charcoal - with just a handful of choice on the menu. The majority of sushi restaurants focus more on rolls than fresh sashimi. And what the hell is "Ethiopian fusion" cuisine?
I probably wouldn't move back (and endure 15 hours a week sitting in traffic) for access to a few restaurants, but little things like this are noticeable once you become accustomed to them.
"Like maybe there aren't actually good restaurants in Dallas and you might just starve to death if you moved there?"
It's a proxy for the wider attitude that 'those places are in red states, which is the same as redneck, and we're blue through and through and don't share anything in common with rednecks as to values or Just Basic Human Decency'.
A few years back, (and keeping this as vague as possible) someone said that they would never, because they could never, live in Iowa (I don't think it was Iowa, but that kind of general flyover state idea) because they wouldn't be able to get sushi there.
And this wasn't a jokey kind of reference, it was serious. Naturally several of us contrarians Googled for "Sushi restaurants Iowa" and found that they did indeed exist, but the real meaning was 'I could never live anywhere that wasn't multicultural by my definition, and Iowa is not that kind of place'.
I was bemused at first because wow, you must *really* love sushi to dismiss an entire region out of consideration, but then I realised the deeper meaning and it made me sad: for you, the people living there are simply benighted barbarians and you can't conceive of anything you might have in common with them.
I think that’s true for certain people but sometimes it’s not that deep. Of course you can find sushi in Iowa, but it’s not going to be near the quality that you can find in San Francisco. I live in philadelphia, and the quality of bbq here is far lower than the quality of bbq in Durham, NC. NYC has by far the best pizza and it’s almost impossible to find a good NY style slice in most of the rest of the country. A city’s culture and history affects the type of experience you have living there.
The hilarious thing is places like Iowa or Minneapolis or St Louis are more diverse than you think both due to migration to farming jobs and the state department settling refugees there.
Minneapolis has really big Hmong and Somali populations and St. Louis Balkan.
Personally I couldn’t live in Manhattan because the streets smell of garbage. I would take clean smelling streets for 85 sushi restaurants.
I’m aware that places like Des Moines snd Minneapolis exist. I’m not even talking about ethnic or racial diversity, necessarily. I’m talking broadly about cultural traditions and heritage in cities, which ethnic make up of the city is only part of.
It’s ok that you wouldn’t want to live in NYC, but there are things that can be found there that can’t be found anywhere else. There are reasons people are attracted to certain cities besides hating conservatives. I’m a musician, and there’s only a handful of cities in America I would want to live in because there are only a few cities with a strong music tradition in the scene I’m involved with. Doesn’t mean Cincinnati or Toledo or whatever are shit places, they just don’t have what I’m looking for.
That's what strategic default is for. Just give the house back to the bank and stop paying your mortgage. Once the bank forecloses on the property, you don't owe the bank anything.
This is true in a handful of "non-recourse" states (maybe a dozen?) but the majority of states still allow deficiency judgments after a foreclosure auction.
""Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard?"
It's all about the ability to re-mortgage. Typically, when you take out a mortgage you sign up for 2-5 years of discount rates, after which you go back onto the 'base rate' which involves much higher payments. So the normal procedure is to spend your 2-5 years paying an affordable rate, and then 're-mortgage' -- i.e., get a new mortgage deal and get another 2-5 years of discount rates. The alternative is to stay on your original plan and have your payments skyrocket.
Except, if your house crashes in value to the point where it is worth less than the mortgage (in the UK we call this 'negative equity... I think Americans call this being underwater), you won't be able to remortgage. A bank won't accept a $300,000 house as collateral for a $400,000 loan. So you'll be stuck with the extortionate monthly payments that five years ago your bank swore you'd never actually have to pay. "This here is the base rate, but don't worry, before this kicks in you'll just remortgage like everyone else". But now your house is worth less, and you're trapped paying a fortune for it, and if you can't make the payments you lose the house.
Mortgages that are fixed for a few years and then have a floating rate exist in the US, but are not near as common as they are in the UK or many other countries. It is much more common in the US to take out mortgages with a fixed rate for the full 15-30 year life of the loan.
There were still large numbers of foreclosures in the Central Valley including on people with floating rate mortgages, but the specific phenomenon you’re describing is less common in the US than places it sounds like you’re familiar with.
Also, the interest rates on 30 year and esp 15 year notes are not (comparatively) high for people who are assessed to be good credit risks. In the US, ballon payments and floating rate loans are overwhelming entered by people who are not good risks, as those are the only terms available to that group.
I don't want these credit tools to go away, but I would counsel everyone to not use them.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower? Wouldn’t the only people who suffer be people who are selling, which means they’re not going to be in the area much longer anyway? Doesn’t this make it easier for new people to move into the area?"
Because (1) housing is on a chain; people rely on selling their old house to pay off the remainder of their mortgage and have a deposit for a new house which they get a new mortgage on, or even better if the old house is inherited from a family member and the mortgage is already paid off.
Knock a step out of the property ladder and it all unravels. Leaving aside first-time buyers, now Mary and John are not selling their old house to move into a bigger/better new house, and that means Sally and Joe who would have sold to Mary and John are not selling, and so on up. That leaves houses empty, but not affordably empty, even at the lower prices (unless you're a vulture fund) because people are now stuck with the housing they already own/rent, or properties which are not worth selling. First time buyers are also at a disadvantage, because banks are more chary of lending when a housing slump happens. If you can't get a mortgage, then it doesn't matter if that house which was formerly $180,000 is now going for $120,000, you still can't afford it.
(2) Housing slumps/bursting bubbles don't generally happen on their own, they are usually part of wider economic downturn. Depending on your mortgage, whether it's fixed rate or variable rate, you can end up paying a lot more for a property that is now worth less than you paid for it, so even if you sell it, you still have more debt to repay. And if the slump happens somewhere that is not very economically active, this puts a huge burden on people - "negative equity" can mean people failing to make repayments, which means their homes are repossessed, which leaves them effectively homeless and the important thing here is that they *can't* take advantage of the reduced cost of housing because they don't have money free to buy or take out a new mortgage. If the economy (local or otherwise) is doing badly, companies may reduce workforces. Now you're laid off, nowhere is hiring, and you owe money on a devalued asset. Now you're in trouble.
People will always want to live in San Francisco and the big beast employers there are relatively cushioned from recessions (unless the talk about a recent tech recession is true). People may not want to live in the Central Valley, even if the houses are cheap, because they can't afford to - the jobs are not there, and they have to live where the jobs are.
>I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?
Doesn't nightlife just mean things you want to do? For some people that's bars, for others jazz bands or symphonies, for me it means "places to play board games with strangers" and "hackathons". In my experience a 'happening' city with lots of symphonies tends to also have lots of board games and hackathons, etc, and generally just more of *everything*. It's not a perfect correlation, Seattle has a huge MTG scene and isn't exactly known for nightlife. But Austin and Atlanta have both.
>the Bay has deteriorated more in the last 10 years than Fresno has in the last 30 IMO
I thought this part was interesting. I spent a lot of time in the East Bay when I was young and got used to deterioration as just being "part of the scenery". Watching this youtube vid was interesting not because it taught me anything new, but because it offered interesting editorial commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHixc-QAhZQ
The entire conversation really hits home to me how differently we tend to think regarding what makes somewhere a "good place to live." I think the general assumption is that we all agree on a certain set of criteria directionally: cost of living low? good! crime rate high? bad! And then we can gather statistics on all of these things and aggregate them and produce some sort of meta-score telling us what places to live are good and what places are bad. And these meta scores will generally track with "common sense" expectations. They'll return a lot of "nicer suburb areas of major metros" and college towns under "good" and neglected urban core neighborhoods and remote rural outposts under "bad" and we'll all smile and nod, because on aggregate, that seems to sort of make sense.
But in reality, these criteria are not equally weighted for every person. Not even close. There are some people for whom cost of living doesn't actually matter at all. They're either already rich, or anticipate that the economic gains of living in a high COL location will offset the cost. Many of these people also don't seem to be bothered by high crime rates at all. I have no reason to think Seth Rogen is being untruthful when he says that having his car broken into 4 times in 6 months is no big deal to him. On the other end of the spectrum, there are some people for whom "access to great outdoor or natural environments" doesn't matter at all. I was once stationed in the military in Ventura County, got a place that was like a 10 minute walk from a relatively nice beach, and went to the beach like twice in four years. Just wasn't my thing. I was busy playing World of Warcraft (which I can do from anywhere with reliable Internet). Similarly, there are people who can live right next to a symphony and a museum and never go there. It's just not their thing.
When you aggregate all of these things together, you can produce a list of places that many people will probably find comfortable enough, and a list of places that many people will probably find pretty terrible. But even at both ends of that list... there will be people in Carmel, Indiana who hate living there and would desperately move to SF if they could. And there will be people in East St. Louis who think the community has a lot of character and is on the verge of turning around the bad stuff. It's just such a personal thing.
The thing about breaking into cars resonated with me, but sort of in reverse. I noticed that I left my car open with the keys in the ignition today in the supermarket. I say 'I noticed' because last week the car locked itself and I don't have a second set of car keys, so before I got out of the car to go shopping I wondered whether I should leave the keys in the ignition, and did so because that's what I always do. Rural France = high trust society, but I'd never have done that when I lived in London... People would try to steal your car with you still sitting in it.
This is only partly related (not specific to the Californian central valley), but perhaps interesting to some (an European's view).
I've never been to the US myself, but my girlfriend has been to Phoenix (for work-related reasons, they actually needed a place which is particularly hot). She noticed two things which are strange from a European's point of view:
1. There were no pavements. The only way to get around was by car...or walking on the roads (presumably quite dangerous). I don't know if this is common in the US (outside the big cities) but if it is, this alone would probably cause a lot of Europeans to dislike the place.
2. There are supposedly a lot of crazy people around. The sort of crazy which manifests itself by wearing goofy clothes, riding a miniature bicycle while shouting profanities at everyone around...or stuff like that. Not sure what to think of that or if that wasn't just a coincidence (from what I heard I guess SF has a reputation for these kind of weirdos, perhaps Phoenix does too?). Of course, you meet weirdos like this everywhere, but supposedly there was a much larger concentration of such people in Phoenix than in most places in Europe.
Oh yeah, a third thing - Phoenix is extremely cookie-cutter, everything looks the same and everything is ordered in right angles. She showed me some pictures from the airplane and it was almost bizarre. It is kind of like the communist panel housing projects in central and eastern Europe (although you can such things in places like Barcelona also, so not strictly communist I guess), except vertical instead of horizontal (though probably built better) and the entire city looks like that not just a housing district on the periphery. When I was in Sydney and especially Melbourne I had the same impression, it was just...too artificial. Too uniform and orderly, not like cities in Europe which feel more organic, probably because they are a hodgepodge of various architecture styles, periods and streets coming together at various angles. Perhaps this is also more so in places like the central valley or the midwest where they basically built a city on a flat plain 100 or so years ago compared to places like San Francisco or even Boston where the terrain and/or enough history prevent such uniformity? Maybe not though, like I said, I've never been to the US, my closest imagined approximation is Australia.
I can't speak for Phoenix, but every US city I've been to had plenty of sidewalks. And yes, I think the age thing is a big deal. Even within the US there's a definite difference in character between older east coast cities that were well established before the invention of urban planning and a place like Phoenix.
It's pretty common in US cities for sidewalks not to actually connect places you'd want to walk to (e.g. going all the way from a hotel to a shopping center with restaurants). Sure the downtown urban core of any city will be somewhat walkable, but as soon as you're out of the highrise/skyscraper zone it reverts to car-centric development that assumes you're going to drive and park anywhere you're going to. It's also common for entire housing developments to have no sidewalks at all. Most of the neighborhoods here in Honolulu are missing sidewalks, for example.
I am also from Europe and having been in Phoenix, I can agree. Phoenix was not a city, but huge village. East coast cities where I have been (Boston, NY, DC) are different, their structure and layout is similar to European cities.
It's a different kind of a city built in a different period and environment than European ones. Europeans don't have a monopoly on a what a city is or isn't.
We are in the early stages of human speciation enabled by mobility and the internet. In a few hundred years we’ll be comprised of two sets of very different people.
I feel like this has been going on ever since dropping hunting & gathering, and is picking up steam fast.
I can't really imagine small towns mattering economically, ever, to anyone anymore. In the meantime we reach some kind of housing singularity where everyone wants to be on top of each other at the same time, and join the elite by being near the elite. At this point in most developed countries it would be economically viable to just go full city-state network with some kind of defense pact, and leave everything outside to rot as it is a huge drain on resources.
I'm not surprised that you're encountering pushback against sweeping claims, and I'm glad you highlighted them. I've started fighting against these kinds of sweeping claims in the battle to slow down the culture war among my social group.
I got called out by my girlfriend during a recent argument about our living situation about my exhortations that the city we live in (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) is a hellhole when compared to Toronto. You know... I kind of deserved it. I grew up here and a lot of the comments that you highlighted could easily have been said about my stance. I pride myself in being even and measured and rational when talking about issues, but then I spout my mouth off about the city I live in because it's hard to find things to do on a Friday night.
I've started asking my substack authors in the comments whether they think they've hit certain levels of audience capture or sniffing their own farts. I'm seeing it happen with Block and Reported, so maybe you're tilting that way? I enjoyed the original article about the central valley, but then some of these comments perfectly highlight you having a warped perspective about the valley. Especially comparing the Mad Max-ification of SF homeless encampments to the relatively-homed CV. I appreciate some editorializing and entertaining writing, but please don't go down the invective rabbit hole.
The problem is that a vibrant cultural and nightlife scene depends heavily on population and disposable income. The arts get heavily subsidised, otherwise those museums and symphony orchestras would not exist.
So smaller cities are not going to have the same range of selection, and when you get to towns and rural/semi-rural areas, forget it.
This then has a knock-on effect, which creates a vicious circle: all the ambitious people, or the people who want art galleries and theatres and nightlife move to the Big City, which means that population and disposable income for young single people wanting to hit the town on Friday night for a good time also decrease, which means whatever cultural life is struggling along gets hit even harder, which means that people who want a cultural life move elsewhere where it's easily and plentifully available -and round and round the mulberry bush we go.
It's a little unfair to blame places that may well be Pop: 50,000 for not having the same amenities as places that are Pop: 200,000 which do not have the same amenities as places that are Pop: 800,000 but that's human nature for you.
Something very positive about the Central Valley / Greater Sacramento area: it has some of the best road running in the country. Namely, it's flat; it has great local races with ample parking; there are loads of fast runners to compete against; it's eerily perfect at 54F and windless every morning. Three wonderful long-distance races to note: 1. Urban Cow Half Marathon (just happened!). 2. Clarksburg Country Run Half Marathon and 30K, November. And of course, 3. California International Marathon, early December.
So it's not all doom and gloom in the Central Valley. At least not on race day.
Skipping ahead to mention I belly laughed at the laptop in the car story. “The only thing left worth stealing was the jack, so they took that.” If crime in SF is really that bad it puts ny into perspective because even though there’s been an uptick here, I’ve lived here since 2001 and I never worry about leaving a laptop in the car.
I think the comments above have pretty covered it, I just wanted to suggest a possible metaphor: you could imagine the museums and opera houses as being a bit like intellectual utilities. Just as you don't ever go to the water treatment plant or the local power station, you don't have to go to the local museum to receive its benefits. Some people go, and those people talk to other people about the latest Neanderthal exhibition, and the ideas in the museum get incrementally added to the stock of things that people in your town sometimes talk about.
(Have I just reinvented intellectual trickle-down economics? Having written this out, I'm not so sure about it...)
I'm a bay area commuter that lives in the central valley. Moved out here last year to get a house (have young kids). The thing that's missed about long commute times is that you don't have to go in every day. I only go in 2 days a week, so although the commute is 2 hours each way, that's only 8 hours total a week, and that commute is by bus so I typically read or work on my computer. Our neighborhood here in the valley is extremely nice and we have a great new home. The neighborhood and city we live in have tons of wonderful parks and playgrounds that our kids love. Overall that seems like a great trade off for me having 8 hours a week in a bus. My salary has increased since we moved out here (now 300k+), so although we could afford to rent (or perhaps buy) a house closer to work, is it really worth it?
Surprised to see a reference to pharmacy schools here but I guess it segues into my central valley experience. From what I understand it's pretty new and not very high quality (which is more a consequence of new pharmacy schools not needing to be high quality broadly) but for a while it was easy to get a pharmacy job in the central valley because natives weren't going to pharmacy school and most pharmacy grads want flashier city jobs. Made it easy for me to get a job here with kind of a busted resume but there's patterns with my colleagues in the region. For example there seems a lot of young women with families from LA who rent apartments out here for during the week and go home on the weekends. I'm told the patients here are especially bad for various reasons but I haven't really spent much time working anywhere else to confirm myself.
As someone who's mostly an internet shut-in it's not really all that bad here and it is genuinely nice living 2-3 hours from downtown LA and just actually having the option to go there on a whim for a day or two.
Fun fact: before Walgreens lost one of their big Medi-Cal contracts one of the stores in Visalia was the third busiest in the country, doing something absurd like 1500 scripts a day; from what I was told was almost entirely people passing through in either direction.
"I would add, that even with the best of liberal intentions by the Eloi, one-party states run by corrupt politicians go bad fast, and the non-elite (Morlocks) get the worst of it while the coastal elites stay richer."
Minor point and slightly off topic, but we should remember that the Eloi are not just elites. They think they are, and live like they are, but they're actually (or at least also) food for the Morlocks.
Yeah, I'm surprised this proxy-variable explanation wasn't mentioned earlier. The small town I grew up in didn't even have a __movie theatre__, or almost any big chain stores outside of basic necessities like grocery. This improved over time as an influx of rich retirees/tourists changed the demographics (and also drove out a lot of poors, whose fishing and farm labour are what founded the town to begin with...) But even today, for so many bog-standard amenities that most medium+ towns or cities have...those all require going to a magical place called "Over The Hill". Mountain pass to the north, mountain pass to the east. (South is a flat exit, but leads to more rural stuff, not less.)
Like it didn't really hit me until I was an adult, how __weird__ it was that every year's back-to-school shopping for clothing, supplies, etc. took place in some other city. Because there simply weren't any of those kinds of shops at home. Not outside the tiny expensive local boutiques which survived by selling to outsiders, not supplying locals. There were a few years, in fact, where freak weather events effectively stranded the town via rockslides and such. It's just different living in a place like that...a pervading sense of insularity and smallness. Which is fine if one's already comfortable, but deeply stifling otherwise. There's a reason most kids who leave for college never really come back. Once you've gotten a taste of life's possibilities outside the bubble...
Realistically, I can't afford and don't even like a lot of the amenities on offer in SF...but many people do, and the collective effect of concentrating so many like-minded aesthetes together makes an overall nicer place. Not at all a hardcore urbanist - there's many things I miss about small-town life. But the fact remains, I mainly left home because it was __boring__, both in its people (the anti-intellectual currents are still strong there) and its things to do. Might be a worthwhile place to retire to in the future, but I wouldn't want to spend the intervening decades commuting. (The local jobs situation is, uh, poor.) Not to mention it's a strongly car-designed town, and I don't drive, so...yeah. I'm sure symphonies also correlate with dense walkable design, too. No one builds opera houses in strip malls or whatever.
>Re: 21, a symphony is nice to go to sometimes, but it’s also a marker for having a critical mass of the kind of people who go to symphonies.
Absolutely, places with great museums and symphonies tend to have tons of whatever, and more of the people who are into whatever, than other cities.
'Nightlife' can be a little distinct, but probably still correlates somewhat with other activities. College towns probably score extremely high on nightlife AND MTG tournaments for example, but not every place with nightlife does.
It's actually worse because the bust involves a run up in which the people with gains sold their house and possibly downsized and stayed in the area but more likely given the limited amount of cheap housing moved and now there are lots of people with negative equity.
The housing bust also hits anyone who works on construction. When house prices are going up, more people are willing to spend on remodeling and new construction. When housing prices are going down, demand for that kind of labor dries up.
Yeah I think that's more the point. There are actually a lot of people involved in real-estate transactions: not just builders, but contractors (no more common time for major house fixups then just before or after a sale), painters, real estate agents, appraisers, termite people, escrow firms, banks and underwriters, insurance agents. When the housing market tanks alll these local people are affected as well.
Construction was what really drove the latter half of the Celtic Tiger era in Ireland, and when the housing bubble burst, that knocked everything sideways (the banks take a huge share of the blame, too, but they were riding high on the property boom as well):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger#Post-2003_resurgence
"The return of the boom in 2004 was claimed to be primarily the result of the large construction sector's catching up with the demand caused by the first boom. The construction sector represented nearly 12% of GDP and a large proportion of employment among young, unskilled men. A number of sources, including The Economist, warned of excessive Irish property values. 2004 saw the construction of 80,000 new homes, compared to the UK's 160,000 – a nation that has 15 times Ireland's population. House prices doubled between 2000 and 2006; tax incentives were a key driver of this price rise, and the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats government subsequently received substantial criticism for these policies."
There could have also, perhaps, been a bigger hit in a given area based on the number of adjustable-rate mortgages held.
I was more speaking to the sentiment I heard at the time in my comment, but I looked up a few statistics. Unemployment in a few key cities in the valley went up about 2.5x during the great recession whereas in a smattering of other cities around the country I looked into it was closer to 2x. Unemployment also tended to start at a higher rate, and I suspect there's a greater demoralizing effect if the rate goes from 8 to 18% compared to if it goes from 4 to 8%
Yes, and also people who buy a house they can just barely afford, possibly with a second mortgage or going interest-only. They buy a $600k home, end up with $600k in mortgage with payments they can barely afford, house drops to $300l in value so there is no ability to sell or to take home equity loans for emergencies.
Any financial surprise at all leads to foreclosure... which drives down nearby property values as the bank won't sit on the property and will sell it for $300k and eat the loss.
This was my initial thought when seeing's Scott's question. Most people don't plan to stay in their home forever, and with pricing skyrocketing in the early 2000s, it seemed like a great investment to buy a house that might stretch your budget in order to sell in a few years when you plan to move. If you lost half of the value you paid for the house, you are stuck underwater and may be better off just walking away than trying to sell out from under a mortgage you could barely afford in the first place. If you put a decent down payment on it, then you're screwed even more.
Plus some bought homes they *couldn't* afford, expecting to sell it to some big-city commuter as the prices kept going up. Real estate agents collaborated in faking income data to get commissions. Once the market goes down the buyer is bankrupt. They walk away. The bank takes a loss. The house may be resold or just left empty. If empty, it's going to be ruined by lack of maintenance (or possibly squatters). Worst case, meth lab.
Heck, there's also the property taxes to fund services. What happens to the city's property tax base if the housing market drops 25%?
In California almost nothing, thanks to Prop 13.
Oh, wow. I never owned property in California, so I didn't know.
Property tax percentages are an epiphenomenon. The taxing authority sets its budget and the assesses tax *amounts* proportional to property values. If every property saw its value drop by a quarter, they'd all still owe the same number of dollars, which would be a higher percentage of the now-lower property value.
Prop 13 certainly screwed California up in a lot of ways, but a widespread drop in property values could actually make the effects smaller since the capped values wouldn't be as much lower than reality.
Not sure what you're driving at here. The taxing authority neccessarily sets its budget according to assessed value, not market value, and in California those can differ widely because of Prop 13 -- and they change little when the housing market surges or plummets. They can never go up more than 2% and the assessor is very unwilling to lower them in a downturn for obvious reasons (because busts follow booms).
My house, for example, has an assessed value that is 1/3 of its market value, because I've lived here a while. I knew a colleague whose house had an assessed value that was about 1/20 of its market value.
Busts don't have nearly the same effect on the disparity as does the time of residence, because of the accumulation over years.
I also don't think Prop 13 screwed California up at all -- rather the reverse. It's a damn crude hammer, but it had the welcome effect of short-circuiting in part the ability of the citizens to vote themselves bread and circuses at the expense of "the rich" (mostly their future selves), so that's a very good thing. I regret the death of the 2/3 majority required to raise taxes for the same reason, this is all part of the slow metamorphosis of what was once a great state into the disastrous New York/Illinois model, which consists of massive cities that are dysfunctional for anyone other than the fabulously rich, alienated outlands, and sky-high levels of corruption, political cynicism, and influence buying. Screw that.
I didn't realize that CA assessors wouldn't drop the assessed values in a downturn, although it makes sense now that you point it out.
The main point I was trying to make is that even in not-CA, a widespread drop in property values wouldn't affect property taxes assessed, so Prop 13 isn't uniquely salient.
The wisdom/value of Prop 13 is somewhat beside the point of this thread, so I won't go into my (relatively uninformed, due to not living in CA) thoughts on it further.
Ha ha yes, one interesting aspect of California property taxes is that if you bought at the top of the market, and then the value plunges, you have to *petitition* the assessor to lower your assessed value to its market value (the assessed value automatically gets set to the sales price when the house changes hands) -- and so far as I know the assessor is under no obligation to comply. Part of why California real estate is a real adventure.
“I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?”
Yes, I would expect so. University of Georgia school that is pretty much centered around 1) their football team and 2) partying about football. Athens GA has the most bars per square mile in the US. A lot of students clearly choose to go here for the football/nightlife, and it drives important demographics in the city.
I’m not claiming it’s purely about nightlife here (did I mention people care about football?) But I think it is clear that here in a medium-sized city, such considerations can drive demographics. I don’t know if we’d have as much of an impact on a city the size of, say, Chicago
I would argue that "having a symphony" doesn't draw much of anyone to anywhere, but "having something" is the only thing that matters.
I live on Long Island. What a town has determines its character, who hangs out there, who lives there, how much money it pulls in. Northport was always a nice, sleepy, well-off town. But I'd never visited until the Engeman Theatre opened. It's great, with terrific productions, and some high-end restaurants around it. We only go once or twice a year for it, sure, but lots of people go once or twice a year now, where before it was zero. And having it there is a draw to move to LI in general.
I definitely get Scott's (and the OP's) point - I lived in NYC for 20 years, and went to the opera once, saw a ballet, museums or galleries twice a year, maybe. But getting hung up on "who other than kids move somewhere for the nightlife? Who goes somewhere for symphonies?" misses the point. You move to a place because it has stuff, and all the urban stuff often comes in a package. When it doesn't, sure, it doesn't make people move there (though it makes people visit). The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra has not caused an influx of new residents eager to hit Powell Hall three times a week. But "culture and nightlife" keep people in New York, because there's a lot of it, and it makes everything else fun and vibrant.
Yes! Specifically phrasing the question as being about a symphony is helpful because *symphonies require physical space,* and that space isn't always in use by the symphony. Your local culture is going to be shaped by *everything else using that space.* They symphony may play on Friday nights, the local LARP group uses the space every third Saturday, the local indie music acts play throughout the week, there's a fall craft show the first weekend in November, etc.
Having the physical spaces for this kind of thing makes culture-building possible in the first place--to go back to Mystik's original comment, UGA/Athens probably has a pretty good music scene and a decent food scene because *the culture is centered around tailgates and bars, both of which are conducive to good live music and a fair bit of food experimentation.*
You’re pretty dead on. Athens is known for having a lot of great bands come out of it, and our restauraunt scene is pretty solid for the size of the city
> Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard?
Uh, a big part of the deal with the 2008 housing crisis is that many people couldn't make their mortgage payments. The Wikipedia article on it is entitled "Subprime mortgage crisis", where "subprime" means "issued to lenders who are likely to fail to make their payments".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
So many houses were foreclosed on, leaving many areas just full of abandoned houses.
Falling housing prices don’t by themselves make it harder to pay your mortgage. Housing prices might be falling as part of the same crisis in which you are also losing income.
A lot of the mortgages were adjustable-rate, so the monthly price literally went up. But yes, surrounding economic conditions also made it harder for people to repay their mortgages.
Not just adjustable rate, many were balloon mortgages or interest only mortgages or other products that involved very low payments for the first few years that then climbed rapidly. Idea being that the owner would sell, refinance, or be materially better off and able to afford the mortgages then. All three of which were torpedoed by the 2008 recession.
Yeah actually rates generally went down, so ARMs weren't a problem in themselves. Teaser rates and interest only were problematic.
But how does that fit with the claims about how unaffordable property has become there? I mean sure, Detroit bounced backed some but it's got enough housing stock as a result to remain relatively affordable.
Yeah, I assume more happened later to cause that.
What strikes me about this discussion is this mismatch between what the CV offers and what some ppl who live there want it to offer. And I wonder if it's not some kind of cultural mismatch that's causing some of the issue.
There are certainly rural areas in the US that lack the kind of culture many ppl complaining about the CV seem to want and it's not even particularly poor in terms of per county average income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties_by_per_capita_income?wprov=sfti1). However, my sense is that those rural areas have many fewer people who want that kind of culture and the poorer areas of the country either have lower costs of living or the people there aren't as likely to expect more.
Having spent time with family in rural parts of the country I was struck by the huge role that religion often played in those areas. No microbrews but church picnics with baked goods and friends. As an proto-atheist I resented being dragged along to the church but the community role it played was undeniable.
I kinda wonder if there isn't some kind of mismatch thing going on here where the CV isn't so alien as to keep out us costal elites entirely and somehow a bit too dense and too cosmopolitan to develop the kind of religious community that often works in rural areas but too rural and too close to places like SF to develop enough of a culture for godless coastal elites.
Having lived in rural areas of several states and loving it, I often feel somewhat attacked by people complaining about a lack of "culture" or places to go. Family especially, but also close friends and religious gatherings, are a key and important part of living in such communities. I get the impression that many city-dwellers don't have a lot of close family, so the idea that you'll build your social network out of family members is probably completely alien to them.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard?"
The 2008 housing crisis was different than the usual housing bust in that so many people had subprime and adjustable rate mortgages. [This](https://www.attomdata.com/news/market-trends/foreclosures/attom-data-solutions-2020-year-end-u-s-foreclosure-market-report/) says that foreclosures rose from 532,000 in 2005 to almost 3 million in each of 2009 and 2010.
"It used to be that Calif. Senators were elected on a scheme that gave each county a representation proportional to its land area." To clarify, no Senate seat could include more than one county and none could include less than one county; as a result, Los Angeles County, with 40% of the state's population in 1960, had only 1 of the 40 State Senate seats.
I thought the OP was missing any direct comparison of the economic conditions of the central valley to the economic conditions of other parts of the US that have equivalent ruralness and test scores. So I'm not really sure there's any anomaly that needs explaining.
Isn't whether a city has a nightlife a proxy for whether you can walk around in the streets at night without being murdered/robbed/raped/etc.?
I highly doubt it. I have lived in plenty of "nightlife" cities where I've walked home at 2:30am and learned in the morning somebody got shot at 2:45am on a block I walked by.
But it would be a neat little trend-line you could throw together real quick to determine if there's any correlation.
Ha ha I'd say almost the reverse. The city I knew with the most enduring and lively nightlife was Chicago (although I've never lived in New Orleans), and it's also the place with the scariest levels of nighttime crime I know. Places that roll up the sidewalks at 8 tend to have low levels of street crime.
Tijuana says no. (Even has San Diego as a natural control.).
I don't think the culture and nightlife point is really about literal culture and nightlife. There's a more-or-less universal perception now that's hard to put into words, but basically it's that there are proper world-tier cities with real culture and nightlife, and where what happens is general is in some sense actually important, and then there are provincial towns/cities with their own crappy versions and which don't matter. By important, I mean in the sense that if San Francisco was destroyed by a tsumani it would be a way bigger deal than if a population-equivalent chunk of the Central Valley was destroyed by a tornado or whatever.
It's really status and signalling - if you think that whatever restaurant is the hip new thing in Bakersfield is cool, then you're a provincial hick. If you think that the hip new restaurant in San Francisco is cool, then that's fine. You can always get status points by looking down at the Bakersfield restaurant, so everyone does, whereas doing that with the New York one is harder to pull off (it's the difference between saying How I Met Your Mother is crap and saying Shakespeare is crap - people who say the latter just seem like they're too thick to get it). Importantly, this is mostly independent of the quality of the restaurant (like a really good HIMYM episode vs Titus Andronicus).
This bleeds into everything, and the result is that there are a few places which people can accept are actually worth living in, and everywhere else becomes viewed as minor-league; to use another metaphor, the Sacramento Philharmonic is Walmart Sugar Flakes to the SF Philharmonic being Frosted Flakes. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as talent flows up a prestige gradient, and you end up living in that town where the restaurant critic reviewed an Olive Garden.
Ironically, I'd guess the reason this is happening now is the internet/social media making it impossible to sustain being an actual provincial hick who looks at the big city with fear and wonderment, so now everyone views their home town as being in competition with it. The development of provincial inferiority complexes isn't a specific Central Valley problem though - it's way worse in the UK, where London is threatening to suck in the whole country like a black hole.
It's really not. It's the 17th largest city in America by population, BEFORE you count the other 6 million people living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
That seems like an urban viewpoint. People I know who live out in the sticks look at the city with contempt, not envy or wonderment. They don't see themselves as hicks, they see the city mice as pretentious courtiers of Louis XIV who know absolutely everything about the latest court fashion or mannerisms, but who if their car slid off the road in a snowstorm would just die, helpless -- meaning they are lacking in what the country mice consider basic adulting skills.
Growing up in the woods, on the outskirts of a hamlet of 300 people or so, once or twice a year we would drive to the “big city” to go to a museum or the like. Seeing the skyscrapers and whatever thing we had come to experience was always a bit awe inspiring: but experiencing the bad traffic, noise, trash, crowds, and lack of space would always have us saying “it’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.”
For lack of a "like" button, I'll comment that this has definitely been my experience. Visit a few times a year at most, get some enjoyment out of whatever purpose we were there for, and be very thankful we didn't have to live in a place like that.
People who live in the country aren't really the comparators though; Bakersfield's population is just shy of 400,000. It's the second- and third-tier towns and cities that have the worst of both worlds - an urban lifestyle (employment at a single indoor workplace, walking to amenities, multiple bar/restaurant options) whilst being painfully aware that all they get to experience are the court fashions of some random squire no-one cares about.
I probably need to caveat this that I'm aware most of the US doesn't really do villages, but I don't think this would start to bite anywhere with a population under about 50,000. In other words, big enough to have lower-tier versions of the amenities that SF/LA have.
Geez I wonder where you've lived, then. I've lived in a farmhouse with the closest neighbor 2 miles down the road, and in small towns with 50,000 people, in the outer suburbs of a major city, and right in the heart of cities ranging from about the size of Miami to the size of Chicago.
In each of these places I would say almost all people I knew were pretty content, and preferred living where they did. The people in the sticks liked the dark skies, the space and nature, being self-reliant, and the quiet. The people in the small towns liked the small-town friendliness and mutual assistance, being on a first-name basis with the cops, the slower pace. The people in the 'burbs liked the family-orientation and good schools and the lower pollution. The people in the urban core loved the rich and rapid flow of events and the ability to do all kinds of things at any hour.
I'm pretty surprised that you found any significant region, at least in the United States, where people were mostly unhappy and wanted to live elsewhere. Not my experience at all. There was always a small minority who were in transition, to be sure. Kids who couldn't wait to get out of school so they could hit the big lights, people who'd lost their jobs or marriages and were figuring out how they could start over somewhere better, people trapped in ugly commutes and cramped apartment living who were working on their escape, stuff like that. But these people were always only small fraction of everybody.
"walking to amenities, multiple bar/restaurant options" doesn't sound like the *worst* of both worlds to me! But then I chose to move from a big city to a smaller one where I can meet up with my friends without putting an event in the calendar for a month hence and then spending hours packed into the Tube in both directions.
What do you mean by "most of the US doesn't really do villages"? Geographically, most of the US is rural, and that means little towns of 1-5,000 people, with little hamlets of 1-500 scattered around them. Plus the occasional ghost town that hasn't quite died yet with a population of 12. I grew up in a hamlet of 300 people: the nearest communities were a town of 1,100 about 12 miles south, and a thorp of 46 people about 5 miles north. Then there was a village about 6 miles east of that, around 400 people, and in between the two of them was a ghost town where the only sign left of it is the old Lion's Club hall. North of the thorp is a village of 200 that is just the remnants of a larger village that was flooded when they put in a hydroelectric dam, and a village of 88 about 3 miles past that. Then you get to the big town: 3,000 people! They even have their own high school.
It's true that if you keep going north you eventually hit the edge of the suburban sprawl, and the deeper you go the denser it gets, but particularly in the West there are large geographic regions where it's pretty much nothing but small towns and villages.
The USA, outside of New England, doesn't do traditional villages in the sense of the usual human pattern. In England and Europe, rural farmers didn't live on independent plots of land, a half mile or more from their neighbors. Instead they lived *right next to* their neighbors - small houses, very small lots- and walked from the central village out to the fields. This pattern yields much smaller and tighter communities, each with its own baker, coffee house, tavern (maybe), dry goods shop, a weekly open air market ( much less common), church, etc.
In the US, to the extent that we have these, it is a small set of shops serving a much wider geographic area, with far less daily interaction and community between the people.
That was the historical pattern in the Middle Ages, but nowadays you can find plenty of isolated farmhouses in the UK. No doubt less isolated than you could find in the US, though.
It's the second-tier cities that have the worst case of envy; they feel their provincial status keenly and are always comparing themselves to the Joneses.
This was my predominant view of Dublin (from my small town mousehole) in my 20s-40s; the wannabe thought leaders and influencers and media constantly comparing Dublin and Ireland unfavourably to London and New York, constantly wanting to be as good as their masters, constantly wanting the rest of the country to change because we were embarrassing them in front of the neighbours for being so provincial.
Myself, I have always thought that the most provincial thing of all is to be wearing the hand-me-downs of the big city next door and always being a year or more behind the fashions. Better to be a country mouse with a culture of your own, than a city mouse always scrabbling for crumbs dropped off the plate of those you clearly consider your betters.
This happens even between small and large cities. I live in Edinburgh, which is a smallish city with both nightlife and high culture (but not a professional symphony - that's an hour's train ride away in Glasgow). On my last visit to London I was amazed at how *impractically* people dressed - as if the need to keep out the weather was not a constraint.
I'm just up visiting Edinburgh to potentially move here. It feels like a bit of an outlier of a place with both beautiful natural surroundings whilst being technically the most educated city in the UK (Proportion of working age population with NVQ4 or higher according to https://www.centreforcities.org/data-tool/su/21686f92), beating both Cambridge and Oxford yet being 4x the size of either (is that due to demographic differences, i.e number of families/children?). People are quite friendly and there's a town-like relaxed feel, and then the massive Holyrood park right in the centre with a huge crag overlooking everything, also access to the Cairngorms only 1:30hr drive away.
City vs Country is quite strong in my mind here as I've come up from a very rural area in Cornwall (I'm not a local I was there working for a couple of years) - Well-off Londoners buying up second-homes has created a housing affordability crisis (massive over simplification) and driven resentment levels high. This has been going on for years.
I agree with the root comment that London is a Black Hole, it's so much bigger than everything else that it really warps everything around it - have a look at its GDP and Population vs the rest of the UK's cities, nowhere else comes close: https://www.centreforcities.org/data-tool/su/0f3b3dbc
I'd be interested in seeing comparative data for other countries, is this unusual for similar size countries in Europe?
I don't know for sure, but I believe London is unusually dominant (though it depends a bit on where you draw city boundaries). And I'd recommend Edinburgh as a place to live - lots going on, small enough that you run into your friends randomly on the street, relatively handy for the countryside (though less so than Glasgow - I think 1.5 hours to the Cairngorms is optimistic unless you're talking about the southernmost edge). Housing is expensive compared to the rest of Scotland, but still cheap compared to London and the South-East.
Most smart conservatives who live in the country (who tend not to be FROM the country) look at city dwelling liberals as mindless NPCs who would be thrilled to live in a shoe box, if the shoe box happened to be located in a closet in a fashionable major city.
I'm reasonably confident that Shakespeare did indeed write plenty of crap, but he wrote so many different types of things that people usually end up both liking and hating at least one. Since you mentioned Titus Andronicus, well, it's basically a gory horror story that wouldn't be out of place next to "torture porn" films such as Hostel, and a lot of people *really* aren't into that kind of thing...
"this is mostly independent of the quality of the restaurant (like a really good HIMYM episode vs Titus Andronicus)."
"Titus Andronicus" is schlock, but it does have one really good joke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Tcmb5nLpfM
It may be over four hundred years old, but nobody needs that one translated!
I think the thing about symphonies and nightclubs is less about the thing itself and more about "how safe do people feel going to events at night? How closely connected and active the networks of human capital and friendship?" etc.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower?"
Some of the loans (maybe a lot?) were loans with balloon payments. One variant was an "interest-only" loan where you made ONLY the interest payments and then, in a few years, the entire balance was due because of the balloon payment.. If you house had gone up in price, then all was well and you'd refinance. But if the value of the house had gone down then you *couldn't* refinance as no bank would loan you the money you'd need (because the assessed value of the house was now too low).
This happened, and once people started defaulting on the loans they could not make then the value of the surrounding houses dropped and the spiral was well under way.
Some people could not even make the payments "as-is." 103% loan-to-value was a thing where the bank would loan you 103% of the sales price of the house. This buys you some time for (a) the house to go up in value, and (b) maybe get a new loan. The banks' models said this was okay historically. But there was a selection bias because banks hadn't handed out these sorts of loans in the past.
"Liar loans" were loans made on the basis of people's claimed incomes with the bank NOT verifying. Pair this with a 103% loan-to-value interest only ARM and you have a problem if anything goes wrong. The term "liar loan" was one used within the mortgage industry ... which suggests that the folks making the loans may have had a slight idea that the loans were less than good.
It was a crazy time.
I'm a Canadian, so I don't have any experience with this.
What did bring this home to me though was the TV series "Heroes". There was a couple where the woman was working (at least at first) as a casino dealer and the man was unemployed (might have been a felon)- but they could afford a three (or so) bedroom detached house in a nice neighborhood.
When people think this is normal, there is trouble ahead.
I've never believed TV or movie descriptions of what allegedly working-class or lower-income houses were like, though. I've seen too many where I went "there is no way a single woman on an hourly wage could afford that kind of house".
That's why the "Roseanne" series was really convincing in the kind of house the Barr family lived in and the kind of neighbourhood.
Yes, Hollywood is bad at this stuff. I think it's partly because many of them are filmed on sets which must have room for cameras and crew so they are implausibly large and uncrowded.
Most of them don't go into as much detail about the characters' finances as Heroes did with this one, which is why that particular bit stayed with me.
I do think it's an oversight that nobody mentioned NAFTA.
NAFTA happened in the 90s and it had an enormous impact on the lives of Mexican farmers. It drove millions of farmers off their land because they couldn't compete with American farms, which were subsidized and more modern.
Impoverished Mexican small farmers had less opportunity in Mexico, so migration was basically a required to survive, whereas before many had migrated seasonally to make some extra cash.
Tightening of immigration also made it difficult for migrants to return home at the end of the season, so many were forced to stay in the US.
From CBS news in 2006 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-nafta-good-for-mexicos-farmers/
"Farmers said that entire towns are emptying because thousands of small farms have gone out of business. As many as 2 million farm workers have lost their jobs — the vast majority headed north across the U.S. border looking for better pay."
One big effect of the housing crash was that it immediately followed a huge housing boom.
So you had armies of construction workers and tradesmen that became unemployed overnight. Housing companies and real estate investors that went bust. Half finished housing developments and subdivisions left to rot because they had no hope of filling in. Restaurants and strip malls that had cropped up to serve these growing suburbs failed and went vacant.
Basically, towns that were hit hard by the crash were the sprawly towns that benefitted most from the preceding housing boom, and there was a huge chunk of the local economy dependent on this continual growth.
A lot of these "Highlights from the comments" seem to simply be ad nauseum arguments for two sides: "I hate rural" vs "rural ain't so bad"
Folks might as well argue about whether apples or oranges taste better
But while we're at it, +1 for "rural ain't so bad"
Surely it's a thing that changes, often, with life stage? I grew up mostly in the boonies, and couldn't wait to hit the big city when I left home at 17. I lived in cities, right downtown if I could, from then until the end of my 20s, and I loved it. Big rich slice of life, so much going on, so many different kinds of people, so many stories, I pitied the country mice who were missing out on all this lively experience.
But then I had kids, and it became no longer merely mildly annoying to contemplate the wild twentysomethings next door cranking up the Pink Floyd[1] at 2am when the baby had finally gone to sleep and I had to be at work by 8am. I got sick of planning for parking like I was a German staff officer planning the invasion of the Soviet Union -- and schlepping an infant and a toddler to the pediatrician by subway or bus is a nonstarter unless you're too poor to avoid it. So I moved out to the burbs, and got myself a boring old 4BR SFR with a yard and quiet neighbors, not a bar or club within five miles but I can accidentally leave my car or front door unlocked and nothing happens -- and where we can put two cars in the garage and the teenage kids could put another in the driveway or street. Got myself a table saw and set up a bench so I could make some shelves and furniture and not entirely forget what it means to work with your hands. Great decision, never looked back.
And now that I see retirement heaving over the horizon I am liking the idea of the country more all the time. I'm much less interested in rubbing elbows with random generic humanity -- sorry, but most of you[2] are tedious when you're not dangerous -- and much more interested in being surrounded by trees, grass, birds, animals, stuff that is now the way it was in 800,000 BC and will be the same in AD 800,000.
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[1] I realize this name makes everyone under 50 laugh, but I have no idea what younger generations would consider edgy late teen music.
[2] Except my friends, of course, but I get choosier about those the older I get.
FWIW the actual edgy 20-somethings are still listening to Pink Floyd, as well as the latest hyperpop
That's...amazing. I had no idea. What is hyperpop, though? I've never heard that term.
I recommend Googling it, as music is easier to understand by listening to it than by reading a description :)
As an edgy 20 something, I can confirm the pink Floyd does come on occasionally, but mostly kinda as a meme when we're doing psychedelics. I think the next generation will have forgotten the association.
We do listen to "hyperpop" but not much, though I'm in the especially group that's mostly nostalgia-ing for 90s and early 2000s alternative and punk. But to be honest at 26 I and my friends already feel like we're behind on the music trends which apparently seem to target 16-22? Idk.
So if I went up to the attic and dug out the turntable -- a Technics direct-drive with the little quartz strobe so you can tweak the speed that was first-rate for college students in the late Pleistocene -- and it actually still worked, I could put my "Wish You Were Here" LP on and passing Gen Zers might nod their heads in recognition at the ethereal slow fade-in of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond"?
I find that weirdly cheering. Not everything less gargantuan than the Great Pyramid or Plato's conversations just turns to dust. A small human blow against entropy, huzzah.
Oh definitely not. The ones who do drugs not at parties might recognize three or four of the biggest radio hits.
Aw. Oh well. Time marches on.
Few things have made me laugh as much as the renaissance of vinyl, when we were assured back in the day that CDs were The Future and would be forever because they were so much superior.
And those people were absolutely right--before CDs were also made obsolete by superior technology. The number of young people who have ever listened to vinyl pales in comparison to the number who listen in to music via the Internet.
Well, they kind of are, at least in ordinary commecial quality, but MP3 and streaming are considerably inferior to both (vinyl and CD), so if all you're used to is MP3s through your AirPods then experiencing a high-quality LP or CD with a good stereo system can be exciting. I dunno if I totally believe the people who say they can detect a difference in high quality LP versus CD -- they remind me of those people who claimed they could tell the difference between a tube and transistor final in the amp, and claimed the tubes gave a "warmer" feeling. But maybe my hearing is not good enough ha ha.
What I find interesting is the shift in obsession from quality to quantity in the music-loving young. When I was a kid, we spend beaucoup on high-quality stereo equipment and recordings, so we could reproduce our favorite pieces in a quality (and volume) that was satisfying. To go back to Pink Floyd again, when that first deep base note strikes in "Time", you wanted to feel it in your bones (as well as have the windows rattle) without the false cramped sound of the overdriven final, this was Nirvana.
But now it seems the obsession is with quantity: audiophiles require thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of pieces on tap. My grown Millenial kids sniff in amused disdain because in 25-odd years I have accumulated maybe a thousand MP3s I can pipe through the earphones when working late. If they were limited to that, they'd feel impoversihed, I guess. Hence (I assume) the popularity of streaming services, where they can run through thousands of songs a month -- maybe a week, for all I know.
It's such a strong contrast to my own youth, where we might wait with anticipatory pleasure for a new album for months, then play those 8-10 songs over and over again for more months. My first year in college, my roommate had an awesome stereo system, and I went to sleep each night for my entire freshman year listening to the same side of a certain album which a desire not to be laughed at prevents me from actually naming. But what kid these days would listen to the same 5 songs in a row every day for months?
I am told "everyone's older brother likes Pink Floyd". I don't have an older brother, but in my social circle that is definitely the case.
I find the public transport point interesting; I live in London, and it's actually a major bonus to be able to get kids around in the excellent public transport (and people are actually really helpful, offering seats or to help with the pram). It's much more pleasant than driving, as I can feed or play with them as we go.
That said, I saw more concerning incidents on the New York subway in two weeks than I have in London on the tube in eight years, so that might be a factor.
Well, London, yeah.
I think New York is going through one of its periodic shithole phases. It did this in the 70s, too. By and by citizens get sick of it and hire a Sergeant Koch to clean it up, and it gets pretty livable. Then their attention wanders (or something) and the place gets Dinkinized and starts to evolve into Mexico City del Norte again.
I don't think it's just life stage per-se but also the life stage of everybody else, leading to network effects. If you had no preference except that the local population has plenty of people who are roughly the same age as you, you'd still find yourself drawn to the city in your 20s and the countryside in your 50s.
Oh and I think the counterculture has fragmented into subcultures so the edgy kids these days might listen to hyperpop or hip-hop or minimalist funk or even modern prog like KGLW. Possibly all of the above.
That's an interesting point, and I can definitely see it for young people. When you're 19-25, pretty much everyone not within +/- 5 years is pretty incomprehensible, being at a very different life stage, so it makes loads of sense that you want to seek out your own tribe and hang with them. (Maybe this is part of why young people will ultimately always want "the college experience" regardless of the educational quality of any alternative.)
I dunno about past middle age, though, that one seems more iffy. I don't really especially identify with or give a damn about what others my age think or what they like. I identify more with people who have similar life trajectories, or similar values, similar attitudes, and they come in a wide range of ages, I guess from about 30 to 80 or so, and don't constitute the majority of any age group -- certainly not my own.
So if it was just a question of finding sympatico neighbors, I would be less interested in the fact that they are close to my age and more interested in whatever life experiences I could infer from their choice in location that brought them to similar character. (Exempli gratia, I have a difficult time relating to anybody who has never reared children.)
Anyway, my vague attraction for the country has nothing to do with seeking sympatico neighbors. To the extent it's socially driven at all, I think it's more a desire to get away from people -- to be left alone -- on account of I find people per se increasingly tiresome: all their tribal squabbling, fascination with social heirarchy and signaling, a bunch of localized (in time) minutiae that mean approximately squat in the face of eternity. I do appreciate those relative few who ponder stuff that can match in its scale the scale of a trillion-year universe, of course, but mostly I want to be left alone by the remainder who see TG-v-TERF or blue-v-red or No Nukes! -v- Decarbonize Now! as Manichaean struggles which brook no Geneva Conventions.
Adding to this: when you're a teenager in the suburbs, you don't really care about the square footage of the whole house, because the footage that's yours is your bedroom. You care about public transport (you either can't drive unsupervised or you can't afford the petrol or you have to negotiate when to use the car AND can't afford the petrol and you get saddled with chores when you do use the car).
So the advantages of suburbs (big houses, your own garden, car accessible amenities) are almost all lost on you.
Cities are super attractive - better public transport, proximity to stuff you care about (jobs, shopping, takeaway and nightclubs as opposed to supermarkets, daycares and chiropractors).
Add to the fact that when you're young, you don't tend to have a lot of Stuff. You accumulate stuff (clothes, cooking equipment, furniture, nice homegoods, gadgets, hobbyware, etc) and suddenly you're 30 and you're annoyed that your shoebox apartment feels super cramped. This wasn't a problem when you were 20 because you moved in with literally a suitcase and a laptop.
As an ex California resident, I'm not offended by your take on the Central Valley. But I do politely request that you do a corresponding piece, "Why is San Francisco So Bad?". Or at least "Perceived As Bad".
It's a real issue, that *so many* ex Bay Area and ex SF residents in particular have such negative feelings about SF.
Although I lived in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose, with just a small amount of living in SF, you can definitely add me to that list.
Addendum: sweet sassy molassy, look at how low the crime rates are in Santa Clara county!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_crime_rate#Counties
Santa Clara's in the middle for property crime and near the bottom for violent crime, despite half of it being the million people in San Jose. I think it should be a major sub-component of the SF story that there's this other full sized city nearby that gets a lot of flak for being boring and suburban but has basically no violent crime by comparison.
[And this is coming from a Palo Altan who tells anecdotes like "the time someone snapped a metal file in my girlfriend's car door lock in San Jose" and "the time a vagrant set fire to my wife's condo property in San Jose" and "the time a vagrant overdosed in my daughter's park in San Jose" and "the time a man passed out in my apartment building hallway and scared the crap out of my female neighbor in San Jose". These things seem bad until I remember that my share of SF stories includes a violent crime, a knife chase, and some naked people injecting things into each other's thighs. And I'm not even including Golden Gate Park stories.]
As an east coast guy, I can't help but wonder if the correct conclusion of all this discussion is "California really sucks".
+1
I visited San Fran and Seattle on school trips and I will never be going back to the West Coast. Atlanta was a better experience by far--I didn't get chased for 4 city blocks by a man who was jerkin' it and screaming things *I'm glad my underage brain did not hold on to* in Atlanta.
My personal take: it's complicated.
Per the article, most of the central valley and the border with Oregon are the only parts of the state turning into a rust belt. The Bay Area, the LA area, San Diego, Sacramento, the fancy little tourist areas, the small coastal communities, and the small mountain communities are all economically and culturally vibrant. Certain skilled people can go to California *right now* and make piles of money doing interesting work, and a lot of them can probably tell themselves it's worthwhile.
LA really is a culture trendsetter and the grey/tech tribe in the Bay Area really are the closest thing we have to thought leaders in the world of the 2020s.
Also, the land, aside from being too dry for civilization, is amazing. Fertile when you water it, beautiful, weather always good.
*But*. Moral fibre is low across the board. People are sharky, or dangerously weird, or stonery. They will cheerfully take from you and tell themselves they're perfectly decent people while they do it. Not just money or time. A female friend of mine once said she would ride around SF on the bus, wearing her wedding ring as a necklace, and far from being dissuaded, people would take it like "oh, you have a functioning relationship? cool, would you like to have another one with me?". She later became a polyamorist, I think not without causing some pain, but certainly without the guilt.
*And*, second class citizens of all kinds are treated very poorly at a systemic level. From the day I set foot in the Bay Area to the day I left, I noticed that Mexican and other Latin American immigrants had markedly worse positions and got worse treatment than supposedly backwards Texas. In Texas, it's not at *all* uncommon that your dentist is Mexican. Somewhat ditto Los Angeles. But in the Bay, Mexican immigrants are housekeepers, poorly paid, the whole stereotype. Similarly, native born non-elite workers are as described above and in other comments: commuting for hours from worse places, barely able to make ends meet, erased from discourse and power. From where I sit, it looks way worse to be a lower middle class White or Black person in California than most of what's east of the rockies. For example: San Francisco was 20% black in ~ 1980. It was already ~ 7% black in 2009. At 700k population, that's *ninety thousand* black people who were priced out of their homes in a 30 year period.
*And*, the homeless and drug problems are the worst in the developed world. Everyone says this about their local area, but, see epistemic disclaimer below, I've lived in a lot of places, and from that standpoint, the west coast is 2x as bad as anywhere else and urban California is 2x as bad as the rest of the west coast.
I think it's very easy to live in and enjoy California if you are good at seeing the dark parts of the world and telling yourself it's fine, you're fine, you deserve your nice spot. If the dark parts throw you or cause you to doubt your validity, California is not easy.
[Epistemic disclaimer: I'm a military doctor's kid, an academic, a programmer, and a white American guy with a Chinese born but very culturally fluent wife. My parents are from New Jersey. I've lived in Texas, California, Washington state, Oregon, Georgia, South Carolina, England, and Germany, and I consider this kind of epistemic disclaimer important for letting you assess my biases in discussions about places.]
Yeah. I've never been to the CV, but to my ears both the people attacking it and people defending it are saying "It's kind of like a worse version of a rural area or small-to-mid-sized city in the Midwest." It shares some of the advantages of those places over the hive cities on the coasts, but fewer of them. And it has some of the same disadvantages, but more of them. So I don't really understand why you would live there.
Central Valley cities are very much like rust belt cities with significantly higher open drug use, and, somehow, significantly lower opioid crisis deaths... maybe it's different drugs.
It absolutely is. I can't wait to leave this horribly mismanaged state.
Addendum 2: I would like to second what Ragged Clown said about commuting.
> When I lived in San Jose, almost every construction worker, gardener or cleaner I spoke to commuted in from Lodi or Tracy or Stockton or Modesto etc because they couldn't afford to live in the Bay Area.
Yes, this. The roads from the east bay to the central valley are huge, and they're nightmarishly choked for a wide range of hours. This is the true cost of having restaurant and construction workers in the Bay Area: such people are basically commuter servants, their lives are bad in ways they can't control, *and* if the environmental cost of this commute was even partially factored into the ratings of Bay Area cities, most of them would drop rather dramatically off of environmental friendliness lists. Your town may be green, but you effective force your policeman and your CalTrain worker to burn *hours* of daily time and *gallons* of gasoline to serve you.
Uhh... I feel like we already spent almost a year talking about almost nothing other than why San Francisco is so bad. A quick look through the archives, and you will see the piece you were talking about, except it's more like 8 different pieces, all talking about homelessness and addiction and construction malaise and Western civilization's lack of ability to manage its cities, etc
Wait, you're right. There was even a book review. Okay, cool, it's been covered, I'm happy.
I like how this hints at all the civilizational inadequacies Scott sees in the world... is actually just Bay Area being terrible.
It's not just the Bay Area though.
I can only speak from my experience, but it's most US states, almost all US cities in their own size-dependent and politics-dependent ways, the entire US government, many UK areas, and the entire UK government. I'd say Scotland seems cool, but it's only really functional at the national government level, not all the local communities. I feel *relatively* good about living in the outskirts of north Austin Texas (I don't like suburbs, especially American ones, but I find there's a local maximum that avoids the problems of the city and the problems of the rural areas). But it's not great. I miss Germany. I wish China would return to communist-capitalist-one-party without a cult of personality. I think civilizational inadequacy is developing at different speeds and being staved off to differing degrees but it's a consistent first world pattern.
As a European I am always amused by SF property values being driven _down_ by the proximity of public transit.
You live in some kind of bizarro world but apparently it has all the money.
An important question is whether you've ridden the American public transit. Have you ridden the American public transit?
In Europe, and in New York, it's for everybody, rich and poor, functional and dysfunctional. This is not true in most of America. It didn't catch on the right way. That's partly down to attitude, but it's also partly down to distance. The car was just too valuable, and the transit system stratified to some degree, so public transit is a *somewhat* dysfunctional strata, and the negative implications of new transit are *real*, as well as the positive ones.
Also SFers are HODLing pretty hard. You should see the internal email threads of a company like Google or Twitter whenever something happens that meaningfully threatens rising SF house prices. Again, I can only speak to my experience, but there's a practical violence in the tone of those discussions that doesn't quite exist in the housing discussions in other places I've lived. If you've ever seen pictures of Los Angeles Koreatown rooftop guys in the LA riots, it rather feels like that mentality.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower?"
This and all the replies to it (as of the writing of this comment) miss the mark and misunderstand what is happening here. Getting a stable, fixed-rate mortgage is how upper-middle-class people buy their upper-middle-class homes. If someone is in a position to be "hit hard" by an economic crisis, we're not talking about those people.
Poor people scrape together enough to buy a home with a small down payment on an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), once they can make the payments given the introductory ("teaser") rate. When that runs out after a few years, the rate gets adjusted upwards, unless they can refinance under a new ARM with a new introductory rate. Which they can do, as long as they still have enough equity that the bank is willing to grant the terms. But if their equity has dropped below what they'd need for a down payment, and they can't refinance, then their monthly payment explodes along with the rate, and they can no longer afford their house.
Honestly, the movie The Big Short did a decent job of explaining it. Ignore the set dressing (mild nudity) for a decent explanation: https://youtu.be/iDcbUAh731s
"oor people scrape together enough to buy a home with a small down payment on an adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), once they can make the payments given the introductory ("teaser") rate."
Maybe once upon a time, certainly not these days
> I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?
My little brother used to go out to drink with friends at least 3 times a week, and often 4 or 5, and then doing something else on the weekend. I go out to drink on average once or twice a year, and never really enjoy those moments, I'm always dragged by other people that insist. I do spend time face to face with people, but it's in small groups (~5 people), in a private place (usually my appartment), and we mostly talk or watch movies.
At least according to my personal experience, nightlife can matter a lot to some people, and not at all for others. This is probably the same with culture. In 10 years in a relatively big city, I've gone once to the theater. I go to the movie theater more often, I'd say around once a month, but if I wasn't in a big city, I could invest part of the difference in rent in a nice home theater system, and rarely feel the need to go out.
I've found the REKOM Night Index at https://rekom.uk/late-night-index/, that surveyed 2,358 18+ year olds between 15/03/22 and 21/03/22 in the UK. Some interesting data:
- Almost half (49.9%) of respondents go out at least once a week, and of those, 26.8% go out weekly, 14.4% go out 2-3 times a week and 6.5% go out 4-6 days a week. The mean is at 1.17 times per week.
- The most popular reason for going on a night out is to spend time with friends (64.9%). Almost a quarter (23.6%) go out to relieve day to day pressures and stress. This figure rises to 28.7% for 25-34 year olds.
- The top factors respondents anticipate being the most important when deciding where to go on a late night out are: Distance from home or ease of getting there (20.4%), Type of music (19.0%), Most affordable pricing (17.6%), Quality of the venue and brand (15.6%).
- The average cost of a night out is 68 pounds. The average duration of a night out is 4 hours and 17 minutes.
I think with that we can estimate the "weight"/"space" that going out takes for people that go out a lot, with the caveat that there may some correlation that haven't been explicited here. For example, what's the impact of the number of time you go out on the average cost of a night out, or the average duration.
With that in mind, we can create a rough estimate for people that go out 2-3 times a week. Let's multiply that by 4.33 to get a monthly number: 8.7-13. That would mean between 592 and 884 pounds a month. As for the time, between 36 and 54 hours.
As for the people that go out 4 to 6 times a week, we can just multiply by 2 our previous findings: between 1184 and 1768 pounds a month, and between 72 to 108 hours. Salary/earnings can be complex and correlated to a lot of other elements that we have, but fortunately hours are the same for everyone, we all get 730 of them in a month. The 2-3 person spends between 5% and 7% of his time going out, the 4-6 person between 10% and 14%. Adjusted for waking hours (1/3 of your time, so multiply everything by 1.5), that's between 7.5% and 10.5% for the 2-3, and between 15% and 21% for the 4-6.
Having written all of that, I'd say that now if my little brother tells me he wants to move somewhere else to have a more active nightlife, I would be able to empathize with his decision. And that it's safe for me to ignore everything nightlife and most things culture related when deciding where to live. Maybe it's the same for art and high-culture and there are people out there spending 15% or more of their waking life engaging with this? All I can say is that I have nobody like that in my bubble.
I care about nightlife despite not enjoying clubbing because it's usually correlated with the availability of cheap takeaway food. Places that have a nightlife usually also have more restaurants which open for longer on most days. This is very important for me because I very often find myself too tired to cook and clean. I need to be able to find meals at 8 or 9pm and that tends to correlate to being in places that see a lot of drunk people.
>Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower?
A couple big things. 1) Adjustable rate mortgages and mortgages made out to people who couldn't atcually afford them.
So you have a bunch of people who put what little savings they could scrape together into purchasing assets that had wildly inflated prices. When those assets collapsed, they were left with debts on properties they had to let the bank take back, and no savings.
2) In the meantime because they were on paper wealthy, people overspent their income even more. So someone mkaing $40k a year with $35k in expenses, puts $5k down on a $500k home. Home needs $15k in debt payments each year, which they cannot afford, but is also going up in value $50k/year so who cares. Then they also run up the credit card a bit because they have an "extra" money in term sof home equity.
Then this is working out so well they buy a second house. Then the value of it all collapses and they have no savings, big credit card debts, and no place to live.
3) The construction and real estate sectors were eating up a lot of marginal/unskilled labor. So you had depressed former rust belt communities turn into meccas of cabin flipping and lake homes and second homes, and a lot of the former paper mill workers spent summers working constuction or selling homes/doing appraisals whatever. Then when all that activity stops, none of those people have jobs. So you have communities with already chronic terrible unemployment ~13-14%, suddenly skyrocket to 25% unemployment. Which is a major crisis.
Smart people would leave such economically depresed areas, but people are always slower to move such areas than is rational.
I have to say, I found the anecdote about the laptop bag not being stolen pretty depressing. That’s a very low bar to pass for a city to be regarded as relatively crime-free.
I think it's meant to be damning of San Francisco, rather than praising the Central Valley.
>I’m grateful to them for putting this into words - I hear a lot of discussion seemingly predicated on that fact that you need to have a certain number of museums and symphonies to be a liveable city. But I basically never go to either and I think most people are probably pretty similar. I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?
Yeah I have never understood this.
I grew up in a mid-sized rustbelt city (~100,000 people). Ok not a super happening place, though we would get acts like Metallica/Guns N' Roses or whatever sometimes, it wasn't a total wasteland. Had a symphony too, and D1 college sports!
A lot of the more "sophisticates" at my HS ended up in Minneapolis/St. Paul as adults. But what I just don't get is of the few who eventually lived in Chiacgo/NY/LA for a bit, about halfl suddenly act like living in Nashville or Minneapolis or Atlanta is some kind of death sentence. Maybe these places don't have doctors or basic services? Like maybe there aren't actually good resturants in Dallas and you might just starve to death if you moved there? That sounds as though an am exaggerating, but I assure you I am not. Do the people in Raleigh just DIE of boredom? How can they survive knowing they could be living in Philadephia instead?!?!?!
These are well educated professional people, who know better since they grew up in a mid-sized rustbelt city. I point out I travel all over the country for work, and it is very samey. The type of restuarant an upper middle class lawyer or whatever is going to go to just aren't that different from major metro to major metro. No you can't get a $1000/plate meal in Phoenix, but who the fuck wants/needs that anyway.
The best meal I can remember in the last 5 years was in Jackson MS and cost $40. I tend to think once you get above "middle class" prices, there just isn't really any improvement and it is all down to taste. At that point you are just paying for status and who the fuck cares?
And yes they have a slightly better art museum in Chicago than Minneapolis, but hardly to a noticable extent. And how often are they going to the art museum anyway, once a year? Twice? And for that your house is twice as much? And yes you can take a 40 minute trainride into work insetad of a 35 minute commute, that is somewhat an improvment! Unless, you know, since housing is cheaper in Minneapolis you can just buy a house in Minneapolis and have a 12 minute commute.
Anyway Chicago is great I don't resent anyone living there or NY. But they definitely have their downsides, and a good half their residents seem to have some sort of threshold for livability where city with an MSA of 8 million is eden, but one with an MSA of 4 million might as well be rural Alabama (which honestly is kind of nice too if you are in the right spots).
Anyway, my theory is that there is so much that is unpleasant and expensive about living in the truly giant metros, that people either really really like them, or convince themselves they do as part of a rationalization of their lifestyle.
I agree that most people who boast about their city’s museums, symphony and culture are going at most once a year and don’t actually give a shit, but I think these types of things can serve as a proxy for the overall cultural environment in the city. A city with a ton of art museums, is going to attract more artists, and this in turn is going to effect the quality of art on the walls of the restaurant you’re eating at.
For example, a city such as Detroit, because of the amount of musical innovation that has happened there, is more likely to have better musicians and DJs playing at the bar/block party than a similar sized city such as Baltimore, which lacks the music tradition.
I mean, it all depends what you’re into, and of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t talented people giving quality entertainment everywhere. Small cities and towns have a ton of benefits. But I think it’s less about the museums themselves than it is the tradition that placed them there. You don’t hAve to ever visit to enjoy the effects of their existence.
...it's possible that many people don't want a party on their block, regardless of the alleged quality of the very loud music.
( not saying this is you particularly, but...it is interesting to me that many people talk about wanting to get out of the sticks because 'the intellectual discourse is better in the city' and yet spend so much time at concerts and clubs where the music is so loud one cannot think let alone talk.)
I mean, i get your point but even dense major cities have quiet parts, and except in occasional block parties I don’t think most music takes place outside lol. But I get what you’re saying some people just want peace and quiet and that’s OK too!
I’ve never heard anyone say that about “intellectual discourse” lol. I think you can have great, valuable conversations anywhere. But you can go to a nightclub on Friday and still have intellectual conversations the other 6 days of the week. Plus there’s a ton of bars that are more geared toward conversation than partying, these are definitely the types of places I prefer.
Specifically with regard to the food scene, larger cities tend to have more specialized / authentic restaurant offerings, likely because the larger population center supports more niche offerings. I moved from Los Angeles to Denver several years ago, and its there's maybe one restaurant that has yakitori made with charcoal - with just a handful of choice on the menu. The majority of sushi restaurants focus more on rolls than fresh sashimi. And what the hell is "Ethiopian fusion" cuisine?
I probably wouldn't move back (and endure 15 hours a week sitting in traffic) for access to a few restaurants, but little things like this are noticeable once you become accustomed to them.
"Like maybe there aren't actually good restaurants in Dallas and you might just starve to death if you moved there?"
It's a proxy for the wider attitude that 'those places are in red states, which is the same as redneck, and we're blue through and through and don't share anything in common with rednecks as to values or Just Basic Human Decency'.
A few years back, (and keeping this as vague as possible) someone said that they would never, because they could never, live in Iowa (I don't think it was Iowa, but that kind of general flyover state idea) because they wouldn't be able to get sushi there.
And this wasn't a jokey kind of reference, it was serious. Naturally several of us contrarians Googled for "Sushi restaurants Iowa" and found that they did indeed exist, but the real meaning was 'I could never live anywhere that wasn't multicultural by my definition, and Iowa is not that kind of place'.
I was bemused at first because wow, you must *really* love sushi to dismiss an entire region out of consideration, but then I realised the deeper meaning and it made me sad: for you, the people living there are simply benighted barbarians and you can't conceive of anything you might have in common with them.
I think that’s true for certain people but sometimes it’s not that deep. Of course you can find sushi in Iowa, but it’s not going to be near the quality that you can find in San Francisco. I live in philadelphia, and the quality of bbq here is far lower than the quality of bbq in Durham, NC. NYC has by far the best pizza and it’s almost impossible to find a good NY style slice in most of the rest of the country. A city’s culture and history affects the type of experience you have living there.
The hilarious thing is places like Iowa or Minneapolis or St Louis are more diverse than you think both due to migration to farming jobs and the state department settling refugees there.
Minneapolis has really big Hmong and Somali populations and St. Louis Balkan.
Personally I couldn’t live in Manhattan because the streets smell of garbage. I would take clean smelling streets for 85 sushi restaurants.
I’m aware that places like Des Moines snd Minneapolis exist. I’m not even talking about ethnic or racial diversity, necessarily. I’m talking broadly about cultural traditions and heritage in cities, which ethnic make up of the city is only part of.
It’s ok that you wouldn’t want to live in NYC, but there are things that can be found there that can’t be found anywhere else. There are reasons people are attracted to certain cities besides hating conservatives. I’m a musician, and there’s only a handful of cities in America I would want to live in because there are only a few cities with a strong music tradition in the scene I’m involved with. Doesn’t mean Cincinnati or Toledo or whatever are shit places, they just don’t have what I’m looking for.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard?"
Stage 1: nice family buys a home with 0-3% down for $500,000
Stage 2: housing bust hits and now their home is worth $300,000
Stage 3: primary breadwinner(s) loses their job and can no longer pay the mortgage payment
Stage 4: bank forecloses and/or family is forced to short sell, except they still owe ~$460,000 on a $300,000 asset
Stage 5: they lose their home, become renters, *and* still owe the bank $160,000
That's what strategic default is for. Just give the house back to the bank and stop paying your mortgage. Once the bank forecloses on the property, you don't owe the bank anything.
This is true in a handful of "non-recourse" states (maybe a dozen?) but the majority of states still allow deficiency judgments after a foreclosure auction.
Plus your credit is fucked for a decade or so.
To be precise the “vast wasteland” thing was Kelly quoting me, in a comment where I was characterizing the way coastal elites view the valley.
""Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard?"
It's all about the ability to re-mortgage. Typically, when you take out a mortgage you sign up for 2-5 years of discount rates, after which you go back onto the 'base rate' which involves much higher payments. So the normal procedure is to spend your 2-5 years paying an affordable rate, and then 're-mortgage' -- i.e., get a new mortgage deal and get another 2-5 years of discount rates. The alternative is to stay on your original plan and have your payments skyrocket.
Except, if your house crashes in value to the point where it is worth less than the mortgage (in the UK we call this 'negative equity... I think Americans call this being underwater), you won't be able to remortgage. A bank won't accept a $300,000 house as collateral for a $400,000 loan. So you'll be stuck with the extortionate monthly payments that five years ago your bank swore you'd never actually have to pay. "This here is the base rate, but don't worry, before this kicks in you'll just remortgage like everyone else". But now your house is worth less, and you're trapped paying a fortune for it, and if you can't make the payments you lose the house.
Yes, this. The people explaining it in terms of the breadwinner losing their job are bringing in unnecessary extra factors.
Mortgages that are fixed for a few years and then have a floating rate exist in the US, but are not near as common as they are in the UK or many other countries. It is much more common in the US to take out mortgages with a fixed rate for the full 15-30 year life of the loan.
There were still large numbers of foreclosures in the Central Valley including on people with floating rate mortgages, but the specific phenomenon you’re describing is less common in the US than places it sounds like you’re familiar with.
Huh, TIL. Thanks!
Also, the interest rates on 30 year and esp 15 year notes are not (comparatively) high for people who are assessed to be good credit risks. In the US, ballon payments and floating rate loans are overwhelming entered by people who are not good risks, as those are the only terms available to that group.
I don't want these credit tools to go away, but I would counsel everyone to not use them.
"Pardon my ignorance, but how does a housing bust hit an area hard? Don’t most people just keep paying the same amount on their mortgage, regardless of whether the sticker price of the house is lower? Wouldn’t the only people who suffer be people who are selling, which means they’re not going to be in the area much longer anyway? Doesn’t this make it easier for new people to move into the area?"
Because (1) housing is on a chain; people rely on selling their old house to pay off the remainder of their mortgage and have a deposit for a new house which they get a new mortgage on, or even better if the old house is inherited from a family member and the mortgage is already paid off.
Knock a step out of the property ladder and it all unravels. Leaving aside first-time buyers, now Mary and John are not selling their old house to move into a bigger/better new house, and that means Sally and Joe who would have sold to Mary and John are not selling, and so on up. That leaves houses empty, but not affordably empty, even at the lower prices (unless you're a vulture fund) because people are now stuck with the housing they already own/rent, or properties which are not worth selling. First time buyers are also at a disadvantage, because banks are more chary of lending when a housing slump happens. If you can't get a mortgage, then it doesn't matter if that house which was formerly $180,000 is now going for $120,000, you still can't afford it.
(2) Housing slumps/bursting bubbles don't generally happen on their own, they are usually part of wider economic downturn. Depending on your mortgage, whether it's fixed rate or variable rate, you can end up paying a lot more for a property that is now worth less than you paid for it, so even if you sell it, you still have more debt to repay. And if the slump happens somewhere that is not very economically active, this puts a huge burden on people - "negative equity" can mean people failing to make repayments, which means their homes are repossessed, which leaves them effectively homeless and the important thing here is that they *can't* take advantage of the reduced cost of housing because they don't have money free to buy or take out a new mortgage. If the economy (local or otherwise) is doing badly, companies may reduce workforces. Now you're laid off, nowhere is hiring, and you owe money on a devalued asset. Now you're in trouble.
People will always want to live in San Francisco and the big beast employers there are relatively cushioned from recessions (unless the talk about a recent tech recession is true). People may not want to live in the Central Valley, even if the houses are cheap, because they can't afford to - the jobs are not there, and they have to live where the jobs are.
>I feel the same way about people who obsess over whether a certain city has “nightlife” or not. Granting that some people center their lives around all of these things, are they really a big enough percent of the population for this to have important demographic effects?
Doesn't nightlife just mean things you want to do? For some people that's bars, for others jazz bands or symphonies, for me it means "places to play board games with strangers" and "hackathons". In my experience a 'happening' city with lots of symphonies tends to also have lots of board games and hackathons, etc, and generally just more of *everything*. It's not a perfect correlation, Seattle has a huge MTG scene and isn't exactly known for nightlife. But Austin and Atlanta have both.
>the Bay has deteriorated more in the last 10 years than Fresno has in the last 30 IMO
I thought this part was interesting. I spent a lot of time in the East Bay when I was young and got used to deterioration as just being "part of the scenery". Watching this youtube vid was interesting not because it taught me anything new, but because it offered interesting editorial commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHixc-QAhZQ
The entire conversation really hits home to me how differently we tend to think regarding what makes somewhere a "good place to live." I think the general assumption is that we all agree on a certain set of criteria directionally: cost of living low? good! crime rate high? bad! And then we can gather statistics on all of these things and aggregate them and produce some sort of meta-score telling us what places to live are good and what places are bad. And these meta scores will generally track with "common sense" expectations. They'll return a lot of "nicer suburb areas of major metros" and college towns under "good" and neglected urban core neighborhoods and remote rural outposts under "bad" and we'll all smile and nod, because on aggregate, that seems to sort of make sense.
But in reality, these criteria are not equally weighted for every person. Not even close. There are some people for whom cost of living doesn't actually matter at all. They're either already rich, or anticipate that the economic gains of living in a high COL location will offset the cost. Many of these people also don't seem to be bothered by high crime rates at all. I have no reason to think Seth Rogen is being untruthful when he says that having his car broken into 4 times in 6 months is no big deal to him. On the other end of the spectrum, there are some people for whom "access to great outdoor or natural environments" doesn't matter at all. I was once stationed in the military in Ventura County, got a place that was like a 10 minute walk from a relatively nice beach, and went to the beach like twice in four years. Just wasn't my thing. I was busy playing World of Warcraft (which I can do from anywhere with reliable Internet). Similarly, there are people who can live right next to a symphony and a museum and never go there. It's just not their thing.
When you aggregate all of these things together, you can produce a list of places that many people will probably find comfortable enough, and a list of places that many people will probably find pretty terrible. But even at both ends of that list... there will be people in Carmel, Indiana who hate living there and would desperately move to SF if they could. And there will be people in East St. Louis who think the community has a lot of character and is on the verge of turning around the bad stuff. It's just such a personal thing.
Agree in general. Horses for courses.
The thing about breaking into cars resonated with me, but sort of in reverse. I noticed that I left my car open with the keys in the ignition today in the supermarket. I say 'I noticed' because last week the car locked itself and I don't have a second set of car keys, so before I got out of the car to go shopping I wondered whether I should leave the keys in the ignition, and did so because that's what I always do. Rural France = high trust society, but I'd never have done that when I lived in London... People would try to steal your car with you still sitting in it.
This is only partly related (not specific to the Californian central valley), but perhaps interesting to some (an European's view).
I've never been to the US myself, but my girlfriend has been to Phoenix (for work-related reasons, they actually needed a place which is particularly hot). She noticed two things which are strange from a European's point of view:
1. There were no pavements. The only way to get around was by car...or walking on the roads (presumably quite dangerous). I don't know if this is common in the US (outside the big cities) but if it is, this alone would probably cause a lot of Europeans to dislike the place.
2. There are supposedly a lot of crazy people around. The sort of crazy which manifests itself by wearing goofy clothes, riding a miniature bicycle while shouting profanities at everyone around...or stuff like that. Not sure what to think of that or if that wasn't just a coincidence (from what I heard I guess SF has a reputation for these kind of weirdos, perhaps Phoenix does too?). Of course, you meet weirdos like this everywhere, but supposedly there was a much larger concentration of such people in Phoenix than in most places in Europe.
Oh yeah, a third thing - Phoenix is extremely cookie-cutter, everything looks the same and everything is ordered in right angles. She showed me some pictures from the airplane and it was almost bizarre. It is kind of like the communist panel housing projects in central and eastern Europe (although you can such things in places like Barcelona also, so not strictly communist I guess), except vertical instead of horizontal (though probably built better) and the entire city looks like that not just a housing district on the periphery. When I was in Sydney and especially Melbourne I had the same impression, it was just...too artificial. Too uniform and orderly, not like cities in Europe which feel more organic, probably because they are a hodgepodge of various architecture styles, periods and streets coming together at various angles. Perhaps this is also more so in places like the central valley or the midwest where they basically built a city on a flat plain 100 or so years ago compared to places like San Francisco or even Boston where the terrain and/or enough history prevent such uniformity? Maybe not though, like I said, I've never been to the US, my closest imagined approximation is Australia.
I can't speak for Phoenix, but every US city I've been to had plenty of sidewalks. And yes, I think the age thing is a big deal. Even within the US there's a definite difference in character between older east coast cities that were well established before the invention of urban planning and a place like Phoenix.
It's pretty common in US cities for sidewalks not to actually connect places you'd want to walk to (e.g. going all the way from a hotel to a shopping center with restaurants). Sure the downtown urban core of any city will be somewhat walkable, but as soon as you're out of the highrise/skyscraper zone it reverts to car-centric development that assumes you're going to drive and park anywhere you're going to. It's also common for entire housing developments to have no sidewalks at all. Most of the neighborhoods here in Honolulu are missing sidewalks, for example.
The no sidewalks and the crazies running riot are definitely very American sights.
I am also from Europe and having been in Phoenix, I can agree. Phoenix was not a city, but huge village. East coast cities where I have been (Boston, NY, DC) are different, their structure and layout is similar to European cities.
It's a different kind of a city built in a different period and environment than European ones. Europeans don't have a monopoly on a what a city is or isn't.
We are in the early stages of human speciation enabled by mobility and the internet. In a few hundred years we’ll be comprised of two sets of very different people.
I feel like this has been going on ever since dropping hunting & gathering, and is picking up steam fast.
I can't really imagine small towns mattering economically, ever, to anyone anymore. In the meantime we reach some kind of housing singularity where everyone wants to be on top of each other at the same time, and join the elite by being near the elite. At this point in most developed countries it would be economically viable to just go full city-state network with some kind of defense pact, and leave everything outside to rot as it is a huge drain on resources.
I'm not surprised that you're encountering pushback against sweeping claims, and I'm glad you highlighted them. I've started fighting against these kinds of sweeping claims in the battle to slow down the culture war among my social group.
I got called out by my girlfriend during a recent argument about our living situation about my exhortations that the city we live in (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) is a hellhole when compared to Toronto. You know... I kind of deserved it. I grew up here and a lot of the comments that you highlighted could easily have been said about my stance. I pride myself in being even and measured and rational when talking about issues, but then I spout my mouth off about the city I live in because it's hard to find things to do on a Friday night.
I've started asking my substack authors in the comments whether they think they've hit certain levels of audience capture or sniffing their own farts. I'm seeing it happen with Block and Reported, so maybe you're tilting that way? I enjoyed the original article about the central valley, but then some of these comments perfectly highlight you having a warped perspective about the valley. Especially comparing the Mad Max-ification of SF homeless encampments to the relatively-homed CV. I appreciate some editorializing and entertaining writing, but please don't go down the invective rabbit hole.
Now I feel like a jerk for this comment :)
The problem is that a vibrant cultural and nightlife scene depends heavily on population and disposable income. The arts get heavily subsidised, otherwise those museums and symphony orchestras would not exist.
So smaller cities are not going to have the same range of selection, and when you get to towns and rural/semi-rural areas, forget it.
This then has a knock-on effect, which creates a vicious circle: all the ambitious people, or the people who want art galleries and theatres and nightlife move to the Big City, which means that population and disposable income for young single people wanting to hit the town on Friday night for a good time also decrease, which means whatever cultural life is struggling along gets hit even harder, which means that people who want a cultural life move elsewhere where it's easily and plentifully available -and round and round the mulberry bush we go.
It's a little unfair to blame places that may well be Pop: 50,000 for not having the same amenities as places that are Pop: 200,000 which do not have the same amenities as places that are Pop: 800,000 but that's human nature for you.
Something very positive about the Central Valley / Greater Sacramento area: it has some of the best road running in the country. Namely, it's flat; it has great local races with ample parking; there are loads of fast runners to compete against; it's eerily perfect at 54F and windless every morning. Three wonderful long-distance races to note: 1. Urban Cow Half Marathon (just happened!). 2. Clarksburg Country Run Half Marathon and 30K, November. And of course, 3. California International Marathon, early December.
So it's not all doom and gloom in the Central Valley. At least not on race day.
Skipping ahead to mention I belly laughed at the laptop in the car story. “The only thing left worth stealing was the jack, so they took that.” If crime in SF is really that bad it puts ny into perspective because even though there’s been an uptick here, I’ve lived here since 2001 and I never worry about leaving a laptop in the car.
Re the value of museums and orchestras:
I think the comments above have pretty covered it, I just wanted to suggest a possible metaphor: you could imagine the museums and opera houses as being a bit like intellectual utilities. Just as you don't ever go to the water treatment plant or the local power station, you don't have to go to the local museum to receive its benefits. Some people go, and those people talk to other people about the latest Neanderthal exhibition, and the ideas in the museum get incrementally added to the stock of things that people in your town sometimes talk about.
(Have I just reinvented intellectual trickle-down economics? Having written this out, I'm not so sure about it...)
I'm a bay area commuter that lives in the central valley. Moved out here last year to get a house (have young kids). The thing that's missed about long commute times is that you don't have to go in every day. I only go in 2 days a week, so although the commute is 2 hours each way, that's only 8 hours total a week, and that commute is by bus so I typically read or work on my computer. Our neighborhood here in the valley is extremely nice and we have a great new home. The neighborhood and city we live in have tons of wonderful parks and playgrounds that our kids love. Overall that seems like a great trade off for me having 8 hours a week in a bus. My salary has increased since we moved out here (now 300k+), so although we could afford to rent (or perhaps buy) a house closer to work, is it really worth it?
Surprised to see a reference to pharmacy schools here but I guess it segues into my central valley experience. From what I understand it's pretty new and not very high quality (which is more a consequence of new pharmacy schools not needing to be high quality broadly) but for a while it was easy to get a pharmacy job in the central valley because natives weren't going to pharmacy school and most pharmacy grads want flashier city jobs. Made it easy for me to get a job here with kind of a busted resume but there's patterns with my colleagues in the region. For example there seems a lot of young women with families from LA who rent apartments out here for during the week and go home on the weekends. I'm told the patients here are especially bad for various reasons but I haven't really spent much time working anywhere else to confirm myself.
As someone who's mostly an internet shut-in it's not really all that bad here and it is genuinely nice living 2-3 hours from downtown LA and just actually having the option to go there on a whim for a day or two.
Fun fact: before Walgreens lost one of their big Medi-Cal contracts one of the stores in Visalia was the third busiest in the country, doing something absurd like 1500 scripts a day; from what I was told was almost entirely people passing through in either direction.
"I would add, that even with the best of liberal intentions by the Eloi, one-party states run by corrupt politicians go bad fast, and the non-elite (Morlocks) get the worst of it while the coastal elites stay richer."
Minor point and slightly off topic, but we should remember that the Eloi are not just elites. They think they are, and live like they are, but they're actually (or at least also) food for the Morlocks.