13 ms·

Socioeconomic sorting at the metropolitan level is making America more polarized

148 points by clumsysmurf 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago
I wonder what happens as things get worse and the foreign money dries up?
- gcb0 9y ago
  you get a new rustbelt
niftich 9y ago
This data is great to back up processes one can empirically observe -- none of this was a particular shocker, but the data quantifies the relative differences between metros' fates very well, such as Chicago punching above its weight in terms of balancing affordability with desirability among the highly-educated. In my opinion, the one surprise is Pittsburgh's particular set of circumstances: in-migrants being less educated than out-migrants, but this can be an artifact of Pittsburgh being a destination for education, which then struggles to attract higher numbers of well-educated to stay or relocate there for work.
- nugget 9y ago
  UPMC educates so many medical professionals it's not surprising that there's an imbalance. I don't think Pittsburgh could absorb all of those MDs even if they wanted to stick around (which most don't). I'm surprised Boston isn't similar.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    There likely is an imbalance for MDs specifically, but Boston has a sizable VC-fueled tech community that can absorb non-MD grads.
  - Texasian 9y ago
    Boston is similar. With so many universities, local leaders are always bemoaning he fact that more of them don’t stay. For any type of specialized field, we’ve got the school... in triplicate. God knows how many law schools and business schools we’ve got scattered around the metro area.
Thriptic 9y ago
Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities. Boston's immediately adjacent suburbs like Cambridge and Somerville are filled with crappy run down houses converted to apartments serving 2-3 users or groups. No one likes them besides the landlords, they are generally of shitty quality / falling apart, and they are extremely expensive. If they were bulldozed and replaced with high rise apartments, costs would greatly fall. Similarly, if the T didn't suck so much and serviced outlying communities, people could more easily live farther away from the city proper, which would also reduce pressures on the city and proximal suburbs to support everyone.
- existencebox 9y ago
  Out of personal curiosity: I was in Boston for a while maybe 10-12 years ago, and remember thinking that the T was so far beyond what most other cities had, and served even the outlying areas well enough via the bus connections. (And I was previously from Philly, so no stranger to decent public transit) In that context I'm surprised to hear you say that the T sucks. Is it that my memory is far out of date with respect to how the city grew? Or are my standards very low? (Also viable is that I was lucky in that the routes I needed to take were well served, usually starting from Cambridge) To give another point of comparison, in Seattle now, I would give an arm and a leg for something even roughly comparable to my memory of the T, let alone SEPTA/subways. Baltimore was similar, in having little to nothing outside of unreliable and sparse buses, and token light rail only along 1-2 "primary" corridors.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    (I grew up in Boston but now live in Silicon Valley.) The T has great coverage but shitty service. Boston is second only to NYC in terms of the fraction of the city that you can get to via public transit. The Red Line covers most of the densely-populated Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge neighborhoods, runs straight into the heart of the city, and then services even the lower-income neighborhoods in Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan/Quincy. The Green Line covers the whole Back Bay and Brookline area. Orange Line will get you up to Tufts & Medford, and Blue Line covers North & East Boston. All of these except the outer reaches of the Green Line have reasonable transit times. By contrast, SF has good public transit if you happen to live in the BART corridor through Mission & Market streets, or around 4th & King or Potrero. But if you're in the Sunset, Presidio, Pac Heights, North Beach, Twin Peaks & highlands, Excelsior, or really anywhere else - you can forget about it. It takes as long to get from the Outer Sunset to Downtown as it does to get from Mountain View, 50 miles away, to SF. However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.
throwaway713 9y ago
As someone that lives in the south, this trend is extremely frustrating. A few weeks ago I visited SF for an interview, and it seems like every tech company on earth is in that one spot. The whole city feels 20 years ahead of where I presently live. But all of my family is in the south, so I’m stuck with the unfortunate tradeoff of choosing to focus on my career or living near family. Because it sure doesn’t look like the tech companies are moving where I am any time soon (with the hopeful exception of Amazon HQ2).
- dnomad 9y ago
  I always wonder why nobody asks why this sort is happening. There's a kind of willful ignorance at work here. Are the highly educated and the knowledge economy moving to cities because they like the beach? Or is there something else attracting them? What's even stranger is the blame. Somehow it's the tech company's fault. Somehow it's the fault of the rich. I've even heard illegal immigrants blamed. Nobody ever seems to think there might be something going on in the south that is driving away the best and the brightest.
  - crowbahr 9y ago
    I moved away from the south because: 1. Few job prospects 2. Terrible transit 3. Disagreeable politics 4. Hot In that order. I moved to Seattle (which didn't really fix #2) and much preferred it. Born and raised in Atlanta but no desire to stay. Off to NYC in a few months to see what I think!
    - umanwizard 9y ago
      NYC has terrible transit but still better than anywhere else in the US. Welcome!
    - someguydave 9y ago
      Do you help reduce polarization by speaking well about the people of Georgia?
      - 9y ago
labster 9y ago
I'd like to be thank the submitter for modifying the title of the article for HN. The original title refers to social class, but nearly the entire discussion thereafter is about economic class.
rumcajz 9y ago
Interesting book to read on the topic is Charles Murray's Coming Apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) Very much like this article, Murray focuses only on US, however, this is a global trend. A person born in Koškovce, Slovakia will move to Košice for high school, to Bratislava to attend college, they'll find their first job in Prague, second one in London and after a short while they'll arrive at San Francisco. It wouldn't take a big stretch of imagination to write a dystopian Sci-Fi about a future where members of Mensa live in extremely liberal city states in Bay Area while the dumb are gradually pushed out to failing hellholes with mad dictators in control.
- internetman55 9y ago
  Fund it!
- madengr 9y ago
  The movie Elysium was essentially that. Though you did not mention the homeless population in the Bay Area. Wealth does not make a place clean; the Bay Area is filthy. Of course that’s liberalism for you.
  - thrav 9y ago
    The filthy parts are well known and mostly keep to themselves. The non-filthy parts are some of the most beautiful city living in the world, with outdoors access that rivals a resort town. (I lived in Park City before)
    - exolymph 9y ago
      Are you kidding? Have you been to SOMA?
internetman55 9y ago
Charles murray has a whole book abiut this stuff (Coming Apart) and its lit
csense 9y ago
So how do we reverse this trend? How do we get more educated people to choose to move to, or stay in, the Rust Belt?

148 points by clumsysmurf 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

I wonder what happens as things get worse and the foreign money dries up?

gcb0 9y ago
you get a new rustbelt

niftich 9y ago

This data is great to back up processes one can empirically observe -- none of this was a particular shocker, but the data quantifies the relative differences between metros' fates very well, such as Chicago punching above its weight in terms of balancing affordability with desirability among the highly-educated. In my opinion, the one surprise is Pittsburgh's particular set of circumstances: in-migrants being less educated than out-migrants, but this can be an artifact of Pittsburgh being a destination for education, which then struggles to attract higher numbers of well-educated to stay or relocate there for work.

nugget 9y ago
UPMC educates so many medical professionals it's not surprising that there's an imbalance. I don't think Pittsburgh could absorb all of those MDs even if they wanted to stick around (which most don't). I'm surprised Boston isn't similar.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  There likely is an imbalance for MDs specifically, but Boston has a sizable VC-fueled tech community that can absorb non-MD grads.
- Texasian 9y ago
  Boston is similar. With so many universities, local leaders are always bemoaning he fact that more of them don’t stay. For any type of specialized field, we’ve got the school... in triplicate. God knows how many law schools and business schools we’ve got scattered around the metro area.

Thriptic 9y ago

Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities. Boston's immediately adjacent suburbs like Cambridge and Somerville are filled with crappy run down houses converted to apartments serving 2-3 users or groups. No one likes them besides the landlords, they are generally of shitty quality / falling apart, and they are extremely expensive. If they were bulldozed and replaced with high rise apartments, costs would greatly fall. Similarly, if the T didn't suck so much and serviced outlying communities, people could more easily live farther away from the city proper, which would also reduce pressures on the city and proximal suburbs to support everyone.

existencebox 9y ago
Out of personal curiosity: I was in Boston for a while maybe 10-12 years ago, and remember thinking that the T was so far beyond what most other cities had, and served even the outlying areas well enough via the bus connections. (And I was previously from Philly, so no stranger to decent public transit) In that context I'm surprised to hear you say that the T sucks. Is it that my memory is far out of date with respect to how the city grew? Or are my standards very low? (Also viable is that I was lucky in that the routes I needed to take were well served, usually starting from Cambridge) To give another point of comparison, in Seattle now, I would give an arm and a leg for something even roughly comparable to my memory of the T, let alone SEPTA/subways. Baltimore was similar, in having little to nothing outside of unreliable and sparse buses, and token light rail only along 1-2 "primary" corridors.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 9y ago
  (I grew up in Boston but now live in Silicon Valley.) The T has great coverage but shitty service. Boston is second only to NYC in terms of the fraction of the city that you can get to via public transit. The Red Line covers most of the densely-populated Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge neighborhoods, runs straight into the heart of the city, and then services even the lower-income neighborhoods in Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan/Quincy. The Green Line covers the whole Back Bay and Brookline area. Orange Line will get you up to Tufts & Medford, and Blue Line covers North & East Boston. All of these except the outer reaches of the Green Line have reasonable transit times. By contrast, SF has good public transit if you happen to live in the BART corridor through Mission & Market streets, or around 4th & King or Potrero. But if you're in the Sunset, Presidio, Pac Heights, North Beach, Twin Peaks & highlands, Excelsior, or really anywhere else - you can forget about it. It takes as long to get from the Outer Sunset to Downtown as it does to get from Mountain View, 50 miles away, to SF. However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.

throwaway713 9y ago

As someone that lives in the south, this trend is extremely frustrating. A few weeks ago I visited SF for an interview, and it seems like every tech company on earth is in that one spot. The whole city feels 20 years ahead of where I presently live. But all of my family is in the south, so I’m stuck with the unfortunate tradeoff of choosing to focus on my career or living near family. Because it sure doesn’t look like the tech companies are moving where I am any time soon (with the hopeful exception of Amazon HQ2).

dnomad 9y ago
I always wonder why nobody asks why this sort is happening. There's a kind of willful ignorance at work here. Are the highly educated and the knowledge economy moving to cities because they like the beach? Or is there something else attracting them? What's even stranger is the blame. Somehow it's the tech company's fault. Somehow it's the fault of the rich. I've even heard illegal immigrants blamed. Nobody ever seems to think there might be something going on in the south that is driving away the best and the brightest.
- crowbahr 9y ago
  I moved away from the south because: 1. Few job prospects 2. Terrible transit 3. Disagreeable politics 4. Hot In that order. I moved to Seattle (which didn't really fix #2) and much preferred it. Born and raised in Atlanta but no desire to stay. Off to NYC in a few months to see what I think!
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    NYC has terrible transit but still better than anywhere else in the US. Welcome!
  - someguydave 9y ago
    Do you help reduce polarization by speaking well about the people of Georgia?
    - 9y ago

labster 9y ago

I'd like to be thank the submitter for modifying the title of the article for HN. The original title refers to social class, but nearly the entire discussion thereafter is about economic class.

rumcajz 9y ago

Interesting book to read on the topic is Charles Murray's Coming Apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book) Very much like this article, Murray focuses only on US, however, this is a global trend. A person born in Koškovce, Slovakia will move to Košice for high school, to Bratislava to attend college, they'll find their first job in Prague, second one in London and after a short while they'll arrive at San Francisco. It wouldn't take a big stretch of imagination to write a dystopian Sci-Fi about a future where members of Mensa live in extremely liberal city states in Bay Area while the dumb are gradually pushed out to failing hellholes with mad dictators in control.

internetman55 9y ago
Fund it!
madengr 9y ago
The movie Elysium was essentially that. Though you did not mention the homeless population in the Bay Area. Wealth does not make a place clean; the Bay Area is filthy. Of course that’s liberalism for you.
- thrav 9y ago
  The filthy parts are well known and mostly keep to themselves. The non-filthy parts are some of the most beautiful city living in the world, with outdoors access that rivals a resort town. (I lived in Park City before)
  - exolymph 9y ago
    Are you kidding? Have you been to SOMA?

internetman55 9y ago

Charles murray has a whole book abiut this stuff (Coming Apart) and its lit

csense 9y ago

So how do we reverse this trend? How do we get more educated people to choose to move to, or stay in, the Rust Belt?