My family and I decided to stay on the north side of Chicago, a very high cost of living location, despite no longer needing to head downtown every day for work. Why not move outside of Chicago where our cost living would be substantially lower?
* We wanted to keep our kids in the same school, which is walking distance.
* We like being walking distance to the grocery store, doctor's offices, etc.
* Our kids can walk to their friends' houses.
* Proximity to the lake is important to us.
* We're close to family.
Moving to the suburbs would find us losing much of that freedom that comes with living in a dense neighborhood. The size of a house and a yard is only one factor here for quality of life. I hope the trend that comes from remote work isn't just people optimizing for the size of a house and low cost of living, especially if it comes at the expense of being able to be in a community with other people around.
+1. Walkability is the main thing that keeps me in the city. A very large part of me wants to go back to the suburbs, rent a house, have a yard, garage -- space in general. However, every time I actually visit someone in the suburbs, the long drive there, watching things get more and more spread apart until it's just strip malls, grocery stores, and subdivisions, really saps the excitement out of having more space for me.
There's no reason (besides inertia) that we can't have both. This is how thriving smaller downtowns are, single family homes within walking distance to amenities. It's just that all those areas get really expensive because there are so few of them. But there don't have to be so few places like that.
If you're willing to get a bike, it can greatly increase your range while allowing for more space. I'm in Baltimore now in a sfh and still within riding distance of everything in the city
For me, the COVID has really opened my eyes to how little I need walkability. My preferences completely flipped from "I want walkscore 75+ and ideally 90+" to "I want walkscore to be <15"
I used to be very pro-transit and walking (didn't even learn to drive till 30), and even as I was not walking as much just before COVID, I reflexively remained so. When most things closed nearby (so we went out less and finally discovered food delivery), I realized I don't really need to walk places - I don't miss them. With spotty reopenings, when some places were indoors and some outdoor-only in bad weather, we drove to go out and turns out it's much better (unless you plan to drink a lot). With more grocery shopping, walking to groceries was out of the question and turns out, even in a dense city, driving for the same amount of time to get groceries is so much more convenient. Etc.
I can see benefits of a park nearby, but that's about it... and then again, in overall less walkable areas parks are less crowded, larger, and also cleaner/nicer.
EDIT: reading other comments I guess I can see benefits for kids, although only with more old-style parenting. I could take a subway by myself when I was 10 or so, and walk around everywhere obviously, so that gives a lot of independence you cannot have in suburbs.
Automobile travel is nice in rural areas but it introduces too many problems for cities with any sort of density.
Traffic, noise pollution, air quality, and auto accidents are all things the unfortunate city dweller is forced to live with because cars are given free reign on streets.
Cities need to convert their freeways to toll roads and limit the registration of vehicles to what the infrastructure can actually handle.
I certainly drove more during the pandemic (though this may have been because I stopped using Lyft due to safety concerns), but I never stopped appreciating living in a walkable neighborhood. Certainly openings were a bit spotty here and there, but having a small grocery nearby, as well as a few restaurants with outdoor seating, was a boon to our mental health while otherwise stuck at home most of the time. We got food delivered more than usual, to be sure, but that still felt like a supplement, not the main mode of eating.
I grew up in the country, used to live in the suburbs, and currently live in Chicago.
Yes, we could afford to have a lot more space that we personally own if we lived in a less dense area. But no, I don't miss it. I don't feel cooped up in a small space where I live right now. Nor did I feel cooped up living in a college dormitory, for that matter.
I do feel cooped up in a small space when I'm staying with friends and family who have palatial homes out in the suburbs for any length of time. My sense of how much space I have at my disposal changes drastically when I'm in an environment where the only space I'm allowed to use freely is space I'm personally owning or renting.
It hits my kids even worse. For them, one backyard, even a big one, is simply not enough room to run.
> isn't just people optimizing for the size of a house and low cost of living
An important point!
I moved recently to a small village from a large town in the UK mainly so that I could afford a good size of house compared to what I could afford in the town. Despite never considering my self a "city boy", I have found the move very challenging. I initially thought it was isolating because of lockdown but then realised that the pace here is very slow and I find the lack of activity troubling. I just have to get used to driving to everything, something I have never had to do before.
I couldn’t live in a small village - I’ve tried it, I found it suffocating, the gossip mill, the forced friendships with people who you otherwise wouldn’t associate with, the never ending charity drives and village hall events that make you want to crawl under a rock. (Young Farmer’s Association Charity Raffle! Over 55’s only!)
I now live a long way from anyone, in a cabin deep in the forest, about 10km from the nearest village over inhospitable terrain, 2km from the nearest trackway along windy and wild paths I cut along the side of a sheer valley. We don’t get visitors, apart from those that we invite.
It wasn’t the lack of activity that I found troubling - rather, the village people, filling their days with forced smiles and petty vendettas. Every time I sat down it felt like someone would knock on the door and ask me to sign their petition.
Here, it’s just me, my wife, and the wildlife.
The pace here is frantic, as surviving and thriving off-grid is a lot of work. I smile and nod at the villagers when I drive by on the weekly provisioning run, and that’s enough for me.
I think a city almost has more in common with being alone than it does with a small settlement - in a city, the crowds allow anonymity and this creates a virtual space for the individual. In the boonies, there is actual space for the individual. In a village, all is cloying, suffocating togetherness. Great if you like that kind of thing, but it really wasn’t for me.
No offense, but presumably your parents did the same thing when they had you for similar reasons. This is simply what happens when you have kids.
However, there are separate but related trends which the articles points out:
- The south's quality of living has drastically increased over the last 20~30 years
- People aren't seeing state localized benefits from high state taxes (IMHO Illinois might the worst tax:benefit ratio in the country)
- Work from home acceleration has accelerated lower cost of living with high quality of life centers (see -> the south)
>People aren't seeing state localized benefits from high state taxes
I always think this, and then I leave Illinois and immediately notice that the infrastructure in neighboring states (Indiana and Missouri, namely) is abhorrent. I think it's just all relative.
It’s funny. Every human could tell you the things that make a place pleasant. (Walkability, cute shops and cafes, green space)
And yet we have people who’s whole job is “planning” and we get spaces that are aggressively unpleasant. No sidewalks let alone dedicated waking paths. Strip malls everywhere. It baffles me.
I enjoy watching a couple of shows about home renovations that take place in the US (some twin brothers and love or list it, or something like that). Two things always strike me as odd as an European:
* People on that show always needs a shit load of space. Especially in the kitchens, for some reason. Sometimes they are a couple without kids or maybe have one kid but they want 2 ovens? And a huge island is a must. Most of the kitchens in those shows are bigger than the average living room in my country.
* Houses made out of wood and walls that you can punch through. This is a different matter though.
Do Europeans not cook all that much? I imagine most suburban US families cook most of their meals, both for cost reasons and because taking children to a restaurant is viewed as a chore here.
Even without kids, my partner and I try to cook often. We have a decent-sized kitchen by urban US standards (it would probably be considered on the small side if we lived in the suburbs), but could still stand to have more counter space for food prep (and cabinet space for storage). Agree that 2 ovens is a bit much, but a huge island can be incredibly useful.
A kitchen much like a server is designed for peak use, not average use. having the space to prep and cook thanksgiving for the extended family or host a party is valuable even if you need maybe half of it on most days.
By "move-to", not sure if you mean Chicago overall, or the north side in particular, but if the former Chicago is growing slower than the national average. 2% last decade (vs 8% nationally) https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/8/12/22622062/chicago-cens...
I had the impression Chicago was actually losing people, but that info was old, from the previous decade where it lost 7%.
I think people are social creatures and will always choose to have social interactions. The difference between high and low density living is whether you can choose the absence of these interactions, even temporarily.
I live in a city and it suits me just fine overall, but I also need some of the "I don't want to deal with loads of people and their drama right now" time to remain sane.
I live in the burbs. Here's my metrics relative to yours
* Kid's school is technically walking distance, bike ride more reasonably
* Walking distance from grocery store, doctor's office, dentist
* Kid can walk to friends' house
* Can ride my bike to a conservation area with camping
* Lakes are all around, but not really fair since I live in FL
* Multiple outdoor parks within walking/biking distance
* Neighborhood/community swimming pool
* Walking distance to gym
* Extremely low crime rate
I'm not saying you should move, especially because of the close to family bit. Nor am I suggesting most of suburbia is like where I live. But if you seek out suburban areas that are designed to be in proximity to things, you will find them.
Chicago, and the rest of Illinois, is in the middle of an ongoing fiscal crisis with no clear path to a solution. Will you continue to stay while taxes increase and government services decrease?
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Different people value different things. You prioritize your kids school and proximity to important destinations and so that neighborhood makes a lot of sense.
When your kids move away after college, does that change the calculation much for you? Both of my kids are away at college and so I'm looking at where I live and what kind of life I want and am leaning more and more to moving further out of the city (I'm already in the suburbs).
Suburbs are very unfriendly for the elderly compared to cities.
The ideal suburbanite is an upper-middle-class person in their 30s–50s in good health who really likes driving their large car and has hobbies they can do individually from inside their own home (e.g. woodworking, gardening), and doesn’t mind that life is miserable* there for their kids. Everyone else is more or less a second-class citizen.
* Edit: suburbs are unpleasant for kids because anyone who can’t drive is completely dependent on someone else (for kids, usually a parent) for transportation: few destinations are within walking/cycling distance, buses are few and infrequent, in general non-car transportation is discouraged by the urban design. Everything is harder to get to, and there are far fewer resources available for people with particular interests.
Can you fill me in on sth? Where Ive lived in Europe, the onlt car-only areas are burbs. Small towns tend to be walkable too, on account of being small. Now, not every small town has a wide variety of shops of course, but most things are bikeable. The only things that are not where I now live are places I'd need a car anyway (furniture, construction, etc). I thought it'd be the same for small town America, but I guess you're saying it's not?
You're right, it's not like that in small-town America: small towns aren't walkable in the US.
There aren't many walkable or bikeable areas in the US, and those that exist are in a handful of large cities. Many US cities aren't very walkable, e.g. Los Angeles (the second largest US city).
What would you think of a combination of high density and large green space? Lay out a city like a fractal with the interior being dense, but you're always close to woodlands, open fields (farms?), or parks. I know zoning boards are incapable of maintaining such a structure without constantly making exceptions for developers, but what would you think of such an arrangement?
That's not far from London, a pretty dense city as they go, but also one that just about, technically speaking, counts as a forest thanks to the number of trees [1]. I live in one of the densest boroughs of London, on a main road, and I've got ample access to parks and green space.
> I know zoning boards are incapable of maintaining such a structure without constantly making exceptions for developers,
Also not a lot of undeveloped cities either to try it out.
For what its worth, something similar (but less dramatic in scale) was already tried before [1]. People tended to not like it. The park space made it a lot harder to get around. You lose the "its ony three block away" nature of cities when you add lots of dead space, and things like rain cover along sidewalks become a problem.
One of the major things that make city streets "walkable" and enjoyable is stuff happening on the street frontage. The complexity of various shops, eateries and city amenities abutting the sidewalk mean there is reason to be there and things to do. You lose that when you recess a building.
I think a much better approach is just to cede some land to be in-city-grid parks, and take over some minor roads and alleys as green-walks where the road is reduced (eg. curved to force slow traffic) or removed, and theres lots of trees and gardens and walkways. Basically get that green space from incremental reclamation, and protection of existing opens spaces. Leave actual city structure as it is.
most people move to hcol areas due to jobs, they don't really have much of a community or family in those areas, so it is an easy decision for many to move away if they could. I myself have lived in dense cities, although i enjoyed the walkability of everything, i also felt myself missing time with nature, to enjoy the peace that life offers etc... and weirdly enough felt more disconnected to humanity living in the midst of a lot of humans.
> Moving to the suburbs would find us losing much of that freedom that comes with living in a dense neighborhood.
This does not make sense. Yes, moving to the suburbs and not using a car would lose much of freedom, but it is not how you live in the suburbs...
When you live the suburbs (with a car or multiple cars), you have way more choices to grocery stores, doctor's offices, friends' houses, public parks, lakes, etc.
I will say, if anybody cares a lot about freedom, would want to live in the suburbs. The whole idea of prioritizing walkability is against freedom.
Walkability means limiting choices, not expanding choices. You are basically shrinking the area of 15 min driving distance (radius of eight miles) to the area of 15 min walking distance (radius of three-quarters of a mile). No matter how dense you set in the area of 15 min walking distance, it will never be comparable to the area of 15 min driving distance (around x100 area space).
In addition, you gain more freedom when you live in the suburbs with a backyard and a garage (or a shed in the backyard). You have lots of things you can do (like home lab, wood workshop, etc.) which aren't available to you if you live in a small house or apartment in the city.
If you chose not to own a car, that's a totally separate topic.
> When you live the suburbs (with a car or multiple cars), you have way more choices to grocery stores, doctor's offices, friends' houses, public parks, lakes, etc. Walkability means limiting choices, not expanding choices.
Walkability doesn't strictly limit choices, especially if you consider walking+biking+transit since they go hand-in-hand. E.g. compared to a car-oriented suburb, personally I certainly have more food options within an X-minute accessible radius, but I don't have as many nature options. It's a tradeoff.
I also don't need to drive, which is probably the freedom OP was talking about, and one that both of us value even if some others like yourself don't. I like that having a no-car option means it's easier to be healthy and active when walking and biking are practical choices for day-to-day errands, that I don't have to think about parking or traffic for popular events, that I'm more likely to bump into friends on the street, and that I don't have to think about designed drivers when alcohol is involved. You may not value any of that, but some people do, and so they prefer living somewhere with that choice.
It's fine if you prefer living with a car, but it's rather silly to say it "does not make sense" to consider it freeing to live in a place that doesn't require one given that many people make that choice.
Also in Chicago (northwest side). After our kids were born, we stayed for many of the same reasons.
+1 on school within walking distance. Walking to-and-from each day with my son has been an amazing experience. A big surprise for us has been the sense of community within our neighborhood and school.
I grew up in the north suburbs of Milwaukee. Did you consider it? Outside of keeping your kids in the same schools (and the schools north of Milwaukee are great), it hits all the same marks and it’s a LOT cheaper.
I love visiting Milwaukee, and Wisconsin in general for the sheer amount of outdoor activities. Unfortunately it would send us the wrong direction with respect to visiting family. I want to spend less time in a car in general.
I sure am. I live in San Jose (which resides in the Bay Area). Here’s why I am leaving.
- $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment.
- Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment.
- Smells like urine on many sidewalks.
- Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown).
- Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings.
- Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your head low if you aren’t progressive.
- We’ve reached $4.99 per gallon for gasoline.
- I’ve experienced two car break-ins.
- Trash everywhere.
- High taxes.
- Crummy roads.
I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what? My standard of living is low. I’m leaving for Texas or Florida. Hopefully either of these two states provide me something better.
Nothing would be better for California in general and the Bay Area in particular for people to move away for a while. The infrastructure of that region is swamped. Everything is overpriced and congested.
I was born in San Francisco a long time ago and it used to actually be a pretty cheap city to live in California once. A lot of LA based law firms would open up offices in San Francisco because it was cheaper to live there then lots of parts of Los Angeles and lots of people thought the city was charming. That's hard to imagine now. To me the charm was hollowed out by it becoming so expensive. So now SF is a boring like Manhattan and Oakland is the Brooklyn of the region.
The only reason anyone pays $2700 for an 500 sq ft apartment in San Jose is because they have a great job near by. I don't want to say anything bad about San Jose but IMO it has always been pretty far down the list of places you want to live in California. You shouldn't have to suffer that much for a job, and it seems like the way things are going you won't have to.
What areas don't have political and ideology homogeny anymore? There are two Americas. I would enjoy an area with better tolerance to the other side's ideals, but it seems that's in short supply everywhere. There's a real viciousness for the other side at the national level, but I can't understand it at the individual human being level or the community level. Your neighbor may not share your politics, but it also doesn't imply they embody all of your opposition's ideas. We pick sides because we have to in a first-past-the-post system.
I think the divide looks more bridgeable on a personal level - on a recent trip to a rural area of Oregon I got to speak with an anti-vax, huge pickup driving, hunting, Christian man. He seemed like a genuine, kind, thoughtful person, and I sincerely enjoyed talking with him. He acted respectful towards my pro-vax, Prius-driving, suburb-dwelling attitudes. Seemed like there was mutual respect there, and I don't think it's too unusual for people to appreciate learning about each other and to respect differences.
Guess I'm just hoping that controversy appears bigger than it is, and most people still do know how to get along and respect each other.
Every us state has liberal and conservative chunks within it - i feel like best bet is to find one of those in the opposite of whatever your state is. Those places I feel like are better balanced and don’t suffer from the excesses of extremism
> I would enjoy an area with better tolerance to the other side's ideals, but it seems that's in short supply everywhere.
There isn't better tolerance on either side. You're mistaking agreeing with group think for tolerance. What is tolerated is just a different set of behaviors, but intolerance is high regardless for behaviors outside that set. You just don't see the intolerance when you agree with the majority.
Not a California thing. I live in Dallas and am all for coming to Texas, but don't expect miracles. There are homeless people everywhere, vacant buildings, my catalytic converter has been sawed off twice, trash all over the place, major road out of my neighborhood has had a pothole big enough to knock a wheel off for 8 months and the city has done nothing about it.
These are just city problems.
On the other hand, my mortgage, insurance, and property taxes are $2,500 a month for a 3,000 square foot, 4-story townhome with a private rooftop deck with a downtown skyline view, so there's that.
you don't have to move that far to escape all that. Plenty of areas an hour away from San Jose that are nice and a lot cheaper (still more expensive than Texas or Florida, sure).
Depending on if you need to change jobs and the family situation sometimes it's just as much effort to move states than move a few hours away.
If you have the opportunity it's good to look at the entire country, sometimes even the world (though for tech the US is by far the best option) for the best value.
Even moving 2 miles away will result in better quality of life. Downtown San Jose has the some of the highest crime rates and largest homeless encampments in the city, and the rent in other parts of the city is not a lot higher.
But if I'm moving an hour away, why not move farther? I was born, raised and have lived 31 out of 34 years in California and I just can't fathom why anyone would choose to live here anymore. I bought a house in Southern Oregon 4 years ago and moved up here full time a year ago thanks to the pandemic. I really hope I never have to move back.
No need to drive even an hour. Downtown San Jose is certainly a hellhole (I worked downtown on Santa Clara St. for a while) but just a few minutes away there are very nice suburbs like Campbell, Willow Glen etc.
There is flight from major metropolitan cities right now. All the problems are the same across these cities. While I'm in the honeymoon phase of my recent move from the city I love and grew up in. I was tired of many of the things you listed.
> I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what?
The weather. The high cost of living in the bay area and California is largely about the weather. People come to California for the dream and stay for the sun.
It's weird how subjective experience can be so different. I live in East San Jose a mile from downtown. I'm very happy with it. I love riding my electric bike around town and my only complaint is that for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized. I can't related to most of your other complaints.
Your other complaints are complaints you often hear from conservatives about San Francisco. I took my bike on the train to SF not long ago and spotted no feces and smelled no urine as I rode around The City.
Homelessness is a problem in San Jose and SF, but no worse than in many other cities I've been in.
> for a supposedly high tech city the traffics lights are not even close to being syncrhonized
No, it's worse. Every time I have to drive in Santa Clara County, I get the impression that the traffic engineers they hired are sociopaths.
The traffic lights on El Camino are perfectly timed to force you to stop at every. single. damn. one. That is, unless you drive 20+mph over the speed limit. I initially thought this might be to encourage walking and cycling, but you run into the exact same problem on a bike. The infrastructure isn't very ped-friendly, either.
I just don't get it. The stoplights are timed to make travel excruciating no matter how you do it. The problem with El Camino light timing ends when you cross into San Mateo county, btw.
It's the polar opposite of LA, where you can drive 10's of miles (late at night) on surface streets with the cruise control set right at the speed limit, never touching the gas or breaks. Cycling in the valley or on LA's west side, you can usually hit 3-5 greens before needing to stop (and then only briefly).
Florida is pretty terrible. Even if you are totally cool with never doing anything outside, never engaging in culture, and never talking to other people, there is literally no positive side to living in Florida other than the combined lack of winter and access to a beach. Sure, people are more right-wing, but I'd much rather live in Texas than Florida. Even a desert is more interesting than endless strip-malls, and big Texas cities are more cultured, and even more commercially diverse, than any part of Florida. Practically speaking, Florida is also always overpriced, and insurance and hurricanes are annoying (and going to get worse).
The two states mentioned are near the bottom of my list but I think your nod to ideological homogeny notes that you are on board. I personally find the policy decisions (and elected leadership) of both to be third world, backward, and dangerous if not outright fraudulent and refuse to entertain offers that would put me there or working for companies there.
I'm going to have to recommend against Florida. Remember, the last gubernatorial election there was decided by ~50k votes. And blue-staters have been migrating there en masse since last summer. I sold my house to one of them several months ago (home prices have been going up like a rocket, btw) and left.
This article and similar ones have been written at least a 1000 times for the last decade with a clear political tinge. The poster child is always around how people want to move to Florida and Texas. But somehow it forgets to include Washington and Seattle which has probably seen the biggest tech migration and grown into the second biggest tech hub in the country, far greater than Austin or Miami (hyped up constantly). I guess it doesn’t fit with the narrative ? My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
> My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
This is my general thinking as well, and it happens to fit with my current life experience.
I'm unconvinced that there has been, generally speaking, a fundamental change in the preferred environment people wish to live in; instead it seems more likely that traditionally popular American urban areas are just too expensive and offer relatively little (compared to other parts of the world) in terms of services to justify living there... Even for those that might otherwise choose to.
There is a litany of social and governmental problems plaguing California, but I always stayed because it's the climate that feels the most natural to me. What finally drove me out was the seasonal firestorms and rain of ashes.
The San Francisco Chronicle has done some analyses of the Bay Area exodus, and the majority are not moving to Texas but instead to places like San Joaquin and Madera county (counties that border the Bay Area). People want the bigger house, but they also want to be able to visit their friends and family.
I'm typing this from Madera County. People are fleeing the Bay Area to move to the worst air quality in the country? My wife and I are figuring out how to move away (again) because the smog is really messing with her health. The air is so much worse here than when we were growing up. Heck, she wants to move to the cleaner air of Santa Clarita (north of L.A.--where we used to live).
This is accurate in my anecdotal experience. I'm from the Bay Area (5th generation or so) and so I have a lot of cousins, aunts, and uncles here and the general trend for friends/family has been to move to cheaper areas in the exurbs: Stockton, Tracey, Antioch, Fairfield, Vacaville, Modesto, etc. This is where the working class are getting pushed out to as they can no longer afford to live in the inner Bay Area.
It looks like FL and TX each had ~130k net migrants per the last reported data. [1] Washington had ~40k in the same year. There's a reason journalists talk more about migration to FL/TX, and it's because there are way more people moving there.
Texas has 4x the population of Washington state, has more urban centers and a much larger state. As a % of population, looks like WA has more migration compared to Texas given your numbers
I used to live in Florida and you couldn't pay me to move back. The weather is hot, sticky and humid, the politics are right wing, the religion is old timey and in your face and the (mostly) latent racism is unpleasant when you encounter it.
I moved to a larger city in the midwest and it's great. Yes, winter is a drag but that's about the only negative that bothers me. Tech salaries go a long way, public schools are high quality and plentiful, politics are generally more balanced (than Florida or Texas), religion isn't a constant presence, crime is low and people are mostly friendly.
People move to Seattle mostly because it is great. But if you are a certain political bent Texas and Florida offer a safe haven to be so. I have a (gladly) ex-worker that is on his way to FL or Montana but all that does is add 2 seemingly nice folks to the pile of racists already there.
For the most part that migration ended about 10 years ago. People are now moving away from there. Right now the hot spots are Idaho, Montana, Florida, Texas.
All of which are experiencing house prices in the last 5 years to shoot through the roof from what those people originally had. That said, Texas is huge so I'm really talking about Austin and 2 hour surrounding cities.
I grew up in a rural town around 4 hours from St. Lois.
I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID!
A short list of things I disliked:
- Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads.
- Conservative values. My parents are solidly blue voters, but growing up in that environment surrounded by racism, you learn a lot of bad stuff that you have to unlearn, or else sink deeper and deeper into the bad stuff.
- Our house became worthless. The community is dying, and the house my family owned is reasonable and has been sitting in the market for years. Nobody wants to move or live there.
- Lack of culture. My parents, up until this year, had never eaten Indian food, real ramen, or a huge number of other commonplace things you get in a city. There weren't any "garage bands" or other artists or coders to collaborate with as a kid. They are getting older now and they are realizing how empty and boring the place they have chosen to live is. My dad is getting really into video poker. There is NOTHING ELSE FOR THEM THERE.
- Bad schools. I had the same teachers as my parents, who graduated 20 years before I did. We had HUGE behavioral problems. Students who fell behind were sent to another school 45 minutes away... until that school filled up and could no longer take the overflow. It was constant triage and if you were a little clever you were BORED. A lot of students their senior year just sat in study hall for 6 hours a day because they didn't have the rooms and the teachers to teach higher level classes. I didn't even know what AP classes were until I got to college.
- Bad hospitals. We had to close ours down because we couldn't play doctors enough to move to our town.
- Total lack of community. You think "less people == people are closer". No. There is nowhere to gather, the only land you can use is the land you own. There are not enough people to support hobbies or meetups. Most of the people get a degree or a trade job and get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
Every time I see an article about an exodus to rural America I am reminded of the rural America I grew up in, and frankly it's terrible compared to living in or near a city. For all the reasons you cite and so many more.
Of course cost of living is cheap in rural America, demand is low and supply is high for land far from modern conveniences.
This rings true to my experience as well. Growing up in a conservative Christian county where I was the only queer kid drove me to attempt suicide twice in my teens before I promptly ran as fast as possible to a large university and never go back except for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
It’s swear it’s so much worse because of the boredom. School got out around 3pm and most days I had to stay inside with a sympathetic teacher until my parents got off work because a group of kids would just hang around waiting for me to walk home.
Thank god for the internet, not sure I would have made it out without it.
I've heard this brought up as a kind of second round of white flight. The middle- and upper-class (primarily) white population is once again moving out of urban centers because telecommuting is something that these high-salary jobs afford them.
I think it will rebound a bit (but not much), as moving from urban to suburban is a very difficult transition, but its even harder going the other way once you've adjusted.
I miss living in NYC, but I'm actually looking to retire in the next few years, and pick up some remote land that I can settle with Starlink, and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years. My retirement will look vastly different from my parents, as I will still work (building web apps, games, furniture, whatever tickles my fancy), just not for anyone but myself.
> and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years
Do you mind sharing how much?
I'm curious why most people seem to think $1M is somehow not enough money to retire modestly on. If previous trends continue, you could easily live on >$4K after taxes per month indefinitely. That's almost 50% higher than median wage (after taxes). Median wage = ~$41,000. Even with $0 state tax, just after federal tax, you're at ~$30,000. At this income, you likely can't deduct more than the standard deduction...
It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
Even at $500k - you can draw down the same amount for ~10 years, and then rely on SS (which would be much more modest - although, obviously still completely doable considering almost half the senior population does it).
Also - a lot of people still do something that makes money in retirement...
>I'm curious why most people seem to think $1M is somehow not enough money to retire modestly on
>It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
It is because they have a different definition of modest than you. I know I can live on even less than median wage. I grew up with far less. But my family did not have access to healthcare and good schools or being able to help out family members if they needed support. We were always 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined.
Is living 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined modest? That is a personal opinion. I aim to cover the legal and health risks for me and my family members, so $1M is nothing where I live. I also predict that I need quite a big buffer the way the population pyramid is shaping up, because labor is going to get more and more expensive, along with devaluation of the dollar.
I also think either me or at least my kids (years 2050 to 2100) is going to have to contend with problems due to climate change and access to clean water and air that have yet to materialize, so need buffer for that too.
The "4% rule" [1] would recommend pulling out $40,000 each year if you had $1 million. This is the amount you can draw down each year without ever depleting the $1 million. The theory is that after you draw down your $40k, the remaining $960k will grow enough to get you back to $1 million by next year's draw down.
You can still live on $3,333/month, (especially since this person plans to keep working and there is likely some social security after age 67) but wanted to add some context.
Many retirement calculators assume post-retirement montly outflow of ~70% of pre-retirement amount. I don't know if this holds true for very high income families, but whenever I run various scenarios, I leave it.
I also assume many people won't have paid-off homes, so they're stuck paying rent or mortgage. Cars aren't cheap to keep running. Medical expenses are insane in the US.
If you also have to look after parents who never saved, you'll need to calculate out a fair bit. One example I saw on reddit was about 40% more than you need for yourself. Then there's teh part that if you don't own a home, you'll be paying that off in retirement.
The person who accumulated $1M (above real estate equity) likely did so by having a larger than median income over their working life (and likely has an associated higher expense profile).
For me, I think a 4% safe-withdraw-rate feels about right. Some argue for 3.5%. Others for 5 or 6%. Each of those has an impact on the cashflow in retirement, but $1M is probably not going to provide a replacement income for the typical folks who accumulated $1M. (Median household income in my state is $87K/yr before taxes.)
The current (November 31) valuation of my assets is almost $200k. That isn't counting debts (which are small, but still exist), and that isn't counting the assets or value of my consulting company (which unaudited is around $50k).
I'm hoping to stash away another $150-200k over the next couple of years to really make my retirement last.
But either way, it isn't THAT hard to have a working retirement on < $500k. You aren't rich, but you are financially secure enough to chose what you want to do.
Many like you are buying up lake-front properties in rural places.
I recommend it, playing farmer-cowboy-houseboateer in Kentucky/Tennessee is a magnitude cheaper than out west, even if you fail, you are out less money than simply living elsewhere.
I'm currently in the process of buying my wife's grandpa's house in rural Louisiana. It isn't on a lot of land (only 1.5 acres), but he's selling it to us "at cost" and that was how much it cost him to build it 20 years ago. We haven't decided if we want to live there full time and give up all the niceties we currently enjoy (a target within 10 minutes vs 2.5 hours, every type of ethnic food you can imagine, etc)., but it is always there for when we retire. Starlink gets over 60mbps in the area, and my wife's telemedicine practice only needs 10mbps for SD video, which is what most of her clients run at anyway since they use their phones and iPads for their sessions.
Currently, it is by paying $850/mo for health insurance for my wife and I. In the future I hope that my CoL expenses drop enough that the cost is fine while I continue to work for a lot less income, or if not, that my wife and I would qualify for subsidies on the marketplace.
I've entertained the same idea from time to time, but just don't see how it can work out financially. What is your contingency plan for medical expenses? Kids?
So in rural America you definitely give up access to top-notch medical care, but I'm relatively healthy currently, and if we drop our household income, we start to qualify for subsidies. My wife only just started her career, 17 years into our relationship, so she's going to start ramping up income over the next few years, and that will hopefully cover any unforeseen issues.
I actually tried retiring this year. I paid to go to university in the UK in a very cheap place to live, but we had a few people in our family pass, and we decided while everyone is aging, we should stick around.
>big fan of your blog posts.
That is so kind of you to say. I'm a big fan of writing them... once or twice a year when I finally remember a story worthy of writing.
I live just west of Minneapolis with my wife in a house that's been in my family for generations.
I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this.
Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.
Police budgets are at their highest levels in history, and yet crime is up. The correlation just isn't there. Wasting money on police isn't solving this problem, which is why you are seeing the calls to move our funds elsewhere.
Nationwide, crime has been on a downward trend for decades. Yes, there are spots where it flares up. And COVID appears to have caused a marked increase in some crimes. But, overall, the US hasn't suddenly degenerated into a state of lawlessness.
FBI crime stats for Minneapolis proper don't look that much higher than the last 20 years, and considering that the metro population has almost doubled since 1990 you have to discount them per-capita. Are you sure it's not just that you are reading too much Nextdoor?
I occasionally see people in Portland cite 2019’s crime stats as proof that things are fine and that you’re just bigoted against homeless people or whatever.
Portland didn’t get the 2020 numbers from the FBI until late September 2021, which at that point showed an 80% increase.
Counterpoint: we live in Edina, a nicer suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. No real crime except for a single hit-and-run by an out-of-towner in the last two years.
Walking distance to two grocery stores, several restaurants, and two malls. Affordable utilities and rent.
Oversimplified, inflammatory statements like "defund the police" and "ACAB" gain a lot more traction composted to more measured statements like, "We believe in maintaining a secure society for everyone and not just certain preferred communities, which isn't possible with the current policing and social care system. We need massive, decisive, and prompt reform that doesn't involve funneling more and more of the city budget directly to the police dept, and if we can't have that then we'd rather re-start from the ground up and police ourselves than sit by while the situation worsens."
Those oversimplified phrases gain traction by provoking an emotional response, but that cuts both ways.
"Defund the police" was very easy to interpret as "abolish the police." It was a gift to the other side of the argument, and to that side's candidates in the 2020 election. Overall it looks like it backfired as a slogan politically, and no major police departments have actually been reformed.
If all your slogan achieves is making your own side feel better, while it alienates moderates and gives easy talking points to your opponents, it's a bad slogan and you shouldn't be proud of it.
How exactly is a community going to police itself?
Look at the marches(if you can, they're rarely shown on any kind of media) every time a 5 year old is murdered from a stray drive by shooting bullet in chicago...thousands of people in the community come out against it, and...nothing happens.
Pay them more to keep failing to provide protection? The cops extort you (the tax payer) by playing with your safety for the sake of inflating the budget.
The point of the calls to defund the police is that the assault and robbery is a symptom of a wider systemic problem. Arresting and jailing the people who committed that particular assault and robbery is like taking a painkiller when you've got a gut wound. Sure, it'll let you ignore the pain for a while longer, but you're not addressing the real core of the problem.
I moved the the suburbs way earlier than I had planned due to the pandemic and my job being much more WFH. I love it. I’m still accessible the city (14-28 minutes by train depending on schedule), I have way more space, and I’m near some really wonderful nature areas. I love having a garage and a yard and a grill. Im still near restaurants and stuff, and I kinda outgrew the bar scene a few years ago — now I’m more likely to hit a brewery or 2, which are dense in the suburbs too.
That sounds great, but I am very skeptical. 14 minutes by train - what's the actual door to door commute time? I'm not aware of any city in the US with commute times that short where the place you live wouldn't be more urban than suburban e.g. Hoboken/Harrison, NJ, Quincy, MA, etc...
The 14 minute train is from Route 128 in Westwood, MA to Back Bay, in Boston’s downtown. I give myself ~15 minutes (for traffic buffer) to drive and park, take the 14 minute train, then it’s a 5 minute walk to work. I’ve done it in 30 minutes seat to seat.
Readit News
Lots to dislike, but I love Paris human side ^^
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I used to be very pro-transit and walking (didn't even learn to drive till 30), and even as I was not walking as much just before COVID, I reflexively remained so. When most things closed nearby (so we went out less and finally discovered food delivery), I realized I don't really need to walk places - I don't miss them. With spotty reopenings, when some places were indoors and some outdoor-only in bad weather, we drove to go out and turns out it's much better (unless you plan to drink a lot). With more grocery shopping, walking to groceries was out of the question and turns out, even in a dense city, driving for the same amount of time to get groceries is so much more convenient. Etc.
I can see benefits of a park nearby, but that's about it... and then again, in overall less walkable areas parks are less crowded, larger, and also cleaner/nicer.
EDIT: reading other comments I guess I can see benefits for kids, although only with more old-style parenting. I could take a subway by myself when I was 10 or so, and walk around everywhere obviously, so that gives a lot of independence you cannot have in suburbs.
Traffic, noise pollution, air quality, and auto accidents are all things the unfortunate city dweller is forced to live with because cars are given free reign on streets.
Cities need to convert their freeways to toll roads and limit the registration of vehicles to what the infrastructure can actually handle.
Yes, we could afford to have a lot more space that we personally own if we lived in a less dense area. But no, I don't miss it. I don't feel cooped up in a small space where I live right now. Nor did I feel cooped up living in a college dormitory, for that matter.
I do feel cooped up in a small space when I'm staying with friends and family who have palatial homes out in the suburbs for any length of time. My sense of how much space I have at my disposal changes drastically when I'm in an environment where the only space I'm allowed to use freely is space I'm personally owning or renting.
It hits my kids even worse. For them, one backyard, even a big one, is simply not enough room to run.
It's a very different mindset that I thought I'd hate but now that I'm here I couldn't imagine it any other way.
An important point!
I moved recently to a small village from a large town in the UK mainly so that I could afford a good size of house compared to what I could afford in the town. Despite never considering my self a "city boy", I have found the move very challenging. I initially thought it was isolating because of lockdown but then realised that the pace here is very slow and I find the lack of activity troubling. I just have to get used to driving to everything, something I have never had to do before.
I now live a long way from anyone, in a cabin deep in the forest, about 10km from the nearest village over inhospitable terrain, 2km from the nearest trackway along windy and wild paths I cut along the side of a sheer valley. We don’t get visitors, apart from those that we invite.
It wasn’t the lack of activity that I found troubling - rather, the village people, filling their days with forced smiles and petty vendettas. Every time I sat down it felt like someone would knock on the door and ask me to sign their petition.
Here, it’s just me, my wife, and the wildlife.
The pace here is frantic, as surviving and thriving off-grid is a lot of work. I smile and nod at the villagers when I drive by on the weekly provisioning run, and that’s enough for me.
I think a city almost has more in common with being alone than it does with a small settlement - in a city, the crowds allow anonymity and this creates a virtual space for the individual. In the boonies, there is actual space for the individual. In a village, all is cloying, suffocating togetherness. Great if you like that kind of thing, but it really wasn’t for me.
However, there are separate but related trends which the articles points out:
P.S.- I grew up in the north shore Chicago. /waveI always think this, and then I leave Illinois and immediately notice that the infrastructure in neighboring states (Indiana and Missouri, namely) is abhorrent. I think it's just all relative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
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* People on that show always needs a shit load of space. Especially in the kitchens, for some reason. Sometimes they are a couple without kids or maybe have one kid but they want 2 ovens? And a huge island is a must. Most of the kitchens in those shows are bigger than the average living room in my country.
* Houses made out of wood and walls that you can punch through. This is a different matter though.
Even without kids, my partner and I try to cook often. We have a decent-sized kitchen by urban US standards (it would probably be considered on the small side if we lived in the suburbs), but could still stand to have more counter space for food prep (and cabinet space for storage). Agree that 2 ovens is a bit much, but a huge island can be incredibly useful.
It's expensive, but let's be serious it's nothing compared to the coast – with a good quality of life (as the reasons you stated).
I had the impression Chicago was actually losing people, but that info was old, from the previous decade where it lost 7%.
I live in a city and it suits me just fine overall, but I also need some of the "I don't want to deal with loads of people and their drama right now" time to remain sane.
* Kid's school is technically walking distance, bike ride more reasonably
* Walking distance from grocery store, doctor's office, dentist
* Kid can walk to friends' house
* Can ride my bike to a conservation area with camping
* Lakes are all around, but not really fair since I live in FL
* Multiple outdoor parks within walking/biking distance
* Neighborhood/community swimming pool
* Walking distance to gym
* Extremely low crime rate
I'm not saying you should move, especially because of the close to family bit. Nor am I suggesting most of suburbia is like where I live. But if you seek out suburban areas that are designed to be in proximity to things, you will find them.
When your kids move away after college, does that change the calculation much for you? Both of my kids are away at college and so I'm looking at where I live and what kind of life I want and am leaning more and more to moving further out of the city (I'm already in the suburbs).
The ideal suburbanite is an upper-middle-class person in their 30s–50s in good health who really likes driving their large car and has hobbies they can do individually from inside their own home (e.g. woodworking, gardening), and doesn’t mind that life is miserable* there for their kids. Everyone else is more or less a second-class citizen.
* Edit: suburbs are unpleasant for kids because anyone who can’t drive is completely dependent on someone else (for kids, usually a parent) for transportation: few destinations are within walking/cycling distance, buses are few and infrequent, in general non-car transportation is discouraged by the urban design. Everything is harder to get to, and there are far fewer resources available for people with particular interests.
There aren't many walkable or bikeable areas in the US, and those that exist are in a handful of large cities. Many US cities aren't very walkable, e.g. Los Angeles (the second largest US city).
[1] https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/did-you-know-tha...
Also not a lot of undeveloped cities either to try it out.
For what its worth, something similar (but less dramatic in scale) was already tried before [1]. People tended to not like it. The park space made it a lot harder to get around. You lose the "its ony three block away" nature of cities when you add lots of dead space, and things like rain cover along sidewalks become a problem.
One of the major things that make city streets "walkable" and enjoyable is stuff happening on the street frontage. The complexity of various shops, eateries and city amenities abutting the sidewalk mean there is reason to be there and things to do. You lose that when you recess a building.
I think a much better approach is just to cede some land to be in-city-grid parks, and take over some minor roads and alleys as green-walks where the road is reduced (eg. curved to force slow traffic) or removed, and theres lots of trees and gardens and walkways. Basically get that green space from incremental reclamation, and protection of existing opens spaces. Leave actual city structure as it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_in_the_park
I want to also note there is a lot in between a dense neighborhood and having no people around.
This does not make sense. Yes, moving to the suburbs and not using a car would lose much of freedom, but it is not how you live in the suburbs...
When you live the suburbs (with a car or multiple cars), you have way more choices to grocery stores, doctor's offices, friends' houses, public parks, lakes, etc.
I will say, if anybody cares a lot about freedom, would want to live in the suburbs. The whole idea of prioritizing walkability is against freedom.
Walkability means limiting choices, not expanding choices. You are basically shrinking the area of 15 min driving distance (radius of eight miles) to the area of 15 min walking distance (radius of three-quarters of a mile). No matter how dense you set in the area of 15 min walking distance, it will never be comparable to the area of 15 min driving distance (around x100 area space).
In addition, you gain more freedom when you live in the suburbs with a backyard and a garage (or a shed in the backyard). You have lots of things you can do (like home lab, wood workshop, etc.) which aren't available to you if you live in a small house or apartment in the city.
If you chose not to own a car, that's a totally separate topic.
Walkability doesn't strictly limit choices, especially if you consider walking+biking+transit since they go hand-in-hand. E.g. compared to a car-oriented suburb, personally I certainly have more food options within an X-minute accessible radius, but I don't have as many nature options. It's a tradeoff.
I also don't need to drive, which is probably the freedom OP was talking about, and one that both of us value even if some others like yourself don't. I like that having a no-car option means it's easier to be healthy and active when walking and biking are practical choices for day-to-day errands, that I don't have to think about parking or traffic for popular events, that I'm more likely to bump into friends on the street, and that I don't have to think about designed drivers when alcohol is involved. You may not value any of that, but some people do, and so they prefer living somewhere with that choice.
It's fine if you prefer living with a car, but it's rather silly to say it "does not make sense" to consider it freeing to live in a place that doesn't require one given that many people make that choice.
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+1 on school within walking distance. Walking to-and-from each day with my son has been an amazing experience. A big surprise for us has been the sense of community within our neighborhood and school.
- $2,700 per month for a 500 sq/ft apartment.
- Homeless people everywhere the moment I step foot out of my apartment.
- Smells like urine on many sidewalks.
- Literally half of the buildings are vacant or abandoned (in downtown).
- Human feces on sidewalks and entrance to buildings.
- Political and ideological homogeny. Keep your head low if you aren’t progressive.
- We’ve reached $4.99 per gallon for gasoline.
- I’ve experienced two car break-ins.
- Trash everywhere.
- High taxes.
- Crummy roads.
I’m paying a lot of money to live here, but for what? My standard of living is low. I’m leaving for Texas or Florida. Hopefully either of these two states provide me something better.
I was born in San Francisco a long time ago and it used to actually be a pretty cheap city to live in California once. A lot of LA based law firms would open up offices in San Francisco because it was cheaper to live there then lots of parts of Los Angeles and lots of people thought the city was charming. That's hard to imagine now. To me the charm was hollowed out by it becoming so expensive. So now SF is a boring like Manhattan and Oakland is the Brooklyn of the region.
The only reason anyone pays $2700 for an 500 sq ft apartment in San Jose is because they have a great job near by. I don't want to say anything bad about San Jose but IMO it has always been pretty far down the list of places you want to live in California. You shouldn't have to suffer that much for a job, and it seems like the way things are going you won't have to.
Guess I'm just hoping that controversy appears bigger than it is, and most people still do know how to get along and respect each other.
There isn't better tolerance on either side. You're mistaking agreeing with group think for tolerance. What is tolerated is just a different set of behaviors, but intolerance is high regardless for behaviors outside that set. You just don't see the intolerance when you agree with the majority.
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These are just city problems.
On the other hand, my mortgage, insurance, and property taxes are $2,500 a month for a 3,000 square foot, 4-story townhome with a private rooftop deck with a downtown skyline view, so there's that.
In think crime and homeless depends a lot on the area in Dallas. A lot of new apartments and townhomes are in “transitional” neighborhoods.
If you have the opportunity it's good to look at the entire country, sometimes even the world (though for tech the US is by far the best option) for the best value.
Still expensive, though.
The weather. The high cost of living in the bay area and California is largely about the weather. People come to California for the dream and stay for the sun.
Your other complaints are complaints you often hear from conservatives about San Francisco. I took my bike on the train to SF not long ago and spotted no feces and smelled no urine as I rode around The City.
Homelessness is a problem in San Jose and SF, but no worse than in many other cities I've been in.
I have often thought if lights were better optimized, we could save on gas usage in cars.
No, it's worse. Every time I have to drive in Santa Clara County, I get the impression that the traffic engineers they hired are sociopaths.
The traffic lights on El Camino are perfectly timed to force you to stop at every. single. damn. one. That is, unless you drive 20+mph over the speed limit. I initially thought this might be to encourage walking and cycling, but you run into the exact same problem on a bike. The infrastructure isn't very ped-friendly, either.
I just don't get it. The stoplights are timed to make travel excruciating no matter how you do it. The problem with El Camino light timing ends when you cross into San Mateo county, btw.
It's the polar opposite of LA, where you can drive 10's of miles (late at night) on surface streets with the cruise control set right at the speed limit, never touching the gas or breaks. Cycling in the valley or on LA's west side, you can usually hit 3-5 greens before needing to stop (and then only briefly).
Edit: formatting
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This is my general thinking as well, and it happens to fit with my current life experience.
I'm unconvinced that there has been, generally speaking, a fundamental change in the preferred environment people wish to live in; instead it seems more likely that traditionally popular American urban areas are just too expensive and offer relatively little (compared to other parts of the world) in terms of services to justify living there... Even for those that might otherwise choose to.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
I moved to a larger city in the midwest and it's great. Yes, winter is a drag but that's about the only negative that bothers me. Tech salaries go a long way, public schools are high quality and plentiful, politics are generally more balanced (than Florida or Texas), religion isn't a constant presence, crime is low and people are mostly friendly.
All of which are experiencing house prices in the last 5 years to shoot through the roof from what those people originally had. That said, Texas is huge so I'm really talking about Austin and 2 hour surrounding cities.
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I prefer they keep “forgetting”.
> My working hypothesis is that people in general want to live in California like places, if they can afford it.
Of course prices (and price movements) will always be the objective measure of desirability across a large population.
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I was MISERABLE. I HATED IT AS A KID!
A short list of things I disliked:
- Completely car dependent as a kid. If my parents didn't give me a ride I wasn't doing anything. Bicycling is not an option because people drive like maniacs and are not expecting bikes, so it is extremely dangerous. People love to haul ass on country roads.
- Conservative values. My parents are solidly blue voters, but growing up in that environment surrounded by racism, you learn a lot of bad stuff that you have to unlearn, or else sink deeper and deeper into the bad stuff.
- Our house became worthless. The community is dying, and the house my family owned is reasonable and has been sitting in the market for years. Nobody wants to move or live there.
- Lack of culture. My parents, up until this year, had never eaten Indian food, real ramen, or a huge number of other commonplace things you get in a city. There weren't any "garage bands" or other artists or coders to collaborate with as a kid. They are getting older now and they are realizing how empty and boring the place they have chosen to live is. My dad is getting really into video poker. There is NOTHING ELSE FOR THEM THERE.
- Bad schools. I had the same teachers as my parents, who graduated 20 years before I did. We had HUGE behavioral problems. Students who fell behind were sent to another school 45 minutes away... until that school filled up and could no longer take the overflow. It was constant triage and if you were a little clever you were BORED. A lot of students their senior year just sat in study hall for 6 hours a day because they didn't have the rooms and the teachers to teach higher level classes. I didn't even know what AP classes were until I got to college.
- Bad hospitals. We had to close ours down because we couldn't play doctors enough to move to our town.
- Total lack of community. You think "less people == people are closer". No. There is nowhere to gather, the only land you can use is the land you own. There are not enough people to support hobbies or meetups. Most of the people get a degree or a trade job and get as far away as possible as quickly as possible.
Of course cost of living is cheap in rural America, demand is low and supply is high for land far from modern conveniences.
It’s swear it’s so much worse because of the boredom. School got out around 3pm and most days I had to stay inside with a sympathetic teacher until my parents got off work because a group of kids would just hang around waiting for me to walk home.
Thank god for the internet, not sure I would have made it out without it.
I think it will rebound a bit (but not much), as moving from urban to suburban is a very difficult transition, but its even harder going the other way once you've adjusted.
I miss living in NYC, but I'm actually looking to retire in the next few years, and pick up some remote land that I can settle with Starlink, and live off a VERY modest retirement (WELL under a million saved/invested) for the next 40 years. My retirement will look vastly different from my parents, as I will still work (building web apps, games, furniture, whatever tickles my fancy), just not for anyone but myself.
Do you mind sharing how much?
I'm curious why most people seem to think $1M is somehow not enough money to retire modestly on. If previous trends continue, you could easily live on >$4K after taxes per month indefinitely. That's almost 50% higher than median wage (after taxes). Median wage = ~$41,000. Even with $0 state tax, just after federal tax, you're at ~$30,000. At this income, you likely can't deduct more than the standard deduction...
It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
Even at $500k - you can draw down the same amount for ~10 years, and then rely on SS (which would be much more modest - although, obviously still completely doable considering almost half the senior population does it).
Also - a lot of people still do something that makes money in retirement...
>It's just obvious that you CAN live on 50% more than median wage. Yet at the same time, so many people seem to think this is some absurd proposition.
It is because they have a different definition of modest than you. I know I can live on even less than median wage. I grew up with far less. But my family did not have access to healthcare and good schools or being able to help out family members if they needed support. We were always 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined.
Is living 1 legal or health problem away from being ruined modest? That is a personal opinion. I aim to cover the legal and health risks for me and my family members, so $1M is nothing where I live. I also predict that I need quite a big buffer the way the population pyramid is shaping up, because labor is going to get more and more expensive, along with devaluation of the dollar.
I also think either me or at least my kids (years 2050 to 2100) is going to have to contend with problems due to climate change and access to clean water and air that have yet to materialize, so need buffer for that too.
You can still live on $3,333/month, (especially since this person plans to keep working and there is likely some social security after age 67) but wanted to add some context.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-4-rule-is-being-debate...
I also assume many people won't have paid-off homes, so they're stuck paying rent or mortgage. Cars aren't cheap to keep running. Medical expenses are insane in the US.
For me, I think a 4% safe-withdraw-rate feels about right. Some argue for 3.5%. Others for 5 or 6%. Each of those has an impact on the cashflow in retirement, but $1M is probably not going to provide a replacement income for the typical folks who accumulated $1M. (Median household income in my state is $87K/yr before taxes.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233170/median-household-...
The current (November 31) valuation of my assets is almost $200k. That isn't counting debts (which are small, but still exist), and that isn't counting the assets or value of my consulting company (which unaudited is around $50k).
I'm hoping to stash away another $150-200k over the next couple of years to really make my retirement last.
But either way, it isn't THAT hard to have a working retirement on < $500k. You aren't rich, but you are financially secure enough to chose what you want to do.
I recommend it, playing farmer-cowboy-houseboateer in Kentucky/Tennessee is a magnitude cheaper than out west, even if you fail, you are out less money than simply living elsewhere.
Of all the things I have planned, this is the only variable I don’t have an answer for because Medicare kicks in at 65.
The market-based plans are either useless (few hundred dollars a month); or expensive (a couple of thousand per month).
Btw, big fan of your blog posts.
I actually tried retiring this year. I paid to go to university in the UK in a very cheap place to live, but we had a few people in our family pass, and we decided while everyone is aging, we should stick around.
>big fan of your blog posts.
That is so kind of you to say. I'm a big fan of writing them... once or twice a year when I finally remember a story worthy of writing.
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I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this.
Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.
Also worth noting that MPD engaged in a work stoppage last summer, which may have had an impact on crime. https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...
https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270
I occasionally see people in Portland cite 2019’s crime stats as proof that things are fine and that you’re just bigoted against homeless people or whatever.
Portland didn’t get the 2020 numbers from the FBI until late September 2021, which at that point showed an 80% increase.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-2021-homicid...
Now we’re at nearly 80 homicides (if we haven’t crossed that, it will likely be this weekend) so far in 2021, breaking the 90s record.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-2021-homicid...
For a while the narrative as that crime was much less serious than is being portrayed in the news. In major American cities, that trend has reversed.
https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2021/12/09/st-paul-h...
Walking distance to two grocery stores, several restaurants, and two malls. Affordable utilities and rent.
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/edina-carjacking-v...
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Doesn't have the same ring, you know?
"Defund the police" was very easy to interpret as "abolish the police." It was a gift to the other side of the argument, and to that side's candidates in the 2020 election. Overall it looks like it backfired as a slogan politically, and no major police departments have actually been reformed.
If all your slogan achieves is making your own side feel better, while it alienates moderates and gives easy talking points to your opponents, it's a bad slogan and you shouldn't be proud of it.
Look at the marches(if you can, they're rarely shown on any kind of media) every time a 5 year old is murdered from a stray drive by shooting bullet in chicago...thousands of people in the community come out against it, and...nothing happens.
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