Define economic winner....you mean top line income and area GDP? These places are the most expensive places in the country to live, and quality of living is considerably lower. Incomes may be lower in many areas of the country, but when you consider you can pay $2k/mo on a 5,000 sq ft mortgage instead of renting a 900 sq ft apartment, I don't view these places as economically successful as many perceive them to be.

Yes, I mean by having lots of high-paying jobs. Speaking in the abstract, that means economic success. You're not wrong that high cost of living can often cancel much of that out at the individual level though.

> quality of living is considerably lower.

See my other nearby comment for why this is a "it depends" thing. A lot of people would consider living in Kansas City to have lower "quality of life" than NYC even if it's less crowded and it's much easier to afford a house.

Your comment itself illustrates the disconnect here: we have one side arguing that the other side is wrong in what they want, ala

"Why don't more techies want to come here?? This is ridiculous!"

"Well, because they want to live in places with X Y Z even if they're expensive and crowded."

"Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."

In my experience, your fundamental assumption about what "techies" want is at least partially flawed. Not that no one in tech wants bike Lanes, public transit, and authentic South Indian cuisine. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people who work at FAANG consider these things important in their life. But there is still a large portion that truly don't care for all that. They live in the bay because if they can find an illegal $800/mo Airbnb they will make a lot of money, if they lose their job there is another close by, and that is where their close friends are. If there were an equal paying, less congested alternative to these tech hives, they would take it. This is, of course, generated from anecdotal evidence. Fundamentally, some people like true urbanism, and others just don't.

You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs.

I focused on it in my original comment mostly just because it's an area I'm particularly familiar with, and it's an area where the cities that are supposedly "desperate" are hardly doing anything at all. (Not that I blame the local governments for that, really, I realize the local residents mostly want their cities to stay that way)

> You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs.

I wonder if the real situation is that it's easier to attract young "top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs." That's also tends to be kind of talent that's willing to work way more than is really good for them. The suburban lifestyle is more suited for established families and older "top talent."

Of course, there are also suburbs of major metros. Lots of people commute into Manhattan from Westchester every day. And, traditionally, most of the tech jobs in "Boston" were actually out in fairly far-flung suburbs and many still are (with the notable exception exception of biotech in Cambridge and the satellite offices of SV firms).

But you're absolutely right that a lot of new college grads want to live in the city and maybe not even buy a car.

The majority of the established workers already own houses in the suburbs, exurban areas, and even NH. For many of them, a location that's actually in the city is a bug, not a feature.

People who with more settled lifestyles are often already settled, though. So even if you wanted them, you don't have as much access.

> older "top talent."

Older top talent often has the resources to actually buy houses even in expensive areas, anyway.

> Older top talent often has the resources to actually buy houses even in expensive areas, anyway.

Maybe at the toppest-top, but it's a struggle for anyone with even a high normal-range income to buy a home in the Bay Area.

This means they are underpaid ( which I am pretty sure quite a few people in tech are ):

- LIC Queens high rises have 2/2 rentals that go for $17k/mo. ~ 1200sq feet. High floors. Ok views. Ok buildings. - In Manhattan those are $22k-$30k/mo in newer buildings and $15-20k/mo in older hifg rises.

They aren't full of tech bros. They are full of finance and attorney bros. I have an acquaintance that lives in one. He is one of the portfolio managers for one of the hedge funds. He is a salary only manager. By the standards of NYC apartments qualification, it means his take home after taxes has to be at around 65k/mo as proven by his tax returns for last two years.

I suppose I forgot to state my original point. Let's hold all else equal, and look at the labor pool divided into two categories, urbanism and ruralism. Suburbs lie on the ruralism side for this comparison. The labor pool is of course not evenly divided in terms of preference, say maybe 3/4 of protential Google employees prefer urbanism. If a given employee prefers urbanism, and lives in one of the cities mentioned above (NYC, Yay Area, Boston), their resulting employee satisfaction (what the company cares about in this scenario) is improved. However, if a given employee prefers ruralism, their resulting employee satisfaction is worsened. Vice versa for a more suburban, smaller city.

Of course there is some cost to not collocating employees. Google has decided new offices are worth this cost, and thus Google can decide to allocate building/location resources based on employee preference alone (let's assume the other factors are somehwat insignificant, which could be valid taking into account the high proportion of labor cost).

If every additional dollar spent on a given location buys the same amount of office space and equipment in both the urban and suburban areas, then it would make sense to divide the budget for offices according to the proportions of the labor pool preferences. Now of course, a dollar in SF buys a lot less office space than a dollar in Lexington, so that should be a accounted for in budgeting decisions, as well as overhead costs involved in opening a new location.

If we look at Google's actions under this framework, it doesn't make much sense for Google to devote as much of their office budget to highly urban areas as they do, unless the proportion of current and potential employees that prefer ruralism is very low. I would find that difficult to believe. Of course there are other factors to consider, but the trend is what I mean to highlight.

That being said, the true proportion would have to be discovered, and company culture may not allow people to express their true desires. This would apply to many tech giants.

* You also have to factor in that people with suburban preferences are going to be less likely to be willing to move. It's a less accessible demographic.

* The nature of "suburbs" is that they don't scale well. They're not meant to, suburbs are supposed to be the thing on the outside, not the thing everyone comes to. And while costs may be lower in some ways, they may be higher in others: like how Google has to run its own fleet of shuttles to go to Mountain View, because transit is inadequate. They don't do that in NYC.

* Google has a cultural preference for being environmentally friendly. Suburban style living and working is more energy intensive and less environmentally friendly than its urban counterpart.

* There's a large contingent of people that are united in their support for companies like Google to open an office in a more suburban city, somewhere, but I suspect that if you actually tried to pick a particular city, suddenly that support would fracture into a million pieces.

I have lived in West Michigan (Insanely Cheap), Kansas City (Kinda Cheap), and Seattle (Pretty Expensive).

Thing is, renting a 900 sq foot apartment in any reasonably urban area has gotten pretty expensive anywhere. It was about 1000-1500$ in KC when I left. It's about 1600-2200 in Seattle. My salary jump from KC to Seattle more than makes up for the difference in rent. Other things may be slightly more expensive, but I don't really notice.

Major difference is you can buy a house in Kansas City, but even that is starting to get expensive - at least in the areas that I would like to buy a house in. Even Grand Rapids, Michigan is having its own housing crisis. At least the salaries are already high in coastal towns. That said, I sometimes feel like I was saving up enough money to buy a house back in the midwest.

Ultimately affordable housing isn't a factor of price as such. There have always been very expensive parts of town. It is how abruptly the city ends. Once these smaller cities get expensive there it nowhere to go, the rest is suburb. 10 000 new people in NYC is almost a rounding error, while even 1000 people in a smaller city (with a small core) could be significant.

This is also what San Francisco suffers from. It goes from city to essentially suburb extremely quick. While cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo just go on and on. Of course we only talk about those examples because they have developed that way over decades.

>There have always been very expensive parts of town.

Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.

I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.

Yeah, Grand Rapids is getting more and more expensive - currently I'm paying $875/mo for ~700sqft, 1br.

> "Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."

I'm guilty of this, but I think your formulation is a straw man. All I want to tell people is that they shouldn't reflexively rule out the middle of the country, because a lot of people really would be happier there. Not everybody, but some people.

And the way (some people on) the coasts talk about the Midwest and the South is as though they're a complete and total non-starter that's out of consideration entirely. "Yeah, New York's expensive, but what am I going to do? Live in Cleveland? Obviously I can't do that!"

I think that kind of talk convinces a lot of people who would be happier somewhere else that they shouldn't even bother looking into those places. And that's a tragedy of human flourishing.

Edit to respond to one comment below:

> I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily.

On the contrary, I think you're inordinately focused on your own particular (and somewhat eccentric) issues. Most Americans prefer car ownership. You might think they're wrong to prefer this. I do, too! But, "I don't want to live somewhere where I have to own a car" isn't a mainstream American opinion.

I grew up in Michigan and moved to greater NYC after grad school, and I want to push back a bit against the idea that nobody on the coasts even considers the middle of the country.

My spouse and I would love to move somewhere less expensive than NYC, but we just can't make it work. We're both in fairly specialized tech fields, and prioritize walkability, diversity, great schools and career growth opportunity. Outside of say Chicago, it's hard to come up with a place that checks those boxes.

It would be pointless to try to speak to your particular situation, but I think a lot of people who think they can't get this or that thing out of, say, Nashville or Minneapolis, or whatever, are wrong. I don't mean to say their opinion is wrong. Live wherever you want! I mean to say that they have objectively false impressions about quantifiable aspects of those cities.

> I think a lot of people who think they can't get this or that thing out of, say, Nashville or Minneapolis, or whatever, are wrong.

If a person values a thing, saying, "well [thing] exists in these other cities too, there's just a whole lot less of it there" is maybe not a super effective counterpoint.

Like, I realize that basically every major city in the US does have public transit...technically. But pointing out that out is not useful when for most of those cities, said transit is slow, unreliable, sparse, and infrequent.

I don't just want transit. I want good transit. I don't just want walkability in a few isolated neighborhoods. I want widespread walkability.

Minneapolis does have a growing tech field, and it is laid out in such a way that you can get out into the country quite quickly after the work day.

However, unless your working in medical devices I wouldn't call it a hub like New York, Boston or the valley.

I don't think that is generally people's concern. What people in bigger cities would want from smaller cities are things that are significantly better to offset the lesser verity and upside. If you to a large degree still have to deal with commuting, the housing market, education and health care (or whatever) it doesn't really do that. If these cities want to be competitive they have be attractive in their own right, not relative to a bigger city.

I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily. I've lived in Alabama before, and heeellll no I wouldn't want to settle down there. This isn't the only problem I had with the area (I lived in several different parts), but it felt super, super hostile to not-driving. And I should know, I had to bike around a lot as a mormon missionary there. We didn't even bother checking transit, it was taken as a given that it would be too slow and sparse to be useful.

My wife is even harder on this line than I am. We live in Munich now, and the biggest reason she doesn't want to come back to the US is that she doesn't want to go back to driving everywhere, and there are only a few cities where a family can reasonably and easily get away without a car.

No, I'm not.

Firstly, I recognize this is just one factor. I focused on it because it's one I'm highly familiar with, not because it's the end-all be-all. I've already pointed this out in multiple comments. We could also talk about educational opportunities or tolerance/discrimination, but those things either aren't as clear cut or would be more contentious to discuss.

Americans saying they prefer cars when you ask makes sense when you consider the other options are usually hilariously bad wherever they live, and where they've lived in the past, too. Give them an option where walking and biking and transit actually work, and suddenly many people find those options desirable. Just look at how many American tourists say they love the transit system in, say, Tokyo, when they visit. Americans mostly "love cars" because they've been given no other serious options.

Lastly, while many people may not think of it in explicit terms, they may nonetheless enjoy some of the knock-on effects of urbanism, like a city "feeling more lively".

People prefer car ownership because car manufactures lobbied for laws that shaped most modern american cities around the car. However, New York is so dense that getting around without owning a car is the norm.

Car ownership is a multi thousand dollar expense, every year. Many people would be happier with that cash in their pocket.

It appears that you assume more sq. ft. implies higher quality of life. Are you aware of any studies that indicate that's true? I would think that most New Yorkers would consider the traffic mess in a place like Dallas to be an indication of a lower quality of life. I believe there are studies that indicate this is true.

It's not easy to imagine what other people place value on. I like peace and quiet, so suburban living suits me. Others value nice restaurants, good weather, close skiing, professional sports, access to first class health care, good jobs, inexpensive housing, low crime, etc. How can we judge the desirability of different cities with such different styles?

It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to. The large cities with the most rapid growth are (from Forbes 2018 list[1]):

1) Boise, ID

2) Seatle-Bellevue-Everett, WA

3) Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX

4) Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL

5) Fort Worth-Arlington, TX

6) Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV

7) Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN

8) Austin-Round Rock, TX

9) Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL

10) Tacoma-Lakewood, WA

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2018/02/28/full-l...

> It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to.

Not necessarily. Many cities strictly limit how much housing they have, such that there is a hard limit on the number of people who could feasibly live there. SF is a good example of this, since it's also small and geographically constrained. Saying "well, the net increase in people was small, so therefore it must be that not so many people want to live there" is not necessarily true if physically the city cannot accommodate many more people due to regulations.

Looking at where people move to is useful, yes, but high housing prices are themselves often a marker of desirability, particularly in supply-constrained markets.

I lived in other "cities" in the US: Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC.

Here’s why people who can end up electing to live in a place like NYC and here's why the NYC is the economic winner.

I pay $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard ( mine ). If I had a car, I could have parked in in a back - I don't because I have 27 zip cars available within a five minute walk. I also have Maven, Cars2Go and Enterprise -- I have an account with Maven because it is free and I only need to pay for usage of cars.

My commute to work is ~35 minutes door to door - which includes walking and a subway. When the L goes down for two years, I will have J and M and my commute at most will increase by 45 minutes. It won't affect me as I will just adjust my hours to avoid the rush hour shitshow caused by the stupidity of MTA and NYC politicians. Employers of NYC know about it and based on my informal polling seem to be willing to accommodate those who would be affected. I have an unlimited monthly metrocard which gives me all the needed access for about $130.

I have 3 super markets within a 10 minute walk, 1 CVS/1 Wallgreens/1 Rite Aid. I rarely have to use Uber, but if I do, it takes ~4 minutes for me to get one where I live. If I needed a doctor or a dentist, there are dozens within 15 minute walk. There are walkin medical centers, including the ones that are open 24x7 within a 20 minute walk. If I needed a proper hospital with ER, it can be accessed in about ~15 min. And some of the best hospitals in the country are at most with crazy traffic over Williamsburg bridge or Queens Midtown tunnel are ~45 minutes away.

If I feel like getting the biggest variety of produce or proteins or wine for cooking or entertaining, I have access to all suppliers in Chinatown, Koreatown, farmers markets (Union Sq farmers market makes other farmers market look like a stale 2 week old french fry), butchers and Hunts Point Terminal ( in addition to ethnic grocery stores and ethnic markets). All of them are accessible by the subway. Most of them deliver. Same day. Well. not Huntspoint but that’s where I can get whole wild caught King Salmon for $9/lb -- the same price that a distributor that sells to a distributor that sells to the vendor who sells to your supermarket for $22/lb pays. Except that I get it 7 days earlier and $13/lb cheaper. You get the idea.

Depending on how much time I want to spend "commuting" (subway ~ 45min max ) I have somewhere between 3 ( walk of of the door ) to 20 ( ten minute on L, J/M (per train/per direction, not total) to 50 (fifteen minutes) to > 400 (35 minutes) coffee shops/bars/restaurants/lounges/nightclubs. This includes the best restaurants in the country that a person who does not live in NYC needs a 3 months in advance to get a reservation at -- I can stroll into them and get a table in an hour worst case scenario simply because I'm out enough which means I run into people who work in or own those restaurants socially. I’m doing it this weekend - wife’s birthday so we are hitting four hottest places in 4 days, three of which are “not reservable until some time in January”. I made calls yesterday -- happen to meet one of the chefs at a party, the other was sitting next to me in a little bistro where a photographer friend of mine works during the day ( he introduced us ) and two others are industry regulars so I know them from the other places they used to work at.

It also includes hole in a wall places that prove access to all kind of ethnic food ( I live in a PR/Dominican neighborhood which borders Polish/Eastern European and African-American neighborhood) really cheap - $20 would feed a family of 4 for at least 2 days. If for some reason I’m itching so socialize with 20 year olds, I can replace my Italian off the runway jacket that my wife picked up on her way home for $200 (it just has a cut on the inside label to indicate it is 'damaged' and does not need to be taken out of the country to avoid taxes) for a $65 vintage blazer from 1995 and be surrounded by the smash the patriarchy hipster girls that voted for Ocasio-Cortez who decide that I must be a socialist professor that they absolutely must fuck either today or tomorrow.

Within a five minute walk from where I live there are 12 bodegas. Of those 7 now carry the same organic blah/blah staples that one has to get at Whole Foods outside NYC. Those staples are priced the same or slightly less than at Whole Foods. And no, I'm not talking about the new, upscale small marts. I'm talking about bodegas that service local population -- bodega cats included.

I do not do "theatre" but if I did, Broadway is 1h away door to door, using subway only. Off-broadway that happens every single day is between 10 minutes to 1 hour away using a subway.

Galleries/Museums/exhibits are at most 1 hour subway ride away (those are the ones that plonk themselves at the MET or Whitney). The edgier stuff is much closer -- 15 minutes away. Some punkish looking characters have just opened what they think will be a gallery two blocks away (~3 min walk ) -- it will probably flop in about a year for for that year it will be a fun and interesting space. Within a couple of months (at most) after they flop someone else will do something with that space.

My biggest dilemma with my wife in the evenings or weekends when we want to do something is just exactly what do we want to do because there are so many options. If I decided that I was going to go out every night and was to pick a random 5 block area somewhere between where I live and where I work and never went to the same place twice, then by the time I finished with every place I would probably need to do it again because some of those places would already be different.

My wife is a somewhat of a fitness bunny and woo-woo conneserus. She can find something to do to feed her habits every day, also accessible by the subway be that yet another pilates studio -- no, not the ones that do mat pilates but the ones that have cadillacs -- or spend her lunch break on a bike at the Peloton studio -- the one that is streamed to the middle of nowhere Kansas ( and she paid nothing for that because the lunch classes were free when she was into that specific form of exercise ) or aerial yoga or meditation or whatever else happens to show up on class pass. Not dozens places. Hundreds. She gets it all for $125/mo that she pays for the class pass.

I have done the calculations -- our lifestyle costs us less than what my wife’s brothers lifestyle costs him living in Ambler, PA -- a cute little town about 1 hour away from Philadelphia. Not only he makes less money and has less things that he can do, he spends more money doing it -- mostly because the town is small which means that pretty much everything that he can do requires him driving somewhere, which costs money and takes an enormous amount of time. And since there are fewer people around him, everything costs more.

The only place in the US where at least one can get everything he or she can get in NYC is the greater Los Angeles, which of course requires driving everywhere which, in turn, makes so many spontaneous ideas impossible.

This is why people want to live in NYC. It is my second stint here. I used to live here when I was much younger. I thought there's no way I would want this in my thirties because there won't be anything that would interest me in this city -- I was wrong. The older I get the more I appreciate that a city like NYC with the population density provides the most bang for one's buck regardless of what one wants. Twenty years from now I'm probably going to buy a condo so I won't have to do any maintenance and still have everything at my fingertips without needing to drive anywhere. I cannot wait until NYC NIMBY get smashed ( we are finally starting ) so Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens start getting high rises which are needed to push those boroughs into the modern age.

P.S. I'm 44. I used to live here when I was single and in my early twenties. I moved back here in late thirties.

P.P.S. Love the downvotes. It is like a badge of honor.

You've stated my feelings on the matter perfectly.

> $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard

though I prefer single floor condos more, and don't want to pay that much in rent. But, that's 20 years too early to be talking about it.

___

I stay in Boston right now, and Charles bordering Boston-Cambridge neighborhoods are similar to how you describe NYC living, just on a smaller scale.

Sounds awesome. If I was single and 25 I'd be all for it. Being 38, married with 3 kids means my lifestyle preferences are a little different.

Married people with 3 kids and suburban preferences mostly do not want to move to begin with. That's why targeting this demographic is usually going to be less effective if you're trying to concentrate a large number of workers in one area.

Yeah, not sure how Google can recruit folks in this category unless they allow full-time remotes.

This is an excellent effortpost. Thank you.

People don't want 5000 sq ft anymore. I looked at suburban houses as an option and was thinking I hope I never have enough crap to fill this much space. I think I can comfortably fit my family of 4 in 1200 sq ft indefinitely and never own a car.

> People don't want 5000 sq ft anymore. I looked at suburban houses as an option and was thinking I hope I never have enough crap to fill this much space. I think I can comfortably fit my family of 4 in 1200 sq ft indefinitely and never own a car.

That's an incredibly broad overstatement. There are plenty of people, including "techies," who still want a suburban home with a car.

There's a lot of talk in this thread that assumes that tech workers all want to live a minimalist lifestyle in a dense urban area (or even worse: that they should want to live that way). That's frankly false. I assume what's really going on is that people are projecting their parochial preferences onto a large group that's much more diverse than they understand.

Yes, I'm generalizing but it's definitely a trend. The schools in my city used to fight for attendance and now they fight crowding and the PTA rates in 7 figures. Families are staying in the city more than ever.

Do you have kids yet? Genuinely curious.

I have a kid and our current duplex (150 sq m, I think) is basically the perfect size for our family of 3. Maybe even a little too big, honestly.

1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family.

I mostly grew up in the city, in a small apartment, but for a while we did live in the Midwest, in a big house. The only problem with apartment living was that we had too much furniture we didn’t need from when we lived in the Midwest.

> 1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family.

That's a projection of your subjective preference.

1200 sqft is not enough space for just me, that's my subjective preference. I currently occupy a home by myself with about ~2,500 sqft. I don't utilize all the space regularly. My bills would not go down by much if I reduced that space to, say, 1,500 sqft. Housing where I live is spectacularly affordable. I consider not having to live in a tiny, cramped space to be a quality of life benefit. I enjoy that my kitchen is the size of a small studio in San Francisco or NY, and it costs me perhaps $120 per month as a share of my mortgage.

I’m sure that people richer than me can’t imagine living the way I do. I’m trying to point out that if you’re in the upper middle or upper class, your standard of living isn’t applicable to everyone else. I’m trying to point out that there exist a large number of people who are ok with the living conditions you see as unacceptable, not prove that no one wants a big home.

The average American home was around 1500 feet 30-40 years ago and people raised families in them just fine. Instead of 4br 400sq ft each with en suite bathrooms, you had 120sq ft bedrooms for kids. It wasn't until the excesses of the mid 2000's that 3-4k sq ft homes became somewhat common, and outside the realm of mansions. Now the trend for home size is decreasing.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. Once we had our kid, I couldn't wait to get out of our 850 sq ft. house. (which also had an 850 sq ft basement for laundry and storage)

I occassionally work from home, and I need a seperate office with a door to do that. Also, I just like having some space to get away from the rest of the family for a while.

Like you, it's what I'm used to from when I grew up, so that probably plays a big part in my preference.

Yes. Two. We live in <1000 sq ft right now and they don't mind at all.

I have 2 kids and a 1200 sqft house. It’s a good size for many 4-person families

exactly, I don't even have kids but I thought this too. If you have kids or pets, I want a lot of space for them to play and for me to play with them

I grew up, 6 people (With frequent guests) in a ~800 sqft house.

Something like ~2500 sqft. sounds amazing to me, as long as it is all on one floor.

NYC literally has an app where anyone can press a button if they're standing somewhere where they feel like a tree should be planted, and if you press the button a couple hours later a group of guys will show up and start digging a hole and plant the tree. For all of its problems, it's the only city that works at least somewhat like a city should.

That's kind of a twee, brooklyn-artisinal-pickle example, but the greater point is true: having lived in a number of big cities around the US (including San Francisco), New York is simply functional in a unique way for a US city. Even San Francisco is a backwater by comparison.

For example: I was issued a ticket in SF for moving (and I hired professionals to do it). That kind of crap simply doesn't happen in New York, but it happened routinely in SF.

> That's kind of a twee, brooklyn-artisinal-pickle example

I'd actually argue that the quality of street / park trees is the best way to judge how competently a city has been run over time. When a city has lots of healthy older trees, that means not a single administration has dropped the ball in over 200 years or whatever. If look around NYC there are thousands of mature American elm trees everywhere, but not in any of the surrounding suburbs. Why? Because NYC parks department actually takes care of the trees when they're sick and removes them if they can't be saved, whereas all of the surrounding tri-state towns just let them infect the surrounding trees and then die.

Now maybe the fact that Robert Moses's favorite tree was the sycamore should have been a hint to everyone that some of his other policies may have been suspect, but that's a different issue.

Sure, yes. But the tree-planting-app thing is still twee.

This sounds awesome! Do you know what the app is called?

You greatly over-estimate how much those things influences people's decisions. People move for jobs. SF is pretty much the poster child for a terrible place to live (transit clusterfuck, aggressive homeless, high rents, no hope of owning property for most, increasing crime) that people keep moving to for the economic opportunity (good jobs).

Personally, I think SF is a great place to live. It has great weather, lots going on, decent public transportation, lots of tech, and more open mindedness about how people want to live their lives. Other than issues that are pretty much inherent to living in a city (less access to large grocery stores, inability to setup a workshop in my home) the only big complaints I can think of are the cost of living, aggressive homeless people, and how crazy the DMV is.

> SF is pretty much the poster child for a terrible place to live

That depends on what you value.

* SF's transit, while indeed bad, is still superior to all but a handful of other US cities.

* Similarly, SF is top tier for walkability and bikeability.

* SF has more cultural and ethnic diversity than most cities, especially since it's the principal city of a metro with a ton of immigration.

* SF has a LOT of interesting stuff that goes on (partially as a result of the previous point). Concerts and walks and other cultural events.

* Also as a result of the diversity, SF's food scene is really excellent.

* I'm not personally much of a fan, but a lot of people actually like SF's weather.

* SF is very left wing, and a lot of people in tech like that. Not everyone, but a lot of people.

The things you listed as problems largely are real problems of course, but there's a reason so many techies still choose to live in SF even if they work in Mountain View, and that's something your theory here doesn't explain: why not live in the closer, somewhat cheaper, and less crime/homeless-filled South Bay?

Your list of problems just reveals your own preferences: you prefer the advantages of the suburbs to the advantages of the city. Nothing wrong with that, but not everyone shares your preferences.

> How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue?

Do you really think NYC is a good example of this? I found the car traffic horrific, cycling is variable at best and downright dangerous at worst. The subway is pretty amazing but massively under-invested.

Even most UK cities which have longer levels of history restricting what can be done for cyclists are better than NYC.

NYC certainly isn't perfect, but there's been significant investment in bike infrastructure (and the expansion of citibike) and is quickly improving. Anecdotally, I find I have to plan my trips a little bit, but can get from my apartment in Queens to most places in Manhattan without leaving a protected bike lane for more than 2-3 blocks

> How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue?

I often wonder about why relatively conservative /cheap/low-density/car-bound are so correlated.

Are there significant counter-examples, in the US or elsewhere, where, for example, a more conservative area is higher density or urban, compared to it's more progressive surroundings?

If those situations are very rare, then why? Is it strictly historical, or does relatively higher density, and more frequent interactions that result, change many people's perceptions.

So, I just got back from a week-long vacation to NYC, and it's reinforced what I've always felt about it: NYC is a wonderful place to visit, but I'd never want to live there.

I had a lot of fun, and I wish I could've stayed another week, but actually living and working there? No thank you. I actively do not want to fight through crowds and run to catch connecting trains just to get to and from work every day. I don't want to live in a tiny apartment with no cooling but a room air conditioner sticking out the window. I don't want to be surrounded by noise 24/7.

Trust me, for every person who wants to live in NYC because it's actually a city, there's at least one person like me who only wants to set foot in cities to play tourist and would rather live and work in the suburbs.

And I'd rather live in modern suburbs at that... in NYC suburbs like Westchester (where I stayed during my trip), the housing stock is so old that even a nice place will be a fixer-upper, and the street layout is horrendously bad because nothing was planned in advance. I strongly prefer living in southwestern suburbs where nothing is older than the late '70s, half the neighborhoods were built in the 21st century, and the suburbs are built around a one-mile grid of six-lane divided highways (e.g. Dallas, Vegas, Phoenix).

The great thing about NYC (and a thing that is lost on most people visiting the city, including myself before I moved here), is how many options you have for your living situation.

Want the crowds, the city life and the noise? Live downtown. Old-school New York? The upper west side. Brownstones on quiet, beautiful streets? Any number of Brooklyn neighborhoods. A quaint New England-y fishing village? City Island. Conservative-leaning, leafy suburbs? Staten Island. The ethnic enclave of your choice? Peppered throughout the city. Cheapo cool kid artist communities? Bushwick/Ridgewood. Want to own a boat and live on the water? The Rockaways. The list goes on and on, and that's not even touching Jersey, Westchester or Long Island.

The beauty of the city is that all of these places are unquestionably, culturally 'New York'. They're also, for the most part, quite well connected to the city core on affordable public transit, and in many cases quite affordable by big American city standards.

If you want a suburban life in NYC you simply move to Queens or the part of Brooklyn that is closer to Queens.

Chicago. In the midwest and has the best urban core in the North America outside of New York.

> One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city.

I think you’re conflating current cultural preference with actual economic ability. Where do towns like Palo Alto, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale fit into this?

Philadelphia

Ooh, that's a good choice. Philly isn't more conservative, but it is cheaper and I'm given to understand it's one of the more urbanist cities in the US (probably because of its age). I'm sure I can still find some things, though.

* Very few miles of protected bike lanes, although at least things are looking up there for the future: https://bicyclecoalition.org/our-campaigns/30-miles-of-prote... (although the fact that 30 miles is celebrated as some big achievement is itself telling)

* Two subway lines is better than most US cities, but still not very many for a metro of this size. Munich has a comparable metro population and has 8 subway lines, for example, not to mention several separated-grade commuter/rapid transit lines that go way out into the burbs. Looks like high quality, rapid transit is still close by for only a small percentage of Philadelphians. It also sounds like the regional rail system is in disrepair.

* Looking at the zoning map, it looks like implementation of mixed use zoning is much better than most US cities, but still very limited in many neighborhoods, which limits walkability: https://openmaps.phila.gov/

* Also from the zoning map, many areas are still zoned just for single-family homes, which limits walkability/bikeability (and also encourages economic segregation, to boot).

Philly's level of urbanism should really be like the bare minimum for US cities, but in reality it's close to the top, I think.

I just moved back to Philadelphia. After stints in Boston, New York, and Seattle. I have a completely different perspective than when I first left.

A lot of the homes are single family, or row homes. This results in swaths of a residential feel in a city. Even the hot Fishtown felt very rural to me after my stint in New York. Although I appreciate the quite. Looking at the history Philadelphia started with the idea of brownstones/row homes instead of apartment buildings. To give people more space. But this does result in sparseness of shops. A lot of the multi tenant buildings are either new constructions or converted warehouses.

The two subways is always a point of contention. But I don't find it that big of a deal. Living near either Broad or MFL, I can get around very easily. The city is also extremely walk able, a majority of the people I knew just walk. It's under two miles river to river. If not that there are a number of buses. http://skookul.com/ <| For real time public transit.

I can't speak regional rail. But when I left ~15, commuting from Delaware was a shit show.

In the city bike lanes I don't think is the best. But the river trail along the west side is well used. I know a number of people up in outer Manayunk bike in. https://schuylkillrivertrail.com/

Having just taken a history walking tour. How the city feels makes alot of sense. It's meant to feel like a number of connected neighborhoods. I still think it deserves a second look for tech companies. With all the universities and good start to transit. It's ripe for an investment outside of Comcast.

Philadelphia is Brooklyn for people who cannot even cut it in Brooklyn.

Yeah, gotta admit here, Philly has done a good job. The public transit is good. I live an hour outside Philly, and taking the train in is a real option here because the trains are good and getting around once in city has never been an issue. Couple that with easy access to NYC itself, and it's even nicer. It's not perfect, but then neither is NYC.

I dunno, I love Philly, but “good” isn’t exactly the word I’d pick to describe SEPTA.

JW, do you use a lot of other public trans? It's easy to be impacted by an issue and think that SEPTA is incompetent, forgetting that public transit is hard and not realizing how bad other people are doing. After all, Septa isn't famous for catching on fire all the time[0][1].

0 - https://twitter.com/ismetroonfire?lang 1 - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/washington-d-c-s-metro-...

So why do you think great is the exact word you use to describe SEPTA?

Portland?

I wouldn't consider Portland to be a cheaper or more conservative US city, and it's still one of the better US cities at urbanism, sad as that is, but okay.

* The MAX has decent reach, but it's severely handicapped in capacity and speed by running at-grade. The Portland metro cheaped out there, and the result is a train system that's only good by American standards.

* Many of the MAX stops, you can go a block or three and hit single-family homes (mandatory single-family homes, I think). To spend billions on a transit system, and then intentionally handicap its usage by strictly limiting how many people can live nearby around its stations...that's just completely insane. What are they thinking? "Better make sure as few people as possible can actually use this enormous investment"?

* No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic.

* Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.

* Despite ostensibly being a major city, most of the residential areas are zoned very low density.

* Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.

Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.

MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade because it has dedicated roads/lanes everywhere it goes. Portland will eventually ban cars downtown anyway (they are close).

Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill. Plus, there is an urban growth boundary which will force higher density.

The bottlenecks in Portland are the bridges and there is at least one bridge that cars can't drive on, only busses and transit and there will be more in the future.

There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles. There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.

Portland is being upzoned all over the place. look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block. The suburbs of Portland haven't caught up, but in 20 years if trends continue in both places I could see Portland being more dense than San Francisco and the suburban sprawl not ending till the sierras.

> MAX is not that handicapped by being at grade

Yes it is. It limits how long the train can be, because it can't block traffic downtown, which limits its capacity.

It also limits how fast it can travel. Having its own lanes is better than not, of course, but not as good as being completely physically separated. For an example of this that I'm particularly familiar with, a big part of Caltrain's unreliability comes from it having so many at-grade crossings.

> Zoning laws are changing and have changed to allow infill.

Yes, but very slowly. The current state is that they're extremely bad. Less extremely bad than the US average, probably, but still extremely bad nonetheless.

> There are entire streets where vehicle through traffic has been blocked in favor of bicycles.

Yes, and that's a good move. Would love to see more of those across the city. The way Portland has done it isn't as good as, say, Munich, but it's still a nice thing.

> There are still bike lanes on the major roads a block away too which is why you probably didn't notice the dedicated streets.

Eh, I mean the neighborhood greenways are good, don't get me wrong, but there should still be more off-street paths and physically protected lanes on arterials.

> look at any major street west of 82nd and you will see new apartment buildings on almost every block.

I'm aware of the steady upzoning in Portland, and that's good. It's still true that they're decades away from the kind of urbanism that many cities in, say, Western Europe take for granted as the norm, where "only single family home" areas do not really exist in major cities.

MAX doesn't have the Caltrain problem because it is not at grade outside of downtown.

You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.

> MAX doesn't have the Caltrain problem because it is not at grade outside of downtown.

That still limits its speed for that area, and its capacity everywhere.

> You are comparing Portland to European cities which is not a fair comparison. Compared to any city in California, Portland is miles ahead.

Nah, transit usage is much higher in SF, and BART + Caltrain + Muni is better than Portland's system.

Anyway, like I said, Portland is one of the better US cities for urbanism, it's just that that's a bit like claiming to be a more honest-than-average politician.

> No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic.

No bus lanes, but buses aren't just stuck in general traffic. Portland has a system that gives them priority at stoplights: https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2016/03/what_are_the_bl...

That's interesting, and good, but it's hardly a substitute for dedicated lanes, let alone separated-grade lanes. A bus with signal priority can still get slowed down by and stuck in traffic when there are flat out too many cars around.

> Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.

Also every Canadian city, with some very rare exception to the bus lanes bit (there are like... two in Toronto).

> Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things.

The other things are more a matter of preference, while I think zoning insanity is the clear leader in making North America's cities and towns tend to be so tedious and isolating.

> Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars.

For all the investments of Dutch urban centres in bicycle infrastructure, it seems to me that it is the culture which makes or breaks this. As a more-than-commuter cyclist, I can say with confidence that a clumsy protected bicycle lane is more dangerous for cyclists (but quicker for motorists) than none at all. Most protected bicycle lanes are clumsy. Here in Hamilton (mid-tier city in Ontario), a lot of the roads are one-way (which has some benefits and drawbacks, the bus routes look funny), but on these one-way roads, the city of hamilton has installed protected two-way cycle paths. Now, these are convenient, to be sure, but you can imagine that when you get on a one way road, you do not expect oncoming traffic, this leads to all kinds of precarious situations, and (among other factors here) probably some deaths.

Detroit?

* Almost no rail transit whatsoever, closest equivalent looks like a bus system that doesn't even have its own lanes, let alone being separated-grade.

* I see a few off-street bike paths, but at a glance, no physically protected bike lanes. Maybe there are a few I'm missing, but if so, very few. Very few bike lanes in total, too.

* Freeways cutting through the city

* City is super sprawled out, looks like most of the space is the typical American mandatory single-family home area with no retail activity, so walkability is limited even where the sidewalks are fine.

* Very wide roads all over the place

Also just in general Detroit seems like it's been historically mismanaged and has lots of problems with crime and infrastructure and corruption and poor schools, which doesn't help things.

I live outside of Detroit. All your points and criticisms are valid. When I visit the coasts, I often tell people who ask that it was nice to spend some time in a "real" city. The true "big city" core of Detroit is quite small, and whenever I'm in Chicago or even Cleveland I'm reminded of that fact.

That said, the experience in the downtown/midtown core of Detroit has improved drastically since the bankruptcy. It feels incredibly vibrant. When I started working there in 2012, the city felt completely empty after about 5:30. Today, downtown is buzzing seemingly all night.

Even if you live within walking distance of your office, though, you still need a car to get groceries though, and as much as it sucks, I don't see how that changes anytime soon (or within my lifetime).

I think there's less value to this kind of experience-living-in-a-city-via-google-maps than you're implying here.

To be sure, an actually thorough analysis would require firsthand experience (and I have visited Portland at least multiple times). It's just that most US cities are so very terrible at urbanism that it's easy to spot many of the massive flaws from Google Maps.

Most Midwestern cities are indeed sprawling, pedestrian-hostile, car-philic wastelands and that's what you're going to see on Google Maps. But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods. If you're moving to NYC, then you can throw a dart at the map and you'll land in a walkable neighborhood. If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.

So, look, it's totally fair to say, "I don't want to live in a city like that." But there are people working really hard to make their little pockets better for bikes and pedestrians and so on, and I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on and the extent to which they could be happy in a neighborhood like that, especially when housing is 1/10th the cost.

> But, thankfully, they didn't destroy all of their pre-war housing and infrastructure and so most of them have at least a couple interesting, walkable neighborhoods.

Sure, but how useful is that, really? Huntsville has a New Urbanist neighborhood that looks nice and cute, but the rest of Huntsville (which I have lived in before) fucking sucks for anything that's not a car. As soon as you need to go anywhere else, you gotta go back into driving, and only driving.

> If you're moving to St. Louis or Cincinnati, then you'll need to do some research. The dart is a bad strategy.

I don't dispute that you can mitigate the effects somewhat via careful selection. But:

* That only works for those particular neighborhoods. You're probably not gonna always stay in those, so you're still going to need to at least own a car, and probably make at least somewhat frequent use of it if you want to go to other places in the area.

* You're probably also looking at other things you want in a neighborhood: crime rate, school quality, restaurants, other points of interest, etc. Having to only look at a few neighborhoods as viable urbanist-friendly locations greatly constrains your options when it comes time to look at the other dimensions.

> I think people underestimate the extent to which that's going on

Maybe other people do, but I'm a dorky-ass urbanism nerd who reads blogs on this shit all the time, so I don't. I'm well aware of what's going on. But I also travel enough to know that these cities are so woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world, it would take literal CENTURIES to catch up at the current snail's pace of improvement. Changes that happen after I'm dead are of no use to me.

Seattle?

Is this a serious reply? Seattle has no shortage of high-paying tech jobs, and it's certainly not a cheap place to live, nor is it in any way conservative.

I think we can consider Seattle part of the "Big Economic Winners"