In the greater Seattle area you'd be stressed to find a back alley condo for that cheap. My rent in the outskirts of Redmond for a 3 bedroom apartment is more than my mother's mortgage for her 5 bedroom house in Bellevue, which, despite being a 70 year old split-level home with low ceilings and a hill for a lot in a forgotten neighborhood without so much as one sidewalk, was appraised two years ago for over $750,000.
I can afford to live on my own, but hell if I can afford a reasonable down payment on a house within 25 miles of where I work.
What he's describing about Dallas is true for the nearly 200 million Americans who live in the Midwest and the South. Cheap housing is the norm in the United States. I'm not bothered by people on the coasts complaining about housing costs, but you look foolish when you make generalizations about your generation that don't apply to the majority of the country.
It's even unclear how real the urbanization trend is as opposed to a preference for a small set of dense locations by college-educated people in a specific age range.
Which is to say:
If you can't afford to live in a coastal state, then what you need more than anything else is a U-Haul.
The demand is there and it's not going away. Whatever you're hoping for, it's too late.
The solution is trivially simple: build a lot of public housing.
If you have a hard time imagining what any part of that plan might look like, take a look at Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
[1] https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-rise-and-fall-of-pu...
>Sure, build a bunch of concrete high rises for tech worker
I guess SF's bus drivers, restaurant servers, etc. don't deserve somewhere affordable to live because it might spoil the "aesthetic"?
You're getting 1.5x the income (usually with longer hours) and paying 5x for the house.
You're also paying more for other random stuff like groceries, eating out, gasoline, electricity, etc.
You're also paying lots more for taxes. Some states have no income tax. Some states have no sales tax. Some have neither!
Also, what's this nonsense about Decatur, Illinois? St. Louis and Cincinnati and Nashville and Pittsburgh and so on all have a bunch of pre-WWII, walkable, interesting neighborhoods, with little restaurants and bars and people putting on poetry readings and bands playing in basement clubs and jazz quartets playing at wine and cheese parties and concert halls that host national acts and major sports franchises and yuppies and hipsters and Python Meetups and comedy clubs and big pretty parks and coffee shops and whatever else you can think of.
No, they are emphatically not like San Francisco or NYC. But don't be silly. Millions of people live in those places. Did you really think they're all just skipping stones and waiting to die?
I'm quite glad I grew up here, because I think I'd be just the type of asshole who'd make jokes about Decatur, Illinois had I not. And you know what? I'd have been wrong.
And to really strain this metaphor, people who have all their wealth tied up in a Ferrari would be a lot better off if they sold it and used the gains to live a comfortable life.
I actually don't see what can be done about it. But it's a bit strange to project Google numbers to the entire generation.
Rent in Brooklyn got them 12 acres 40 minutes away from Uptown Charlotte, and a house to boot.
"Cheap" housing only goes so far when your employment is 30 hours per week at the local Walmart for $9/hour. You're trying to pretend this is some "coastal" phenomenon, but you can't get there from here - you can't get the number of young people who have left the nest down from 60+% to just barely over 30% without it involving the entire country.
Young people in middle America can't afford to move out either.
In California the median household income is $67,458, and the median house sales price is $405,000, or about 6x median income.
So no, it is not actually true that the lower housing prices in flyover states are offset by lower incomes. Housing in California is proportionally twice as expensive as it is in Ohio.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/25/1-in-2-working-americans-m...
If you look at per capita income instead of household, Ohio gives $135,500/$26,937 ~= 5, and California gives $405,000/$30,441 = 13 By that standard, California is 2.6 times more expensive instead of only 2.
But you'd need to earn 159k per year in San Francisco to match the spending power of that $55k in St. Louis. And even that wouldn't be nearly enough to reach parity in home purchasing. Housing is 790% more expensive in San Francisco!
I get that it's fun to joke about flyover country, but the numbers are what they are. People simply are not struggling to move out of the house in St. Louis in the same way that they are in the Bay Area, for example.
Which is to say, once again, that there must be other factors at play.
http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/st.-louis-mo/san-fr...
They're subjective but it's important to realize both scenarios and everything in between exist, and to acknowledge when you're only considering the extremities of that range.
What this is, more than anything else, is ignorant. I think I understand how it happened. The inner cores of the Midwestern cities that give large metros their names really have been gutted. They were literally ripped through by highways, intentionally segregated, their manufacturing base decimated.
They're crumbling.
And boy oh boy does this story have legs. It's sort of fun to flip through the destruction porn. Pictures of brick piles where houses once stood titillate.
So, it must sound as though entire regions are falling apart. But it's just not so.
If you were to do a quick search for information about St. Louis, MO, you'd learn that the city has a paltry median income of about $30k, a dwindling population of about 300k, and a pathetic land area of only 66 miles squared.
But the City of St. Louis refers to a very small part of a much larger region, an area myopically bound by voters who in 1876 couldn't imagine much happening in the farmlands beyond those lines.
The region today -- much of it on those old farmlands -- has 2.5 million people and a metro-wide median household income of around $55k.
This is the true picture of the region, though most descriptions of it are drawn from only its worst parts.
The fact is that, for many people, the opportunity in places like California lags far behind the increased cost of living. Lots and lots of regular folks would be far better off relocating to places they've long-ago dismissed without a serious look.
Yes, we have winters. And no ocean. But, yes, there's actually culture (of the kind generated everywhere that two and a half million humans live). And good housing. And, most important: you can actually afford it.
1. Crumbling ghettos (as you describe) 2. Crumbling non-ghetto rust-belt that's still not pretty 3. Rural areas beset by meth and herion. 4. Vast-scale suburbs with indeed little to no culture and fairly thin on jobs. 5. Areas like the coasts but costing close to the price of the coast -
But I'm sure there's good stuff between that.
Also, the City Of St. Louis is certainly the limit of the broad St. Louis ghetto, as the Ferguson events clearly shows. The metropolitan area is basically the 2nd or third most dangerous city in the US (behind Detroit and sometimes New Orleans).
This is not only incorrect, it's perhaps the most notorious example of the problems caused by comparing cities at a level smaller than the MSA. The St. Louis MSA is, in fact, about middle of the pack on crime. See here:
http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/crime3.aspx
And here:
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bettencourt/urban_observatory/vio...
The division between St. Louis City and St. Louis County creates a lot of issues for this region, but the fact that you could make your comment with such confidence demonstrates that the area's primary challenge is image marketing.
To illustrate this, imagine one region where the baseline crime rate is not extreme, but above average all across the region. Now, think of another place where most of the region is pretty safe, but one pocket of the area has an extremely high rate.
These two regions might have identical crime rates. But which one would you rather live in?
This is why the FBI recommends against using its own numbers to make comparisons like the grandparent's:
"Each year when Crime in the United States is published, many entities—news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation—use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents."
Source: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/...
Is that why the vast majority of "school decides to teach Creationism in science classes" type stories emerge from flyover country?
http://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=creationism
Sort by date, then check the states.
Ohio. Mississippi. Kansas. Idaho.
No sir, you do not have good schools compared to the rest of the country.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/best-school-districts-in-amer...
Amen! You get tired of living in basically a post-college dorm scene really quick, all the meanwhile paying 1000-2000 for the "luxury" when you can turn around and put that same money into 4x the space, and be actually building equity in the process.
Also, the burbs (Grapevine, Colleyville, Arlington, Euless, Irving, etc.) are soulsucking tracts of aparments and housing subdivisions. Walking around is hard, biking difficult (getting murdered on large streets and highways), and the only non-chain stuff tends to be overly-face folksy town centers that people are moving towards (see Southlake, but even then it's a lot of big chains because of how much it costs to be there).
And that's before you even go into the shittiness of commuting around Dallas.
This is a very coastal/urban-centric view, IME. The large majority of my social circle growing up in suburban Dallas (a) still lives in suburban Dallas and (b) found a detached home before age 30 (if not 25). I moved away from the suburbs, and to a big coastal city, and so did almost "everyone I know" out here (with a lot of selection bias), but judging from that and housing prices in those crazy markets doesn't work for extrapolating to the country as a whole.
Of the ones still living at home, I don't know anyone thinking "it would be just as cool to have my own place, so might as well save money." The causality is reversed: "I'm broke, so might as well save as much money as possible, and my parents' place is big."
"Not cool" starts being a lot less relevant pretty quickly after getting out of college for most people, IME. Suburban houses are bigger than apartments. They're less noisy. They're more pet friendly. You have a garage for storage/workshopping/whatever. You have more space for starting a family. All those reasons still apply as much as they ever did, the big change from ten years ago to today is economic, not around coolness.