14 ms·

As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study

181 points by hhs 5y ago

nikkinana 5y ago
I was poor. I learned to code. Now I am rich.
PhileinSophia 5y ago
Cities are bastions of production, of course there will be more inequality in productive output, so there will be more inequality in wealth. And yes, as the area becomes more desirable, the cost of living will increase, and the people who don't earn enough to live there will increasingly struggle. This is basic economics, no need for a study nor an article.
georgeoliver 5y ago
> He speculates that poorer city dwellers are missing out on the increased social interactions that are credited with driving innovation and wealth creation in large metropolises. I don't disagree, but it seems a little strange that the article highlights this point rather than the endemic rent-seeking of the urban upper-classes?
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  It does seem strange to relabel the accelerating trend of converting housing into speculative investment vehicle as "wealth creation" and wondering why the poor are "missing out".
  - sgregnt 5y ago
    IMO, the eeath creation happens almost by definition from increased efficiency of resource allocation in the society: Thebl free market forces drive more efficient allocation of scarce resources, so the weath is created in a sense, that there is the least amount of waste compared with other alternatives.
    - lumost 5y ago
      In a free market of rational economic actors, no externalities, no liquidity limitations, and an unlimited time horizon this is probably true. The North American urban real estate market is increasingly dominated by a dwindling number of economic actors who collectively act to restrict housing supply. This is not a system where the free market is functional or would necessarily produce the best results.
      - sgregnt 5y ago
        > In a free market of rational economic actors Not sure what rationality has to do with this. It is about personal utility which is subjective and at time irrational. > liquidity ... time horizon Not sure how is this related? Liquidity in itself is an asset, if you have readily available money vs oney on paper that a big difference, always was and always will be. But how is this related? > ...limited number of actors... IMO, there are always so many alternatives, (e.g. moving to a different city, living in suburbs) it is hard to image uncompetitive real estate market, even if all the land in a city was in a private hands of a single "actor" it would still be very competitive market overall. But that's hardly a case, indeed even if the land is in hands of two actors it's enough for a competition here. Or do you suggest there is a cartel? In that case it's a legal issue of failed police force not a free market failure unless you privatize police as well.
        lumost 5y ago
        Liquidity matters in free markets as it effects the ability of buyers to buy and sellers to sell. In Urban housing markets many individuals do not have the liquidity to buy even if they have the cash flow. The number of actors matter as moving to different cities typically means changing jobs which may or may not be viable, if alternative cities have the same pricing dynamics at play - then it may not be possible to find a better alternative in price. As to the reason why this all matters and we aren't content with simply choosing to rent from REIT A or REIT B is that zoning boards have proven unable to cut through A & B's protests against new construction. While A&B may compete with each other they do not compete with any alternative, and all potential customers must acquire housing. As long as the total number of housing units remains below the demand for housing then A&B will benefit. In practice there are still a number of players who interact with the zoning board - but the net result is still a frustratingly stagnant housing supply.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    Investing in housing is GOOD for society, because housing is not a scarce resource - the more is invested the more is built. It's precisely those places that have put up the most barriers to investing and building housing that have seen the greatest deterioration in housing affordability: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 Beware of the anti-profit bias: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-anti-profit-bias-that-blinds-us-to-the-social-benefits-of-free-markets/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-an...
    - taurath 5y ago
      Obviously having housing stock is probably good. Housing however IS a scarce resource, especially housing when it comes to being close to things like transit, views, natural amenities, parks, businesses and other amenities - and one of the most important things that doesn't seem like its talked about: neighborhoods of similar social classes. There are myriad reasons one area does great, and I don't think its entirely due to barriers in investing and building, else those with no barriers would see massive movement towards them. Often times the desirability of living in a place is almost directly inversely related to how little regulation they have.
      - CryptoPunk 5y ago
        >>Housing however IS a scarce resource, especially housing when it comes to being close to things like transit, views, natural amenities, parks, businesses and other amenities Obviously density can compromise something like having good views, or the benefit of a relaxed low-density neighbourhood, but almost any other kind of housing scarcity can be addressed through densification. The study in the aeaweb link above estimates that increased housing restrictions in just three cities in the US; New York, San Francisco and San Jose, caused the US to have 36% less economic growth between 1964 and 2009 than it otherwise would have, by inhibiting population growth in these cities, which all provide settings for higher productivity due to agglomeration effects and being coastal cities with low logistical costs. A report by the White House's Council of Economic Advisors in 2016 largely came to the same conclusion: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi... >>else those with no barriers would see massive movement towards them We see a massive movement of people from New York and California to Texas: https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map It's hard to isolate factors behind this move, but I don't think it's a leap to assume lower housing costs, largely due to fewer restrictions on housing investment and construction, is one of them. In contrast to San Francisco, which is notorious for zoning restrictions and rent control mandates instituted by extreme-left city governments, and unsurprisingly, has the highest rental rates in the world (while not having the highest average income rates), Houston is renowned for its pro-free-market housing policy, and communersately affordable housing: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
- teclordphrack2 5y ago
  This article is about the study. If you want the article to be about "rent-seeking of the urban upper-classes" then you would need to do a study for that.
- pasquinelli 5y ago
  maybe it's strange, or maybe the santa fe institute's funding would be in danger if they published that sort of analysis. i tried to get in idea of what they were about briefly, but it made my eyes cross.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  What are the urban upper-classes, and what is the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in?
  - BirdieNZ 5y ago
    Urban upper-classes are landowners, the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in is via monopoly control of land, which people need for living and working. They are able to extract high proportions of people's income for rent from those who are unable to afford to join the land-owning upper class.
    - throwawaylinux 5y ago
      > Urban upper-classes are landowners, the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in is via monopoly control of land, Who has monopoly control of land? is there a cartel or corporation of all these shadowly urban upper-classes who own everything? > which people need for living and working. They are able to extract high proportions of people's income for rent from those who are unable to afford to join the land-owning upper class. Owning land is not "rent-seeking". Owning highly desirable land is not. Owning a large amount of highly desirable land is not. Renting it out is also not. Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not.
      - BirdieNZ 5y ago
        Landowners have monopoly control of land. There are ways of defining monopolies that avoid this conclusion, but the effect of a monopoly is precisely the effect of landowners. See, for example, Churchill: http://www.andywightman.com/docs/churchill.pdf http://www.andywightman.com/docs/churchill.pdf Land is essentially monopolised through regulatory capture (council land use restrictions) and the lack of new production of land (ignoring for now the very minor exceptions of, say, Dubai, Singapore, the Netherlands). There is a lack of viable substitutes of land, and due the necessity of land for human life, the owners of land are able to extract rent far above their marginal cost. It would be possible for landlords to not engage in rent-seeking, but in practice there are exceedingly few landlords who do not. See, for example, Ricardo's Law of Rent for an introduction as to why land-lording is the classic example of rent-seeking. Note that by saying "Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not." I suspect that you see land as equivalent to other forms of capital, and thus a legitimate form of investment to be pursued without any ethical qualms. However, land is not capital, and is distinct from other forms of investment.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Would this hold true factoring in other sources of resources? A soup kitchen wouldn’t show on an income statement and nor would a food bank or a free clinic, but I imagine that there are more support services in cities. As poor people seem to flock to cities.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  The article doesn't seem to have any real substance. Poor people have an inherent incentive to agree with you that "Yeah, dude, it sucks to be me and life is unfair and I get nothing but shafted! I need relief!" And they aren't wrong to do that. Plenty of people were willing to take advantage of me and get free benefits from my knowledge, expertise etc when I was literally homeless and going hungry regularly while they did nothing for me. I still go hungry regularly and still add value and still can't figure out how to get my fair share. I don't know what the solution is for me and I don't know what the truth is about cities, but I'm wholly unimpressed with this piece.
  - burlesona 5y ago
    I hope this doesn’t sound trite, and I suspect you’ve already done/tried this, but just in case it can benefit you or anyone reading… At a certain point in my life I was strapped, and I really related to your statement: I was trying hard to make a living freelancing / gigging etc and had accumulated a lot of skill and knowledge that I was offering far and wide. I found lots of takers for free or super cheap labor, but I was having a hard time paying my bills and really needed to get paid. Somewhere along the line I realized I had to just stop doing anything for free. I started telling people up front something like “I could definitely solve X for you. I bill $50/hour.” Some things that I had previously worked on went away, but others surprisingly started paying. Over time I was able to raise my rate. I eventually realized that, before, I hasn’t valued my own time enough, and I had been much too generous in doing things pro-bono just because they interested me, or I hoped that they would open doors down the line. And I realized that other people would never value my time for a penny more than I valued it. And again, part of it was that I was chasing some work I really wanted but was _never_ going to pay, and when I started having pay as a requirement, it stripped some of that stuff out of my life but ultimately replaced it with more productive and satisfying work. I know that’s easier said than done, but it was a true ephiphany and major life breakthrough for me. So, again just in case that’s helpful or encouraging to you or anyone else reading, thought I’d share.
werber 5y ago
I live in Detroit and as our downtown core and few other inner ring neighborhoods have grown exponentially the rest of the city has not changed or lost population. Our mayor is currently challenging the last census, but it’s looking pretty clear that the growth of the now largely white downtown core has been at the expense of the largely black greater city. Obviously anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean much, but my lived experience reflects what this article is saying.
- bluedino 5y ago
  How has it been at the expense of the others?
  - werber 5y ago
    Things like the district Detroit, the Hudson site, going back farther Comerica. These projects all used public funds and over promised, and undelivered.
- semperdark 5y ago
  I agree with you that some neighborhoods are being left behind by growth, but what is the alternative? Leaving aside race, Detroit needs to densify or die - nothing sustainable about supporting services in neighborhoods with one occupied house per block. Duggan has no choice but to chase downtown growth for tax revenue. It's a city with infrastructure built for millions and a population of half a mil.
  - werber 5y ago
    I’m just not sure that the investments being made downtown will be successful long term. There’s very little high density housing for sale, it’s easier to buy in the loop in Chicago than in downtown Detroit. And at the same time, non visitor amenities are lacking. It’s a weird situation
    - semperdark 5y ago
      Very true; downtown feels like disneyland for the suburbs. I really hope it can make the transition into a more coherent city.
Ensorceled 5y ago
When I was a poor student in Toronto there were lots of rooming houses and cheap hotels; those have all been fire coded, by-lawed and gentrified. Even a basement, single bedroom apartment is pretty much out of reach of somebody making minimum wage, let alone somebody scrapping by working odd jobs and odd hours. It's not just the size of cities, as a culture we are deliberately exacerbating the impact of wealth disparity.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  Canada is especially pernicious. Right now I live in a sort of nothing town on Vancouver Island 3 hours from Victoria or Vancouver and rent is STILL unaffordable if you can even find a place. As bad as it is in the states, I feel like it’s even worse up here. The upside is that after having lived in both places, I’d still rather hit a rough patch in Canada. The healthcare, policing, and social services are all way more friendly in Canada.
  - waterside81 5y ago
    Hey you got Tacofino so there’s that. No but seriously it’s nuts how expensive the island is and I’m from Toronto
    - dghlsakjg 5y ago
      I’m in Comox! I don’t even get Tacofino. The Canadian government’s, at all levels, unwillingness to do anything but talk about housing without action blows my mind. It’s like they never noticed what happened in the US.
      - 271828182846 5y ago
        Why would you call it a nothing town? Seems like a really nice place. I envy you for all the nature and the sea.
        dghlsakjg 5y ago
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criticaltinker 5y ago
From the cited paper [1]: > We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent > For the poorest income deciles, cities have no positive effect over the null expectation of a linear increase > we find that mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of income distributions all increase with city size. > the Kullback–Leibler divergence between a city’s income distribution and that of the largest city decreases with city population, suggesting the overall shape of income distribution shifts with city population > Our results show that the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities. > our analysis including housing cost demonstrates that despite agglomeration effects on income, bigger cities are less affordable for people of all deciles in the sense that they spend proportionally more of their income on housing; this is especially true for lower income people IMO this presents evidence that dense and well developed cities attract wealthy individuals and businesses. Perhaps this attraction can be attributed to the diversity in food, entertainment, transportation, and labor force. The paper does not attempt to explain why the poorest income deciles do not scale with city population - but take a look at the other comments here for plenty of speculation on the dynamics of income inequality. [1] Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13150.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13150.pdf
burlesona 5y ago
I would love to see how Houston fares in this analysis, as AFAIK it’s the only large city in North America that is quite permissive towards residential development, including lower-end development. I suspect that a lot of what’s happening in general is the unavoidable scarcity of _land_ in prime urban locations manifests as a scarcity of _housing_, and development in general, due to the hyper-regulatory environment in most cities. And of course if you make housing scarce everyone is worse off, most of all the poor, but at every point in the income ladder people are paying much more per square foot of space than is necessary or desirable.
- beebmam 5y ago
  And for homeowners, that means more equity for them. It's a massive wealth transfer to homeowners
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    It actually sucks when your house goes up in value, if you don't plan on moving, because everything else nearby has also gone up in value, so you'd be force to leave if you ever sold, and because your property taxes go up (in some places).
    - bbreier 5y ago
      Extremely true in Houston (and the rest of Texas). Property taxes are big and can change dramatically year to year.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      If the property taxes are going up that much, then the local government is spending much more. But I have seen places where land values go up, and tax rates actually go down (and/or assessments remain low), since the government expenses do not rise at the same rate.
      - rbranson 5y ago
        That would be rare, because rapidly increasing property values are almost always driven by rapidly increased demand. The municipal government has to expand its expenditures to meet this demand, usually ahead of when it receives expanded revenue. Generally speaking, it's much more expensive to grow quickly than slowly.
tbihl 5y ago
Misleading title. The study (based on the abstract as I don't have access) doesn't track anyone in this study; it just compares deciles over time, ignoring movement between these. So 'the poor' may very well be getting something, but then they're not 'the poor' anymore. In essence, the study rediscovered that division of labor proliferates as economies grow.
- refurb 5y ago
  Yup. Not a very convincing analysis. There was another study that determined that gentrification actually benefited low income, in particular those who owned property (which is not a small number).
- arc-in-space 5y ago
  Right. Furthermore, from the very abstract: >We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent. Perhaps suboptimal if you believe income inequality is a massive problem, but scaling linearly with population? That's actually better than what I'd expect, and certainly not as tragic as the cherrypicked wording of the headline/news publication seems to imply. It's another episode of an editor using a result to say literally anything they already wanted to. Meta point: Nothing against the study itself here, but growing increasingly tired of this sort of truth-twisting nonsense. It seems like it will never end. How can we fix anything if we can't at least agree to not outright lie to each other?
- NineStarPoint 5y ago
  There’s a fair quantity of research out there exploring how higher inequality between income brackets tends to come hand in hand with there being less mobility between those income brackets (both in an intergenerational and individual sense). I couldn’t say the extent that is true of cities specifically, but without reading the paper to see exactly the arguments made I wouldn’t out of hand be willing to say the title is misleading.
  - tbihl 5y ago
bmmayer1 5y ago
This seems suspect. Almost anywhere you look throughout all of history, in countries with rural areas and urban areas, poor people flock from rural areas to urban areas for the opportunities and wealth that urban environments offer. This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city. This study purports to show that "inequality" is worse in cities, but of course it is. The richest person in the small village is not going to have many multiples of wealth than the poorest, because they simply can't due to limited opportunities to build wealth overall. But that doesn't mean the poorest person isn't worse off in the village than the poorest person in the city. People voting with their feet make it plain that this is not so.
- jollybean 5y ago
  "This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city." That trope is a little bit of a trope. It's one thing for young people from small towns to jump to a nice spot in the bigger city pyramid, but that doesn't speak to the fact that the poor, in cities, are still quite poor and have a low standard of living. And frankly, nobody from a small town is impressed by someone 'making' it into a middle class lifestyle in the city anyhow. Part of my family lived in a nice enough home in a small town, everyone knew each other, living was very cheap. Most people were actually technically poor, but how poor can you be if you own your own home, have access to basic resources, and material things, and very full social lives and hobbies, arguably more so than most city people? The problem is that 'economic standing' is a crude assessment. Toronto has these vast areas of older, ugly residential high rise buildings, you can hardly walk anywhere, there's maybe a crappy local strip mall nearby. No culture, no local institutions, no way to get away - you're just 'stuck at the bottom' in a pile of ugly concrete. Canadian winters are 'hard' but it's made 'ok' if there's space, places to play, trails and other activities which these areas tend not to have for both material and cultural reasons. At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors. All the 'working class' I know in small towns have either boats, RVs/Campers, often cottages while their peers in the city live in concrete jungles. I feel that cities are far more likely to have fragmented communities, people are more individualist, which also means more opportunity in the technical sense for prosperity, but on the other end of the Bell Curve ... it's also bad. The cities with less transient populations are probably a little better. Cost of housing is probably a very fundamental factor.
mc32 5y ago
As a city grows it accretes those looking for opportunity. Businessfolk look for opportunity in a large market where they have more buyers. Laborers look for work opportunities. People from the hinterlands who may contribute at the margins are the main contributor to population increase (vs newborns or arriving wealthy). This dynamic will put pressures on resources (in far flung Beijing satellite cities you have “ant houses” to house these folk who given their meager earnings cannot afford better dwellings in more convenient locales. Even centralized government systems cannot provide an idealistic solution to the pressures growing populations put on cities; however, given that people never the less pursue those opportunities even at a local disadvantage will take it because it’s better than their home opportunities.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
The poor know this, in return they get called NIMBYs. My neighbors would rather live next door to an empty lot filled with trash than have the lot developed, and they've fought against every attempted variance to get ultra-dense housing there. I didn't understand it at first, but I've lived here long enough now to see it first hand. The rich move in, their dogs shit all over the sidewalk, they complain about everything, they are not social, they call the police for every little thing, their kids go to private schools... and everyone else's rent and property taxes go up. These poor neighborhoods have been under-served by the city for decades, and suddenly when the land is valuable the city wants to "have a dialog with the neighborhood about development."
hhs 5y ago
If interested, a link to the 19-page study paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13150 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13150
eric4smith 5y ago
I compare my time living in New York City in 1994 to now living in Bangkok, Thailand, 2021. Both very large cities with about 8 million people each. New York City (5 boroughs) has become almost unaffordable for someone on the mean wage and salary USA personal income, which is $66K USD in 2019. You more or less have to share your apartment. If I'm renting an apartment in any of the 5 boroughs that is anywhere near decent, I'm probably going to pay over $2,000 p/m. Even in Bangkok, although rents are lower, salaries are also lower for the people at the bottom, so in the end, it comes down to the same problem. Most office workers making under USD$1,000 per month will be living in substandard accommodation or with family. I would say, that in cities, food and transportation are still relatively cheap. But rents are driving out a lot of people now. We will see the soft white underbelly of all of this when the rent moratoriums finally end. (Winter is coming!)
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Why use the median wage nationally, when almost everyone living in NY benefits from higher wages there? Even the jobs which require no skill and no work experience pay $15/hr
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - mjmahone17 5y ago
    Exactly. $15/hr with $2k/mo of rent is entirely unaffordable (that would mean $2,400/mo in wages, or 80% of total pay). And that’s less than half the median wage nationally. That makes the argument that NYC is unaffordable even stronger.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Where does $2k/mo rent come from? I paid less than that while working at a FANG making $200k/yr.
  - NineStarPoint 5y ago
    Crazily enough, the median household income in New York City isn’t significantly different than the national average. In 2017 it was about 1k lower than the nation, and in 2018 it was 2k higher. The mean income in NYC is of course a fair bit higher than the national average, but in general that higher minimum wage doesn’t mean that people in NYC make much more than anyone else in the US, despite the significant cost of living there.
tootie 5y ago
This just seems like a microcosm of wages not keeping pace with GDP. Anyone who doesn't own equity (real estate, stocks or whatever) aren't reaping the rewards.
cubano 5y ago
Due to my BG check issues, I am currently quite poor. I can't really afford housing so I sleep outside on land owned by the Post Office. Why they don't kick me off is something I haven't been able to figure out, but I'm grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week. Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing "when cities grow". What I've seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts. To be honest, I've always been very much a loner so I don't really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff. I really don't want to be poor like this, but I guess it's no one's fault but mine why I'm in this predicament. What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree "Escape" charge that's always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I've moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don't "match" to the real charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges. I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I'm sure think I'm a super junkie who has 50 felonies. I don't really think it's fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that's happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don't you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren't we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways? I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence! It's SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I've applied for I've gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.
- metiscus 5y ago
  Have you looked into expungement? I'm not super familiar with how it works and it does vary state to state but you may be able to fix some of the issues via that route. There might be some public legal aid available to help because I have heard the process can be expensive and time-consuming.
deleted 5y ago
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Clewza313 5y ago
This study only covered US cities, and the main factor seems to be housing prices. It would be interesting to replicate this in places where cheap housing is more abundant, be it through liberal zoning (Tokyo), subsidized public housing (Singapore) or shantytowns (much of the developing world).
boplicity 5y ago
For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society, income inequality, particularly as it relates to housing, should be front-and-center in our list of things to address. Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work. In many cities, people have been pushed further and further away from the city core because of high housing costs. This leads to more and more driving. It's not like driving is a choice, either. It's easy to say "stop driving so much, you're destroying the planet!" But, people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. So they drive (long distances) to work. Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality. These things are a major problem directly related to climate change. By addressing these things head on, we can make the world much safer, in terms of climate change, and much better, in terms of actual quality of life for the majority of people living and/or working in cities.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.
    - closeparen 5y ago
      Not a "commitment." They need to actually exist, at something like 10,000x the scale they currently have.
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    So your solution to include poor people in cities is to have the poor pay more money for gasoline? Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?
aaron695 5y ago
> As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study This is wrong As cities get bigger everyone benefits as expected confirmed by the study - "We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent." "We repeat our analysis after adjusting income by housing cost, and find similar results" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682590_Scaling_of_Urban_Income_Inequality_in_the_United_States https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682590_Scaling_o...
- Clewza313 5y ago
  It's not "wrong", you're just parsing it differently. The title means that the poor don't enjoy any additional benefits from that growth, since their expenses scale accordingly; thus theie net growth in disposable income is "nothing at all".
  - arc-in-space 5y ago
    That is certainly the original meaning, but do you think that after seeing the headlined "nothing at all" before reading further, most people will arrive at this exact understanding? There is a very good reason the title used quotation marks, and it's not because it's a quote.
  - aaron695 5y ago
    Expenses don't change with city size with a few exceptions. Housing being the only one they look at, which I think is fair. With housing costs removed they say - "The poorest two deciles in bigger cities make about the same income as their counterparts in smaller cities" Which does match the title. I think there are a few obvious problems with this. But as a paper it's a good start. I object to the strongly worded title, but it's not wrong from the paper.
ineedasername 5y ago
It doesn't seem to address per capita income relative to cost of living. I don't think astronomical income differences are a great thing, but if the COL-adjusted income is higher among, say, the bottom 25% in a city than in a suburban or rural area, that would be an important factor to take into account. Even more so if COL-adjusted income is lower since that would mean the poor are getting less than nothing. Just looking at the income gap doesn't really tell the story though.
41209 5y ago
Even 10 or 11 years ago you could find a studio apartment in LA for 600 to 700$. It wasn't perfect( mine didn't have a kitchen, I learned how to cook pasta via a rice cooker), but considering it gave me a much needed escape from the insanity of my family, might as well of been a mansion. I was making 10$ an hour back then, at 40 hours a week I'd take home maybe 1300 a month. Rent was very doable. Now the same apartment is 1100$, minimum wage is 15$ but it's harder to get a 40 hour work week. I strongly believe you should be able to at least move out at 18, 19, etc. The best way to deal with a toxic family is dealing with them less. But that's largely impossible now.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
This is because regulatory restrictions inhibiting housing construction leads to housing shortages which prices out lower income workers: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
S_A_P 5y ago
I will preface this by saying that I hate sprawl and think we should figure out how to disincentivize it. But why would the size of a city growing magically make people more wealthy? It isn’t magic, a person would need to somehow get a piece of the city via real estate or a business to benefit from population growth.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  The people who own see their property values rise. The people who rent see their monthly payments rise.
coder-3 5y ago
> inequality is primarily an urban phenomenon, arising from underlying social dynamics I'd love for West to provide some corroborating evidence for that claim...
taurath 5y ago
One thing I've noticed about NA cities vs those in Asia is that NA cities sort of just stop growing upwards at a certain point - they never make the leap to having an actual urban core, with transit, density, and many apartment buildings. Condo buildings in asia often can have a 10x-100x difference in price between units. The maid for the person in the penthouse might live downstairs, or a few buildings away. They planned for their cities a lot better to actually have a lot of people in them. New condo projects go up constantly, all the time. Seattle for a while in the past few years had the most cranes in use in the US, at something like 18. That number seems pitifully low.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Neither do the middle class. My property taxes as a home owner just keep going up and I don't really see anything in return for that from being in a growing city. I suppose I can sell my house for a tidy profit, but that's not why I moved here. I moved here for friends and the city as a platform to enjoy life.
brozaman 5y ago
I discussed this with a mate precisely yesterday, we ended up agreeing that people who have no/low qualification jobs shouldn't move to big cities, at least here in Spain (maybe in other countries it's different). Most of this jobs will pay close to the minimum wage anyway but the living expenses are significantly lower in the smaller towns. I don't know how much of this can be exported to other countries such as the US though. I live in Spain in a small town (<100k citizens) and a single person with a modal wage can easily afford to own both a house and a car. And a family with two parents with minimum wages and two kids can live without luxuries but without missing any of the essential stuff. However, in Madrid you would need over half of a modal salary and well over 70% of a minimum wage just to rent a single bedroom apartment in a location that isn't in the middle of nowhere. One of my friends here is a delivery man and his wife is a cashier, they have two daughters, own two good cars which weren't pre-owned, have a detached house less than 10km away from the city center (10 minute drive) and they live well, go on vacation every now and then, etc.
observer23 5y ago
I feel bad for you young guys. You get so much less than I did to do a job that is just getting harder.

181 points by hhs 5y ago

I was poor. I learned to code. Now I am rich.

Cities are bastions of production, of course there will be more inequality in productive output, so there will be more inequality in wealth. And yes, as the area becomes more desirable, the cost of living will increase, and the people who don't earn enough to live there will increasingly struggle. This is basic economics, no need for a study nor an article.

georgeoliver 5y ago

> He speculates that poorer city dwellers are missing out on the increased social interactions that are credited with driving innovation and wealth creation in large metropolises. I don't disagree, but it seems a little strange that the article highlights this point rather than the endemic rent-seeking of the urban upper-classes?

Ensorceled 5y ago
It does seem strange to relabel the accelerating trend of converting housing into speculative investment vehicle as "wealth creation" and wondering why the poor are "missing out".
- sgregnt 5y ago
  IMO, the eeath creation happens almost by definition from increased efficiency of resource allocation in the society: Thebl free market forces drive more efficient allocation of scarce resources, so the weath is created in a sense, that there is the least amount of waste compared with other alternatives.
  - lumost 5y ago
    In a free market of rational economic actors, no externalities, no liquidity limitations, and an unlimited time horizon this is probably true. The North American urban real estate market is increasingly dominated by a dwindling number of economic actors who collectively act to restrict housing supply. This is not a system where the free market is functional or would necessarily produce the best results.
    - sgregnt 5y ago
      > In a free market of rational economic actors Not sure what rationality has to do with this. It is about personal utility which is subjective and at time irrational. > liquidity ... time horizon Not sure how is this related? Liquidity in itself is an asset, if you have readily available money vs oney on paper that a big difference, always was and always will be. But how is this related? > ...limited number of actors... IMO, there are always so many alternatives, (e.g. moving to a different city, living in suburbs) it is hard to image uncompetitive real estate market, even if all the land in a city was in a private hands of a single "actor" it would still be very competitive market overall. But that's hardly a case, indeed even if the land is in hands of two actors it's enough for a competition here. Or do you suggest there is a cartel? In that case it's a legal issue of failed police force not a free market failure unless you privatize police as well.
      - lumost 5y ago
        Liquidity matters in free markets as it effects the ability of buyers to buy and sellers to sell. In Urban housing markets many individuals do not have the liquidity to buy even if they have the cash flow. The number of actors matter as moving to different cities typically means changing jobs which may or may not be viable, if alternative cities have the same pricing dynamics at play - then it may not be possible to find a better alternative in price. As to the reason why this all matters and we aren't content with simply choosing to rent from REIT A or REIT B is that zoning boards have proven unable to cut through A & B's protests against new construction. While A&B may compete with each other they do not compete with any alternative, and all potential customers must acquire housing. As long as the total number of housing units remains below the demand for housing then A&B will benefit. In practice there are still a number of players who interact with the zoning board - but the net result is still a frustratingly stagnant housing supply.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Investing in housing is GOOD for society, because housing is not a scarce resource - the more is invested the more is built. It's precisely those places that have put up the most barriers to investing and building housing that have seen the greatest deterioration in housing affordability: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 Beware of the anti-profit bias: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-anti-profit-bias-that-blinds-us-to-the-social-benefits-of-free-markets/ https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-an...
  - taurath 5y ago
    Obviously having housing stock is probably good. Housing however IS a scarce resource, especially housing when it comes to being close to things like transit, views, natural amenities, parks, businesses and other amenities - and one of the most important things that doesn't seem like its talked about: neighborhoods of similar social classes. There are myriad reasons one area does great, and I don't think its entirely due to barriers in investing and building, else those with no barriers would see massive movement towards them. Often times the desirability of living in a place is almost directly inversely related to how little regulation they have.
    - CryptoPunk 5y ago
      >>Housing however IS a scarce resource, especially housing when it comes to being close to things like transit, views, natural amenities, parks, businesses and other amenities Obviously density can compromise something like having good views, or the benefit of a relaxed low-density neighbourhood, but almost any other kind of housing scarcity can be addressed through densification. The study in the aeaweb link above estimates that increased housing restrictions in just three cities in the US; New York, San Francisco and San Jose, caused the US to have 36% less economic growth between 1964 and 2009 than it otherwise would have, by inhibiting population growth in these cities, which all provide settings for higher productivity due to agglomeration effects and being coastal cities with low logistical costs. A report by the White House's Council of Economic Advisors in 2016 largely came to the same conclusion: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/images/Housing_Development_Toolkit%20f.2.pdf https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi... >>else those with no barriers would see massive movement towards them We see a massive movement of people from New York and California to Texas: https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map It's hard to isolate factors behind this move, but I don't think it's a leap to assume lower housing costs, largely due to fewer restrictions on housing investment and construction, is one of them. In contrast to San Francisco, which is notorious for zoning restrictions and rent control mandates instituted by extreme-left city governments, and unsurprisingly, has the highest rental rates in the world (while not having the highest average income rates), Houston is renowned for its pro-free-market housing policy, and communersately affordable housing: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-way-to-affordable-housing/ https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
teclordphrack2 5y ago
This article is about the study. If you want the article to be about "rent-seeking of the urban upper-classes" then you would need to do a study for that.
pasquinelli 5y ago
maybe it's strange, or maybe the santa fe institute's funding would be in danger if they published that sort of analysis. i tried to get in idea of what they were about briefly, but it made my eyes cross.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
What are the urban upper-classes, and what is the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in?
- BirdieNZ 5y ago
  Urban upper-classes are landowners, the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in is via monopoly control of land, which people need for living and working. They are able to extract high proportions of people's income for rent from those who are unable to afford to join the land-owning upper class.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    > Urban upper-classes are landowners, the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in is via monopoly control of land, Who has monopoly control of land? is there a cartel or corporation of all these shadowly urban upper-classes who own everything? > which people need for living and working. They are able to extract high proportions of people's income for rent from those who are unable to afford to join the land-owning upper class. Owning land is not "rent-seeking". Owning highly desirable land is not. Owning a large amount of highly desirable land is not. Renting it out is also not. Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not.
    - BirdieNZ 5y ago
      Landowners have monopoly control of land. There are ways of defining monopolies that avoid this conclusion, but the effect of a monopoly is precisely the effect of landowners. See, for example, Churchill: http://www.andywightman.com/docs/churchill.pdf http://www.andywightman.com/docs/churchill.pdf Land is essentially monopolised through regulatory capture (council land use restrictions) and the lack of new production of land (ignoring for now the very minor exceptions of, say, Dubai, Singapore, the Netherlands). There is a lack of viable substitutes of land, and due the necessity of land for human life, the owners of land are able to extract rent far above their marginal cost. It would be possible for landlords to not engage in rent-seeking, but in practice there are exceedingly few landlords who do not. See, for example, Ricardo's Law of Rent for an introduction as to why land-lording is the classic example of rent-seeking. Note that by saying "Investing in appreciating assets of any kind is also not." I suspect that you see land as equivalent to other forms of capital, and thus a legitimate form of investment to be pursued without any ethical qualms. However, land is not capital, and is distinct from other forms of investment.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Would this hold true factoring in other sources of resources? A soup kitchen wouldn’t show on an income statement and nor would a food bank or a free clinic, but I imagine that there are more support services in cities. As poor people seem to flock to cities.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
The article doesn't seem to have any real substance. Poor people have an inherent incentive to agree with you that "Yeah, dude, it sucks to be me and life is unfair and I get nothing but shafted! I need relief!" And they aren't wrong to do that. Plenty of people were willing to take advantage of me and get free benefits from my knowledge, expertise etc when I was literally homeless and going hungry regularly while they did nothing for me. I still go hungry regularly and still add value and still can't figure out how to get my fair share. I don't know what the solution is for me and I don't know what the truth is about cities, but I'm wholly unimpressed with this piece.
- burlesona 5y ago
  I hope this doesn’t sound trite, and I suspect you’ve already done/tried this, but just in case it can benefit you or anyone reading… At a certain point in my life I was strapped, and I really related to your statement: I was trying hard to make a living freelancing / gigging etc and had accumulated a lot of skill and knowledge that I was offering far and wide. I found lots of takers for free or super cheap labor, but I was having a hard time paying my bills and really needed to get paid. Somewhere along the line I realized I had to just stop doing anything for free. I started telling people up front something like “I could definitely solve X for you. I bill $50/hour.” Some things that I had previously worked on went away, but others surprisingly started paying. Over time I was able to raise my rate. I eventually realized that, before, I hasn’t valued my own time enough, and I had been much too generous in doing things pro-bono just because they interested me, or I hoped that they would open doors down the line. And I realized that other people would never value my time for a penny more than I valued it. And again, part of it was that I was chasing some work I really wanted but was _never_ going to pay, and when I started having pay as a requirement, it stripped some of that stuff out of my life but ultimately replaced it with more productive and satisfying work. I know that’s easier said than done, but it was a true ephiphany and major life breakthrough for me. So, again just in case that’s helpful or encouraging to you or anyone else reading, thought I’d share.

werber 5y ago

I live in Detroit and as our downtown core and few other inner ring neighborhoods have grown exponentially the rest of the city has not changed or lost population. Our mayor is currently challenging the last census, but it’s looking pretty clear that the growth of the now largely white downtown core has been at the expense of the largely black greater city. Obviously anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean much, but my lived experience reflects what this article is saying.

bluedino 5y ago
How has it been at the expense of the others?
- werber 5y ago
  Things like the district Detroit, the Hudson site, going back farther Comerica. These projects all used public funds and over promised, and undelivered.
semperdark 5y ago
I agree with you that some neighborhoods are being left behind by growth, but what is the alternative? Leaving aside race, Detroit needs to densify or die - nothing sustainable about supporting services in neighborhoods with one occupied house per block. Duggan has no choice but to chase downtown growth for tax revenue. It's a city with infrastructure built for millions and a population of half a mil.
- werber 5y ago
  I’m just not sure that the investments being made downtown will be successful long term. There’s very little high density housing for sale, it’s easier to buy in the loop in Chicago than in downtown Detroit. And at the same time, non visitor amenities are lacking. It’s a weird situation
  - semperdark 5y ago
    Very true; downtown feels like disneyland for the suburbs. I really hope it can make the transition into a more coherent city.

Ensorceled 5y ago

When I was a poor student in Toronto there were lots of rooming houses and cheap hotels; those have all been fire coded, by-lawed and gentrified. Even a basement, single bedroom apartment is pretty much out of reach of somebody making minimum wage, let alone somebody scrapping by working odd jobs and odd hours. It's not just the size of cities, as a culture we are deliberately exacerbating the impact of wealth disparity.

dghlsakjg 5y ago
Canada is especially pernicious. Right now I live in a sort of nothing town on Vancouver Island 3 hours from Victoria or Vancouver and rent is STILL unaffordable if you can even find a place. As bad as it is in the states, I feel like it’s even worse up here. The upside is that after having lived in both places, I’d still rather hit a rough patch in Canada. The healthcare, policing, and social services are all way more friendly in Canada.
- waterside81 5y ago
  Hey you got Tacofino so there’s that. No but seriously it’s nuts how expensive the island is and I’m from Toronto
  - dghlsakjg 5y ago
    I’m in Comox! I don’t even get Tacofino. The Canadian government’s, at all levels, unwillingness to do anything but talk about housing without action blows my mind. It’s like they never noticed what happened in the US.
    - 271828182846 5y ago
      Why would you call it a nothing town? Seems like a really nice place. I envy you for all the nature and the sea.
      - dghlsakjg 5y ago

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criticaltinker 5y ago

From the cited paper [1]: > We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent > For the poorest income deciles, cities have no positive effect over the null expectation of a linear increase > we find that mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of income distributions all increase with city size. > the Kullback–Leibler divergence between a city’s income distribution and that of the largest city decreases with city population, suggesting the overall shape of income distribution shifts with city population > Our results show that the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities. > our analysis including housing cost demonstrates that despite agglomeration effects on income, bigger cities are less affordable for people of all deciles in the sense that they spend proportionally more of their income on housing; this is especially true for lower income people IMO this presents evidence that dense and well developed cities attract wealthy individuals and businesses. Perhaps this attraction can be attributed to the diversity in food, entertainment, transportation, and labor force. The paper does not attempt to explain why the poorest income deciles do not scale with city population - but take a look at the other comments here for plenty of speculation on the dynamics of income inequality. [1] Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13150.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13150.pdf

burlesona 5y ago

I would love to see how Houston fares in this analysis, as AFAIK it’s the only large city in North America that is quite permissive towards residential development, including lower-end development. I suspect that a lot of what’s happening in general is the unavoidable scarcity of _land_ in prime urban locations manifests as a scarcity of _housing_, and development in general, due to the hyper-regulatory environment in most cities. And of course if you make housing scarce everyone is worse off, most of all the poor, but at every point in the income ladder people are paying much more per square foot of space than is necessary or desirable.

beebmam 5y ago
And for homeowners, that means more equity for them. It's a massive wealth transfer to homeowners
- nitrogen 5y ago
  It actually sucks when your house goes up in value, if you don't plan on moving, because everything else nearby has also gone up in value, so you'd be force to leave if you ever sold, and because your property taxes go up (in some places).
  - bbreier 5y ago
    Extremely true in Houston (and the rest of Texas). Property taxes are big and can change dramatically year to year.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    If the property taxes are going up that much, then the local government is spending much more. But I have seen places where land values go up, and tax rates actually go down (and/or assessments remain low), since the government expenses do not rise at the same rate.
    - rbranson 5y ago
      That would be rare, because rapidly increasing property values are almost always driven by rapidly increased demand. The municipal government has to expand its expenditures to meet this demand, usually ahead of when it receives expanded revenue. Generally speaking, it's much more expensive to grow quickly than slowly.

tbihl 5y ago

Misleading title. The study (based on the abstract as I don't have access) doesn't track anyone in this study; it just compares deciles over time, ignoring movement between these. So 'the poor' may very well be getting something, but then they're not 'the poor' anymore. In essence, the study rediscovered that division of labor proliferates as economies grow.

refurb 5y ago
Yup. Not a very convincing analysis. There was another study that determined that gentrification actually benefited low income, in particular those who owned property (which is not a small number).
arc-in-space 5y ago
Right. Furthermore, from the very abstract: >We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent. Perhaps suboptimal if you believe income inequality is a massive problem, but scaling linearly with population? That's actually better than what I'd expect, and certainly not as tragic as the cherrypicked wording of the headline/news publication seems to imply. It's another episode of an editor using a result to say literally anything they already wanted to. Meta point: Nothing against the study itself here, but growing increasingly tired of this sort of truth-twisting nonsense. It seems like it will never end. How can we fix anything if we can't at least agree to not outright lie to each other?
NineStarPoint 5y ago
There’s a fair quantity of research out there exploring how higher inequality between income brackets tends to come hand in hand with there being less mobility between those income brackets (both in an intergenerational and individual sense). I couldn’t say the extent that is true of cities specifically, but without reading the paper to see exactly the arguments made I wouldn’t out of hand be willing to say the title is misleading.
- tbihl 5y ago

bmmayer1 5y ago

This seems suspect. Almost anywhere you look throughout all of history, in countries with rural areas and urban areas, poor people flock from rural areas to urban areas for the opportunities and wealth that urban environments offer. This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city. This study purports to show that "inequality" is worse in cities, but of course it is. The richest person in the small village is not going to have many multiples of wealth than the poorest, because they simply can't due to limited opportunities to build wealth overall. But that doesn't mean the poorest person isn't worse off in the village than the poorest person in the city. People voting with their feet make it plain that this is not so.

jollybean 5y ago
"This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city." That trope is a little bit of a trope. It's one thing for young people from small towns to jump to a nice spot in the bigger city pyramid, but that doesn't speak to the fact that the poor, in cities, are still quite poor and have a low standard of living. And frankly, nobody from a small town is impressed by someone 'making' it into a middle class lifestyle in the city anyhow. Part of my family lived in a nice enough home in a small town, everyone knew each other, living was very cheap. Most people were actually technically poor, but how poor can you be if you own your own home, have access to basic resources, and material things, and very full social lives and hobbies, arguably more so than most city people? The problem is that 'economic standing' is a crude assessment. Toronto has these vast areas of older, ugly residential high rise buildings, you can hardly walk anywhere, there's maybe a crappy local strip mall nearby. No culture, no local institutions, no way to get away - you're just 'stuck at the bottom' in a pile of ugly concrete. Canadian winters are 'hard' but it's made 'ok' if there's space, places to play, trails and other activities which these areas tend not to have for both material and cultural reasons. At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors. All the 'working class' I know in small towns have either boats, RVs/Campers, often cottages while their peers in the city live in concrete jungles. I feel that cities are far more likely to have fragmented communities, people are more individualist, which also means more opportunity in the technical sense for prosperity, but on the other end of the Bell Curve ... it's also bad. The cities with less transient populations are probably a little better. Cost of housing is probably a very fundamental factor.

mc32 5y ago

As a city grows it accretes those looking for opportunity. Businessfolk look for opportunity in a large market where they have more buyers. Laborers look for work opportunities. People from the hinterlands who may contribute at the margins are the main contributor to population increase (vs newborns or arriving wealthy). This dynamic will put pressures on resources (in far flung Beijing satellite cities you have “ant houses” to house these folk who given their meager earnings cannot afford better dwellings in more convenient locales. Even centralized government systems cannot provide an idealistic solution to the pressures growing populations put on cities; however, given that people never the less pursue those opportunities even at a local disadvantage will take it because it’s better than their home opportunities.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

The poor know this, in return they get called NIMBYs. My neighbors would rather live next door to an empty lot filled with trash than have the lot developed, and they've fought against every attempted variance to get ultra-dense housing there. I didn't understand it at first, but I've lived here long enough now to see it first hand. The rich move in, their dogs shit all over the sidewalk, they complain about everything, they are not social, they call the police for every little thing, their kids go to private schools... and everyone else's rent and property taxes go up. These poor neighborhoods have been under-served by the city for decades, and suddenly when the land is valuable the city wants to "have a dialog with the neighborhood about development."

hhs 5y ago

If interested, a link to the 19-page study paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13150 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13150

eric4smith 5y ago

I compare my time living in New York City in 1994 to now living in Bangkok, Thailand, 2021. Both very large cities with about 8 million people each. New York City (5 boroughs) has become almost unaffordable for someone on the mean wage and salary USA personal income, which is $66K USD in 2019. You more or less have to share your apartment. If I'm renting an apartment in any of the 5 boroughs that is anywhere near decent, I'm probably going to pay over $2,000 p/m. Even in Bangkok, although rents are lower, salaries are also lower for the people at the bottom, so in the end, it comes down to the same problem. Most office workers making under USD$1,000 per month will be living in substandard accommodation or with family. I would say, that in cities, food and transportation are still relatively cheap. But rents are driving out a lot of people now. We will see the soft white underbelly of all of this when the rent moratoriums finally end. (Winter is coming!)

oh_sigh 5y ago
Why use the median wage nationally, when almost everyone living in NY benefits from higher wages there? Even the jobs which require no skill and no work experience pay $15/hr
- deleted 5y ago
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- mjmahone17 5y ago
  Exactly. $15/hr with $2k/mo of rent is entirely unaffordable (that would mean $2,400/mo in wages, or 80% of total pay). And that’s less than half the median wage nationally. That makes the argument that NYC is unaffordable even stronger.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Where does $2k/mo rent come from? I paid less than that while working at a FANG making $200k/yr.
- NineStarPoint 5y ago
  Crazily enough, the median household income in New York City isn’t significantly different than the national average. In 2017 it was about 1k lower than the nation, and in 2018 it was 2k higher. The mean income in NYC is of course a fair bit higher than the national average, but in general that higher minimum wage doesn’t mean that people in NYC make much more than anyone else in the US, despite the significant cost of living there.

tootie 5y ago

This just seems like a microcosm of wages not keeping pace with GDP. Anyone who doesn't own equity (real estate, stocks or whatever) aren't reaping the rewards.

cubano 5y ago

Due to my BG check issues, I am currently quite poor. I can't really afford housing so I sleep outside on land owned by the Post Office. Why they don't kick me off is something I haven't been able to figure out, but I'm grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week. Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing "when cities grow". What I've seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts. To be honest, I've always been very much a loner so I don't really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff. I really don't want to be poor like this, but I guess it's no one's fault but mine why I'm in this predicament. What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree "Escape" charge that's always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I've moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don't "match" to the real charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges. I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I'm sure think I'm a super junkie who has 50 felonies. I don't really think it's fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that's happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don't you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren't we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways? I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence! It's SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I've applied for I've gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.

metiscus 5y ago
Have you looked into expungement? I'm not super familiar with how it works and it does vary state to state but you may be able to fix some of the issues via that route. There might be some public legal aid available to help because I have heard the process can be expensive and time-consuming.

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Clewza313 5y ago

This study only covered US cities, and the main factor seems to be housing prices. It would be interesting to replicate this in places where cheap housing is more abundant, be it through liberal zoning (Tokyo), subsidized public housing (Singapore) or shantytowns (much of the developing world).

boplicity 5y ago

For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society, income inequality, particularly as it relates to housing, should be front-and-center in our list of things to address. Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work. In many cities, people have been pushed further and further away from the city core because of high housing costs. This leads to more and more driving. It's not like driving is a choice, either. It's easy to say "stop driving so much, you're destroying the planet!" But, people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. So they drive (long distances) to work. Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality. These things are a major problem directly related to climate change. By addressing these things head on, we can make the world much safer, in terms of climate change, and much better, in terms of actual quality of life for the majority of people living and/or working in cities.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    Not a "commitment." They need to actually exist, at something like 10,000x the scale they currently have.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  So your solution to include poor people in cities is to have the poor pay more money for gasoline? Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?

aaron695 5y ago

> As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study This is wrong As cities get bigger everyone benefits as expected confirmed by the study - "We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent." "We repeat our analysis after adjusting income by housing cost, and find similar results" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682590_Scaling_of_Urban_Income_Inequality_in_the_United_States https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682590_Scaling_o...

Clewza313 5y ago
It's not "wrong", you're just parsing it differently. The title means that the poor don't enjoy any additional benefits from that growth, since their expenses scale accordingly; thus theie net growth in disposable income is "nothing at all".
- arc-in-space 5y ago
  That is certainly the original meaning, but do you think that after seeing the headlined "nothing at all" before reading further, most people will arrive at this exact understanding? There is a very good reason the title used quotation marks, and it's not because it's a quote.
- aaron695 5y ago
  Expenses don't change with city size with a few exceptions. Housing being the only one they look at, which I think is fair. With housing costs removed they say - "The poorest two deciles in bigger cities make about the same income as their counterparts in smaller cities" Which does match the title. I think there are a few obvious problems with this. But as a paper it's a good start. I object to the strongly worded title, but it's not wrong from the paper.

ineedasername 5y ago

It doesn't seem to address per capita income relative to cost of living. I don't think astronomical income differences are a great thing, but if the COL-adjusted income is higher among, say, the bottom 25% in a city than in a suburban or rural area, that would be an important factor to take into account. Even more so if COL-adjusted income is lower since that would mean the poor are getting less than nothing. Just looking at the income gap doesn't really tell the story though.

41209 5y ago

Even 10 or 11 years ago you could find a studio apartment in LA for 600 to 700$. It wasn't perfect( mine didn't have a kitchen, I learned how to cook pasta via a rice cooker), but considering it gave me a much needed escape from the insanity of my family, might as well of been a mansion. I was making 10$ an hour back then, at 40 hours a week I'd take home maybe 1300 a month. Rent was very doable. Now the same apartment is 1100$, minimum wage is 15$ but it's harder to get a 40 hour work week. I strongly believe you should be able to at least move out at 18, 19, etc. The best way to deal with a toxic family is dealing with them less. But that's largely impossible now.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

This is because regulatory restrictions inhibiting housing construction leads to housing shortages which prices out lower income workers: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

S_A_P 5y ago

I will preface this by saying that I hate sprawl and think we should figure out how to disincentivize it. But why would the size of a city growing magically make people more wealthy? It isn’t magic, a person would need to somehow get a piece of the city via real estate or a business to benefit from population growth.

colechristensen 5y ago
The people who own see their property values rise. The people who rent see their monthly payments rise.

coder-3 5y ago

> inequality is primarily an urban phenomenon, arising from underlying social dynamics I'd love for West to provide some corroborating evidence for that claim...

taurath 5y ago

One thing I've noticed about NA cities vs those in Asia is that NA cities sort of just stop growing upwards at a certain point - they never make the leap to having an actual urban core, with transit, density, and many apartment buildings. Condo buildings in asia often can have a 10x-100x difference in price between units. The maid for the person in the penthouse might live downstairs, or a few buildings away. They planned for their cities a lot better to actually have a lot of people in them. New condo projects go up constantly, all the time. Seattle for a while in the past few years had the most cranes in use in the US, at something like 18. That number seems pitifully low.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Neither do the middle class. My property taxes as a home owner just keep going up and I don't really see anything in return for that from being in a growing city. I suppose I can sell my house for a tidy profit, but that's not why I moved here. I moved here for friends and the city as a platform to enjoy life.

brozaman 5y ago

I discussed this with a mate precisely yesterday, we ended up agreeing that people who have no/low qualification jobs shouldn't move to big cities, at least here in Spain (maybe in other countries it's different). Most of this jobs will pay close to the minimum wage anyway but the living expenses are significantly lower in the smaller towns. I don't know how much of this can be exported to other countries such as the US though. I live in Spain in a small town (<100k citizens) and a single person with a modal wage can easily afford to own both a house and a car. And a family with two parents with minimum wages and two kids can live without luxuries but without missing any of the essential stuff. However, in Madrid you would need over half of a modal salary and well over 70% of a minimum wage just to rent a single bedroom apartment in a location that isn't in the middle of nowhere. One of my friends here is a delivery man and his wife is a cashier, they have two daughters, own two good cars which weren't pre-owned, have a detached house less than 10km away from the city center (10 minute drive) and they live well, go on vacation every now and then, etc.

observer23 5y ago

I feel bad for you young guys. You get so much less than I did to do a job that is just getting harder.