12 ms·

America, Stop Moving West

38 points by bhalina 5y ago

jcims 5y ago
You can move west without moving to a desert. I’m in San Diego for a bit. It’s been in the low 70’s and climate control consists of opening or closing the windows. Meanwhile back home in the midwest I’m trying to coordinate someone to be at my house while the HVAC folks replace the compressor in my heat pump. I was going to wait until we got back but the temps are getting so high we’re concerned our fish are going to die.
- ChainOfFools 5y ago
  san diego long time resident here. the city has the climate you describe only by virtue of it being centered almost entirely within a coastal scrub biome about 20-30 miles wide. it's a sweet spot both created by and geographically impacted within the enclosure of a low coastal range immediately east, beyond which things get very hot and barren almost immediately. this strip exists in some form for most of the so cal coastline up through roughly the central coast, where the mountain range edges up to the water line itself. it's just not anywhere near enough land. Too narrow, and much of the land is impractical to live within outside of retirement or vacation circumstances (not even considering that vast swathes are on military property). It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.
  - khuey 5y ago
    > It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established. Sure it can, if it were built at any remotely reasonable density. But there are plenty of people deeply invested in that not happening who already live there.
  - jcims 5y ago
    Understood, i spent the weekend roaming around Borrego Springs. My broader point is that there is a lot of land in ’the west’ that doesn’t meet the criteria that the author is talking about. Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado all have attractive destinations that aren’t (literally or practically) the desert. Also, anecdotally it seems many of the folks migrating to Austin are actually moving east. The point the author is making is legit, I’m just engaging in the time honored tradition of roasting bad titles.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  >You can move west without moving to a desert. is San Diego really different from LA water (or climate) wise?
  - eindiran 5y ago
    The difference is that what people think of as LA includes a huge number of suburbs that push out quite far east into the desert. So if you are in Santa Monica or Malibu, the climate is very comparable to coastal San Diego. If you drive out on the 10 for a ways, its going to get brutally hot and arid quite fast. Water-wise, San Diego also gets a lot of its water from the Colorado river, but it has a desalination plant as well. I'm not sure how much impact that has on the water situation there.
- eindiran 5y ago
  San Diego (the city) barely escapes the semi-arid/arid designation, placing it slightly within the CSa / Mediterranean climate[0] designation. But it is surrounded by BSh areas (the Sonoran desert and California chaparral) - by area, I'd guess most of San Diego county is BSh. So unless you want to live right next to the coast (and can afford to), Southern California is mostly desert. San Diego itself really does have an amazing climate though. [0] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...
- sjg007 5y ago
  Technically San Diego is in a desert.
cratermoon 5y ago
Or south: Texas from the Gulf Coast to the Hill Country, New Orleans, Miami...
- jdavis703 5y ago
  The article calls out Austin and Miami as risky places to move. It should probably be called “Americans, stop moving out of the north east.”
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Yeah, people living on the west coast read this as "stop seasteading." Which is actually good advice
  - zzzzzzzza 5y ago
    i dont think they thought it through very well... more gulf coast heat = more water for austin
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      How do you figure?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    It mentions Seattle as being potentially a good place, if it built more housing. That's sort of not true because it's at sea level, but sort of true because it's hilly.
nyokodo 5y ago
> How did we become so divorced from reality? Before criticizing those seeking a better life in questionable directions first ask why are they motivated to do so in the first place? This pattern predates COVID, what is the problem in the North East that is causing people to move south west? Answer that and you might have a clue as to why the migration is happening and what to do about it.
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Right...and isn't the reality that a country as rich as America can afford to have people live in places which aren't directly compatible with life? Power and water seem to be the most important aspects regarding quality of life. I'm not worried about power because the southwest has tons of solar power available. And I'm not worried about water in the southwest because, yes, the Colorado river is oversubscribed, but only about 10-15% of it is used for residential use. The bulk of it goes to agricultural uses who are greatly underpaying for their water access and using it to grow ridiculous crops like cotton in Arizona. If there ever really was a crunch, those water rights would be obtained to let people drink and shower instead of to grow those crops (either through buying out, or just straight highway robbery).
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    America is a country run by rich people for rich people, not a rich country. Saying "America is a rich country" is a classic demonstration of the difference between median and mean in statistics.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Do you think Phoenix is full of rich people? And yet, there they are, in the middle of the desert, somehow not all dying of thirst while the 1% waters their multi-acre front lawn.
    - sologoub 5y ago
      For US Median ~63k vs mean ~73k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_Unit... Germany (typically used as an example of a wealthy country in EU) is ~49k mean (average), so US has higher median and mean income than Germany. One can get into services, etc, but still US is a rich country. Once you get much past north west of EU, things get decidedly poor. While situation is not ideal in the US, most Americans have considerably more luxuries in their lives (in other words higher consumption of goods and services). Whether we are consuming and prioritizing the wrong things is a different question, and I suspect your criticism is more aimed at what do we actually get in return for this wealth/consumption.
nomy99 5y ago
Moving to Chicago from nyc because of lower rent
spoonjim 5y ago
Having moved from Boston to California — I’m never going to miss frozen hair, chipping ice off the sidewalk, and going for walks in shopping malls.
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  Right, like, suggesting people move to Albany or Pittsburg or Worcester, without mentioning that the winters are incredibly tough and that colder climates are another aspect of global warming, strikes me as incredibly naive.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    “Incredibly tough” is overstating a bit. Winter isn’t that bad in any of those places. Not like Saint Paul or Maine or parts of Canada.
- v0x 5y ago
  The article repeatedly calls out Miami for being the hottest city in the country. I've never been to Miami, but it looks like averages in the 70s and 80s year-round. I'd take that any day over having to put up with the blizzards, shoveling snow off my driveway and car, etc. that I did in Omaha.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Miami is sickeningly hot in the summer, regardless of what the numbers say.
    - bavell 5y ago
      It's the humidity that makes it so bad. You're basically sweating after a few minutes outside, even at 80-85F.
- elevenoh 5y ago
  You might miss the air quality however.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
> For the climate-friendly but less glamorous northern cities like Albany, Worcester, and Pittsburg, a successful marketing campaign could make them the climate-proof cities of the future. Putting aside any of the climate change arguments, suggesting that successful marketing could make Albany a “city of the future” is absurd. I don’t know what you would have to pay me to be willing to live in Albany, ever, let alone during the winter — but it would be a lot. Like, at least $1.5m a year. And even then, I’m going to be taking many bad for the environment flights to NYC or a more desirable western city as often as possible. I abhor the Midwest (although Chicago, Boulder, and Denver are some exceptions), but if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota or even Indiana before I would live in Albany. The article also seems to ignore non-coastal western and southern cities that aren’t as deeply impacted by climate change. Yeah, Phoenix and Las Vegas might be fucked, but Denver? Salt Lake City? It says “don’t move west,” but also mentions Seattle, NYC, and Boston and places that need to still concentrate on affordable housing to be attractive — which as a person who has lived in NYC and Seattle, I can tell you housing/rent hasn’t been affordable in NYC compared to the rest of the world in decades and Seattle is getting less and less affordable (I pay more in rent than all but one of my NYC friends and her mortgage is a monthly figure that would make even most New Yorkers choke), housing isn’t affordable because it doesn’t have to be.
- danans 5y ago
  > but if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota That's as crass as when the 45th president of the US described entire countries like that.
  - stevehawk 5y ago
    clearly you've never been to Albany or Somalia /s
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- LargeWu 5y ago
  "if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota" Minnesota is a shithole? As a Minneapolis resident for 20 years now, that's news to me.
yuy910616 5y ago
A lot of hot air: People move to these cities because of PR and marketing? It seems like it is the author who is divorced from reality. Is there study on marketing dollar to population growth? Do mega cluster exists because of superior marketing? A more convincing argument would be that policy attracts talent and business, and locations with bad weather is more likely to have better policy. That and serendipity - Michael Dell and William Shockley come to mind
adarsh_p 5y ago
> Arizona: Beautiful but not made for humans. That's a photograph of Monument Valley in Utah...
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Monument Valley is kind of at the border, but IIUC more in Arizona than in Utah.
- wesleyfsmith 5y ago
  Hahha I noticed that too....
egypturnash 5y ago
Americans Have Options. So Why Do They Go West and South? I spent about seventeen years in the north. I came pretty close to offing myself due to seasonal depression. There's a not-insignificant chance that New Orleans will end up drowning before the end of my expected GenX lifetime but I'm still gonna enjoy the rest of life several orders of magnitude than if I'd stayed in Boston or Seattle. Even if it ends in that flood.
- burlesona 5y ago
  I will say, New Orleans is really underrated. I understand the flood risk and it would make me nervous too, but what a great city. Perhaps there’s a way to keep the core city above water long-term?
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Ha, it's about five feet below sea level already and the way we use the land and river just makes it keep on slowly sinking even without factoring in rising seas. Really the bigger worry is heavier/longer hurricane season meaning more chances for one to fill up the bowl of the city, especially with the pumps and their generators being increasingly in need of maintenance - right now there's barely enough of the power system online to keep them running if the cyclone coming up the gulf at us decides to dump an asston of rain, for instance. Or maybe the Mississippi will finally triumph over the Army Corps of Engineers and start going down the Atchafalya, like it's been wanting to do for most of my life, and then a significant part of the city's revenue dries up. Ain't nothin' permanent anyway. Any given hurricane could be The One, and everyone in town knows it, and that's part of why we have such big parties. Enjoy it while it lasts.
- sys_64738 5y ago
  NE cities are having milder winters. Climate change isn’t bad for everyone.
exporectomy 5y ago
She doesn't actually make any logical arguments for her conclusions except contradicting herself. Triple the risk of drought in a place that's already a desert? Obviously drought isn't a can't-live-there problem. Even Miami is getting a sea wall to protect it. Increased this and more of that? How much more? Enough that people won't live there or not enough to matter or enough to be worth the lower real estate prices? Also people move to places to live there today, not suffer a bad life just so their house will be worth more in 50 years.
hamburgerwah 5y ago
This has to be one of the sillier things I've ever seen. Highlighted in the article is Phoenix arizona in Maricopa County which is one of the most responsibly managed metropolitan areas in the country if not the world. More than 50% of the power derived from nuclear at Palos Verdes just 45 miles from the city which evaporates wastewater to drive turbines and provide cooling. Another 14% from solar. Plumbed grey water throughout 80% of the metropolitan area. Per-capita water used declined by 20% over the past 40 years. Net groundwater contributor with 100 year plan for water usage anticipating drought conditions. This is actually the picture of a sustainable metropolitan area with low taxes and high quality of life. Meanwhile the author lives in a city (somerville, ma) which routinely dumps its sewage and into the nearest rivers, in a part of the country that burns diesel to stay warm for months out of the year and where without a precision engineered weather suit between dec and may you will die from just being outside. I'm not saying 118 is for everyone but if you have shade you won't die. Just comically out of touch.
- mempko 5y ago
  Highest eviction rates in the country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0qf0dv6jjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0qf0dv6jjE
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Are there any statistics on homelessness per city? There seems to be a rise in homelessness in Atlanta as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a country-wide thing for big cities.
- adamvalve 5y ago
  If you move to Phoenix now and plan to live in your house for 30 years, then you are going to have a bad time because Phoenix will be unlivable if there aren’t drastic measures put in place. 118 is the ceiling now. Not the ceiling forever.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    I think many of the people moving there (retirees) actually don't plan to even be alive in 30 years. :-/
Tiktaalik 5y ago
> Though real estate investment groups are often blamed for the lack of affordable housing, the real problem is restrictive building laws — especially in desirable, liberal, and highly regulated cities. > The above-listed places are cheap because they have lots of land and few regulations... Being clear here there's a difference between what "building more housing" means in SF, Seattle etc, that is, densifying existing detached homes and creating a compact city, and what is means in Vegas, Phoenix and other places, which is unsustainable, endless, automobile dependent sprawl. The former a much more politically challenging thing as it means pushing back against the "American Dream" of a detached home and white picket fence. Adding yet another house on the edge is of course quite easy. This sprawl is part of what is driving the doom of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Woefully inefficient sprawl, absurdly large highways and countless CO2 emitting cars. I'm sure electric cars will help, but it's gonna be a tough transition to there and the energy needs will be incredible. What really needs to happen is to stop sprawling and rebuild these cities, but who knows if the genie can be put back into the bottle there.
- void_mint 5y ago
  "Building more housing" in SF, Seattle, etc means building apartment complexes whose cost is restrictive enough such that only those that aren't experiencing a housing crisis can afford them.
  - Tiktaalik 5y ago
    Yes, and having the option to rent those nice brand new apartments means the wealthy are a lot less likely to compete with the less wealthy over the same shitty 40 year old apartments. More vacancy is a big win for someone who can only afford a 40 year old apartment.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  "Desirable" and "highly regulated" are a contradiction for a fair number of people...
megaman821 5y ago
The author talks about climate change, but it seems he doesn't know that cold-weather cities use more energy in heating than hot-weather cities use in cooling. Also the energy sources used in heating (oil, propane and natural gas) contribute more to global warming than the electricity energy mix used for cooling. The north-east is going to have an expensive reckoning as they build billions of dollars of off-shore windfarms to start catching up to the renewable energy production that is already in the Southern US, and also the tens of millions of households that will need to replace their furnaces and boilers with heat pumps to stop burning fossil fuels to heat their homes.
addison-lee 5y ago
I love how this “article” completely glosses over the fact that the northeast/Midwest gets devastating snowstorms that cripple entire states for days at a time. These “polar vortexes” are clearly becoming more severe and more common as the earth’s weather continues to spiral out of control. So the options are move somewhere where it’s hell on earth for a portion of the year, move somewhere where it’s a frozen wasteland for a portion of the year, or move somewhere temperate along the coast which is also going to be impacted by climate change. Author should get off their high horse.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  The Polar Vortex has definitely become a regular (annual?) occurrence in the central US. What should scare Texans is that this year it only came 5-10% further south than “normal”. But you have to remember - it is bringing air down from the arctic circle - this air is as cold as it gets. It’s not getting colder over the next few decades. It’s ludicrous to expect that there will be a region in the world that will be unaffected by climate change over the next 5 decades. There are going to be negative effects everywhere. But some places are going to be worse than others, and the southern half of the US is going to be worse off than the northern half of the US. I personally think that we are 10-20 years away from the point at which climate migration makes sense for the smart money, with ready buyers of the property you want to leave behind. Put a reminder in your calendar and go about your life.
munificent 5y ago
This is a fascinating article because at the surface level it appears to be high quality information. It looks nice. It's well written. It speaks in the kind of sweeping generalities and economic lingo that give it an air of authority. But by the time I got about 3/4 of the way through, I realized that this was basically just some random blogger's opinion piece with little to no research or data to back it up. It falls apart if you squint at it. First of all, the title implies that some general directional trend is at play, but then cherrypicks just a couple of cities. I'm not sure how Miami of all places is a good example of people moving west. Also, attributing the success of the handful of cherrypicked cities to "marketing" is... bizarre. These are actual places with actual history that people can form real opinions of based on what the place is actually like to live in. People don't live in Austin because someone told them to live in Austin. They live there because they love it, a property they are able to accurately perceive for themselves independent of marketing telling them what to think. I don't like to be negative online but this article is just not very good.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  It's also content marketing for a content marketer who is talking her book. "Writer, growth hacker, and crypto enthusiast based on the East Coast", and her Substack is titled "Confessions of Reluctant Marketing Guru." More power to her for going out and hustling, but understand that it - just like it's purported solution - is just marketing.
alwaysanon 5y ago
This is why some of the rustbelt cities like the one I grew up in (Buffalo, NY) will have a resurgence at some point. They have affordable housing, good infrastructure bones (including green hydro power from Niagara Falls), are on one of the world's largest sources of fresh water in the Great Lakes and have direct flights to most cities you'd need to get to for work when required. While the few months of winter rather suck, it is easier to deal with a few months of winter than these 115 degree summer days the article talks about (heating, an extra layer or two of clothing, etc.). Buffalo also has being on the Canadian border and being an hour and a half from Toronto going for it. I moved to Sydney, Australia to be with my Aussie wife (who wants to stay here) but I see several of my friends who had moved away moving back to Buffalo to be around family and buying a house for cash under these remote work conditions - and if I was States-side I'd be considering it too...
transfire 5y ago
Run a water pipeline from Miami to Phoenix. We do such things for oil. Both problems solved.

38 points by bhalina 5y ago

You can move west without moving to a desert. I’m in San Diego for a bit. It’s been in the low 70’s and climate control consists of opening or closing the windows. Meanwhile back home in the midwest I’m trying to coordinate someone to be at my house while the HVAC folks replace the compressor in my heat pump. I was going to wait until we got back but the temps are getting so high we’re concerned our fish are going to die.

ChainOfFools 5y ago
san diego long time resident here. the city has the climate you describe only by virtue of it being centered almost entirely within a coastal scrub biome about 20-30 miles wide. it's a sweet spot both created by and geographically impacted within the enclosure of a low coastal range immediately east, beyond which things get very hot and barren almost immediately. this strip exists in some form for most of the so cal coastline up through roughly the central coast, where the mountain range edges up to the water line itself. it's just not anywhere near enough land. Too narrow, and much of the land is impractical to live within outside of retirement or vacation circumstances (not even considering that vast swathes are on military property). It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.
- khuey 5y ago
  > It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established. Sure it can, if it were built at any remotely reasonable density. But there are plenty of people deeply invested in that not happening who already live there.
- jcims 5y ago
  Understood, i spent the weekend roaming around Borrego Springs. My broader point is that there is a lot of land in ’the west’ that doesn’t meet the criteria that the author is talking about. Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado all have attractive destinations that aren’t (literally or practically) the desert. Also, anecdotally it seems many of the folks migrating to Austin are actually moving east. The point the author is making is legit, I’m just engaging in the time honored tradition of roasting bad titles.
vineyardmike 5y ago
>You can move west without moving to a desert. is San Diego really different from LA water (or climate) wise?
- eindiran 5y ago
  The difference is that what people think of as LA includes a huge number of suburbs that push out quite far east into the desert. So if you are in Santa Monica or Malibu, the climate is very comparable to coastal San Diego. If you drive out on the 10 for a ways, its going to get brutally hot and arid quite fast. Water-wise, San Diego also gets a lot of its water from the Colorado river, but it has a desalination plant as well. I'm not sure how much impact that has on the water situation there.
eindiran 5y ago
San Diego (the city) barely escapes the semi-arid/arid designation, placing it slightly within the CSa / Mediterranean climate[0] designation. But it is surrounded by BSh areas (the Sonoran desert and California chaparral) - by area, I'd guess most of San Diego county is BSh. So unless you want to live right next to the coast (and can afford to), Southern California is mostly desert. San Diego itself really does have an amazing climate though. [0] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classifica...
sjg007 5y ago
Technically San Diego is in a desert.

cratermoon 5y ago

Or south: Texas from the Gulf Coast to the Hill Country, New Orleans, Miami...

jdavis703 5y ago
The article calls out Austin and Miami as risky places to move. It should probably be called “Americans, stop moving out of the north east.”
- klyrs 5y ago
  Yeah, people living on the west coast read this as "stop seasteading." Which is actually good advice
- zzzzzzzza 5y ago
  i dont think they thought it through very well... more gulf coast heat = more water for austin
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    How do you figure?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cratermoon 5y ago
  It mentions Seattle as being potentially a good place, if it built more housing. That's sort of not true because it's at sea level, but sort of true because it's hilly.

nyokodo 5y ago

> How did we become so divorced from reality? Before criticizing those seeking a better life in questionable directions first ask why are they motivated to do so in the first place? This pattern predates COVID, what is the problem in the North East that is causing people to move south west? Answer that and you might have a clue as to why the migration is happening and what to do about it.

oh_sigh 5y ago
Right...and isn't the reality that a country as rich as America can afford to have people live in places which aren't directly compatible with life? Power and water seem to be the most important aspects regarding quality of life. I'm not worried about power because the southwest has tons of solar power available. And I'm not worried about water in the southwest because, yes, the Colorado river is oversubscribed, but only about 10-15% of it is used for residential use. The bulk of it goes to agricultural uses who are greatly underpaying for their water access and using it to grow ridiculous crops like cotton in Arizona. If there ever really was a crunch, those water rights would be obtained to let people drink and shower instead of to grow those crops (either through buying out, or just straight highway robbery).
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  America is a country run by rich people for rich people, not a rich country. Saying "America is a rich country" is a classic demonstration of the difference between median and mean in statistics.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Do you think Phoenix is full of rich people? And yet, there they are, in the middle of the desert, somehow not all dying of thirst while the 1% waters their multi-acre front lawn.
  - sologoub 5y ago
    For US Median ~63k vs mean ~73k: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_Unit... Germany (typically used as an example of a wealthy country in EU) is ~49k mean (average), so US has higher median and mean income than Germany. One can get into services, etc, but still US is a rich country. Once you get much past north west of EU, things get decidedly poor. While situation is not ideal in the US, most Americans have considerably more luxuries in their lives (in other words higher consumption of goods and services). Whether we are consuming and prioritizing the wrong things is a different question, and I suspect your criticism is more aimed at what do we actually get in return for this wealth/consumption.

nomy99 5y ago

Moving to Chicago from nyc because of lower rent

spoonjim 5y ago

Having moved from Boston to California — I’m never going to miss frozen hair, chipping ice off the sidewalk, and going for walks in shopping malls.

filmgirlcw 5y ago
Right, like, suggesting people move to Albany or Pittsburg or Worcester, without mentioning that the winters are incredibly tough and that colder climates are another aspect of global warming, strikes me as incredibly naive.
- wffurr 5y ago
  “Incredibly tough” is overstating a bit. Winter isn’t that bad in any of those places. Not like Saint Paul or Maine or parts of Canada.
v0x 5y ago
The article repeatedly calls out Miami for being the hottest city in the country. I've never been to Miami, but it looks like averages in the 70s and 80s year-round. I'd take that any day over having to put up with the blizzards, shoveling snow off my driveway and car, etc. that I did in Omaha.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Miami is sickeningly hot in the summer, regardless of what the numbers say.
  - bavell 5y ago
    It's the humidity that makes it so bad. You're basically sweating after a few minutes outside, even at 80-85F.
elevenoh 5y ago
You might miss the air quality however.

filmgirlcw 5y ago

> For the climate-friendly but less glamorous northern cities like Albany, Worcester, and Pittsburg, a successful marketing campaign could make them the climate-proof cities of the future. Putting aside any of the climate change arguments, suggesting that successful marketing could make Albany a “city of the future” is absurd. I don’t know what you would have to pay me to be willing to live in Albany, ever, let alone during the winter — but it would be a lot. Like, at least $1.5m a year. And even then, I’m going to be taking many bad for the environment flights to NYC or a more desirable western city as often as possible. I abhor the Midwest (although Chicago, Boulder, and Denver are some exceptions), but if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota or even Indiana before I would live in Albany. The article also seems to ignore non-coastal western and southern cities that aren’t as deeply impacted by climate change. Yeah, Phoenix and Las Vegas might be fucked, but Denver? Salt Lake City? It says “don’t move west,” but also mentions Seattle, NYC, and Boston and places that need to still concentrate on affordable housing to be attractive — which as a person who has lived in NYC and Seattle, I can tell you housing/rent hasn’t been affordable in NYC compared to the rest of the world in decades and Seattle is getting less and less affordable (I pay more in rent than all but one of my NYC friends and her mortgage is a monthly figure that would make even most New Yorkers choke), housing isn’t affordable because it doesn’t have to be.

danans 5y ago
> but if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota That's as crass as when the 45th president of the US described entire countries like that.
- stevehawk 5y ago
  clearly you've never been to Albany or Somalia /s
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
LargeWu 5y ago
"if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota" Minnesota is a shithole? As a Minneapolis resident for 20 years now, that's news to me.

yuy910616 5y ago

A lot of hot air: People move to these cities because of PR and marketing? It seems like it is the author who is divorced from reality. Is there study on marketing dollar to population growth? Do mega cluster exists because of superior marketing? A more convincing argument would be that policy attracts talent and business, and locations with bad weather is more likely to have better policy. That and serendipity - Michael Dell and William Shockley come to mind

adarsh_p 5y ago

> Arizona: Beautiful but not made for humans. That's a photograph of Monument Valley in Utah...

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Monument Valley is kind of at the border, but IIUC more in Arizona than in Utah.
wesleyfsmith 5y ago
Hahha I noticed that too....

egypturnash 5y ago

Americans Have Options. So Why Do They Go West and South? I spent about seventeen years in the north. I came pretty close to offing myself due to seasonal depression. There's a not-insignificant chance that New Orleans will end up drowning before the end of my expected GenX lifetime but I'm still gonna enjoy the rest of life several orders of magnitude than if I'd stayed in Boston or Seattle. Even if it ends in that flood.

burlesona 5y ago
I will say, New Orleans is really underrated. I understand the flood risk and it would make me nervous too, but what a great city. Perhaps there’s a way to keep the core city above water long-term?
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Ha, it's about five feet below sea level already and the way we use the land and river just makes it keep on slowly sinking even without factoring in rising seas. Really the bigger worry is heavier/longer hurricane season meaning more chances for one to fill up the bowl of the city, especially with the pumps and their generators being increasingly in need of maintenance - right now there's barely enough of the power system online to keep them running if the cyclone coming up the gulf at us decides to dump an asston of rain, for instance. Or maybe the Mississippi will finally triumph over the Army Corps of Engineers and start going down the Atchafalya, like it's been wanting to do for most of my life, and then a significant part of the city's revenue dries up. Ain't nothin' permanent anyway. Any given hurricane could be The One, and everyone in town knows it, and that's part of why we have such big parties. Enjoy it while it lasts.
sys_64738 5y ago
NE cities are having milder winters. Climate change isn’t bad for everyone.

exporectomy 5y ago

She doesn't actually make any logical arguments for her conclusions except contradicting herself. Triple the risk of drought in a place that's already a desert? Obviously drought isn't a can't-live-there problem. Even Miami is getting a sea wall to protect it. Increased this and more of that? How much more? Enough that people won't live there or not enough to matter or enough to be worth the lower real estate prices? Also people move to places to live there today, not suffer a bad life just so their house will be worth more in 50 years.

hamburgerwah 5y ago

This has to be one of the sillier things I've ever seen. Highlighted in the article is Phoenix arizona in Maricopa County which is one of the most responsibly managed metropolitan areas in the country if not the world. More than 50% of the power derived from nuclear at Palos Verdes just 45 miles from the city which evaporates wastewater to drive turbines and provide cooling. Another 14% from solar. Plumbed grey water throughout 80% of the metropolitan area. Per-capita water used declined by 20% over the past 40 years. Net groundwater contributor with 100 year plan for water usage anticipating drought conditions. This is actually the picture of a sustainable metropolitan area with low taxes and high quality of life. Meanwhile the author lives in a city (somerville, ma) which routinely dumps its sewage and into the nearest rivers, in a part of the country that burns diesel to stay warm for months out of the year and where without a precision engineered weather suit between dec and may you will die from just being outside. I'm not saying 118 is for everyone but if you have shade you won't die. Just comically out of touch.

mempko 5y ago
Highest eviction rates in the country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0qf0dv6jjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0qf0dv6jjE
- judge2020 5y ago
  Are there any statistics on homelessness per city? There seems to be a rise in homelessness in Atlanta as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a country-wide thing for big cities.
adamvalve 5y ago
If you move to Phoenix now and plan to live in your house for 30 years, then you are going to have a bad time because Phoenix will be unlivable if there aren’t drastic measures put in place. 118 is the ceiling now. Not the ceiling forever.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I think many of the people moving there (retirees) actually don't plan to even be alive in 30 years. :-/

Tiktaalik 5y ago

> Though real estate investment groups are often blamed for the lack of affordable housing, the real problem is restrictive building laws — especially in desirable, liberal, and highly regulated cities. > The above-listed places are cheap because they have lots of land and few regulations... Being clear here there's a difference between what "building more housing" means in SF, Seattle etc, that is, densifying existing detached homes and creating a compact city, and what is means in Vegas, Phoenix and other places, which is unsustainable, endless, automobile dependent sprawl. The former a much more politically challenging thing as it means pushing back against the "American Dream" of a detached home and white picket fence. Adding yet another house on the edge is of course quite easy. This sprawl is part of what is driving the doom of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Woefully inefficient sprawl, absurdly large highways and countless CO2 emitting cars. I'm sure electric cars will help, but it's gonna be a tough transition to there and the energy needs will be incredible. What really needs to happen is to stop sprawling and rebuild these cities, but who knows if the genie can be put back into the bottle there.

void_mint 5y ago
"Building more housing" in SF, Seattle, etc means building apartment complexes whose cost is restrictive enough such that only those that aren't experiencing a housing crisis can afford them.
- Tiktaalik 5y ago
  Yes, and having the option to rent those nice brand new apartments means the wealthy are a lot less likely to compete with the less wealthy over the same shitty 40 year old apartments. More vacancy is a big win for someone who can only afford a 40 year old apartment.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
"Desirable" and "highly regulated" are a contradiction for a fair number of people...

megaman821 5y ago

The author talks about climate change, but it seems he doesn't know that cold-weather cities use more energy in heating than hot-weather cities use in cooling. Also the energy sources used in heating (oil, propane and natural gas) contribute more to global warming than the electricity energy mix used for cooling. The north-east is going to have an expensive reckoning as they build billions of dollars of off-shore windfarms to start catching up to the renewable energy production that is already in the Southern US, and also the tens of millions of households that will need to replace their furnaces and boilers with heat pumps to stop burning fossil fuels to heat their homes.

addison-lee 5y ago

I love how this “article” completely glosses over the fact that the northeast/Midwest gets devastating snowstorms that cripple entire states for days at a time. These “polar vortexes” are clearly becoming more severe and more common as the earth’s weather continues to spiral out of control. So the options are move somewhere where it’s hell on earth for a portion of the year, move somewhere where it’s a frozen wasteland for a portion of the year, or move somewhere temperate along the coast which is also going to be impacted by climate change. Author should get off their high horse.

OldHand2018 5y ago
The Polar Vortex has definitely become a regular (annual?) occurrence in the central US. What should scare Texans is that this year it only came 5-10% further south than “normal”. But you have to remember - it is bringing air down from the arctic circle - this air is as cold as it gets. It’s not getting colder over the next few decades. It’s ludicrous to expect that there will be a region in the world that will be unaffected by climate change over the next 5 decades. There are going to be negative effects everywhere. But some places are going to be worse than others, and the southern half of the US is going to be worse off than the northern half of the US. I personally think that we are 10-20 years away from the point at which climate migration makes sense for the smart money, with ready buyers of the property you want to leave behind. Put a reminder in your calendar and go about your life.

munificent 5y ago

This is a fascinating article because at the surface level it appears to be high quality information. It looks nice. It's well written. It speaks in the kind of sweeping generalities and economic lingo that give it an air of authority. But by the time I got about 3/4 of the way through, I realized that this was basically just some random blogger's opinion piece with little to no research or data to back it up. It falls apart if you squint at it. First of all, the title implies that some general directional trend is at play, but then cherrypicks just a couple of cities. I'm not sure how Miami of all places is a good example of people moving west. Also, attributing the success of the handful of cherrypicked cities to "marketing" is... bizarre. These are actual places with actual history that people can form real opinions of based on what the place is actually like to live in. People don't live in Austin because someone told them to live in Austin. They live there because they love it, a property they are able to accurately perceive for themselves independent of marketing telling them what to think. I don't like to be negative online but this article is just not very good.

nostrademons 5y ago
It's also content marketing for a content marketer who is talking her book. "Writer, growth hacker, and crypto enthusiast based on the East Coast", and her Substack is titled "Confessions of Reluctant Marketing Guru." More power to her for going out and hustling, but understand that it - just like it's purported solution - is just marketing.

alwaysanon 5y ago

This is why some of the rustbelt cities like the one I grew up in (Buffalo, NY) will have a resurgence at some point. They have affordable housing, good infrastructure bones (including green hydro power from Niagara Falls), are on one of the world's largest sources of fresh water in the Great Lakes and have direct flights to most cities you'd need to get to for work when required. While the few months of winter rather suck, it is easier to deal with a few months of winter than these 115 degree summer days the article talks about (heating, an extra layer or two of clothing, etc.). Buffalo also has being on the Canadian border and being an hour and a half from Toronto going for it. I moved to Sydney, Australia to be with my Aussie wife (who wants to stay here) but I see several of my friends who had moved away moving back to Buffalo to be around family and buying a house for cash under these remote work conditions - and if I was States-side I'd be considering it too...

transfire 5y ago

Run a water pipeline from Miami to Phoenix. We do such things for oil. Both problems solved.