Inundated? How so? What are you seeing?
Tax benefits, work-life balance and bigger homes? Really, you can see these changes in the last 6 months of a pandemic? I could be wrong but I don't think the majority of employers are letting employees change states (and state taxes). WFH does not mean work from anywhere, especially tax-wise.
This all sounds plausible longer term but to say you're inundated seems like it must be hyperbolic.
Surely not but I would wager that most employees work for companies that already have multi-state (and in many cases multi-national) operations, and therefore have the administrative infrastructure to support employees in arbitrary states.
After during research, you come to the conclusion that yes, productivity won’t fall. However, you note that finance has flagged the payrolls issue.
Your boss tells payroll to sort out multi state taxes.
If only the world was so simple, haha.
Stories about problems in California get a lot of clicks, so people see a couple week’s worth of bad news and think the state is on fire is ways that aren’t due to actual flames.
Of course, the other way to look at the de-campers is that they were going to move to the burbs inevitably. Which good for them, but cities are injured, not dead.
It strikes a nerve with me because in Massachusetts a similar sentiment is expressed by Boston-Cambridge folks about Lowell, Worcester, and other periphery cities. Its simply mot true that these places are devoid of culture snd cuisine and in the age of Yelp and Google Maps it takes almost no time to find it.
But SF has more high quality restaurants within a 20min walk of my apartment than my hometown had in total. Average restaurant quality is higher too. Just because there’s more competition.
Another fun example: in SF we have 5 grocery stores within a 10min walk. Back home the nearest grocery store was a 3min walk away, great. But the next one after that was 10min. To get to a proper supermarket size grocery store ... that’s a car trip. In SF it’s a 15min walk.
Density is wonderful. There’s economies of scale that you get at 18,400 people per square mile that you just can’t pull off at 4,500.
The ultimate test for a city is this: Do you have 5 “asian restaurants” or do you have 5 south vietnamese, 3 north vietnamese, 10 cantonese, 5 ramen, 6 japanese grill, 3 sushi, 4 dimsum, etc
For example back home we had the mexican restaurant, here you have 10 for each type of mexican food.
If it weren’t for SF’s high concentration of my industry (tech), I’d likely move to NYC, London, or Paris.
I'd say Paris and London (and most > 1m people cities in Europe and many in Asia) are also more walkable than SF.
Agreed, and I think the parent was saying that LA and Fremont are less walkable than SF, not that Tokyo is.
There are exceptional cuisine resources in San Francisco, and amazing grocery stores, like Bi-Rite and Rainbow, but as a whole the situation neither benefits from the culinary community that it used to have (how many people have moved away) or from the kind of consumer that it used to have (well to-do kids just out of Stanford or a midwest school are not people who know what buffalo mozzarella is, or why you'd want to buy it, but their money rapidly became the only money that mattered).
So here’s some perspective: My entire home country has 6 Michelin star restaurants. Of those, 1 is in the capital which is the home town I’m comparing above.
SF has 7 restaurants with 3 stars.
Places with stars don't have the economic situation I discussed: they have the money to really go beyond their surroundings.
The competition means that a lot of places scraping by in smaller cities can’t make it in a bigger city. In theory that means median quality is higher.
And even a 3-star restaurant won’t survive in a place that doesn’t get enough well-to-do visitors to sustain it.
For a more casual perspective, SF has 126 restaurants on the Michelin list (not all hve stars). My entire home country has 52.
Quality food has more to do with agriculture and supply chains than money or density per se -- good salad is not something you can buy if no one is growing it -- and more and more areas in the US have made the transition to that kind of farming and production.
Now challenging SF on grocery stores -- that's another matter. They are drawing on deep roots, there.
In fact some of the best food & drink I've had was in parts of Nebraska & Missouri and Wisconsin. You absolutely don't need to be in the city to get good food & entertainment.
I wonder if there is precedent with the migration out of NYC and the like in the post-WWII/mid Century period. It was a real boom time for the West...California in particular. A lot of folks came from back East or the Midwest...
Not many tried to explicitly recreate their East Coast/Midwest life in the West...in fact they made a point of trying to create a unique California “lifestyle”. That new California lifestyle was the hot US cultural trend from, say, 1960 to 1990.
May happen again, but in the reverse direction, Californians creating a new Montanan/Utahn/Ohioan/etc. culture by engaging in the roots of their new not-California and building something better, bringing their creativity while leaving behind their California. Of course, if they try merely to graft a California-lite onto their new rootstock...well, they could be an important new source of protein for the locals...
I don’t think this creative dynamic could happen in other “tech hub cities”, because, frankly, there is no essential culture there to work with. Austin may be nice, but it seems more parasite on Texas culture than symbiont.
(Which has been a slam against California over the years too. What’s the difference between California and yogurt? Yogurt has an active living culture. More people outside of California believe that than you might think. It’s been 30 years since CA has been a dominant nationwide cultural thing, Hollywood as almost a metaculture notwithstanding. Silicon Valley? That’s getting onto 25 years old now...that’s senescent in US cultural terms.)
CA, like it or not, has an outsized influence to the whole world, to the point that it kinda becomes 'undistinguishable' as it is everywhere. I am talking about tech/SF/SV and Hollywood. They have risen to the 'metaculture' level which few places/countries have.
ps, HN, reddit, FB, started in the east coast, but had to move in the west in order to flourish. Same with the Movie industry. It started in the NYC and New Jersey suburbs, but had to move West in order to flourish.
But this pandemic is going to be crushing state and municipal budgets across the country, and many of the worst-hit places will be rural and exurban.
So long as the fed can print money the federal government can spend. It cares not about the states or how much income tax flows in. Hence, it can run up structural deficits until faith is lost in the $ (inflation).
State governments, on the other hand, cannot print money. They must operate in a zero-sum mode.
But the GOP Senate intransigently refuses to act or even negotiate, and so state/local governments are getting crushed.
That's a political decision and the gop has decided to let the states that need bailouts diy it.
I don't think it's wise, but it sure is within gop policy aims
As a bonus irony, the "taker" states also tend to house the most vociferously free-market/anti-government types.
There are only ten donor states in 2019:
- Connecticut (- $4,000)
- New Jersey (- $2,368)
- Massachusetts (- $2,343)
- New York (- $1,792)
- North Dakota (- $720)
- Illinois (- $364)
- New Hampshire (- $234)
- Washington (- $184)
- Nebraska (- $164)
- Colorado (- $95)
- Virginia ($10,301)
- Kentucky ($9,145)
- New Mexico ($8,692)
- West Virginia ($7,283)
- Alaska ($7,048)
- Mississippi ($6,880)
- Alabama ($6,694)
- Maryland ($6,035)
- Maine ($5,572)
- Hawaii ($5,270)
In every state though, rural and ex-urban areas are subsidized by federal and state tax revenue coming from cities.
New York put together a report for 2017 that seems more reliable than the list you are using: https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/2018/federal-budg...
Instead of income or property taxes, some places raise money via sales taxes instead, or other regressive schemes. Some places raise money by questionable fines on their own residents. Some places make money off the back of wanton environmental destruction.
Some just accept shoddy local services. (When you compare the US to other wealthy nations, it’s really shocking how poor our basic infrastructure and public services are, even in the richest US states and cities.)
But most low-tax areas of the US are substantially supported by federal-level transfers, for example from federal highway budget, from military bases and defense contracting located there, from federal agriculture subsidies, from federal welfare and healthcare funding, from social security payments to people who retired somewhere different than they lived while actively working, ...
The U.S. seems to be stuck in a loop wherein the available funds are argued about endlessly, and everybody acts as if that's the only dimension about which to speak and win. Not nearly enough is done to boost competence in the government sector. I think this is plenty true even if we set aside the current U.S. administration in which a number of federal entities are headed by naked toadies (to be fair, it's certainly not true of all federal organizations even now).
I tend to agree with you that the U.S. is probably not taxing enough for consistently high-quality outcomes in areas where the government is responsible. Yet I'm sympathetic to those that point to places where tax rates are high and so is wastefulness. But when the only lever it seems that can be pulled is on the revenue/spending, it's no wonder the correlation between that lever position and good outcomes is low - it ignores the competence with which any of those funds are managed.
I think it's entirely possible to have competent government if that is made a priority and addressed with some flexibility.
Our company has decided not to reopen a majority of it’s office space. Ironically, the Bay Area office is remaining open while other offices are being closed, but even there it will be a shadow of it’s former self
I would like local and federal governments to come up with a plan for the inevitable bail out that transforms some of this space into more livable space, more community access, and more on-demand office space.
Apple’s HQ has turned into the worlds largest set piece for a iPhone ad.
San Fran is going to come out of COVID dramatically weaker. That’s been inevitable for a while, the pandemic just accelerated it.