Only a small fraction of the article was about housing prices in the suburbs. The vast majority of it was an exploration of the idea that many of the drivers to people moving to the suburbs are going away (better infrastructure, lower crime, more prosperity).

Further the articles main point may be that mitigating those problems in the suburbs may be harder than the all ready tricky task of mitigating them in denser urban areas due to higher infrastructure costs, increased transportation costs and more limited areas for new development.

The prosperity bit is key. Prosperity being jobs in this case.

When the risk of unemployment or underemployment is higher, why live somewhere that limits your opportunities? An expensive house or a cheap house is irrelevant if you are unemployed for a significant stretch of time and can't afford a mortgage period.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy. Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country.

> When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy. Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country.

This is the specific reason why I have self-limited my living situation to one of the major tech centers in the US. The downside is nearly unlimited if you're in a rural area: particularly if you have a house. You must be able to get a job if your company collapses, and most companies get shirty about remote work for people they don't know. So you're stuck trying to move in a hurry, to a place where you have no network. Hopefully it's not a down economy and lots of people are looking... then things are even dicier.

Move to the city, young man (or woman). There be jobs there.

> You must be able to get a job if your company collapses

On the bright side, with lower cost of housing the mortgage will cost you less and will be easier to pay off. I'm in my early 40s, have three kids, and we actually own our house. If we had lived in a similar house in a larger city we'd still be grinding through the mortgage.

I guess what I'm tring to say is that there plenty of middle ground between living in San Francisco and living the Unabomber dream in the Montana forests. There are a lot of places on the face of the earth where there are not hundreds of nerby companies hiring, but maybe five or ten within driving distance. And where you can actually afford to buy a house.

Remote work isn't hard to find if you have a technical skill set that people are looking for. If you're concerned about networking opportunities, you're better off at a conference than your local coffee shop anyway.

> When I moved to the Bay Area, I justified the increased cost of living as the sunshine tax as well as the cost of reducing the risk of unemployment in a down economy.

Texas offers more sun and a solid stable economy as well as much lower costs. Something to consider?

Not to mention that there's tons of techy jobs in Austin, bunches in Dallas, and plenty in Houston.

And all of these cities are downright cheap compared to pretty much anywhere on either of the coasts.

> Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country.

In the event of a tech crash you're better if in nearly any major city outside of SV where even tech companies are based around more "blue chip" industries.

>Even in the event of another crash specific to the tech industry, I guarantee I'd have an easier time getting another job out here compared to flyover country.

In "flyover country" many (possibly most) tech jobs are created by other industries and would be insulated.

If the pull of the cities is good enough wouldn't people just naturally leave the burbs anyway? And if the suburb doesn't have many people living in it, why would we need to mitigate those problems? Why not just let the houses crumble and stand as decaying ruins?

Detroit's been doing that, the biggest expense seems to be having to tear up the roads since gravel/dirt is safer than an unmaintained paved road. For the places that do have growth potential, the cheapness of real estate should just encourage people to redevelop as infill.

Are we worried about crumbling building materials leaching toxins into the surrounding environment or is it more of a concern about blight/eye-sores?

> If the pull of the cities is good enough wouldn't people just naturally leave the burbs anyway? And if the suburb doesn't have many people living in it, why would we need to mitigate those problems? Why not just let the houses crumble and stand as decaying ruins?

That is assuming the people there have the resources to move. We'd mitigate them to provide opportunity for that choice. Those crumbling houses and decaying ruins will be the home to the members of our society least able to help themselves.

>That is assuming the people there have the resources to move. We'd mitigate them to provide opportunity for that choice. Those crumbling houses and decaying ruins will be the home to the members of our society least able to help themselves.

That solution isn't in building up the burbs though. It would be in making it easier to move to and live in places that aren't dying.

In any developing country there is a constant pull of rural to urban migration. The big stumbling block is having a place to live and a job for when you get to the city, not how fancy your village was.

I think the issue is proximity to a world class city. The economic growth that we see in bigger cities leads to lots of opportunities for advancement. These are the places smart young people move to after they graduate university, the places where many of the top universities are based, they are also expensive due to this success.

The suburbs are finding it harder to attract educated 20 somethings because of a lack of professional opportunities as well as changing lifestyle trends. I think there will be a graying-out of the suburbs as they get older until property prices become affordable to young professionals and the work/commute times become more bearable. I have no idea why working remotely is not more common in 2017 but that would be a massive improvement over the ridiculous commutes so many people have to suffer through.

This narrative might feel true, but isn't supported by actual data.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/think-millennials-prefer...

My theory as an outside observer has always been that [white] Americans are like salmon. They are born in the suburbs, they move to the city to find mates and build careers, then they move to the suburbs to have children.

As an American-in-training I too would be terrified of having a kid in a place like San Francisco. Ain't nobody got money for that.

That said, when I did live in the suburbs for a while, I found it to be depressing and miserable. But I grew up in a small city, 10min walk from as downtown as it gets, so I'm biased.

It's not just Americans. The dream of having a place in the country that is your own personal property is about as close to a cross-cultural norm as you can find. English country houses, Roman villas, French royal hunting lodges... even the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union had their dachas.

Americans were just the first culture to make it practical for large numbers of people to actually do it.

There's a big difference between having a country dacha as your second home and living in a gross tasteless suburb as your primary residence.

The presence of all the other people ruins the dacha vibe.

> gross tasteless suburb

Wow, what you describe as gross tasteless suburb is I imagine a dream come true for 90% of world population.

Only because they haven't actually lived in it yet. It's one of those things that looks great at first glance, but only after actually living it for a while do you realize what a dystopian hell it is.

"Only because they haven't actually lived in it yet."

There are multiple generations of people who have willingly lived in suburbs.

I repeat: their tastes are not the same as yours.

"living in a gross tasteless suburb as your primary residence"

People buy houses in those "gross, tasteless suburbs" by choice. No one is putting a gun to their head.

Their tastes are not yours.

Actually, many dachas are at McMansion density or higher.

> [white] Americans are like salmon. They are born in the suburbs, they move to the city to find mates and build careers, then they move to the suburbs to have children.

I think the difference is that Americans are forced to do that dance, even the ones that actively don't want this.

Kids are crazy expensive to have and raise. Just child daycare alone starts at around $1,000/month and goes up from there. Housing costs are so high in every single city that if you want to give your kid a bedroom of any kind, you are effectively required to live in the suburbs, unless your extremely wealthy.

If you do have the money to stay, then comes the network. Housing in cities gets hard to find at all (no one wants to live near you, since you bring the screaming infant into the building). And American buildings are all built like shit, so everyone can hear everything. Childcare isn't just expensive -- it's difficult to find at all. (As one example, Seattle daycare waitlists are 2 years long in some cases - http://crosscut.com/2014/09/parents-seek-alternatives-tough-... )

And we haven't even started on the mess that is schooling.

Generally, American society treat parents and children like shit, and then forces families to live elsewhere. It's no surprise that those parents just up-and-leave to form their own little enclaves out in the suburbs, where they can at least try to remove some of that pain.

> That said, when I did live in the suburbs for a while, I found it to be depressing and miserable.

Well yeah. It can be depressing and miserable to be poor or working-class-poor. But at least suburbs are a safe and somewhat-affordable place to live. It's not like there is an alternative -- there are no functional cities willing to house people. And especially no cities willing to house families at all.

I agree. This whole city thing always looks like media generated hype to me.

Media are based in the city, their reporters (and their friends) live in the city and in their worldview, everyone lives in the city?

You are missing the point. I said "educated young people... move to world class cities". These world class cities are also expensive. You pay a lot to live in New York, Los Angeles or London. Unfortunately, this lack of affordable housing pushes out all but the highest paid workers. There is some social housing and other benefits to help the very poor. Everyone in the middle gets squeezed out of the big cities, especially when they marry and/or have kids and need more space. So, a lot more people would like to live in San Francisco for example than can currently afford it. This is why less well educated young people are moving to the newest suburbs. It's what they can afford. These new suburbs often have the fewest and lowest paying employment opportunities so it's a long term drain on the economy and future growth.

There are only three world class cities in America.

America has lots of rad cities with strong economic opportunities: NYC, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, Austin, Denver, ...

I live in the Boston area, and the only things that are world-class here are the Ivy League universities and Massachusetts General Hospital. This place doesn't deserve anything remotely like the ego it actually has.

(Take note: I'm originally from New York. There is a rivalry at work here.)

As a person who had the misfortune of taking Public transport from La Guardia to Manhattan, I would not label entire NYC "world-class" unless I get to append it with "mess".

Jamaica LIRR station, right?

That's JFK. Considerably easier, despite being considerably further away.

You should have taken the private express bus, and instead you complain about your poor choice? Eh?

Uh, thanks for the downvotes? My point is that there is no express public transit service from LaGuardia to Manhattan; there's a express private service, and most people know about it. If you look on the Internet it's pretty visible.

This kind of makes the point. A world-class city, but no good public transportation from airport to city center? World-class mess.

So NY would be a better city if they started an express bus service that competes with the existing, popular private bus service? Either way, I take the bus.

If a city wants to be truly world-class it needs to have a good public transportation system.

I found Boston to be super provincial (outside of the university crowd), and way overpriced for what it offers. Moving there from a city like Chicago was really quite a shock for us. A fraction of the culture and food scene for a multiple of the price. We spent a year there and ended up moving to Providence, which is much better value for money and also has better food.

Boston is a fine city, but not world class. First time I flew into Logan I looked around thinking I must've flown into the small secondary airport.

@eli_gottlieb: You're being downvoted for what reasons that should seem fairly obvious, so here's some support from a fellow native New Yorker :)

@sremani: We have really fucked this up. The lack of a direct rail link from any one of our three airports to Manhattan is shameful.

There's a world class non Ivy League university just outside Boston too.

I was including MIT in "Ivy League", even though it doesn't play football with the rest of them.

They do have an excellent reputation for participating in the games under their own rules, tho :-)

OK so how about a city like Albany NY, which is not far outside of NYC and is somewhere between 1/10th to 1/25th the cost of housing as found in the bay area.

There really is only one. The pretenders on the West Coast should really know better than to get into this fight by now.

A related thought...

Startups and tech companies should pick a few midwestern or NE cities and open offices there.

Imagine if Cleveland Ohio was a tech hub and "cool" by any vague stretch that a western city is, housing there is practically free by west coast standards.

https://www.zillow.com/homes/cleveland-ohio_rb/

Even cities like Albany or Rochester NY are dirt cheap compared to any city in a western state.

https://www.zillow.com/albany-ny/

But instead everyone piles into San Francisco, bay area, Seattle, Portland, LA, and overpays by small fortunes.

I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me moving to the middle of nowhere for a startup is exactly zero.

True.

But for some American born engineer who has family outside of SF/NY/LA, being able to work remote while staying near family/hometown would be awesome for himself, the hometown and ultimately residents of those mega cities too as they would see some relief in ever increasing cost of living.

Google/Facebook/etc have to pay a lot higher salary to keep talented engineers in/near SF because of much higher cost of living.

Those employers probably COULD save $ if they paid lower salary and allowed full remote working. Even if they flew in the engineers on chartered jet every other week and housed them in hotel for regular face-2-face time in HQ, they still probably would end up saving $ in the end. Like instead of paying salary of half a million a year, they could pay $300,000 and use the $200,000 for chartered jets and housing when they are visiting SF.

The vast majority of people in SV don't make 500k. 200-300 puts you in the upper middle even in tech.

Yes, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. If there were plenty of good tech job opportunities in Nowheresville, USA, tech people would move there. If there were more tech people in Nowheresville, USA, companies would move there. Who has to act first to bootstrap the next tech hub?

Google, Facebook, and Amazon? Many of my friends believe that Google's new Austin office might lead to other tech companies to move here, but that's just speculation.

You mean like IBM, Intel, Oracle, Dell, Facebook, Apple, Dell, VMWare, Rackspace, PayPal, Indeed, etc. etc.?

Yawn, It will be a cold day in hell, when Austin has more tech jobs than Dallas or Houston.

But then you have to live in Dallas or Houston.

Have you been to either? Texas is quite nice, and has great weather.

Cost of living is a small fraction compared to the bay area or west coast cities too.

>Texas is quite nice, and has great weather.

No, it doesn't. It's hot. And the people are conservative; nothing nice about that.

Yes, I live in Austin. It's quite nice comparatively. :)

Same one that bootstrapped Silicon Valley. The government.

Indirectly!

The Cleveland metro area is ~2 million people.

Granted it is going to have less tech jobs, but it isn't really the middle of nowhere.

It IS the middle of nowhere when you're talking about tech jobs. How many people live in the city is irrelevant if they don't have jobs for you there.

I once made a comfortable living as a Software Engineer in Cleveland metro, they do have Progressive insurance, bunch of banks like National City, Key Bank (which may have now been acquired).

The comments coming out people who very likely are Bay Area residents are the most ignorant as well as close-minded. Unless you are killing it in R&D departments of Google, FB, Amazon, Microsoft etc. There is some one doing a similar job you are doing in 10 other metros in 'Murica.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your specialty. I do embedded programming, and there's a bunch of metro areas where there just isn't much work for me; NYC is one of these. There's tons of software work there, but it's all finance or web, and very very little embedded. But there's other places, which are not traditional tech hubs, where there is some work for me where I'd rather not work, such as Detroit.

What specifically about Detroit makes you not want to live there?

disclaimer: detroit resident

Brutal winters and high crime rate, what else? Of course, there's lots of other problems like decrepit infrastructure (like the water pipes in Flint nearby), and I seriously doubt there's any kind of nice downtown area to walk around in like in nicer cities. I hear the suburbs are OK, but that doesn't exactly make me want to live someplace.

Basically, AFAICT, Detroit sounds like someplace that would be OK if all you wanted was to live in the suburbs and never leave your house, and you have zero interest in outdoor activities, and don't care about going to nice restaurants downtown. The crime downtown is terrible, there's huge stretches of abandoned neighborhoods, the winters are horribly cold; I honestly don't know why anyone would want to live there. The location surely made sense a century ago back when shipping on the Great Lakes was a big thing and the location was sensible for manufacturing and shipping reasons, but those reasons are all gone now.

so youve never been to detroit and are going on what you hear from the media - got it. Just wondering if you had any real reasons

Those are real reasons. If you think I'm going to spend several years visiting every city in America over 250k people so I can see what it's "really like" instead of just reading about it, then you're absolutely insane. If Detroit can't fix its image in the media, that's its problem, not mine.

Moreover, why the hell should I believe some anonymous troll on HN over plenty of journalistic articles?

tech companies open up offices in cities to hire existing talent in those communities. they don't open up offices to take talent away from their existing offices, at great expense to the company with no measurable upside.

Perhaps not surprisingly the two things a region can do to boost its economic vitality is to put in an airport and Internet infrastructure. I'm still waiting on the citylab report comparing similar economic zones with Google Fiber and those without.

The Internet so that you can work remotely, and a easy to use airport when you can't work remotely.

Network effects -> high cost of living.

I've never been to Cleveland, Ohio, but most of these flyer states in America where housing is cheap are boring. Add to that the chicken-and-egg problem, you're going to have a tough time convincing young single people to move there.

Only practical solution to avoid high cost of living is to embrace remote work and give employees the freedom to work from wherever they want.

Having grown up near Cleveland, I'll take the weather of San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, LA over that of Cleveland.

The weather is what keeps me in the SF Bay Area despite the traffic congestion and high cost of living. Being able to bike to work nearly every day of the year goes a long way toward making up for heavy traffic.

Weather in SF and LA is likable, but Seattle and Portland are dreadfully rain soaked and socked in clouds for 9 months of the year. You don't move to the latter two locations for the weather, you move there because they are considered trendy and "cool" in modern culture and you're a trend seeker. The same "cool" designation could be slapped onto Cleveland or Milwaukie or Ann Arbor and you'd have the same trend seekers piling into there too.

rain is a lot easier to deal with than snow and ice on the roads. i'd take 9 months of cloudy skies over 4 months of invisible black ice patches, multi car pileups, blizzards, polar vortexes, scraping ice off my car every morning, shovelling my driveway, extreme heating costs, etc.

While the PNW isnt ideal compared to drought ridden california, its vastly nicer weather than what millions of americans put up with every year.

Biking in drizzle isn't hard or all that dangerous, and if it's not drizzling too much is pretty fun (it keeps you cool).

Biking in sub-freezing weather and snow is entirely different.

Does Cleveland even have any bike lanes?

Interesting how you call people who seek practical, comfortable weather "trend seekers", and you seem to think that enduring brutal winters is normal.

Part of being cool is also the cachet of living somewhere "exclusive". If a place is considered cool, then the demand to live there should increase by definition, and therefore prices will rise.

Also, the weather is noticeably nicer, plus you're in a city with an international airport hub.

"plus you're in a city with an international airport hub."

>pays an extra $30,000 a year to live near SFO

>saves $50 on a flight to Asia once a year

rationale checks out

If you like to travel and fly a few times a year, being near a major airport may not be justifiable financially but removes so many pain points from the process. I definitely travel more than I would if it was more difficult.

I grew up in a small town far from any airport and traveled internationally regularly. We either drove 50 miles to a small regional airport, which meant we'd have layovers and connections flying almost anywhere (more chances for lost luggage!), or we drove three+ hours to a big airport with expensive parking. Landing after a long international flight and having to get in the car and drive for three hours is a terrible way to end a trip.

These days I live within a 30 minute cab ride of LGA or JFK. The availability of flights and the ease of getting to and from the airport makes a huge difference in how annoying it is to fly. Cheap early morning flights don't require pulling an all nighter, there are direct flights to so many cities, and the wheels-down-to-hot-shower-and-beer-at-home time is so short.

It works for the CEOs who make the decision.

Living near a major airport gives them a lower chance of seat upgrades, though. Nobody in ATL ever gets Delta 360.

A two-bedroom condo for less than $100k, period? You can pay off the mortgage with a couple years of income, free and clear?

Now I see why my parents like living in Albany!

I think Microsoft did this with Redmond?

It's not very far from Seattle (which had aerospace and such when Microsoft was starting).

the basic problem, once you put aside mythology and the realities of VCs tending to fund local companies, as summarized by a friend who picked up and did a funded startup in Austin:

1. top tech talent in austin is rare and they know they are rare 2. because of (1) they can always work remotely for big valley companies (e.g., the top ten by average eng salary) 3. so if they are working locally, you are mostly going to give the top guys valley-like comp 4. the rest of the talent is cheaper

... which doesn't sound too bad, as far as it goes. But then you run into an issue. There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally. So now you're in the position of hiring a remote worker or trying to get someone to move. Depending on your team, your product, team communications skills, how important in-person vs. remote is, etc. to the company, real or imagined, this can basically screw things up.

"There's going to be some specific skill that you need and you simply are not going to be able to hire it locally."

Such as?

Cheers! Moved from Boston to Myrtle Beach, SC 5 years ago, so we could afford a home. (weather and gigabit fiber to the home don't hurt either). Still plenty of land to develop here. Get a new 2000sq ft 4 bedroom home for $150k-$200k within 15min drive of the beach.

Only challenge here is tech jobs: remote or bust.

I've been doing remote until I started my own company.

> Get a new 2000sq ft 4 bedroom home for $150k-$200k within 15min drive of the beach.

Wow, and that is exactly my point. For what is barely a down payment out west you could theoretically just buy a home outright.

Imagine the equivalent in the bay area or LA, it'd be $3 million+. Even in Seattle or Portland it'd be $700k-800k+ or likely higher given their trendy status.

The South keeps coming off as racist/homophobic these days, constantly. So does a fair bit of the Midwest. I have this weird allergy to that.

So I see you've learned everything you know about the South from TV/movies.

When you get a chance, visit (in person) Jacksonville, Savannah, Asheville, Charleston, Austin, Birmingham, Atlanta...and on and on. It's amazing how they're just like the other non-hateful cities from time to time.

I grew up in the south, and it really hasn't changed.

You are old enough to know better than that. No difference between Ivan Allen and Shirley Franklin?

I am old enough to remember when Jeff Sessions was radioactive enough to not be confirmed by the US Senate. What more needs to be said?

That the Senate isn't the south, and the Senate used to have an ex-Klansman in it (Robert Byrd), so even the Senate is better than it used to be.

Can't speak for the rest of the South, but Houston (which you might or might not count as a Southern city) elected an openly gay woman as mayor in 2009 [1]. The current mayor is African-American [2].

Obviously, looking at mayoral demographics is a pretty crude way of judging a city's tolerance, but it is better than extrapolating from news reports, which can hardly give a detailed picture of a region that encompasses a dozen or so states.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_Turner

To be fair, Texas isn't really part of the "Deep South", and isn't really known to be as backwards and racist as places like MS, AL, etc.

> Texas isn't really part of the "Deep South"

I dunno, it seceded to protect slavery from twice as many countries as any other state in the South; that's got to count for something.

Tennessee seceded in the Civil War too but it's not part of the Deep South either. I think Arkansas did too, and that's definitely not part of the "South" at all. Same goes for Missouri.

> But the suburban dream of middle class life at low prices is alive and well in the midwest, south, and much of the NE too, where nice housing is still no more than 2x-3.5x median income levels.

So explain to me how well things are going in Columbus, OH, Johnstown, PA, or Rochester, NY?

And I don't see people clamoring to move to Tennessee, Alabama or Mississippi.

If those locations were deemed "cool" by the trendy and trend seeking zeitgeist they would suddenly be doing well. It's often perception and cultural attention that drives interest in an area, you can see many examples of this in the western states.