People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

Also, the abatement isn't even that good for the condo buyer (assuming he intends to stay for more than a few years):

http://www.urbandigs.com/2006/06/biggest_scam_in.html

instead poor people are pushed out into the rest of the country, where they still have the longest commutes, even lower paying jobs and get to pay for gas too.

tax abatement only 'needs to exist' because the market is so distorted from zoning

Is the vacancy rate actually low though? In London you always hear that "we need more houses - at least a quarter million by 2014!" or something, but the actual number of vacant properties in London is actually enormous

iatee I like that post about how gentrification and domestic migration is more complicated than the narrative all of us have internalized - I'd love to read more along the lines of those blog posts you linked to

the primary cause of increasing housing prices is domestic migration, young people who are willing to 'gentrify' traditionally poor city-native neighborhoods (but become bitter when those neighborhoods get expensive)

Not only did I not say this, but I repeatedly said I was not saying this. But I'm done trying to make arguments, since lazy reading apparently is making communication impossible.

I also never tried to argue against increased development as such, nor zoning changes in general, nor construction of new housing stock. I just tried to argue that MY's approach was sort of nuts and very underdocumented. I also thought making fun of bloggers + stuff was funny along the way, so my bad there. A little too close to home, bros.

(It occurs to me writing this that iatee tends to read me talking about "gentrification" and substitute that word with "primary cause of expensive housing" when no I'm just talking about gentrification and looking askance at discussion of housing issues that doesn't want gentrification to be part of the picture. Part of this is when MY [and iatee initially] discuss housing costs, they're basically talking about costs to the upper middle class, and not really paying any attention at all to affordable housing for other parts of the urban population. Also part of this is just putting fingers in ears and chanting "supply and demand" instead of really digging in to the actual structure of market issues at play in a given specific instance.)

Also as I keep mentioning I'm quite dubious about how 90% of the info on this is filtered through the manhattan institute (which also sponsors the empire center that iatee linked above), and just google these guys because they deserve 0% trust on anything without corroboration from at least a few other soruces.

theat empire center data is just census data dude

or rather, irs returns I think. in any case it's not 'politicized'

Is the vacancy rate actually low though?

http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/downloads/pdf/HPD-2011-HVS-Selected-Findings-Tables.pdf

City-wide rate is about 3%, which I was told by a housing policy guy is considered "crisis level"

(It occurs to me writing this that iatee tends to read me talking about "gentrification" and substitute that word with "primary cause of expensive housing" when no I'm just talking about gentrification and looking askance at discussion of housing issues that doesn't want gentrification to be part of the picture.

again, gentrification is 'part of the picture', there's just data that shows that it's *not a very important part of the picture*. it can affect some people, in some neighborhoods, but focusing on it at the expense of more important variables just shows a weird bias for 'the gentrification story'. when I talk about housing costs, I'm talking about housing costs for every single demographic in the city, most of whom are not upper income, most of whom are not part of the gentrification story.

old, but http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/nyregion/13housing.html

those 33% of people paying more than half their income in rent in the bronx are not thinking about all the gd hipsters in williamsburg

iatee, rising rents in the bronx are definitely in large part a result of gentrification of other parts of the city. This fits very well within your own explanations so far ITT>

I mean "incomes haven't kept pace with rent" is not an explanation of housing costs

nor is domestic migration ie 'the johnny from idaho gentrification'

"Gentrification and the rapid loss of subsidized rental housing have also pushed housing costs up for low- and moderate-income families, housing experts said."

that's from the article you linked

lol well I didn't read it, it's the nyt and they buy the same narrative that moses takes apart in the above links

if you want the word gentrification (its a not particularly useful word and never defined clearly) to include 'lower crime rates across the board, a change in the general preference for living in cities, etc.', then yes, 'gentrification' has affected prices in the bronx substantially. but johnny from idaho opening up a cafe in brooklyn has not.

johnny from idaho opening a cafe in brooklyn is just a specimen of the larger phenomena you are talking about so I don't really see what point you are trying to make anymore

when I talk about housing costs, I'm talking about housing costs for every single demographic in the city, most of whom are not upper income, most of whom are not part of the gentrification story.

iatee the gen stuck article i referenced said "restrictive regulations on multi-family home building" are "discouraging talented middle-income people from settling in San Francisco and New York" and then you said "(artificially) high rent due to zoning both make the cities (artificially) less competitive, discourage millions of well-educated people from moving there". So the argument wasn't rising rent is a problem for immigrants in the bronx in need of affordable housing, it was explicitly at the start (as is MY's argument) that lower housing costs would attract more "well-educated people" from around the U.S. who are clearly in short supply in major coastal cities or something. And the discussion, at least initially *was* very much just about housing for such people.

That's sort of what set me off.

And when you think about it, and I don't want to do the work of breaking down a full-fledged model here or anything, there's basically a version of trickle-down economics applied to housing at work -- if the supply of profitable high-rise lofts along the riverfront goes up then somehow that will mean lower housing costs for folks in flushing. In a super-simplified model, yes. In the real world, I really don't think that's how things will play out. So I that regard I think that Hurting is on to something.

I mean, if you think about it, more high-quality housing for the upper middle class might just mean that you have more upper middle class moving in (or just not moving out to the suburbs/jersey at such a pace). And that's sort of MY's express goal. But how that would mean anything good for other folks is a bit beyond me.

johnny from idaho opening a cafe in brooklyn is just a specimen of the larger phenomena you are talking about so I don't really see what point you are trying to make anymore

well it's more *another response* to the larger social, economic, immigration factors. 'gentrification' is a narrative that people think they understand, so it's attractive. but it's fuzzy enough that people use the term and the word to mean whatever they want. crime didn't go down in the bronx because of 'gentrification'.

here's population change in the bronx:

1980
1,168,972
−20.6%

1990
1,203,789
3.0%

2000
1,332,650
10.7%

2010
1,385,108
3.9%

(most people think 2010 is a massive undercount)

why do you need 'johnny from the bronx' and his cafe in brooklyn to understand a massive increase in rent when population growth went from negative 20 to plus 10 in a very short span of time?

Well that depends on what is causing the increase in population in the Bronx. If it's people coming from other boroughs who can no longer afford them, then yes, gentrification is a cause.

that lower housing costs would attract more "well-educated people" from around the U.S. who are clearly in short supply in major coastal cities or something. And the discussion, at least initially *was* very much just about housing for such people.

purely from an economic pov, educated upper-midddle class people w/ bank accounts do 'create more jobs' than people without them. that phenomenon has an upper limit, which is (one reason) why supply side tax cuts are wasteful. but in cities, people w/ money have substantially more opportunities to create service jobs than they do in a wealthy suburb. dog walkers, tutors, dry-cleaners, restaurant workers, taxi drivers etc. it's easier to turn something you don't want to do into a service job than it is in suburban texas. so, strictly w/ 'job creation' in mind, nyc is better off when it attracts upper-middle class people, people in the 'culture industry', whatever - just as other parts of the country are worse off when their upper-middle class leave. if you are a poor nyer w/ a hs education and no job, then 'more rich people' is def in your self-interest. more foreign immigration? that's not quite as clear. but you'd rather focus on the rich people than the immigrants.

driving a taxi, for example, was not always a job done 100% by immigrants

'johnny from the bronx' lol I meant 'johnny from idaho' he goes by johnny from the bronx now tho

anyway I'm also not arguing that nyc should *only* attract wealthy and/or well-educated people just that it's ridiculous to act like it's a bad thing for the nyc economy, including nyc unskilled labor, w/ whom they will not be sharing a labor market. and again, one more time, people leaving nyc domestically still have higher incomes than people coming in.

a good piece on that: http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~moretti/socret.pdf

and a good piece on gentrification here:

(keeping in mind, again:

a. it's usually left as a vague and mysterious force, but there is still *something* that can be defined as a process and measured

b. under any definition that requires 'young white americans' as key actors, 'gentrification' is not a particularly important issue for the nyc housing market at large, or the majority of poor people in the nyc metro area, an overwhelming majority of who are in neighborhoods that are nowhere close to filling up w/ johnny from idahos. those poor people don't get media attention because there isn't an interesting narrative to the poor neighborhoods that hipsters aren't moving to. people get kicked and priced out of their apartments in the bronx too.)

and with all that in mind

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2802068/#R1

Our findings do suggest that neighborhood gentrification is associated with disproportionate in-migration of college graduates, particularly white college graduates under 40 without children. However, in the full sample, synthetic cohort analysis of out-migration finds no evidence of disproportionate exit of low-education or minority householders. A decomposition of the total income gains in a gentrifying neighborhoods attributes a substantial 33% of income gains to black high school graduates. This sizeable contribution results from the fact that black high school graduates make up a full 30% of the population of gentrifying neighborhoods in 2000 and that the average income of this demographic group in gentrifying neighborhoods increases substantially during the 1990’s.

Our results indicate that, on average, the demographic flows associated with the gentrification of urban neighborhoods during the 1990’s are not consistent with displacement and harm to minority households. In fact, taken as a whole, our results suggest that gentrification of predominantly black neighborhoods creates neighborhoods that are attractive to middle-class black households. While this does not rule out the possibility of negative effects in individual neighborhoods or other time periods, it does suggest that policy makers can approach discussions of gentrification with the knowledge that recent gentrification has not solely benefited high-income white households at the expense of lower-income or minority households.

post about density and why it's good

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-growth-lesson-america-could-take-from-china/2011/08/25/gIQAxRiU9R_blog.html

http://grist.org/oil/5-is-the-new-4-how-high-do-gas-prices-have-to-go-to-change-behavior/

the dream is real

i used to drive up and down the highway a lot just as something to do! used up a lot of gas to go nowhere

Kids used to be more into the "scooping the loop" thing where you'd drive around the square/downtown area of a small town. A bunch of obnoxious kids from rural surrounding communities used to pull this crap in the city, but I think gas prices and a revitalized downtown is killing that crap.

idk we used to just hop on the highway and talk and listen to music and it was p great. don't really drive unless i have somewhere to go most of the time these days

iatee, from yr. linked paper:

Because the focus of our research is on the demographic trends in gentrifying neighborhoods, we do not want our definition of gentrification to determine the results. Some definitions of gentrification require educational up-skilling, racial turnover and even displacement, but our analysis of in-migration and exit will be much less interesting if we condition our sample on these outcomes. We instead take gentrifying neighborhoods to be those tracts in the low-income neighborhood sample that experience an increase in average family income between 1990 and 2000 of at least $10,000.

Low income

So the problem then is that this definition theoretically won't beg the question with regards to up-skilling or displacement, but by construction it *does* select for an increase in income. So the results you cite, even in the best possible interpretation, say that for neighborhoods that poor and got less poor, the people in those neighborhoods got less poor. The distribution of how they got less poor would be interesting, but the figures only capture a portion of it. The strongest result seems to be that in neighborhoods so selected, the people who got less poor the most were black people with high school educations. But there's no causality there at all. All we really know from this is that of the poorest metropolitan neighborhoods, those of them where income rose generally can attribute a fair amount of this rise in income to increases in income of black high school graduates living in these neighborhoods. Which is I guess a fine observation, but once you break it down, has nothing at all to do with gentrification -- especially since going from an avg. family income of under 30,000 to one of under 40,000 is not at all what any of us in this thread have been using as a metric for "gentrification."

Also if you read the methodology, the discussion of synthetic cohorts should make it clear that they really have no idea how many people moved in and out -- just a story about shifting demographic ratios. Which, again, is interesting, but hardly is capable of doing the lifting you would like it to.

er, above, "low income" should read "low income is defined in this paper to be avg. income in the lowest quintile of u.s. families"

but in cities, people w/ money have substantially more opportunities to create service jobs than they do in a wealthy suburb. dog walkers, tutors, dry-cleaners, restaurant workers, taxi drivers etc.

other than taxi drivers, is there any reason to think that this is true?

in fact lemme toss some things in complete opposition in there for you - yard cleaners, lawn service, landscaping, fence peeps, car mechanics

Yeah, landscaping is a HUGE thing.

Not to mention home maintenance. I like homes, but having some shared resources in a building cuts down on the number of maintainable items. Individual houses each have their own power, water, and sewer service along with heating, cooling, and all related costs and maintenance issues. All of which mean more service jobs.

especially since going from an avg. family income of under 30,000 to one of under 40,000 is not at all what any of us in this thread have been using as a metric for "gentrification."

right, most people haven't been using a definition at all. it's not a process we can measure, it's an undefined and vague'bad'. if gentrification *doesn't* select for an increase in income, how do you measure it? change in ethnicity? increased frequency of exit-from-neighborhood? rent prices? those are all things that occur outside of the narrative of 'gentrification', measuring them doesn't get at what we want. I agree that there isn't a *direct* causality between 'gentrification' and higher incomes for hs grads - esp since most jobs aren't where you live - but rather would say that they're both probably due to similar positive-macro-level-changes.

I'm not arguing that poor people aren't priced out of their neighborhood and that that isn't a bad thing. that does happen, sometimes due to hipsters even, tho it's less of a problem than our snail-speed growth of dense urban housing. there isn't much of america to really gentrify - detroit isn't a substitute for brooklyn. this 'gentrification' is mostly part of a bigger process that's ultimately 'a good thing'. our inner cities collapsed because the middle and upper classes left. the knee-jerk reaction to their return is ridiculous, esp since it's fairly clear-cut that as far as everything but rent goes, it's a huge plus for the metro economy, including the poor. neighborhoods and populations change and always will. the real problem is our nearly-fixed supply of dense urban housing stock, not the fact that some people are going to get priced out of their neighborhoods over time.

other than taxi drivers, is there any reason to think that this is true?

Not to mention home maintenance. I like homes, but having some shared resources in a building cuts down on the number of maintainable items. Individual houses each have their own power, water, and sewer service along with heating, cooling, and all related costs and maintenance issues. All of which mean more service jobs.

yes. you can find someone to fix your car (if you have one) or clean your yard (if you have one) in a dense city. these jobs aren't necessarily linked to lack of density, they're linked to personal consumption-choices (some of which are more appealing to people outside of cities). if, instead of buying a house in iowa city, you lived in the smallest, cheapest apartment in iowa city and decided to spend all your money at restaurants in iowa city, you'd still be fueling the service industry. likewise the money you spend on your car is partly a personal consumption decision (if you want a nice car), but it's money that would be spent on other stuff if you bought a cheaper car or took the bus.

the big difference is that there are countless personal consumption choices that *can* exist in dense cities that can't exist elsewhere because the scale doesn't add up. you can get someone to make and bring you a pizza in the suburbs, but you generally can't get someone to make and bring turkish food. you can get someone to bring you a newspaper once a day, but you can't order your groceries online - even if you'd prefer spending $10 to having to go out and go shopping yourself today, that's not a choice you have, because the scale isn't there. there are consumption choices that can only be made when the scale exists, and that's not limited to food.

on top of this, density is linked to productivity and wealth, an effect that's partly constrained by the distortions in the housing market: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/one-path-to-better-jobs-more-density-in-cities.html

there are just straight up *more people* in cities

iatee, the thing thats kind of frustrating abt all of this is that you make these statements as if they are fact when they aren't? i can get (actually) turkish food, and have it delivered where i live, and i can get groceries delivered too. i think sometimes you make some pretty questionable assumptions based on just having no real experience with non-urban living.

ie yeah you can hire someone to do yard work in the city, but given that i think we can agree that there are far less yards, and thus less yard work, that doesnt really work as a rebuttal - i mean you can take cabs in the suburbs too, it is just far less common a behavior than it is in NYC

Individual houses each have their own power

like let's focus on this.

now the pg&e guy who checks my building's electricity is going to be checking proportionally more customer electricity bills per hour than the one in iowa city. in a way, you could frame this as job loss - 100,000 people in queens require fewer dudes to check their electricity than 100,000 people in iowa city. but the ones in nyc are far more productive on an hour by hour basis. we could double the number of guys out there and make them all do half the work, matching the hourly productivity of an electricity dude somewhere else. but I don't think, when you frame it like that, anyone would believe that's a great way to create jobs.

iatee, the thing thats kind of frustrating abt all of this is that you make these statements as if they are fact when they aren't? i can get (actually) turkish food, and have it delivered where i live, and i can get groceries delivered too. i think sometimes you make some pretty questionable assumptions based on just having no real experience with non-urban living.

lol I grew up in the suburbs dude. I would say 'you cannot get turkish delivery' is a fairly reasonable assumption for the average american suburb. maybe minnesota is different, I admit, I have never been to minnesota. anyway food isn't even 'that important' it's just an easy example.

i thought the new cw was that for great 'ethnic' foods find the places in suburban strip malls

From that NY times editorial:

"Many of them left for places like Phoenix, which attracted over 500,000 residents from other American cities, despite wages 40 percent below Silicon Valley levels.

Factors like taste and taxes account for some of the migration, but the biggest reason for the shift is housing costs."

What is this, I don't even.

"In every year from 1992 to 2009, Phoenix granted permits for two to three times as many new homes as did the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas combined."

And that construction boom worked out great! A++ would bubble again!

well you see the difference between phoenix and san jose is that san jose is the center of one of the most important global industries and phoenix has an economy dependent on, idk, old racist people

the argument here cant possibly be that a suburb of a given geographic size 'creates' or 'requires' or 'supports' as many jobs as a city, can it?

Sterl, a failed construction boom in Phoenix is not even remotely credible as evidence in the argument over construction in NYC. We have had a bona fide housing shortage for years!

Yes max people are just talking about geographic size and not population, clearly. They are in fact arguing that Alaska because it is so big has more jobs than anywhere else. You nailed it!

xpost: Hurting I'm just making fun of the stupid editorial which is *hailing* the boom in Phoenix.

And the boom in Phoenix was also sprawl not tall. Which isn't an argument for or against anything except for that editorial being stupid.

yeah you're misreading it

max the argument is that somehow an upper middle class person in a city has more job creating power in the service industry than the same UMC person in a suburb, which i dont think is true

here is the same author on phoenix:
http://www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=1780