5 ms·

I mean, do you want a specific number? Because if you go to the Wikipedia page for "List of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas", you'll see the following Amaril

I mean, do you want a specific number? Because if you go to the Wikipedia page for "List of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas", you'll see the following Amarillo TX population: 265,000 NY, LA, CHI, DAL, HOU, DC, MIA: 70,000,000

atburrow 8y ago
21.5% is not what I would consider “most of the population”.
- aaomidi 8y ago
  Well he's not considering in a lot of the other cities that have the same problem. Example: Philadelphia and its suburbs.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Additionally, there's only 144m people employed in the USA according to BLS, so 70 million is half the country :)
    - mac01021 8y ago
      Except that 70 million probably contains a lot of people not in the workforce. So it's not "apples to apples".
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        Then assume 50-60% are working and include the addition multi-million person metropoles I left out like BOS PHI PHX etc
        bzbarsky 8y ago
        Assuming that 50-60% of the population of cities is working is probably too high. As a simple example, the third table at https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/table01.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t... data for New York City for 2016. Total population is 8,537,673. Population under 18 is 1,798,888. Population over 64 is 1,155,075. That's 35% of the population right there. Some of them might be working, of course. For the kids, this is not likely to be more than 10% (which would be _all_ the 16 and 17 year olds, pretty much). For the seniors, let's guess 33% (pretty much everyone under 70). That leaves 28% of the population in the kid-or-senior age range and not-working and 7% in the kid-or-senior age range and working. To get to 50% overall working with those assumptions, you need 43% of the population to be prime age and working. The prime age population is 65% of the total. So you need 43/65 = 66% of the 18-65 age population working. But in 2017 (yes, I know, a year later; I haven't found the 2016 equivalent) https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/economic/labor-force-trends-nys-2017.pdf https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/economic/labor-force-tre... claims a labor force participation rate of just about 60% for NYC (see page numbered 14 in the document, page 17 of the PDF). And that's the rate for 25-64, which should be higher than the 18-64 rate, because as the document notes "people between the ages of 16 and 24 are more likely to be in high school or college". Page 15 of the document (page 18 of the PDF) does show labor force participation rates for 16-24 and 65+ in New York State and our "33%" above for seniors was likely a significant overestimate based on that, though it's hard to tell: NYC labor force participation may not match the overall state very well, obviously. Anyway, under the (imo optimistic) assumptions above, something like 45% of the overall population of NYC is in the labor force. Or in other words if you ignore the 18% of the population that is children under 15, it's about 55%. So your estimate was pretty close if you ignore the existence of kids... Or put another way, if the prime-age labor force participation rate is 60%, there's no way that 60% of the overall population is working. Just not possible.
        anoncoward111 8y ago
        I appreciate your statistics but I'm not quite sure how they are related to our discussion. Most of the kids in NY state are living under the care and support of their parents and aren't working, therefore they shouldn't even be a factor in population/labor force participation metric. Additionally, many of the old people who aren't working shouldn't be factored in either because they are receiving quite high pensions to live from, as well as social security. When you factor this in, my initial ratios still stand. Out of the 325m people living in the USA, 45% are working (145m). When subtracting the 30% of Americans who are retired or under the care of parents, you are removing 100m people. Therefore, as you say, the "prime age" labor force participation rate is 65% (145m/225m). Applying this ratio to my original numbers, 45.5 million people are laborers in the Northeast. The other 25m either used to be laborers or are protected financially by laborers. We cannot possibly say that an area like Amarillo TX, with just 100,000 laborers, is indicative of some nationally sustainable trend where cost of living is cheap and wages are still high. This denies the existence of an extremely large block of humans, who are struggling despite earning decent money.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    Even without considering other cities, we're starting to stretch the definition of "a select few"
hueving 8y ago
It's easy to find decent living on $60k in DAL, HOU, CHI, and MIA if you're willing to go out to the suburbs where, guess what, tons of people live.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Even if there are millions of people (out of the 7m in Dallas) who are supposedly prospering on Texas' favorable housing/gas/income tax situation, this statistically is not the case in higher tax locations, such as the entire Northeast USA, Chicago, and all of California. Believe me, I want all of us to be like Texas.
  - extra88 8y ago
    Taxation by the states is not people’s problems in the Northeast and “Northeast” contains a lot of variance in cost of living and economic outlook.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      How can you possibly assert this when property taxes in the Tri-State (23 million people) are often $10,000 a year per house, and income is taxed at 5-9% compared to Texas which is 0. The price of rent/mortgage is directly affected by property tax.
      - extra88 8y ago
        Homeownership is not necessary for well-being. The absolute cost of property taxes in some parts of the Northeast are high because the properties are highly valued. Taxes are not robbery, people in higher taxed areas get more services than low-tax places like Texas. Higher property taxes correlate with higher rent but the inverse can be true when home buying (i.e. a seller can ask more for a home in a low property tax city than an otherwise identically situated high property tax city). The Northeast is a lot more than just the Tri-State area, there are plenty of communities that do no have high property taxes either in absolute terms (because the homes aren't worth much) or as a percentage (either because the areas offer less services or they have so much commercial income that home property taxes can be kept low).
refurb 8y ago
Houston is a place where $60k is enough to buy a house.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Is it enough, or just barely enough? I'm seeing a median home price of 300k per Zillow. In addition to coming up with the 15-60k needed to put a downpayment on the house, you are hit with $2,000 a month in mortgage/insurance. This hardly sounds like a steal to me because it is exactly what I am paying in NY. I make $2200 post tax per month, which is bang on the median income in this area. Half of my money goes to rent, the other half to car/food/health insurance and so on. Were I to lose my job or have kids, the situation would be completely unaffordable in a matter of months as opposed to years, which is the type of cushion the earlier generations had.
  - refurb 8y ago
    Zillows says median home price of $187,000.[1] Where did you get $300K? You could put $30K down and have a monthly payment of under $1,000 per month for mortgage, insurance and taxes. [1]https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/home-values/

atburrow 8y ago

21.5% is not what I would consider “most of the population”.

aaomidi 8y ago
Well he's not considering in a lot of the other cities that have the same problem. Example: Philadelphia and its suburbs.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Additionally, there's only 144m people employed in the USA according to BLS, so 70 million is half the country :)
  - mac01021 8y ago
    Except that 70 million probably contains a lot of people not in the workforce. So it's not "apples to apples".
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Then assume 50-60% are working and include the addition multi-million person metropoles I left out like BOS PHI PHX etc
      - bzbarsky 8y ago
        Assuming that 50-60% of the population of cities is working is probably too high. As a simple example, the third table at https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/table01.htm https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/vital_statistics/2016/t... data for New York City for 2016. Total population is 8,537,673. Population under 18 is 1,798,888. Population over 64 is 1,155,075. That's 35% of the population right there. Some of them might be working, of course. For the kids, this is not likely to be more than 10% (which would be _all_ the 16 and 17 year olds, pretty much). For the seniors, let's guess 33% (pretty much everyone under 70). That leaves 28% of the population in the kid-or-senior age range and not-working and 7% in the kid-or-senior age range and working. To get to 50% overall working with those assumptions, you need 43% of the population to be prime age and working. The prime age population is 65% of the total. So you need 43/65 = 66% of the 18-65 age population working. But in 2017 (yes, I know, a year later; I haven't found the 2016 equivalent) https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/economic/labor-force-trends-nys-2017.pdf https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/economic/labor-force-tre... claims a labor force participation rate of just about 60% for NYC (see page numbered 14 in the document, page 17 of the PDF). And that's the rate for 25-64, which should be higher than the 18-64 rate, because as the document notes "people between the ages of 16 and 24 are more likely to be in high school or college". Page 15 of the document (page 18 of the PDF) does show labor force participation rates for 16-24 and 65+ in New York State and our "33%" above for seniors was likely a significant overestimate based on that, though it's hard to tell: NYC labor force participation may not match the overall state very well, obviously. Anyway, under the (imo optimistic) assumptions above, something like 45% of the overall population of NYC is in the labor force. Or in other words if you ignore the 18% of the population that is children under 15, it's about 55%. So your estimate was pretty close if you ignore the existence of kids... Or put another way, if the prime-age labor force participation rate is 60%, there's no way that 60% of the overall population is working. Just not possible.
        anoncoward111 8y ago
        I appreciate your statistics but I'm not quite sure how they are related to our discussion. Most of the kids in NY state are living under the care and support of their parents and aren't working, therefore they shouldn't even be a factor in population/labor force participation metric. Additionally, many of the old people who aren't working shouldn't be factored in either because they are receiving quite high pensions to live from, as well as social security. When you factor this in, my initial ratios still stand. Out of the 325m people living in the USA, 45% are working (145m). When subtracting the 30% of Americans who are retired or under the care of parents, you are removing 100m people. Therefore, as you say, the "prime age" labor force participation rate is 65% (145m/225m). Applying this ratio to my original numbers, 45.5 million people are laborers in the Northeast. The other 25m either used to be laborers or are protected financially by laborers. We cannot possibly say that an area like Amarillo TX, with just 100,000 laborers, is indicative of some nationally sustainable trend where cost of living is cheap and wages are still high. This denies the existence of an extremely large block of humans, who are struggling despite earning decent money.
- mac01021 8y ago
  Even without considering other cities, we're starting to stretch the definition of "a select few"

hueving 8y ago

It's easy to find decent living on $60k in DAL, HOU, CHI, and MIA if you're willing to go out to the suburbs where, guess what, tons of people live.

anoncoward111 8y ago
Even if there are millions of people (out of the 7m in Dallas) who are supposedly prospering on Texas' favorable housing/gas/income tax situation, this statistically is not the case in higher tax locations, such as the entire Northeast USA, Chicago, and all of California. Believe me, I want all of us to be like Texas.
- extra88 8y ago
  Taxation by the states is not people’s problems in the Northeast and “Northeast” contains a lot of variance in cost of living and economic outlook.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    How can you possibly assert this when property taxes in the Tri-State (23 million people) are often $10,000 a year per house, and income is taxed at 5-9% compared to Texas which is 0. The price of rent/mortgage is directly affected by property tax.
    - extra88 8y ago
      Homeownership is not necessary for well-being. The absolute cost of property taxes in some parts of the Northeast are high because the properties are highly valued. Taxes are not robbery, people in higher taxed areas get more services than low-tax places like Texas. Higher property taxes correlate with higher rent but the inverse can be true when home buying (i.e. a seller can ask more for a home in a low property tax city than an otherwise identically situated high property tax city). The Northeast is a lot more than just the Tri-State area, there are plenty of communities that do no have high property taxes either in absolute terms (because the homes aren't worth much) or as a percentage (either because the areas offer less services or they have so much commercial income that home property taxes can be kept low).

refurb 8y ago

Houston is a place where $60k is enough to buy a house.

anoncoward111 8y ago
Is it enough, or just barely enough? I'm seeing a median home price of 300k per Zillow. In addition to coming up with the 15-60k needed to put a downpayment on the house, you are hit with $2,000 a month in mortgage/insurance. This hardly sounds like a steal to me because it is exactly what I am paying in NY. I make $2200 post tax per month, which is bang on the median income in this area. Half of my money goes to rent, the other half to car/food/health insurance and so on. Were I to lose my job or have kids, the situation would be completely unaffordable in a matter of months as opposed to years, which is the type of cushion the earlier generations had.
- refurb 8y ago
  Zillows says median home price of $187,000.[1] Where did you get $300K? You could put $30K down and have a monthly payment of under $1,000 per month for mortgage, insurance and taxes. [1]https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/home-values/ https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/home-values/