4 ms·
My perception is that cost tops the list. That's partly about home size (why pay twice as much for a condo that's half the size?), but I think mostly about shee
by pash 14y ago
My perception is that cost tops the list. That's partly about home size (why pay twice as much for a condo that's half the size?), but I think mostly about sheer high prices. [0]
Cost is also tied up with the issue of public versus private schools, and it's that issue more than any other that in my experience is the reason urbanites become suburbanites. Then generalized negative perceptions of American cities (as cesspools of crime, noise, high taxes, etc.) keep many suburbanites away.
Those perceptions are half-truths at best, but a perhaps even bigger problem is that for the great many people who haven't lived it, there's no consideration of the benefits of an urban lifestyle. Of course you're going to choose to live in the 'burbs if you only see the city's detriments and not also its commensurately higher (or better) advantages.
0. In cities like San Francisco, a lot of that cost is due to land-use regulation. But in a typical mid-sized Midwestern city like Cincinnati or Kansas City, where public transit is poor and parking is provided pretty much everywhere, only the true urban warriors try to get by without a car. So parking is a big driver of the cost of city living. Structured parking costs $40,000 or more per space, and median home prices are well under $200,000. Ten to twenty percent or more of the cost of a condo downtown is parking, and you still have to pay for a car. (And it should go without saying that the benefits of city living are greatly reduced if you need to drive a lot anyway.)
- rayiner 14y agoThe problem is cities are full of poor people, for various lamentable and not so lamentable reasons. That fact drives all the other things that drive people out of cities: crime, bad schools, etc. The sorry state of American cities is due in huge part to state distortion. The social services for the poor are heavily concentrated in the cities, so that's where they go (has the irony ever occurred to anyone that people complain about not being able to afford SF, NYC, etc, but at the same time those places are filled with poor people living in project housing?). Social services for middle class people (roads, good schools, etc) are concentrated in the suburbs, so that's where they go. Then the municipalities prevent all development, causing skyrocketing rents for people who want to try and live in the city anyway. City and state governments try as hard as they can to get people to leave their cities.
- danielweber 14y ago(has the irony ever occurred to anyone that people complain about not being able to afford SF, NYC, etc, but at the same time those places are filled with poor people living in project housing?) I can't find it now, but I know Megan McArdle has written about how there is a bathtub-shaped curve (my word) for income distribution in many parts of NYC. You can be poor, and you will do okay. You can be really rich, and you will go well. But in the middle it becomes a desert.