the additional benefits college graduates gained from having access to a variety of desirable local amenities actually outweighs the negative effects of high housing costs. The 50 percent increase in the wage gap between high school and college graduates from 1980 to 2000 actually understates the true increases in economic inequality due to changes in wages, housing costs, and local amenities by at least 30%.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
I think that the story she tells is pretty close to my model of gentrification.
1. Some high-skill enterprises locate in a downtown area. Think of the New Commanding Heights industries of health care and education.
2. This attracts well-educated professionals.
3. This attracts amenities that well-educated professionals enjoy. Bicycle lanes. Sushi restaurants. Opportunities to meet other well-educated professionals.
4. Rents and house prices go up.
5. Former residents are driven away by declines in low-skill jobs, higher housing costs, and lower propensity to enjoy bike lanes, sushi, and opportunities to meet well-educated professionals.
I just don’t know about this. Amenities? They have Sushi joints out in the burbs, heck some of the best restaurants are these farm to table places outside the beltway of most cities. Bike lanes are death traps for weirdos that slow everyone else down.
Maybe its just me, but I find living in a city to be an immense hassle. There are so many fucking people, they are in the way everywhere you go. It’s crowded, noisy, dirty. Most of the people are living in a way no conductive to my own (what is the lifetime TFR of DC professionals). The schools are terrible unless you pay for exorbidient private school.
I think people move to cities for the same reason I did. It’s where the jobs are! Wealthy executives that don’t deal with the same bullshit as the middle class choose to locate in the city, and the rest of us just have to deal with it. Everything else seems like a rationalization to me.
Also, its not the lower end that is leaving places like NYC. It’s middle class whites. Plenty of poor people are moving to NYC, they are just Puerto Ricans living twelve to a room and subsisting off EBT. We are creating cities full of a mass menial underclass to amplify their vote dominance over the suburbs, combined with a gene shredder for UMC professionals. Finally, people can sip cocktails and go shopping until they die off.
http://www.netmigration.wisc.edu
For young professionals I think life in the city is a bit of a tournament. I just turned 31 and most of my friends are in the young professional cohort.
My subjective observation is that right after graduation almost all of them want to live in a trendy urban area for the reasons Arnold mentioned.
However, not all of them have the capacity to stay there and the ones that don’t get enough traction in their careers early on eventually relocate to less crowded places. Sometimes its by choice because they have families or need to relocate for a job, but a lot of the time they just get sick and tired of not being able to afford the amenities they need to enjoy urban living so they eventually raise the white flag and move somewhere cheaper.
It’s this tournament that really stratifies people by how much value they got out of higher education. The people with non-specific signaling degrees tend not to fare well unless they have good personal connections or familial wealth. Most of these people get shoehorned into low wage jobs and many of them choose to maintain some sense of status in their occupational choice in lieu of higher paid blue collar work, but the majority of them eventually cave in and go do something else.
The ones that leave college with a decent amount of human capital tend to get started with a decent job after graduation and have enough wage growth that they can stay far enough above the cost threshold to entice them to keep living there.
It’s not just a cost issue. The city is literally a fucking shithole of noise, dirt, and crowding. I can’t understand why anyone would like it. So you can walk to a restaurant? How fucking meaningless is a life of going to restaurants.
My fiancee and I are both making good money but this is actually a reason why we can escape the city and get a house somewhere human. I guess if we made a million dollars a year we could buy our way out of the worst parts of city life, but that applies to an incredibly small slice of humanity.
I don’t really understand this tournament stuff. A tournament for what? Working overtime to live in a crowded apartment and not have any kids?
This is all a bit ranty I suppose, I just find myself with such an opposite sentiment at a core level I can’t really understand the other side. I’m only really happy when I’m out someplace quiet and full of nature.
This assertion is either dramatically outdated, or you have a very, very different definition of “noise, dirt, and crowding” than the average young professional. I live in one city (DC) and regularly visit friends in another (NYC), and my experience with both is utterly foreign to the litter-filled streets stalked by muggers and hooligans depicted in 80’s flicks.
Certainly, it gets loud in some parts of both cities–the price one pays for living across the street from your favorite bar, I’m afraid–but it’s not terribly difficult to find a place where you can get a good night’s sleep without difficulty and still be able to walk to your favorite neighborhood hangouts.
I dunno. Coworker of mine just returned from NYC and says it’s dirty, especially the subway entrances and platforms. And with humidity to pile on. Of course what he’s used to is the paved, clean streets of Sunnyvale.
And SF is notoriously dirty, at least in any area not high up on a hill.
In any case we can all agree that cities are noisier and more crowded.
Subways are a bit grimy, but they’re not littered with garbage or something. From ASDF’s hyperbole, one would think city-dwellers need galoshes to navigate the rivers are feces that flow down Fifth Avenue.
Similarly to the noise and the crowds, a city is probably dirtier than the suburbs (although it’s not like Long Island or New Jersey is pristine), but the notion that any of the three is so terrible as to make a city into a “shithole” just doesn’t hold water.
Why declines in low-skill jobs? I’d guess they are complememts to high paying jobs, because the affluent professionals will outsource ‘home producing’ functions to those with a lower time value of labor. Who is working at all those amenities? Who is doing the landscaping, daycare, cleaning, etc? Sure, those aren’t factory jobs, and instead are ‘those new service sector jobs’, but is there some reason to expect a decline in those jobs vs the change being indeterminate or even positive?
I think it is more likely that the low skill service jobs remain, but the folks doing those jobs have to live and commute from far away because they can’t afford to be close.
This is exactly what happens.
My family fits in this category and they currently live in NYC. They commute to their work from outer Queens near Jamaica, and this is what almost all of the immigrant population does.
To be honest, it’s a pretty punishing lifestyle and not worth it IMO. I think with zero friction a lot of them would leave but the non-young who are in this lifestyle are often more bound to their location than they’d like because of family ties so it’s difficult to just pick up your stuff and move to Long Island.
Example: The metro areas of, and around, Boston. “Techrification” is ongoing.
“The 50 percent increase in the wage gap between high school and college graduates from 1980 to 2000 actually understates the true increases in economic inequality due to changes in wages, housing costs, and local amenities by at least 30%.”
I think it’s the other way around — due to housing costs and taste differences the ‘true’ level of inequality is much smaller than the salary differences. As Arnold notes, lower income workers don’t particularly want bike lanes and sushi but often do want amenities that aren’t available in large gentrified cities — a house with a few acres of land, maybe a pole barn for the boat and RV, open land nearby to hunt or ride four-wheelers, etc. They don’t experience any additional subjective inequality from having less convenient access to bike lanes and sushi, but they would experience a drop in subjective well being if they lost the rural amenities they do value.
I wonder if dating plays a role in the attraction of cities. The age of meeting your spouse seems to have increased, and is now out of the university age group. So that group, 25-35, are the ones attracted to cities. Perhaps because it’s got the largest group of other singles.
Anecdotally, a lot of my friends who were single went to the cities after university. Eventually they got married and promptly decamped for the suburbs.
Maybe the increasing attractiveness of cities is mostly a secondary effect of the rise in the age of marriage, especially for the university-educated cohort.
That’s certainly part of it. DC is 47.2% white amongst those aged 20-34 and 22.3% white amongst those aged 5-19. You’ll find a similar split in most major cities.