Housing is so expensive in the city I don't think many people can afford it.
1 bedroom apartment in bad areas where your car insurance will be at the highest cause of thefts etc costs around £250k.
Towards central London you are looking at around £750-900k for an 1 bedroom apartment.
Also I'd argue that London hasn't fixed crime, or schools, certainly there are less gun crimes but thats it really, everything else is the same.
Or pollution. The city is a cesspit. I can't wait to get out.
As somebody who a few years ago was looking to move to London and was getting depressed reading all sorts of alarmist comments I feel the need to respond. This place is wonderful!
Concrete data:
* I pay a bit over 1/8 of my salary (_excluding_ stock, I consider that extra) on rent. I live in a nice two bedroom apartment in zone 1 and share a room with my GF; the second bedroom is rented by a friend of ours.
* I walk to work; pay nothing for transport unless I want to go visit something. I don't own a car and don't need it.
* The culture is awesome. For example, I like music a lot and I constantly find stuff I love that I can see live. I go to at least one concert a month. I don't think there's another city that tops London on music (at least for the genres I like).
* The food is awesome, quality is way, _way_ better than anything I've had in the US. Super varied and affordable - there are plenty of street markets selling delicious food for £5-8 / portion during lunchtime in the week. I don't have catered food at work, but I think I would still prefer the street food.
* I didn't realise how _green_ the city is. There are a lot of trees, parks and nice places to walk around.
* The weather's nice enough that I can run outside a few days a week for the duration of the year. The summer's lovely and there are loads of places to spend time outside.
* I don't have kids and am not interested, in the short term at least.
* I was lucky enough not to need any medical assistance / GP services so can't comment on that.
Please stop with these baseless categorizations. I lived in Slough for almost a year so I understand that there are places less than perfect here but let's try and base the discussion on objective facts.
> Towards central London you are looking at around £750-900k for an 1 bedroom apartment.
GBP 250 == USD 312
GBP 750 == USD 938
GBP 900 == USD 1124
Man, apparently rent is a LOT cheaper in the UK. Cause I'm positive you can't get a one-bedroom apartment in even the _worst_ parts of NYC or SF for $310 (not a single one I bet), and $900-$1100 for a one bedroom would be considered a deal in even the _worst_ parts of NYC or SF. (exceptions for long-time tenants with rent control)
A one-bedroom in NYC or SF is like $2000 and up. Way way up. A new construction-ish one-bedroom is going to start at $3000 (if you're 'lucky') and go way up.
Indeed, these rental prices are not typical of other US cities, just as I'm sure London is untypically high rent for the UK.
So my main takeaway is, woah, I had no idea rent was so cheap in London!
And I'm not sure people who don't live there (especially who live overseas) realize quite what we're talking about when we talk about how expensive rent has gotten in NYC or SF.
You missed the k which means thousand
France, Canada, England, Japan and other "civilized nations" debate how best to fund schools and fight crime just like the US.
Here in the US, crime has been falling steadily for decades now, and no one's really sure why. One big theory is that the elimination of leaded gasoline had a big effect: our population was suffering from low-level lead poisoning from all the lead in the air and environment. But crime here is of course still much, much worse than Japan. Crime in England is probably significantly worse, with the main difference being that you don't have to worry much about getting shot over there, but you have to worry a lot more about being mugged or knifed.
The reason for this is not generally applicable outside extremely homogeneous populations.
Where you get ultra-low crime is when you combine that homogeneity with good public education. Take a look at the education systems and levels in places like Japan or Norway, and then compare to Appalachia or Sicily or various middle eastern nations. Also look at the levels of religiosity.
I've come to believe that the potential to rise in social position is what matters most, except possibly in Zoroastrian societies. Appalachia, Sicily (including lower-class parts of Boston), and the Middle East all agree that where you were born is where you'll stay, and that ambition is ridiculous or contemptible; while the healthiest societies are the ones where talent can bubble to the top even if you're not the judge's son.
My favorite example of the vitality that social mobility brings is the Ibo of Nigeria -- "the Jews of Africa", the most successful and energetic of West African peoples. Also look at the dynamic nature of the early Islamic world, compared compared to the stagnant nature of the modern one. And what's true of the Islamic world is equally true of the Iberian one; Brazil and West Virginia have the same basic problem. And back in the Middle Ages, too, it was the most fluid societies -- Lombardy, England, the Low Countries, and the Iberian states -- that were the most successful ones.
Also, I never said that religiosity by itself would result in downfall of a society. Lots of religious societies have done well in history, but they also had relatively good education. The early Islamic world you mention I think qualifies here. It's when you combine religiosity with terrible education that you're really doomed. The education serves as a check against the religiosity getting out of control and turning into theocracy, or whatever you call the wackiness we're seeing in the right-wing here in America today.
I think that the American right is a unique sort of society, and that patterns drawn from their behavior can't be relied on in most other contexts. Their religions look like Christianity but act like non-syncretistic paganism ("worshiping oneself in the guise of worshiping God"), and their hostility to an awful lot of scholarship seems to originate in not wanting to be taken for a ride -- and in the confidence of many peoples, especially relatively backwards ones, that they already know everything that's necessary in order to live well. (The Persians told Chardin as much in the 1500s, as mentioned in The Structures of Everyday Life.)
Have you read Albion's Seed? If not (and it's about 600 pages of historical scholarship, so I won't blame you), look up Slate Star Codex's review, which makes the book's essential points in reduced (and maybe slightly caricatured) form.
Probably, these days, everyone has something better to do.
Edit: perhaps the grandparent comment meant that crime in England was "a lot worse" than in Japan? If so, then yes that's true.
From what I can tell, in European countries the divide isn't so stark and middle-class-and-up people are more likely to be victims of petty and street crime like muggings. Here, if you're a white suburban dweller, you just don't have to worry about being victimized in a mugging or carjacking very much, while in the ghettos you definitely do.
"Obama administration spent billions to fix failing schools, and it didn’t work"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/obama-adminis...
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
They tried forced busing of students to schools across the cities in Ohio back in the 70s and 80s to equalize school demographics. Parents moved in droves to the suburbs and Ohio cities only started recovering in the past 10 years after the program was ended in the 90s. No one wanted their children to go to a school 40 minutes away when there was a perfectly good one within walking distance.
If one still thinks this is a viable solution, how is it going to going to avoid the mistakes of previous attempts? Last thing the cities here need is a mass migration back to the suburbs when the cities have just started turning around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_City_Schools#1977_Des...
This is a good starting point:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
And the only people that didn't want this were the racist parents of students of upper-middle class schools:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXSU1GvuLPs
It's actually quite embarrassing to watch.
In light of that, there's very little that the state can do to force middle class families to stay in integrated school districts, and that issue destroyed integration efforts in the '70s and '80s in most of the northeast.
The real solution to the larger problem is probably a completely different education system, but the solution to this particular problem is to expand busing to the suburbs. If desegregation is the only solution to highly unequal educational outcomes, we simply need to pursue to greater lengths.
Some districts like Columbus lost around 1/3 of their students over the 20 years they forced school integration. Ohio schools are funded by property taxes (not the best of ideas, but that's what the state decided), so Columbus was also forced to close many schools, cut back spending and likely hurt schools even further. It definitely hurt the city, since tons of buildings were left empty for years and no one had much of a reason to visit the city after 5pm.
San Francisco assigns students to schools via a lottery. The result looks a lot like this.
But in many major cities, the majority of children are already minorities. The white children who do live there are part of the upper middle class and their parents won't accept the downsides of re-integration. I see this in DC, parents either put their kids into private school, try to get a charter school, or leave the district for suburbia.
You could try to bus the kids to suburbia, but the logistics are tough. The suburban cities don't want it and fill fight it.
Desegregating the cities is the better option.
Well that's pretty hard to do in DC because now you're talking about crossing state lines. DC is a federal district, totally separate from Maryland and Virginia where the suburbs are. That's a lot harder than just busing kids from one school to another in the same district within the same state.
Not to mention, we had a 750 sqft, 2 bedroom apartment that cost $3,000 a month. It was a quality of life downgrade compared to living in the Seattle suburbs.
When I visited it seemed true: lots of rather young kids walking around the streets on their own, tons of tiny mixed use roads for kids to freely and safely walk around in, etc. Heck, culturally they even have that Kid Tasks[1] show. It seemed a lot better for kids than NYC (where I live now), Silicon Valley (where I used to live), or small suburban towns in the south (where I grew up).
I'm also surprised you lived in a lived in a high-rise, famously uncharacteristic of Tokyo housing, which may imply you lived in a less family friendly district than the typical Tokyo resident.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/japanese-young-children-solo-com... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5k5XTZy0rA
And yeah, I lived in Shinjuku 5 minutes walking from the largest subway in the world in terms of people going through and it and physical size. It was a busy area.
This is the apartment I lived in - https://tokyoapartmentinc.com/room/17207/
http://www.rental-apartment-tokyo.com/?post_type=fudo&p=2036...
I never felt like an outsider at all, that wasn't an issue. The issue was that you have to make a daily effort to get your kids outside whereas in the suburbs here in Seattle, they can just go outside when they want. That's not an issue once your kids get older, but at 5 and 6 it's a little early to let them run around Shinjuku. It would have been easier if we lived outside the Tokyo center.
The dark is a real thing. It is not just the rain. It's more the large number of overcast days plus the very short days during winter months.
Whether or not it bothers you is a different matter. As far as I can tell, it's practically a biological thing. The lack of light just gets under some people's skin while others aren't bothered by it. Ask yourself, do you find gloomy days draining: oppressive clouds looming overhead, color washed out of everything, can't go outside, cold, wet? Or do you find them energizing: turbulent sky looking different every day, you snuggly in the warm light inside, doing creative stuff on a rainy day at home, or bundling up and getting refreshed by the cool breeze and rain spray?
If you're more the former, Seattle will suck your soul out and drown it in Puget Sound. If the latter, you'll love it.
Personally, it's a great fit for me. I love the contrast in weather between the summer and winter months. When it's miserable out, I love nothing more than settling in under warm lamplight and reading or coding. I can't imagine living somewhere arid. I would dry out like a frog on a hot windshield.
If you're considering moving here, I would suggest renting for a year. If you make it a full 12 months and don't feel oppressed by the climate at all, you should be fine.
The winter is Seattle is best spent hopping from coffee shop to coffee shop and getting snug with blankets.
Surely there's indoor swimming pools you can go to. In that climate, it seems to be stupid to even bother building an outdoor swimming pool.
Of course, if you're talking about the ocean/sound, there's not much you can do there, but I never hear people in the Northeast complaining about it rarely being warm enough to swim at the beach. I doubt the water's ever warm in Maine either.
>>>If we can fix schools and crime, like other civilized nations, then there is no reason to believe people will move out of cities once they reach a certain age.
If it was an easy prop, it would have been achieved, may be you should see "The Wire Season 4" to get an idea!
Incidentally, Vancouver also used to be a city where people would flee to the suburbs when starting a family. At least, it was before the suburbs became just as comically unaffordable as the city.
Also rent in cities like Paris is prohibitive for most families. There is also the problem that in Paris, as in smaller-but-still-large cities, large apartments have been divided into several smaller ones to make more profit for the landlords. So it is even more difficult to just find a large apartment, supposing you could afford it.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2015/11/03/so-much-fo...