I'm not sure that it makes sense to group Boise with the other cities they mention (Austin, Denver, Portland, Indianapolis, etc.). Boise has less than half the population of Raleigh which I think is the next least populated of the cities that they mention.
In addition, while this is much more subjective, most of those cities seem to share a similar "cultural prestige"/influence as compared to other large cities like Columbus, Jacksonville, etc.
It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".
About 7 or so years ago I visited Boise for the first time when I was coming back from a backpacking trip. I instantly fell in love with the city, and if proximity to family wasn’t a priority for me (I’m on the east coast), I’d have started looking for jobs there the next week. (I may have done a cursory search anyway, but not with any real seriousness.) It surprises me zero percent that it’s been growing like crazy, and I think it absolutely merits being included here.
Denver, on the other hand, has already “arrived” in my mind, as anyone I know who had any inkling of outdoor adventureness in them ended up there 10 years ago, the traffic is/has been a mess for years, and the ski slopes are way too crowded.
HP used to do a lot in Boise, not sure about these days. As a tech hub in that area, SLC is probably more successful, especially when a growing tech scene in Provo is included (they even have a Starbucks now near BYU, if that is believable). Boise is a lot less Mormon than SLC is (15 vs 50%).
Boise's tech scene is still very Mormon. Lots of people commute in from the outer burb of Meridian to downtown. I work in downtown Boise, and my tech lead, middle manager, and his boss are all Mormon. I'm the only guy on my team that didn't go on a mission or go to BYU for part of my schooling.
Idaho is very Mormon in the south, and Mormons tend to be significant in the tech scene throughout the west (eg at Microsoft in Redmond), so that doesn’t sound surprising at all.
You are exactly describing the reasoning I went through when selecting Portland as the place to move to from SF.
Edit: to be clear, price for me was really the main reason to move away from SF and not to move for example to NYC. If there had been city similarly vibrant and interesting, large city as NYC or SF that is affordable I'd have chosen that in a heart beat over Portland.
Portland is great. My wife likes to call it "the last liveable city in America".
I like the culture; food is varied and superb; public transit exists. Especially the east side has a funk going that I really like. Although local chains are growing in recent years and making most little downtown areas a lot more alike. It sometimes grid a little provincial to me and I more frequently get on an airplane then I drive outside of the Portland metro area. All that might say more about me you than the city and region.
I could say a lot more, but am not sure what you'd be interested in.
If she's angry about the problems that come with newcomers, she can ask the govt or people to outlaw newcomers.
Otherwise ... No one occupies the high moral ground. Every newcomer, no matter how far back, changed forever what was there.
Edit: when I lived in San Diego in the seventies, it was all but impossible to get a permit for a new water hookup, effectively banning new homes and therefore new people. Your wife could start with that.
It’s not newcomers. (The native Americans weren’t too thrilled when here ancestors came into town, I’ll tell you what.) It’s Californians specifically.
Even people on the other coast are dismayed at the californians trying to change oregon, nevada, washington (too late) and even texas it seems. It is quite startling actually.
As someone who has been looking into those areas for possible moving, the changes in recent years are bringing real fears that they could actually start going the way of California, which makes them much less attractive.
The popular perception is that the people leaving California bring their politics with them and vote for the same things they did in California, therefore making their new state just as miserable as the parts of California they fled.
There was a big influx of Californians to Seattle early 90s from aerospace tectonic shifts and normal moving around. The worry was rising property prices mainly, because they brought lots of cash from selling their expensive California homes.
And they were always leaving off the last syllables of words. But mainly property prices.
Nothing personal, I can very much relate to this attitude as someone who grew up in the Bay Area and watched it explode... but cities grow. Everyone came from somewhere else, right?
Tell your wife her ancestors should have bought all the land in the state if they didn't want anyone moving there. I don't find these sentiments funny or cheeky at all.
I get it, I grew up in a small town and this feels like straight townie-ism to me.
Portland people who hate CA transplants have the same mindset as SF people who hate "techies" who have the same mindset as Red Americans who hate immigrants. There are always some cultural differences people point to (they are raising prices!/taking jobs!/crappy people!/more traffic!) but it is really just a form of territorial pissing that dumps negativity on individuals for societal shifts.
Some of these small cities have decent infrastructure, lots of charm, natural beauty, and cute city centers - for really cheap! I recently purchased a street of $30,000 homes that I’m turning into a creative community.
Taxes. State income tax. This can be as high as 9.0% (CA or NY). That is insane. If you make 100k, the state could take 9k a year. In some states that will cover your entire mortgage on a house. I love CA or NY, but FL, TX, NV, etc have NO state income tax. ID is awesome, but 7% taxes is no go.
That isn't necessarily a robust analysis of cost trade offs. A good example of how this can be inaccurate is Texas which has a reputation as a relatively low tax state, but in order to fund its considerable road network levies extremely high property taxes which in turn trigger higher rents than might be expected. New Hampshire has a similar situation with low taxes being made up for with high property taxes which pay the cost of rebuilding the roads which are ripped up seasonally by frost heaves and geologic activity.
Ultimately people demand basic services which have to be paid for. Eliminating one source of funding may reduce the overall burden but more likely simply shifts funding.
And many of these services are fairly essential, so if your taxes aren't covering them, you'll end up paying out of pocket for them anyway. This can be something like fire protection (e.g., if you live somewhere unincorporated) or healthcare (e.g., US).
Isn’t this just another example of what you’re replying to? UK’s VAT sounds appallingly high to American ears too, but it isn’t really meaningful to compare a single type of tax in isolation.
The max council tax on say a 10 million pound mansion is around £4k - which from chats with some one living in one of the cheaper states is less than a basic 4 bed house.
Sales tax in many states is between 5-10 percent; the UK VAT is 20%. The top income tax bracket in the UK is a bit higher (45%) than in the US (37%) and the National Insurance Contributions are often larger than FICA (etc). The UK also has (e.g.) a TV tax, which the US doesn't.
Looking at headline levels doesn't always work especially if your middle class, Share options are taxed much less harshly you get pension tax relief at your effective rate.
we don't have to pay some one to do our taxes either.
No it's not? Property taxes on a home in the Houston area will range from 2.3% to 3% of the appraised value per year. That includes improvements on land and it's not prevented from rising every year with the value of the house.
"If you make 100k, the state could take 9k a year."
That is absolutely not how income taxes work. If you live in California and earn $100k, your tax liability would be around $6k before any exemptions or deductions.
So true, but as a first pass, the high marginal tax rates in California, Washington, and Wisconsin have to be accounted for as a "cost of relocating." If you are a successful professional you are probably making closer to $250K and the highest marginal rate can apply to that last $150K. So moving from low tax Michigan to high tax California can mean $10,500 more in taxes. Over 20 years that adds up.
If you are in tech and are considering moving to CA and the income tax difference is actually a deterrent then you shouldn’t move because you are already making a disproportionally huge salary for your region.
In my experience, talking to many many people considering moving to or from CA, the delta in salary coming to CA dwarfs any differences in income tax.
California's high income tax are bad, but not because they take too much income (that's a separate argument about the morality of taxing labor vs wealth). The income taxes are bad because when the labor market implodes the tax base dries up. At least there's a well-funded "rainy day" account now. But in the Great Recession state finances were quite a mess, which meant the services everyone relied on got cut. So essentially there was a one two punch of job losses and less services for the unemployeed to use.
Irish, tax is 52% on each euro above 33k year (about 20% below) property tax is about 300eur per year, no universal healhcare, employer pays health insurance.
Corporation tax, It's there at 12.5% however if you have a company like I done for last 12 years you get hit with exact same income taxes as normal employees. Revenue have angles locked down. In fact as director you loose a pile of tax credits.
But but you can give yourself a loan out of company? Nope withholding tax due on that!
Ok what about expensing everything? Don't do it, Revenue will nail you as you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent in their eyes.
Idaho has a very small tax base, so they have to tax what's there at a higher rate. At the same time, what a lot of people like about Idaho is vast amounts of wilderness and unspoiled nature. If somebody loves to hike in the mountains, they're sooner going to pay 7% income tax and live in Idaho than move to Florida or Texas. It's the luxury of choice that someone making 100k/year in Idaho can afford.
Always trade offs. Can’t imagine living somewhere with draconian laws around employers owning work you do on your own time with your own equipment and space. California is a leader here. There are nice, less expensive cities in California like Chico if you can swing remote work.
Boise is at the wrong end of a fire-hose of people leaving big cities in CA and will likely have the same economic growth and social problems as other cities with similiar circumstances. Grouping it with Denver, Portland, Austin makes sense. Indianapolis I'm not so sure about.
You can see this out in Northeast Metro Atlanta. People flee the perimeter to escape the things they hate about the city. Then they realize they miss what they like about the city, so that gets built, and now they move further out. Repeat.
Now I-85/985, I-20, and every highway between them is littered with tiny Atlantas at every exit for 50+ miles. Every former bedroom community is turning into its own little city. At least some of them are trying to manage it in a way that leaves them better off once the exodus ends and flips back around.
People seem to have decided 50 miles is enough, so the escapist development has turned to the west and north sides.
> Every former bedroom community is turning into its own little city.
Isn't that a good thing, if you want people to have everything they need in their own neighborhood, rather than needing to commute 20 miles for a Costco and another 10 miles for a latte?
I'd rather have smaller (potentially walkable) communities than rows and rows of suburban housing where people just get in their car to drive elsewhere when they need to do something.
One thing though, is the influx of ex-Californians will change the culture of Boise (not judging - just saying it will). Soon they will petition In/Out Burgers to open there, and bring other California cultural touch-stones to Idaho.
> It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".
Agree completely. Many workers are moving from LA or Chicago to Phoenix, which is far from a small city, but is less expensive.
Analysis done during boom periods (low unemployment, high stock market) is worthless. During the dot com, housing and crypto bubbles, there were many trends of people doing X.
As Buffett says, "It's only when the tide goes down, you'll see who is swimming naked".
Real trends survive recessions and market busts. Take everything else with a grain of salt
While I don't disagree with your fundamental point, the fact that these places are smaller (hence less crowded/expensive) than Los Angeles and New York City, is a big part of the appeal. Even Boise and Austin are more similar in size to each other than they are to L.A. Austin metro area is about 3x the population of Boise, but L.A. metro area is about 8x the population of Austin, for example.
I'd love to see a survey on what actually went into the decision making progress. I know for myself larger city equaled more desirable, but there also is a correlation between size and affordability, especially if a short commute is desired.
> For each worker who left Boise over the past four years, 1.57 workers moved in, making the city the biggest magnet for new residents in the LinkedIn analysis.
It may not be as large presently as those other places, but they're seeing higher growth rates. So it's reasonable to compare them in this report.
>It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".
I want to leave Seattle cause it's too expensive. Immediately Austin, Denver (or boulder), and Portland come to mind as reasonable alternatives.
It's just about money. You can have an absurdly well paying job in Seattle and it really doesn't matter because you still can't afford a house. You can pay absurd amounts for a small condo. You can have a god awful commute. Or you can move 3 hours south and your money goes further while you still get the appealing parts of living in a city.
I just moved out of SF and went remote. It’s pretty awesome. Living there was fun but also stressful and inconvenient especially with kids.
I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood. In fact kind of improves if you factor in not worrying about getting mugged or accosted by homeless crazies.
My large home in one of the top planned communities in the nation costs me just under the shack I rented in the east bay.
I just did the same thing. Being remote at work allowed me to trade the SF Bay Area for Northern New Mexico a couple years ago, and I can't describe how much happier I am. Life feels so much less precarious, I don't bleed money every time I go outside, and there's less of a crushing feeling of being stuck in the rat race out here.
I'm renting a 2 bedroom house with a nice backyard, able to focus on my health, relationships, and interests, and it's totally feasible now for me to go back to school if I want to (granted, this one is probably made easier by the fact that I don't have kids myself). Compare with my life in the Bay, where I rented a tiny, musty smelling room with no closet in a house with a serious mold problem for the exact same price I pay today while barely scraping by.
I can't honestly imagine how living in the Bay Area would be with kids -- that seems like that would be incredibly hard.
Things I do miss: incredible produce, walkability, excellent public transit, fresh produce, fresh sourdough. But now I have excellent fresh green chiles, beautiful landscapes, slightly more interesting weather, and (IMO) nicer, less-stressed people.
Missing fresh produce? You can buy straight from the farmers off their trucks. Santa Fe has farmers markets every Saturday morning. The natural grocers, sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods also have fresh produce. Norther NM just had a bumper year of it’s “wild” fruit trees. Even here where I live. Maybe ask around?
In California it's pretty easy to find like, perfectly pristine greens -- like, zero wilt or bruising or yellowing whatsoever. I'm at WFM and Sprouts nearly every weekend and have yet to find for example cilantro or kale or spring greens that don't have some wilt or yellowing going on. Which makes sense -- the climate out here isn't really amenable to picture perfect greens like California is.
But also, I'm probably more critical because I ran buying teams at grocery (brick & mortar and ecommerce) stores for 10 years so I'm always instinctively looking for minor blemishes
And yeah, really and truly I'm not being completely fair -- I haven't visited the farmers markets yet, and I've heard that about the trucks. Would love to check them out, hopefully I'll find some time this weekend.
The fruit has been pretty great though. I've been really happy with the stone fruit. One weird thing I've noticed is that the California avocados out here are consistently better than they were in California -- like, perfect ripeness, no browning, never disappointed when I get home, which would happen every other time in CA. Maybe there's more QA going on between CA and here, and time to ripen on the trucks
The farmers markets are amazing. I’ve had them walking distance from places I lived in San Francisco, Mountain View, San Jose, and Chico. The quality is incredible.
In a similar situation - year 5 of remote, now living in a small town still working for big tech. It does get lonely and you have to manage this yourself.
Volunteering with an organization you care about is a great way to combat this. They're locals, you get to know the community you're living in, and you probably share a common interest. Also feels great to give back.
Piling on to say +1 of lonely remote work. In my 3rd year remote I ended up renting a desk part time in an incubator just to be around people and get out of the house.
> P.S. First year of being completely remote was fantastic. Fifth year? Really lonely..
Yeah, I have taken to trying to find work-ish community outside of work. If you don't meet many people who have shared as much of your experience as employees of your own company, at least you can meet people who have shared similar experiences. It's a bit easier than getting to know complete strangers.
> I didn’t even lose my “walkability” you can find that in many places if you choose the right neighborhood.
Sadly the case for me seems to be that there are very nice walkable areas in these small cities, but everytime I interview for a job it turns out the office in in some way out suburban office park, so I have no way of commuting
I wonder if there's a way to split the difference, for instance get a job at the new locale, but gradually switch to working from home. This would at least be "less remote" from the employer's standpoint because you could bop into the office for meetings when needed.
While this sounds attractive, the major benefit (salary/cost-of-living arbitrage) completely goes away.
Local employers can't afford to pay you your big-city salary, and the benefit for a big-city employer to keep you remote is retention and a known quantity (assuming you're worth your salt).
It's a win-win for the worker and their employer.
The article focuses on the supposed loser: the township that loses out on a local job - but the newly relocated remote worker adds to the tax base and pays for groceries, etc.
20 years into work from home...
10 years of it after leaving the valley.
There really is no comparison. Less cost, less stress, and more productive. Bonus is valley companies tend to pay the same salary regardless of the jobs on-site/remote status. Got a house with 2 extra bedrooms - set one up as an office and the other as a 'server room'.
Went remote. Bought a house back near my family. Mortgage is nearly a quarter the cost of my one bedroom in Seattle. I'll miss Seattle, for sure, but at least now I don't have to hustle so hard. Especially with a kid on the way.
Single data point here, but I moved back to my hometown after leaving NYC about 5 years ago, I work remotely, and I will never go back. Quality of life massively better.
Always fun when recruiters reach out. Many simply can’t believe someone wouldn’t want to move back to a bigger city in return for a much higher paycheck (which I politely explain is effectively less money than I make now, due to costs of living).
The top picture in the article said "You must own a car here" and likely most households own more than one, with at least one being an SUV.
Living in Manhattan, I sometimes go weeks without taking the subway or bus, years without taking a taxi/Uber/Lyft/etc, and I can't remember the last time I drove.
My point is face-to-face walking community. I've found no substitute.
Though the sea levels continued rising and everyone acting like other people should change factors in.
I've been working remotely for about 18 years, and I've consistently chosen to live in major cities throughout (NYC, LA, Seattle, and now back home to Chicago). I love being able to walk or take public transportation to everything. I have a car if I need it, but I like to not _need_ it. As far as I'm concerned, working remotely and living in a major city is the best of both worlds.
I work remotely (6 years) and I live in a small-ish town (130k). I have no desire to live in a big city. I get the appeal of being able to walk or take public transportation everywhere, but the tradeoffs are worth it. It’s quieter, more laid back, and I have a lot of space. I also have a family and a dog, and so maybe that plays a part.
I've gone from very rural, to suburban, to very urban and I'm the opposite. When you're freed from the commute grind, life becomes much more quiet and laid back. I do have a little less space, but I also have an endless variety of things to do and one of the best parts of the big city is the multiculturalism. We have so many neighborhoods of immigrants that the cultural variety from food to entertainment is incredible. I've found that I'm much happier in my smaller home than I was in a four bed suburban nightmare. Spent a lot of my free time and a chunk of my income just keeping it clean and maintained. That's not the life I want lol.
I've never been as happy as when I could walk to my local soccer teams stadium and walk to my local grocery store. Although the massive international and farmers markets are very close too, so I always have every fresh ingredient I could ever need for every dish from every culture I've wanted to try. Especially if you don't get to travel much, being in a place where travel comes to you can be very rewarding and enriching.
I definitely get the appeal for some people (and if I was young and single it would probably appeal to me). I just get annoyed when I see people saying that we should all want to live in dense urban areas. Not saying that happened here, but I've seen it several times lately.
Would you mind elaborating why you prefer working remotely given you already live in a big city? When I've worked remotely I've always found the lag of actual face-to-face interaction a huge downside and prefer a short, ideally walkable commute. I'd love to hear your experience. Thanks!
Not the person you're asking, but orthogonal to where I live, penny-pinching on open office floor plans ended my ability to do productive work in an office nearly a decade ago.
And no I'm not going to put on headphones. IMO my work environment should naturally be conducive to getting s* done. But that seems to have become crazy talk.
The short answer is quality of life, and freedom to live my life the way that is most comfortable for me and my wife. I love the city so I choose to live in the city, but that choice is completely irrelevant to my work, as I can live / work from anywhere. The long answer is below.
I don't personally do well with the same schedule every day, which was a constant issue when I had regular jobs. The more I tried to fit into the day the world wanted me to fit into the less happy I became. It's not the work. I honestly love the work I do, but I abhor having a "job".
I have a lot of other reasons I don't like working at an office. I'll try to list a few off the top of my head.
- I don't like having "office friends".
- I can't stand office politics
- Scheduling meeting rooms is confusing and silly
- It seems a lot of time is wasted in meetings and in between tasks
- I don't enjoy being locked to a single place in order to get things done that I can do anywhere.
- I spend a lot of time wandering around and staring in space while I try to work out a problem, and the office was never really conducive to that.
- These days with the open plan offices, forget it. The last startup I worked with was acquired by a company you've probably heard of and as much as I truly liked the people there, I couldn't get a single thing done in that place. Headphones kind of helped, but I felt like I was at a lunch table in high school. I only had to work in that office for about a week per quarter, and it was my least productive week per quarter.
So on to the pros of my situation
- I can work wherever and whenever I want; This is generally in my office at my sit-stand desk with my three monitors and fancy chair, but if I want to fire up my fire-pit and break out my laptop, as I did last night, nothing stops me - besides maybe the weather. Coffee Shops, Shared Spaces, Airports, Other Cities, Seaside Towns, Cabins in the Woods, etc are all perfectly acceptable places for me to work upon my whim.
- I generally allow my sleep schedule to change naturally, so sometimes I sleep days and work nights. I get tons more done when that happens, and without anyone to report to outside of a weekly stand-up, it's a total non-issue.
- I can do a couple hours of work and then go run errands, and then a couple more, and then have lunch with a friend, and then a couple more and make some dinner and then answer a few emails, and my day is through. I've put the same amount of work in, but I've had a full, accomplished, and social day.
- My time is rarely wasted. If I'm not able to focus for the day, I'll just leave my desk and come back to it later or the next day.
- My friends are all my actual real friends who I like to see regardless of what industry they work in. I hang out with some of the people I work with, but that's entirely by choice, when we happen to be in the same city.
- I probably set an alarm two or three times a year. I generally like to wake up whenever, take my time to make breakfast, make or go and get coffee/tea, sit on my front porch for a bit to read the news, and then kiss my wife, make my way into my office and shut the door. It's kind of like a commute, but it's just me making my way through the house "on the way to work".
Obviously my way won't work for everyone, but after 18 years like this, I'm not sure I could ever go back.
> I spend a lot of time wandering around and staring in space while I try to work out a problem, and the office was never really conducive to that.
I am so glad to hear someone else does this. I sometimes feel like I'm wasting time when I get up to refresh my cup of coffee and then pause an extra four or five minutes to stare out the window and ponder what I'm working on.
For me personally, the ideal is the kind of good walkability and public transit you're talking about, but in a small town or city, somewhere in the 50k-500k range. Those are probably my favorite working arrangements. I like the smallness, less noise/congestion, and reasonable prices combined with the ability to still have a walkable downtown, and maybe hop on a train to get somewhere bigger a few hours away if I really need to. Easier to find those cities outside the USA though.
After trying Charlotte, SF, and Seattle on for size, I’ve learned the same about myself.
I work remotely for an SF-based company from Greensboro, NC: population 300k, with a highly walkable downtown. Bought a townhouse in the heart of everything with a commercially zoned office as the first floor. I go weeks without driving and share a single car with my wife for the times we need it.
It hasn't changed too much. We have a house in the city, so the standing plan is to stick around for at least a few years. We both grew up in major cities (NYC, Chicago), so that preference isn't likely to change any time soon.
Things like quality of schools may change what neighborhood we prefer, but we still have some time before then. If it turns out home-schooling is the best way, then we'll go that route.
Have you ever been in a bike-able city? When you're in a walking Utopia like Manhattan, it's hard to imagine anything other than walking. I thought I couldn't live without being in a walkable city.
Then I moved to a city that's not very walkable but very bikeable. I miss walking sometimes, but biking is pretty awesome.
Living in NYC, your food, clothing, electronics, most resources are transported to you by giant boats or trucks. You don't get to act environmentally superior because you outsource your transport.
How is that different from any suburb? You do get to act environmentally superior for using up less land to live, and using public transportation.
Most pollution comes from the energy used by motors to move people from one place to another, which is obviously more in a suburb environment rather than an walking environment.
Most pollution doesn’t come from “motors to move people”. Transportation is 14% globally and 28% for US, however that includes every kind of transportation - trucks, large ships, cars, trains, etc.
Largest sector globally is industry and heat, followed closely by agriculture.
Big cities may be superior in some respects, but they are also the symptom of a larger problem - it’s a lot more of us on this planet than were pre-industrial.
I'll bite. Of those three industry and agriculture I can have no control over. Both are going to be roughly the same in the suburbs as in the cities. However heat is radically different if you live in an apartment than if you live in a detached house on a plot of land. Not only are you sharing walls with other people but also your living spaces tend to be much smaller. Smaller also tends to mean less 'stuff' which means less industry to produce such stuff. Smaller also tends to mean less building material which again reduces industry. That combined with the much reduced energy costs of transportation means that city living is much better for the environment than outside the cities.
The downvotes for your comment makes no sense and highlights how ideologically sensitive HN has become. The biggest contributing factors to greenhouse gases and pollution more broadly are high per capita consumption (due to a modern standard of living that goes well beyond transportation) and population growth. And no, being in a city does not somehow make you magically more efficient to an extent that offsets the additional per capita impact.
The per capita consumption is hugely magnified for people living in single family homes with yards and garages. That type of low density housing makes it impossible to create mass transit options, or even cycling and walking, all at the same time increasing distances of travel for everyone and subsequently all the infrastructure that has to be installed along that distance.
Giant boats and trucks moving things in bulk is, pound for pound, way more efficient than every single person riding a 2 ton machine to move things around.
Then stop buying things from overseas. But if you're trying to use this as an excuse to tell yourself that everyone individually driving everywhere is fine for the environment you're engaging in motivated reasoning.
it's actually vastly more efficient and centralized; goods are transported to all stores like that, but in cities like NYC there's no last mile GHG emission.
I mean tons of the last 7/10 of a mile is done by old beat up delivery trucks, with much less capacity than 18 wheelers, that idle in traffic or idle double parked in the turning lane. I'm not going to argue that cities aren't more efficient but the picture that city-dwellers (self-satisfied New Yorkers in particular) paint about their environmental and ecological impact tend to be a very narrow window of the overall impact of their choice to live there.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. People in urban areas have lower carbon footprints than people in car-dependent suburban and rural areas. No one has a zero or negative carbon footprint unless they do something to actively offset their emissions. I don't think most city dwellers are self-satisfied jerks. A few are, but then does it really have anything to do with the city?
Ultimately, poking people in the eye about their consumption habits is counter-productive. Cities are efficient, but not efficient enough to prevent global warming. This problem is only going to be solved through technical innovation and government regulation.
If you're living in a suburb and working remotely, it's a pretty good deal. You're not burning gas to get to work and you get to enjoy some space.
I think the biggest evil of suburbs is the commute. I think part of the reason there's no social activity in suburbs is because, honestly, who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job and knowing you need to be out the door by 6:30 the next day?
> I think the biggest evil of suburbs is the commute.
Commute fuel costs aren't remotely the biggest inneficiency with living in a diffuse suburb, though. Someone has to grade and pave all those extra miles of road. Someone has to pour all that concrete for sidewalks that no one walks on. Someone has to trench and lay piping and cable through all that unused space. Those large diffuse houses need more energy to heat and cool both because they're larger and because they're diffuse.
And even then, granting that you're not commuting to work, your kids are commuting to school on vehicles that need to travel much farther, your family is commuting to dinner and shopping over much larger distances, and everyone that needs to be at your home for any reason (to repair something, deliver something, etc...) needs to spend more fuel and time to get there.
Suburban sprawl is a bad trade. The worst of it, for you, may be the psychological impact of the daily commute. But that doesn't mean the rest of it isn't bad.
People write stuff like this a million times a day. The reason it has no effect on me, for one, is that at the end of the day, I think if living in a suburb was as relatively wasteful as people claim, it would as a consequence be correspondingly relatively expensive.
Usually people say something about externalities to explain why they deplore certain activity, but it seems to me that when you spend an incremental dollar (such as to live downtown), it rapidly diffuses into the economy and represents the average amount of carbon-intensity. So I think how much you spend is the key to focus on, rather than the "niceness" of what you spend on.
There is, in fact, social activity in the suburbs. There may be less, per capita, then in big cities, but that's because what is in the suburbs is car-dependent, and once you have that a threshhold cost, the marginal cost of leaving the suburb for activity in the nearest urban center is low, so lots of social activities partaken by suburban dwellers occur in urban centers rather than suburbs.
> who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job
Weekday social activities are often partaken in near work prior to commuting back home, avoiding this problem and often reducing commute time by avoiding traffic.
I have friends who have regular block parties in their neighborhoods with BBQ and keg beer. Probably depends a lot on your neighbors and their proclivities.
>I think the biggest evil of suburbs is the commute. I think part of the reason there's no social activity in suburbs is because, honestly, who wants to do anything after spending an hour in traffic after getting off your 8-5 job and knowing you need to be out the door by 6:30 the next day?
Takes me an hour+ to get home 6 miles outside of the city (still in the City, but not downtown) on the bus. Not a great argument you have there unless you ignore everyone that isn't privileged enough to live in the city downtown proper.
It also depends on the city. I can travel 30KM in 15 minutes on a train, or drive that distance in 2 hours if I’m lucky.
Many cities are planned well and easy to get around. But this isn’t really true for most American cities. Although if you’re working in a city and living outside of it, you’re almost certainly wasting more time than anyone in it during your commute.
I dream for an American city with public transit as good as some European countries. Hopefully some infrastructure projects will come through, but I really don't see it happening any time soon with the amount of corporate lobbying making sure everything stays exactly the same: profits for oil.
It's debatable whether I am in a suburb or not at the moment - I am barely technically within the city limits, about 3.5 miles from the middle. But anyway, per Google Maps, I'm about 8 minutes drive from work, 54 minutes bus ride, and 62 minutes walk! Bicycling is estimated at barely over 20 minutes.
When I lived 10 minutes walk from work, the bus took about the same time, but waiting for its schedule meant practically speaking it was more like 30 minutes. It felt a little safer than scrambling across three highways, but after a bit, I couldn't stand the wait, so I went back to walking, and then to driving.
If I lived in a popular suburb further to the north, then I wouldn't be able to ride the bus at all (although that's too far of a commute for me by car)
So, across the whole range of commute distances, I can't see any situation where riding the bus makes sense. It either takes essentially as long as walking, or isn't available at all.
Maybe the US is different but in the UK there is lots of social activity in the suburbs and plenty of people do go out mid week knowing they have to be in work the next day.
Most of the time during the last ten years, I've lived in a suburb of a roughly 1 million population area, and generally my commute is 10 minutes or less. When I've lived in the middle of a city, my commute has been (in two different cases) about a 10 minute walk. Even when I was inside the DC beltway, not exactly in the city or in the suburbs, my commute was about 10 minutes. I simply wouldn't consider anything much worse than that.
What is probably accurate is that there’s a lot less for a single twentysomething (though that depends on your interests). If you’re an adult with a family, there’s more than enough to do.
It's literally not zoned for it. Change the zoning laws to at least allow for a local pub or coffee shop in the middle of a residential area, that would be a positive step in the right direction IMHO.
I mean I kind of agree with your point about zoning but you realize that your chosen examples make you look like a single, childless 20something and thus somewhat out of touch with what a lot of people consider socializing?
I don't like to suburbs either but I'm currently visiting my brother who lives in one. Their socializing is kids basketball & soccer games at the park (which suburbs are zoned for), picnics at the local greenway (also zoned for), and swimming in the community pool. All of which are walking distance.
Not to mention, you know, inviting people over to their house because it isn't a tiny 400 square foot apartment. They make dinner for friends and watch football on the porch.
Honestly, that’s sounding pretty close to just being a town.
I’ve lived in a few suburbs. One of them was blessed to have a dollar store within walking distance (you’d need to cross a busy highway, but you could walk). None of them so much as had sidewalks, though. Grocery stores were from 15-25 minutes by car. Entertainment (theaters, pools) were around that distance if not more.
Suburbs vary from place to place, just as towns and cities do. Some offer conveniences that make it hard to imagine living anywhere else. Some make it impossible to do absolutely anything without a car and a few gallons of gas.
You seem to think that social activities depend on access by walking. Suburbs are very car dependent, sure, but that doesn't mean that social activities don't happen, it just means that people drive to them.
Late 30s, father, just not "urban". The best layout I've seen was in Amsterdam - every neighborhood had it's own local pub, local coffeehouse, and small grocery, all eminently walkable/bikeable. Neighbors knew each other and socialized regularly. The "small town feel" was nailed pretty well, IMHO, while still being in a bustling urban center.
This is the case in many, if not most, major (and some not so major) European cities. I've lived in Berlin & Vienna for the past ~decade and a half & it's certainly true here (worse cycling infrastructure than Amsterdam tho).
I'll bet this is also the case for cities in developed east Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan & South Korea as well.
OK, here's a question - you say "tiny apartment", but is that really all that exists in the US? In the UK, there's a rather large amount of 2 and 3 bed flats - the one I'm living in is nearly 800 square feet, not unreasonably priced, and we can fit more people than we can reasonably organise to be available at one time.
There's also three parks within 10 minutes' walk, more a short bus ride away, and multiple shops and cafes surrounding us. And we're about 15 minutes by bus from the city centre.
Just saying... the issues the US seems to have with cities seem to mostly be a result of lack of caring about them, not inherent properties of cities.
Typical apartments in the US seem to be around 700-800 square feet, with one or two bedrooms, so not "tiny". These may or may not be located in walkable neighborhoods or with easy access to city center, it depends on the city. As an anecdote in Seattle, which is better at this than most cities, I have a one bedroom flat that is almost 1200 square feet and can walk to everything except the airport, for which there is public transit. Not unreasonably priced, though not inexpensive either. There are dozens of bars, restaurants, cafes, etc within a few blocks as well as several shops of all types.
Of course "tiny apartments" are not all that exists in the US. Many apartments are 1000 square feet or larger where I live, especially ones with more than 1 bedroom. Travis Kalanick just bought an apartment in NYC that is around 6700 square feet.
Americans also have parks, buses, shops, and cafes. All the suburbs I have lived in are about 10 minutes from a "city center".
The assumption here seems to be that all the yard and home space everyone is complaining about is left unused. You may need pubs and coffee shops for socializing in the cities. In the suburbs, people host each other in their homes or yards on a pretty regular basis, at least in my experience.
in my residential area most of the social activity is dog walking and neighborhood meetings where people discuss whose car or place of living was broken into and how to get the police to actually show up
Let's not confuse a suburb with a smaller city. I live in a 500k hab city, that's the hard limit for me. But it is a fully functional city, not an island of houses; I don't have to drive 16km to buy groceries.
> There's a big difference between moving to the suburbs and moving to a small town.
“Small town” and “suburb” are overlapping categories, and if it's in the former category but also lets you work in a big city (so that what you can afford on the same salary is relevant), it's almost certainly also in the latter category.
I think people need a way to differentiate between the concrete 5 lane highway and parking lot requirements that make it impossible to walk anywhere, versus towns with small roads and businesses spread out that one can walk around easily. I would interpret the word suburb to describe an area where you must use a car to get around and walking is not an option, versus a small town where you don't need a car and can walk around to do most routine activities.
> I would interpret the word suburb to describe an area where you must use a car to get around and walking is not an option, versus a small town where you don't need a car and can walk around to do most routine activities.
The problem with this binary division is that plenty of real communities outside of metropolitan coresñ.ñ
would be a blend of “small town” and “suburb” by this description, varying on a continuum between being nearly purely “small town” in their local core (which might or might not be styled as a “downtown”) to pure “suburb” as you get further from that core.
This. I moved from Downtown Seattle to Downtown Raleigh with a remote job, and cut my rent in half without changing driving or living patterns significantly. My husband and I still share 1 car which gets used 2-3 times a month for trips to nearby cities/beaches/mountains (Charlotte, Wilmington, Asheville), and then otherwise we walk to cafes, bars, restaurants and corner stores, even my doctor and dentist are only a short walk away.
There are not many parts of Raleigh where you can do this, and it's still more expensive than suburb living out here. But I find that I have equal or better access to the stuff I actually want and use, so I don't feel like I sacrificed much.
Suburbs ARE evil, but our land use policies keep us from building enough housing in cities, which makes them too expensive to be considered a good option for most people.
I didn't downvote it, but it's likely due to the unsubstantiated claim that suburbs are evil or the sweeping generalization that all cities have poor zoning and land use planning. Or perhaps the biased implication that large cities are good for everyone.
Yesterday, or at least when I remember the craze of moving from suburbs to the city, city real estate cost around 50% of what it does today. Property costs have inflated a lot alongside the popularity of living more concentrated.
So it stands to reason that the pendulum now swings the other way. People are very good at sussing out the economics of a trend that used to be profitable but no longer is.
I think the trick is, you need to live in a larger metro area for awhile and establish yourself before you're seen as a viable remote candidate by most employers. That, or start your own busienss.
Smaller areas typically lack competitive tech positions and larger areas don't want to take a risk on you when they have a pool of warm bodies to choose from.
I moved to a smaller city after living in NYC for ten years. It's had a profound affect on mental and physical health. I enjoyed New York a lot, but it is far too culturally and politically intense for my liking. I also casually drank too much while I lived there.
Above all though I had such poor access to natural beauty and wild country, which I now realize is important to me.
> which I politely explain is effectively less money than I make now, due to costs of living
a rule of thumb I hear from a financial adviser: "Why work in a huge first tier city for 10% more money when you can move to a second or third tier city where housing prices are 50% lower?"
I live in Sweden and I did the same. Moved back to the community I came from when we got our son. Got rid of the commute and we got a house that's 2x as big for, I kid you not, 1/10th of the price.
In fact our expenses fell so much I could even start working 60%, and we had about as much money left as before.
There are trade-offs. There are no restaurants except fast food, there is no martial arts training I used to do, there are no boardgame clubs and it's much harder to get friends. But if you can get through that economically it's a ridiculously beneficial thing to do (given you can get a job of course).
In the U.S., moving from the city to the suburbs is probably the best thing you can do to ensure decent public schooling. For instance, a recent list of top ranked public high schools from US News and World Report:
Academic Magnet High School, South Carolina
Maine School of Science and Mathematics
BASIS Scottsdale, Arizona
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia
Central Magnet School, Tennessee
Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology, Georgia
Haas Hall Academy, Arkansas
International Academy of Macomb, Michigan
Payton College Preparatory High School, Illinois
Signature School, Indiana
Be very careful with that list. Those are specialized, highly competitive schools. What puts them on that list as opposed to Oklahoma School of Science and Math or North Carolina School of Science and Math is that the latter are boarding schools that serve their whole state. These are schools that serve the same role but only allow people in from their county (e.g., Alexandria County for Thomas Jefferson).
Also, US News and World Report rankings are useless. They're a measure solely of prestige and brand, not of any actual quality of education.
I'm not saying your wrong. I'm just saying that this data doesn't support your point.
They must have changed that since 2005 when I was dealing with their graduates. It certainly wasn't open to me earlier on when I was a high schooler elsewhere in Virginia.
I'm not worried about education. Sure there might be more choices in the city, and the local education has it's problems, but it's still good enough. It might not be the best, but most schools in the city aren't either.
Health is the biggest worry (which I even forgot in my comment). Not because we'll get worse care here, but because the distance to the nearest hospital is very large (2 hours by car). Which is especially worrisome as we're expecting another child in about 5 months. A pretty big change as we used to live a 10 min walk away from one of the biggest University hospitals in Sweden.
Then again health care in the big cities, like Stockholm, isn't that great either. There's a lot of stories about understaffed hospitals, very long queues and how new mothers are sent home almost immediately after giving birth (otherwise you can stay a couple of days to get settled).
> There's a lot of stories about understaffed hospitals, very long queues and how new mothers are sent home almost immediately after giving birth (otherwise you can stay a couple of days to get settled).
Same here in the UK interestingly enough. Two hours is a while though, but unsurprising as generally the UK is pretty compact.
I'll note that there are several smaller hospitals much closer (but they're not allowed to be called hospitals). There is light emergency care, nurses and doctors there but they often need to send us to the hospital 2 hours away. For example for our ultrasound we can go to one 1 hour away and for regular talks and checkups the local one is fine.
> She and her husband, who have two children, bought a house in the Boise area after renting in L.A. It is twice as big as their old place, but the monthly payments are half as much as their L.A. rent. There was also enough room for her mother to move in.
2x the space for 1/2 the price. Our remote-working future cannot come quick enough.
It this price disparity will only last as far as the demand for these areas stays low. As the demand from remote workers fleeing large cities grows, so will the prices. See Austin for an illustration of rapid gentrification due to migration.
Indeed, there is a lot of open space. When you look at why Austin has the appeal for high tech industry, I think it largely was/is based on University of Texas and their strong record in computer engineering. This caused companies like IBM, Motorola, Samsung, etc. to locate there.
It takes decades to build out another such city from scratch. I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be done, just that it doesn't happen quickly.
IMO the hardest part is convincing people to be part of such a task because they have self-reinforcing loops like workers go where jobs are, companies go where talent is.
That is doubtful. Consider scale. While there are a few dozen really densely packed cities, there are a couple orders of magnitude more small cities. There simply aren't enough people to 'fill up' the small cities in the US. There will of course always be regional places that are more in-demand than others, but overall it's like moving from a puddle to the ocean. It's just not going to make a dent.
I think you're missing the point that many of those moving out of the really big cities are going to the same smaller cities. Taking Austin as an example, it's growing by leaps and bounds. The gentrification is indeed happening.
If the outflow from the really big cities was equally distributed (say, as percentage of city's population), then your view would be accurate. But that's not what's happening.
When I lived in Raleigh/Durham back in 2011, I bumped into John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats at a coffee shop. We chatted for a few minutes and he said that he hears a lot of people say that Durham is the Brooklyn of the south, but he doesn't buy it. He thinks (and I agreed) that it has its own charm, its own vibe and its own identity, and that people are trying to make it into something it's not.
That's to say, I think you're absolutely right - people want to move to these places cause they perceive them as little Brooklyns or little Seattles. They have the sensibilities and prestige of those places, but not the crowds or the cost.
>That's to say, I think you're absolutely right - people want to move to these places cause they perceive them as little Brooklyns or little Seattles.
I think people just want to be able to afford a mortgage without giving up some basic urban amenities like walkability or nice restaurants and bars. They might miss things about Brooklyn or Seattle and want to recreate it, but that doesn’t mean they think it’s a “little” anything.
People could just be using it as a shorthand for things that are aspirational goals. Like when startups say "It's like Uber but for custodial engineers!"
Maybe at the highest end, they're 3000, but a quick search of apartments.com shows there are still plenty of nice apartments to be had in the 1000-1500 range.
IME people move out of big cities when they get into their late 20s / 30s, when the joy of exploration of what a big city has to offer starts to wane compared with the ease of living life in a comfy groove, when you know what you want and it's available without putting up with everything else that a big city pushes on you - high prices, high rents, crowds, long commutes.
I don't think this means that young people are going to stop coming to cities.
I took a pay cut to work remotely in Asheville, NC (about the most remote, stable, infrastructure-enabled city I could find next to Chattanooga, TN) and while the community was great and living costs were much cheaper, this kind of plan was still wishful thinking because unless...
1. you stay remote (read: can handle work != social structure)
2. your spouse's employment situation is also accommodating
3. your community doesn't decline due to the brain drain / job drain problem of areas outside major metro centers
So you need to be resistant and resilient to the downsides of living away from so many techies.
Funny you mention Asheville and Chattanooga. I’m currently working at one of the large tech companies in the Bay Area, but if I ever take a remote job, those are the top two cities I would move to.
I knew about the Denver area’s potential at the time but the high real estate prices were a problem. Part of my objective was to get years ahead of a big boom and save money before it got too bad, and I managed to do that fine in Asheville. The region has a lot of the same issues as smaller towns in the US without any industries to accelerate its growth besides craft beer and tourism. The healthcare industry is entirely because of the massive retiree population that are typically snowbirds that don’t contribute to state and county taxes besides property taxes, so its everyday population is starved for government resources relative to its size while it has the highest property values in NC (well, it was until 2016 last I saw). So basically Buncombe County was the lowest earning but most expensive part of NC to live in - this is not a recipe for sustainable growth. I really liked the community and it was a really good place to live if you could afford it. Chattanooga is much better off in comparison although I’m curious about how it’s done at attracting a sustained tech industry almost a decade after its investments.
I was in Atlanta for a few years afterward (not my choice honestly) and wound up back in a much better situation and same location than I started before my move to Asheville. It was a humbling experience that I may not have gotten if I had stayed in the DC region, which also was never my preference either.
Bend, Oregon is apparently the remote work capital of the US, according to statistics compiled by one of the Oregon state economists who - it turns out - works remotely from Bend rather than in Salem or Portland.
IDK... I've done remote work too, but I now have a job in an office and it makes me happier to be around other people, and to be able to chat about stuff in a higher bandwidth way.
I've experienced both remote work from another state in a house I owned and working in the company office in Manhattan for extended periods. Working in the office was massively better for my daily mood and mental health than working at home all the time. Just little things like getting up to go get an afternoon coffee with the people I work with.
When I worked at home sometimes I wouldn't even leave the house for two or three days at time.
I started going to the store every day just to have something to do to go out. My wife was like "NO, we don't need anything!" until she kind of got why.
The infrastructure in many big cities is so broken, daily existence is kind of painful. I live in Austin which isn't really even that big of a city but the infrastructure is so poor that commuting anywhere is very painful and there are a lot of road rage incidents as a result. Unless you live downtown there is no walkability and if you live downtown you need to work downtown. The public transit system is laughable. We have a metro rail that doesn't run after 6 and doesn't run on Sundays.
Austin's infrastructure is broken and poor because it (like many cities in the US) were not at all designed in mind with a growing population.
So as people move around to cities like Austin, they place immense stress on the transit system while the city is unable to act due to both the regional and state politics and poor city planning. The rapid gentrification of the city outpaces the creation of new homes or businesses which means in 5-10 years Austin will be in a really, really bad state.
I dont think I could ever move back to the midwest. Spent a couple years in columbus and that city gets old pretty fast. Either you pay 1.3k a month to drink in a 4 story apartment complex with thin walls and a pool closed for 8 months of the year, or you live out in white bread suburban hell until you are in hospice care. Not for me.
Where I’m at now is probably the most multicultural city in the americas. You see signs in all kinds of languages on a daily bases. Neighborhoods actually have striking character. There are interests I have here that I could never pursue in any other city. There’s also the weed, the weather, the fact that ambitious transit is actively being built, and, my god, the FOOD. My ashes will be scattered across the santa monica mountains.
US is one of the very few places in the world where most people live in their own house, even if it's in "hellish" suburbs. Outside of US, even in first world countries, most people live in flats. Also, majority of world population live in flat out third world countries, and for them, moving to a "boring" (safe, clean, reasonably well designed, consisting of polite/civilized people, having working, high-quality infrastructure etc. etc.) US suburb would be a huge improvement.
> Outside of US, even in first world countries, most people live in flats
That's where the overestimation comes in. You assume people are miserable and would rather live in a ridiculous house and have to take a car to go do anything.
I suppose one interesting question is if some of these cities that are highly attractive to remote workers will gather up a large enough concentration of them that they will start to get hired locally there. (Or perhaps this is even happening already?) If I was in charge of economic development in one of those areas I'd certainly want to look into what might encourage that local→remote→local transition to take place.
Definitely happening here in Boston with people choosing to live in Portland, ME and Providence, RI. Both great places to live with a much lower cost of living. The commute is somewhat do-able from Providence. It's a great deal if you can get the Boston salary and make the remote/semi-remote life work.
Boston is building an incredible amount in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, the Seaport, and even downtown with new buildings. I’m optimistic that Boston can avoid the trap SF fell into with nimby’s blocking everything. Rents have stabilized the last few years.
Yeah, Boston area housing prices will be the death NH/ME/RI. Considering how culturally incompatible the Boston area is with NH and ME I feel really bad for the people of those states who get to see their states turned into MA-Lite.
We moved to the Boston area when I was a kid in the early 80s and the exact same things you described were said then. So either it’s not true or just taking a heckuva long time
This is very true. I commuted from Newburyport MA (20 minutes south of Portsmouth NH) to Boston by bus for a few years. (My other option was MBTA commuter rail, which was further from my house and ran into North Station, which was farther from work.) The bus ride was routinely 1 hour 20 minutes, so add another 20 to get to Portsmouth.
(Edit: I’ve also done the Providence, RI to Boston commute, by rail, which was just over an hour typically.
Don’t forget that commuting works well when your job is near free parking/train/bus. It gets pretty bad when you have to add another 20 minute subway wait/ride in once in town...)
Damn dude how was it possible that the MBTA was further than driving all the way up to Portsmouth? The Newburyport commuter rail station is dead center of town. Was this before they opened the station up there?
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. The bus runs Portsmouth NH -> Newburyport, MA -> South Station. (No drive to Portsmouth necessary.)
The train is on the Newburyport/Newbury town line, so not quite the center of town... but that’s a quibble. Parking for the train isn’t free either, and tickets cost more than the bus. The busses run more frequently too (they’re smaller, so it’s like breaking one big train into pieces.)
It's harder to get a remote job. There are more non remote jobs than remote. So if you're looking for a job, you have a set of 3 choices, remote only, non remote or both. Moving when you have a remote job is cool, but if things get tough say in an economy downturn and you need a new job. You might find that it's more difficult to get another remote job. If you moved to a location without much jobs, you are going to put yourself in a difficult bind. If you bought a house, tougher!
Out of curiosity what do you do? If you don't want to share that's fine, but I also wish to do the same however have not found something to solve/make yet.
Literally the most boring thing you would ever think of which has tons of competitors. I sell it to big companies who don't mind spending $1K/year on it (h/t to Joel on software for this tip)
If you want to do it, then find some product that exists, that you like, copy and tweak.
Canadian datapoint here. I used to expend every cent living in whatever crappy rental I could find in Vancouver. Moved to a tiny island community six years ago and now work remote one of two days a week to cut the commute down.
I have deer walking in my yard and 20 square miles of untouched forest to hike in directly where I live. Our internet provider recently upgraded service to 1Gbps, so video conferencing is snappy and glitch-free.
Many of my employees are making similar moves. One moved to a mountain town about an hour outside of the city. Another moved to a seaside village.
This is clearly the future, brought to us by the vast improvements in remote work infrastructure such as Slack and Zoom.
> ... [W]orkers tend to spread out geographically during an economic cycle’s later stages, economists say, raising questions about how these cities will fare in a downturn. Workers are usually more confident—and employers more lenient—when the economy has been flourishing.
> In 2017, some 5.3% of adults in metro areas of between 500,000 and three million people worked from home, a rough proxy for remote workers. That was up from 3.7% a decade earlier...
It’ll be interesting to see whether these workers will be able to maintain their “big city” salaries over time, and how they’ll fare in a economic downturn (e.g. they’ll be far away from “most” jobs in their sector.)
I work mostly remotely from a small town outside a mid size city that has a satellite office for a company based in a big city. I get the big city salary for now, but I'm operating on the assumption that the gravy train will stop at some point. I'm OK with that tradeoff.
As someone who lives in a small city (120k city pop ~800k metro pop) I'm still looking to move to larger one for an number of reasons. Most of probably due to my specific niche issues and likely arent important at all (for example early 20s, I cant drive, lowering my quality of life, etc.)
But one big one is networking. I've been told by people trying to get into larger tech companies that the only way to get in as an experienced professional is referrals. Living in a larger tech hub opens up so much more potential for networking and career growth that I just cant get here.
This is a good thing, whilst centralisation of workforce has it's upsides, it has in many places exceeded that balance with many negative impacts. Whilst these are small steps, for those removed from the overheads of a delayed saturated comute and associated impacts upon health. Equally, one less commuter, helps reduce that saturation and crowing with associated delays, might even be that per person we are only talking a nanosecond level of scale. But when you have many of these small reductions in saturation, and those gains project across a larger scale. You end up with slightly better air quality, slightly less health impacts, slightly less delays.
Hopefully this is a trend that tractions as many roles can be shifted in this way and improve quality of life overall.
On the flip-side, will we see large corporation office space shifted into the virtual World? Will signs start appearing in offices "Will the last one to relocate, please not turn off this server". Maybe.
But the ability to use up an area and then move on, expand and repeat the process has been one trait humans share with many biological organisms. Is this just nature at play thru adaption to the environment,on some level - I'd say yes.
For many instances - no as you are just removing that long commute. Many places have high priced area's that people commute to from a great distance. In those cases you are removing the commute. For those moving into the countryside, unless your building new houses - your not using up more land. Just shifting and also removing the need for new housing in dense area's, so protecting green spaces were they are more needed.
But any swing one way or another can shift that balance. You can look at the extreme of people all shifting to the countryside that the countryside itself becomes a town, a city.... But things tends to balance out.
After all, in many area's we are seeing the demise of high street shopping, is that a good or bad thing. But I'm sure many do not want to live in stacked up boxes so small as so they are barely affordable and all other activities reduced to door delivery. Though in many area's, that is kinda what people have already.
Then the whole aspect of the population not getting any smaller and such shifts will be more than offset by population expansion.
You aren't really removing the commute. You're replacing the work commute with the grocery/social life/needs etc commute. Which is also far less efficient on a community-level because those smaller towns and suburbs have to be strongly subsidized in order to maintain infrastructure that far fewer people use. Not to mention that by working remote you're also starving those small towns of business growth opportunities by having it be centralized in another state, which means paying for new infrastructure is much harder especially given how tax-averse Americans tend to be.
Where does the funding for new infrastructure come from? Hospitals? Public services such as police or firefighters? Libraries, if your town has any? Or how about schools?
This money comes from the federal government, gets distributed down to the state level which then gets distributed out to the various cities and localities depending on need [1]. A lot of these towns are given grants or loans from the USDA in order to fund various improvements [2].
That can in many parts of the World yield a bit of a chicken and egg combined with the - if you build it - they will come approach. Though in most, it's supply and demand and TAX distribution according to that populous. Even in cities you will see poorer area's subsidies by more affluent area's, though that is not always the case and opens up a whole area of have and divide politics and economics.
But it gets down to local experience and equally the country for people, so one perspective can seem complete polar to another's experience.
We build our own in Iowa. Not sure how that works elsewhere. We build our excellent secondary road system (access to every section in Iowa for agricultural purposes). We build our hospitals. Our library was a local bond issue.
And our schools! A new bond issue every few years for schools for a growing population.
And lets forget the myth that 'federal funding' is free, or come from somewhere else. It comes from us.
Federal funding mostly comes from the states with the highest economic activity. Unless you're disputing that states with higher number of individuals and economic activity doesn't correlate with more taxes paid to the federal government.
And on the iowa website itself [1] I can see the grants and federal funding used by the state government. My point being that if the more rural cities were required to pay for everything themselves, they would not be able to.
I'm aware that at least in the UK and many other countries that the drive for 100% broadband and mobile coverage has seen subsidies to cover rural area's.
"“Cool,” which is to say, a certain type of bourgeois, with a certain aesthetic that unites it with larger cities while still maintaining a feeling of quaintness. In Tulsa, for example, there’s a gorgeous new book store, an ever-expanding number of breweries, co-working spaces in rehabbed brick buildings, coffee shops in rehabbed brick buildings, airy restaurants with farm-to-table menus in rehabbed brick buildings. There’s a walkable downtown, a First Friday art walk to get people there, a cultural tourist site (the Woody Guthrie Museum) and public (in this case, actually private) outdoor space (The Gathering Place)."
I am on one of those arrow paths from New York City to the upper south.
Sort of. They fly me in from NYC during the week for four days, then fly me back for the weekends.
I didn't really make a decision to move, I was looking for work in NYC, but was given a good job offer which said I'd be paid a NYC type salary, and have expensed flights, hotels, car rentals and meal etc. per diems. I haven't exactly moved, I rent in NYC and stay at a hotel down there. I don't plan on staying down here permanently - if and when I start looking for another job it will be in NYC.
I think some of what is observed is kind of illusory. Because what is really happening here? On a very broad level - am I from NYC saying I want to become more of an upper south kind of guy? Or is this upper south Fortune 100 company saying it wants to become more of an NYC-type company, and bringing me and others down there to accomplish that? From everything I have seen, more of the latter. Northern Virginia has already pretty much been swallowed into the Boston to DC megalopolis, and it's possible that Richmond, Virginia Beach, Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and Charlotte are next. Or if companies are desperate enough for IT etc. talent, they might start offices in NYC, SF etc. looking for it. Our company already has a west coast advanced IT office, as well as some offshored stuff to India.
New York means not needing to own a car, because it has a massive public transit system (which has been a little shaky for the past five years though). It means 4AM last call. It means having technical meetups and conferences, and universities like Columbia and NYU with impressive CS professors and students. It means lots of job opportunities with good salaries. You can even avoid the city and live a suburban existence if you want.
All anybody talks about are the slim pickings in the local job market down there. You don't have that problem in San Francisco or New York.
The article doesn't touch on carbon impact, which I can intuitively think of as going in either direction. On the one hand, it's obvious that replacing a car commute with remote work is directly advantageous on a one-to-one basis. On the other hand, it's also possible that many households will actually see an overall increase in car and air miles (to say nothing of systemic scalabilities from serving infrastructure/goods/services to dense vs sparse populations) - so whether the trend is overall positive or negative is not obvious to me.
Yep, I saw this play out first-hand. My company hired a good group of people in the Seattle office for a job that was essentially remote. After a few years, the office shrank from about 6 people, to 2 as people decided to just move to CoL cities. Example destinations: Tampa, Santa Fe, Spokane, and Raleigh (in my case).
Nobody regrets their move yet to my knowledge. I'm definitely very happy to be saving money, and my standard of living is better. My urban lifestyle hasn't changed much (still only drive 2-3x a month for trips to cities, beaches or mountains) and I'm from NC, so culture stuff like the food and friendly people are a positive as well.
I live in SF, which many would consider a big city, but I’ve come to realize that I actually do enjoy living in a big city, it’s just that in the US in particular big city living means a big cost of living premium.
There’s dozens of big metropolitan cities outside the US that have better public transportation systems, lower rents, lower food costs, etc. that the analogous big city in the US, namely SF, LA, and NYC. I’m beginning to realize that the best way to continue living in a big city but lower my monthly expenses would be to move abroad.
If I were at a small startup as an engineering manager and the CEO told me to outsource to save money, I would try very hard to convince him to outsource within the country. Employees are cheaper while the timezone and skill set remain high. It obviously is nowhere near as cheap as Vietnam or India, but so much better even with 1/4 as many devs.
That outsourcing conversation I had at every single startup I worked for, and I greatly hope the trend to remote work continues.
On top of that if your startup has any meaningful operations or customer service headcount, you will save so much money outside of SF/LA/NYC -- not just because of wages, but because of rent, as well.
We've been seeing this for several years now. VBOs (Virtual Business Owners) are seeing their effective spending power double by moving to places with lower taxes and cheaper housing - that is REAL! - https://vbonation.com/vbo-lifestyles/move-to-rural-america/
It's an odd phenomenon when elements aggregates into a pole to accelerate until that pole is saturated and overwhelmed, improved elements now go away, until the next cycle.
Living in Berlin for almost a decade, bought a house here and love to live here because costs of living is far less than compared to my original city (50k people, even the house market is expensive over there).
No car needed, plenty of services for family and kids. My original city doesn't offer them at all and you need to own a car if you want to go somewhere.
I had been working remotely for a startup and since funding is very limited so is my pay for now. Moved across the border from San Diego to Tijuana. My cost of living is less than half of what it was even though I live at the beach now instead of a low income neighborhood in San Diego.
Many of these second tier tech cities have a full tech ecosystem: nationally ranked tech schools, lots of startups, venture capital, tech accelerators, startup weeks, etc. I have live in both Palo Alto and Denver over a decade each. Denvers biggest tech shortcoming is a lack big VCs.
I'm all for spreading the workforce out and encouraging more remote work. It makes no sense to subject so many people to LA, SF, and NYC commutes every day when the job can be done just as well from home or another office location in a suburb or satellite campus somewhere.
The difference is in those places you have a lot more options to pivot to a new job. If the suburban office closes there are no jobs for you in the area and you’d have to relocate. Some people like remote work, but personally I don’t. I get a lot more done being able to run into people face to face and quickly hash through something in the hallway or at a desk or over lunch.
And you can live close to work in those cities. I live and work in LA and commute on public transport for 20 mins one way. The rents may be high in LA, but even minumum wage is nearly $14 now, and rents are pretty even across many parts of town barring some obvious exceptions.
Does hiring a remote worker trigger nexus if you don't otherwise have a "presence" there? I'm sure you'll need to register with the secretary of state there to pay payroll taxes.
Didn't read the article because, paywall. But Austin, Denver, Portland have all had significant price increases. RiNo in Denver is really cool but homes are $700k+. It's a big discount from LA, but I wouldn't call it life-changing, especially when you consider what you give up.
Art, culture, and diversity of people are what make a city so interesting to me. In LA, we have so many friends who are working on interesting projects and are very intelligent. Every time we discuss moving to a smaller town, we are concerned that we might have difficulty finding social circles that fit us. The average American and I just don't have a ton in common. I know that sounds super snobby, but people are different. I'm not saying one is right or wrong.
I always think about what will be the next tier of cities where remote work and satellite offices will be popular? To me, Asheville, Greenville, and to a lesser extent Chattanooga will be popular locations. CoL and an urban core are requirements, but also access to nature, transplants and local universities seem to help. A good airport is also big, as we love to travel.
The Idaho Statesman did a write-up a while back asking if Californians moving to Idaho would change the politics. What they figured is that it was mostly right-leaning Californians coming to Idaho. While it surely will change the politics I don't think it is guaranteed to become more blue.
It likely has some effect though at the same time, it's much more difficult to see "them" as evil when you're neighbors, making everyone a bit more purple.
I really hope not or we will start to see the same problems in these small cities that liberal policies caused elsewhere creating an endless cycle of rich liberals migrating to conservative run higher quality of life cities and ruining them.
And recent grads a place that is affordable. All my friends from Los Angeles have moved to Texas and Florida (some are families) and they are all progressive like most in Californian major cities. So they will make those states more blue. Which goes against what youre saying.
I fail to see why families from big cities would be red. Most in big cities are progressive, even families. I havent seen data that would suggest otherwise
I'll just say this and take my downvotes[1]: It's impossible to read a piece like this in the modern world, about two white middle class families leaving large, coastal multiethnic metropolises for suburban homes in (what a quick google tells me is) the sixth whitest state in the union, without a racial lens.
These workers "fleeing" big cities simply don't seem likely to be a uniformly sampled demographic, and for the article not to at least nod to that seems like pretty questionable journalism.
But maybe that's just a step too woke.
[1] Edit: heh, two minutes before the first accusation of racism. Pretty much what I expected.
I had similar thoughts/assumptions when I noticed in the graphic that people leaving New York and Chicago are back tracking the same paths taken 100 years earlier when the industrial North attracted people who needed out of the south.
Putting aside the qualifiers that the dataset[0] is specific to cities with population above 100K and that it's a decade old, the counts include Hispanics and whites together, which is obvious from Laredo, Corpus Christi, and El Paso all being in the top 8.
In other words, using your source, Boise is all of 1.3 percentage points whiter than Laredo, Texas.
I mean I'm brown and I left san francisco for a smaller city. Although unlike most people here I actually liked the san Francisco area and the 'rat race' and would like to live there but it is cheaper outside of course
My spouse's family was one of the only Chinese American families in their small Wyoming town. Her father moved to there poor and is now a VP at the local employer and heads multiple local organizations. The first time she experienced actual harmful racism was after moving to Seattle.
All it takes is a willingness to put yourself out there, attend a local church, etc. The people I’ve ran into there are far friendlier and more genuine than nearly everyone I’ve met in my years of city living.
My aunt in a small town in rural Florida was visibly brown and Muslim (well, Ahmedi, but that's not important for this post). She described getting relentlessly proselytized at her doorstep, at the A&P, every Sunday, etc. Attending a local church wasn't an option.
Your politics are not superior. If your state, community, or legislature makes moves toward gun control it's anyone's civic duty to support or oppose based on their own beliefs not where they live.
One would think that if you are moving away from California for reasons in part caused by political factors (progressive NIMBYism that opposes new housing development, tent city promotion), you would reconsider whether your politics are really that beneficial to the community you're moving to.
Alas, people don't really learn and Austin is already starting to have a flourishing tent city complete with typhoid fever and all. I'm beginning to understand the "Go back to California" sentiment.
Given that people literally want to move to states like his, due to their better qualities of life for less money, I think its safe to say their politics may be superior
The Constitution allowed slavery to exist. Literally humans owning other humans. It's a document to care about if you are a rich white landowner. If you are anybody else in the USA it's just another law document.
it's not a solution to the housing crisis. It's a solution for a minority of the professional class who have the opportunity to work remotely. The majority of workers in large urban areas don't fall into this demographic, blue collar and white collar service sector workers won't be able to work across the country.
Not to mention that it'll be interesting to see what happens during the next recession when some of those people are let off and all the remote workers in Boise are a mismatch for the local economy. Which they already arguably are because as the article points out their purchasing power keeps spiking local prices without bringing in local investment and business.
I agree, if anything it seems like this will entrench and exacerbate income disparities. Now the developers making $200,000 a year are living in a neighborhood where they make 4x the local average and are more easily able to turn it into generational wealth that they pass on.
Not saying it isn't a great deal if you can get it, but it doesn't really seem like a solution for many.
When I lived in columbus there were already new build 1brs asking for north of 1.3k a month and the housinf market is inflating. Developers have seen blood in the water and cost of living will rise accordingly if people with high salaries continue to move into the city.
In addition, while this is much more subjective, most of those cities seem to share a similar "cultural prestige"/influence as compared to other large cities like Columbus, Jacksonville, etc.
It seems to me that a more accurate description is that people are moving from the most expensive and culturally prestigious cities to slightly less expensive and culturally prestigious cities. It doesn't sound to me like they are moving to what people generally think of as "small cities".