4 ms·
Why Middle-Class Americans Can't Afford to Live in Liberal Cities
- api 12y agoGood economy, affordable housing, NIMBYism: pick two. Liberal cities tend to be NIMBY cities -- there's a lot of zoning, an anti-development mindset among many, and other restrictions on new construction. These cities also tend to have good economies and high incomes. Constrained supply + increasing demand = exploding price. It's pretty simple. Note the outlier: Orange County. It's got high income and is conservative (by California standards), but it has a sort of peculiar NIMBYism of its own. A lot of people in OC are opposed to "high density housing," and many of its neighborhoods are very planned with newer and higher density construction restricted. OC is the exception that proves the rule.
- geebee 12y agoThis was an interesting article. However, one thing that wasn't discussed is the correlation between existing population density and resistance to new construction. San Francisco is notoriously opposed to new construction, but it does have relatively high population density by US standards. I'm not saying that this means the opposition to new construction is justified, but I do think we might want to investigate the possibility that population density may play a bigger role than political liberalism. This could be a difficult one to tease out, mainly because there aren't all that many highly dense areas that lean heavily conservative in the the US. New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Seattle… they're pretty much all liberal cities (as measured by percentage voting for Obama vs Romney).