I think the most important factor for solid B cities is governments not taking economic growth for granted. For example, Seattle has now spent years fighting with its largest employer, Amazon, which has had serious negative impacts, but the city is mostly doing fine. Columbus does not have the luxury of being able to pursue policies like that.
That's Portland. The fabs are in Hillsboro, a suburb outside of the greenbelt. The problem is the state of Oregon, which levies high taxes and delivers miserable public services for the trouble.
I’m not aware of any particular single-floor requirement for fabs, but generally speaking yes, I’ve never heard of a cleanroom that was more.
I’d imagine, judging from my own CR experience (I was just down there as usual today!) that it’s mostly about flow and navigation. Most factory floors are set up on a single floor because it makes things simple, you only have to deal with two dimensions instead of 3.
Ayy, fellow semi guy! We have a fab floor and a subfab with a bunch of extra wiring and piping, which does make it hard to build vertically even beyond an ordinary clean room. But there are a ton of regulatory barriers to everything you'd need to build a new fab: Oregon doesn't really even have water going for it at this point.
Go for it! I’m not aware of anything that Substack would do to prevent you from DMing me, but if there is, let me know what I need to do and I’ll take care of it.
So OP didn't mean "college town" they meant "THE flagship university of the state public system"?
I guess but the whole theory strikes me as very rickety. What is meant by "resilient" here? (It isn't like Austin hasn't had long, deep crashes, for instance) How do state capitals without flagship universities do? How do state capitals with universities that aren't flagships do?
Is "flagship university in a state capital" actually doing much work here?
To me, big flagship is different from just college town.
Has Austin had long deep crashes? I've had friends there for 30 plus years and it has solidly out performed the overall US economy. I think the same is true for Columbus and Madison. The resilience comes because there is always a floor underneath the economy from the state government and the university, plus both those entities tend to incubate other businesses, and in the case of the universities, industry strong points.
I think the most plausible claim is that the past couple decades have been particularly good to state capitals with major universities that weren’t already huge. This gets you Austin, Madison, Columbus, Nashville. I think Baton Rouge is probably the best potential counterexample (it has a major university but hasn’t don’t particularly well as far as I know) and there may be a few on the other side, where a state capital has done well without a major university (Indianapolis, Des Moines). I don’t know enough about the fortunes of Lincoln and Lansing to see how they’ve been doing.
Though I've been to Harrisburg briefly I don't have a strong opinion on whether it is a college town or not but just wanted to add that I didn't make that up myself and got it from "Best college towns to start a career", which is admittedly just a dumb listicle, so I'm happy to defer to your presumably more informed judgement.
I'm from Pennsylvania, and this is in no way a dig at you.
Harrisburg is a nice little city, but no one in PA would describe it as a college town. Being on that list is actually somewhat comical. Penn State, the state flagship, is in its own town, State College, which is at least 90 minutes away from Harrisburg. Philadelphia and Pittsburg both have lots of substantial universities of course, and then there are a bunch of smaller towns around the state that are anchored by either a private or public college, all of which you would think of as college towns ahead of Harrisburg.
That metro has thirteen colleges/unis including a major SUNY research school and highly regarded Rensselaer, Union College, Skidmore, etc. Sounds pretty collegey!
The UC Davis hospital is in Sacramento, so Sacramento gets half a point. It has both an undegrad institution and a medical school, just not from the same university.
It’s actually kind of a nice place but it is very hard to get to. Few direct flights and lousy highway access. Feels very middle of nowhere for its size as a consequence e
Size, I would assume - the Tallahassee metro area is only 400k, which is half Madison's and a sixth of Austin's and Columbus'. Not saying Tallahassee isn't growing (I know little about it besides an acquaintance that lives there and teaches), just that it isn't that large and doesn't have the same economic gravity that Austin does as a result.
True, at least until very recently. Most of Texas appears to be growing, but Austin still stands out. Columbus is impressive because it's a growing city in an otherwise stagnant state.
One of the (many, many) reasons why "standing" is an idiotic, authoritarian legal doctrine is that it prevents anyone from suing over stuff like this. I could walk into any court in this country and get an injunction in two seconds to halt this obviously unconstitutional crap except that because I'm a mere peon of a taxpayer, I am deemed not to have "standing" to object that my tax dollars are being spent unconstitutionally.
Conservative judges just made that concept up-- it's nowhere in the constitution or statutes of the United States. But they wanted rich people to have more rights to sue than ordinary people, so they created rules to make sure ordinary people's rights exist only on paper.
"Conservative judges just made that concept up..."
You could check your history and speak informed about things, or you could just make stuff up based on what you assume happened.
I dislike strict standing rules, but I'm aware the modern version originate from Fairchild v. Hughes authored by Louis Brandeis to protect the 19th amendment. He was famously a leader in the progressive movement and has been a hero of many liberal jurists.
Ah yes, a 9-0 decision of the Taft Court, author of such notably [checks notes] liberal decisions as "upholding criminal syndicalism laws." Real bastion of progressivism you got there.
Fairchild itself is a remarkably unpersuasive ipse dixit, which might explain why no one bothers to read it anymore.
"Fairchild itself is a remarkably unpersuasive ipse dixit, which might explain why no one bothers to read it anymore."
Serious people who want to speak with authority on something should read the documents where it originated. Like saying you don't like how our government works, but can't be bothered to read the constitution.
That being said, I agree that modern standing rules are stretching the wording of the constitution about "cases and controversies." Just wish more people recognized that the rules created for their side are going to be used against them by the other side when in power. Thus the importance of creating good rules.
I'm not claiming the Court's current standing law is as good as it could be, but are you saying there shouldn't be any standing requirement at all, or that it should be something different than it currently is?
Because I doubt it's a good idea to let every loudmouth taxpayer with an opinion clog up the courts with what are basically op-ed lawsuits, complaining about something where Congress just disagreed with them.
If you're willing to pay for (or can obtain pro bono rep for) a suit, then you should get your day in court. If what we want is to deter frivolous lawsuits, then more aggressive loser-pays rules would be sufficient to do that. Standing doesn't-- it causes people with meritorious cases to never get justice at all.
And if the issue is that the courts themselves are overtaxed, then charge higher filing fees to cover that. So long as you have an adequate means of ensuring that fees are waived for the indigent, it works fine.
That would basically turn the courts into a sore-losers-review board for people who disagree with some political policy decision even though they're not personally affected by it.
If you can't show how it affects you, and you can't persuade elected officials that you are right, why should you be able to ask a judge to overrule what elected officials have decided?
Because it's unconstitutional, or otherwise illegal.
Again, this only matters in situations where the so-called "sore loser" is correct on the merits. We should want "what elected officials have decided" to be overruled when the party seeking the overrule is correct on the merits.
(I should add that the test is NOT that you "show how it affects you," it's that you "show how it affects you differently than the average citizen." It's trivial to show that Trump using the Treasury to bribe whoever he wants negatively affects me in the form of higher taxes and corrupt governance; it's just that it also negatively affects everyone else in exactly the same way.)
Timing doesn't line up, but: if he pays TSA entirely in ones, well, the bills have his name on them so I guess that's within the executive remit, at least for a couple more years?
More seriously, it's certainly not the ideal way to get around the "government shutdown" failure mode, but does help illustrate the ongoing gormlessness of that particular Constitutional quirk. How many has it been under this administration now, 3? 4? One loses track so easily.
I think it shows that if Congress decides not to fund Trump's war with Iran, he will simply declare that it is an "emergency" and he can move money to fund it anyway. If he does it for the TSA, he'll sure do it for a war.
Tiger Woods arrested for DUI after rolling over his car around 2 PM--and just a couple weeks before the Masters at that. This guy has not had a good history with motor vehicles at all.
How far did it roll though - was he on the fairway, the green, the rough? Can he still make par, or is it time to take a -5 and pack it in?
My brother and I were partly inspired to pick up golf as kids due to the inspiration of Tiger Woods. Had the striped club case and everything. Many Such Cases. It's sad to see your sports heroes deteriorate in later life.
What makes me sad is that many years ago, during the Obama administration, Entertainment Weekly did a poll on “top 10 most popular Americans,” and Tiger Woods made the list!
What makes me even sadder: it’s not like EW was some kind of super woke institution around 2010. But the demographics of that top 10 list were woke as heck! Only 2 of the 10 were white men: George Clooney and Tom Hanks. Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and iirc Will Smith were on it.
Clearly, the polling skewed very liberal. But my point is, a popular magazine published a list of “most popular Americans” that was predominantly Black, and people didn’t lose their entire shit over it! It was presented just kind of matter of factly. Can you imagine what the discourse would be like if this were published today?
He's gone to rehab for Percocet and his 2017 tox report had this insane cocktail:
According to the report, the drugs in Woods' system were:
Hydrocodone, the generic form of a painkiller branded as Vicodin.
Hydromorphone, a strong painkiller commonly known as Dilaudid.
Alprazolam, a mood and sleep drug commonly known as Xanax. (The report also listed Alpha-Hydroxy Alprazolam, which is what Xanax becomes when it breaks down in the system.)
Zolpidem, a sleep drug commonly known as Ambien.
Delta-9 carboxy THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Dude is sadly hooked on pills and has been for 15 years.
It's really unfair that Chicago's biggest problem being a superstar city is the weather. In the summer, Chicago is really one of the most fun and beautiful places to be in the country.
I have never in my life understood why uncomfortably hot and humid during the longest days of the year was better than cold during the shortest.
I can put on a warm jacket and venture outside in January and be comfortable. My in-laws live near Dallas, you can't get naked enough for 100 degree heat and 95 percent humidity to be comfortable.
Yeah, which I guess is why they compensate for that by driving everywhere, never walking outside, and blasting the AC in every building until you can see your breath.
Maybe not in as much of a minority as you think. Most of my family feels strongly the same. As time goes on, I hear of more and more people who feel this way. Maybe it has to do with the increasing heat, or maybe people finally feel free to admit this.
My wife is from Atlanta and she's been here now 15 years. Here's how she thinks about it. Nov.-Dec. are awesome just with the holidays. January is bad. Feb. is horrible; peak seasonal depression. We try to travel A LOT in Feb.. March-April get rolling. May always sucks and seasonal depression kicks back in. Summer hits in June and we've been having Indian summer's deep into Oct. the past couple years which are awesome. It's not Santa Monica but for 9/12 months it's a really fun place to live.
We've had a couple really bad Mays in a row so I might be over-reacting but you always get a couple nice weekends in March and April and you expect May to pop but it's cloudy 20 days on average and still in the 50s and cold at night so you're still wearing all your winter jackets and it just sucks. Then June hits and it's summer. It's really jarring.
I don't have any recollection of that, but I also like sweater weather. I do wish we'd stop yo-yo-ing between freezing and near-summer warm. In the same day.
Chicago’s biggest problem is the corruption in both private and public spheres. It’s markedly dysfunctional in this. It feels sometimes like Mississippi.
It’s also a terrible location. Smack dab in the middle of flyover country. If it had the same weather but it was on the coast of Rhode Island it would be an easy A.
That makes some sense, but my daughter lives there now, and it is so easy to get to Chicago than many places that are closer because there are multiple daily direct flights from even smaller cities. Also, there are 26 public beaches in the city itself. I had the great opportunity to enjoy several of them this summer, and they were so joyful. A much different experience than, say, my childhood experiences at Cape Cod beaches, which were fine but much more boring. Plus the water was warmer.
Is Chicago our only major city that has a beach within city limits? I think in Miami and L.A. the beaches are technically in other municipalities, but maybe that's wrong.
New York does - Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Rockaway, but if you read Robert Caro's book on Robert Moses, you will realize why you never remember this. Access to the water or even views of the water throughout NYC are cut off and obscured, whereas in Chicago, the built environment was created to celebrate the water.
Venice Beach is in LA city limits. Checking the map more carefully, it looks like Dockweiler Beach by LAX is also in city limits, and even the stretch of beach connecting the two is as well, despite Marina Del Rey putting the marina in a different municipality.
Also, Will Rogers State Beach in the Palisades appears to be within LA city limits.
And if you go way down south to the port, connected to the main part of the city by a tendril of land parallel to the 110, it looks like there is a beach called Cabrillo Beach in the Los Angeles part of San Pedro (though it appears to look out directly on the giant container ship ports and be inside their breakwater, so I don’t know how pleasant it is).
But yes, overall, the beaches of Malibu are bigger than Will Roger’s, and the beaches of Santa Monica are bigger than Venice, and the beaches of Long Beach are far bigger than San Pedro, and in general, the better beaches are down in Huntington and especially San Clemente.
...and yet the rurals seem to think it's a war zone. My stay at the Congress Plaza gives lie to that. Obviously the South Side is different but one thing rurals just don't understand is how big cities are.
I mostly agree, but the cost of housing in Chicago, although high, is much more attainable than it is in New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc. It is one reason we are toying with the idea of retiring in Chicago. That cost might also be why the bookstore/literary scene seems surprisingly stronger in Chicago than NY or Boston/Cambridge.
Last time I was there, cab drivers were like "can you believe I have to pay $600 a month for a two bedroom apartment? I'm getting ripped off!" and I wanted to scream.
I wonder which neighborhood. Until a few months ago, I had two kids going to school at opposite sides of the city, and we didn't see anything under $1,000 for a two bedroom. My daughter lives in a 3 bedroom/2 bath that costs about $2,400, which is still a great price compared to major East Coast cities. The location is meh, especially in terms of getting downtown, but she can walk to most of the essentials other than medical appointments.
It’s not high in Chicago, though, right? Even compared to decidedly second-tier cities like Portland or Pittsburgh, by any reasonable metric, Chicago rents are middling
I recently visited Chicago and thought that maybe I'd like to move there given that it's so much more affordable than Seattle. So I figured I'd see if the pension apocalypse was as bad as people said it was. And yes it is. It's a shame because at some point they're going to have to make some really tough choices and I expect that the quality of life will get worse due to whatever choices they make.
It's too bad because otherwise the city was great.
I've been working on a joke* that nobody seems to find funny, but I like it. Basically: "People think its cool to live in NYC. Is it? Its literally the most common city to be from. Its like 'Oh, you're from New York? Yeah, you and 8.5 million other people.' There's no other American city that more people are from. I'm actually impressed when I meet somebody who lives in a small town. 'Wait, there's only 2,000 of you? And you're here!? You're rare. You're unique.' Being from New York is like being a product at Walmart. I know this is true because New York bans Walmart. They don't want people to see the similarities." Etc etc.
Yes, I live in a solid B city, and no, I'm not envious of superstar cities. Why do you ask?
I'm from NYC and sometimes tell that to people in other countries when they go all "oh my gawd New York!" I'm more likely to be from there than anywhere else!
I’ve lived in a B city for my whole life… the reality is mixed. There are definitely big advantages like low cost of living and convenience with a short commute which makes it easy to raise a family plus being a big fish in a small pond.
But disadvantages are pretty significant too. Dating is bad—women are much more likely to move to big cities. I got lucky but most of my successful male professional friend group at age 40-ish are unmarried. Most jobs are run by a pretty stifling conservative corporate culture that most people are just trying to retire early from ASAP. There’s not a lot to do so I spend most of my free time playing video games, online, or planning a trip (which is also less convenient as our airport has few direct flights) Overall it just feels a bit isolating, which is fine if you have kids and one of the few interesting jobs, but those require a fair bit of luck to get in addition to skill.
If I were advising my sons I would probably advise them to go to a big city.
I would advise A- city when single, then consider a B city after getting married. Although if one can freely choose where to live without being constrained by work, most people should try to live close to their families and existing friends.
This situation happened to me by accident (lived in a A- city, my job moved me to a B city and my now-wife came with me) and I can confirm that this is a recommended route: I wouldn't want to be my age and single in my current city, but it's great to be here while married with a kiddo.
Agreed. In fact in a low immigration, low birth rate environment, as more people stay single for longer or are childless, the draw of the metropole is even stronger.
B tier cities are in a growth mirage at present. The more single households or childless households there are, the less attraction B tier cities hold.
Austin, Denver, etc are big enough that the career impacts of being in a small market are limited. You get much smaller and a sort of distinctions equilibrium can set in where employers know they can't fire someone because it will be so hard to find a replacement. And employees don't quit because finding a new job will be so difficult. For the ambitious who may need to switch jobs every 2-4 years it can be an issue.
Hmm, this might be a recommendation for one of my kids. He just wants a "regular job" and a "regular life." He is very frugal and already has more savings than most people twice his age, but says he just wants a "regular apartment" - doesn't expect to ever be able to afford to buy his own place (he doesn't want a detached single family anyway). He is a dependable and honest worker, just not particularly ambitious. Maybe I will suggest he look for work in Columbus when the time comes
I don't know where in the country you live, but metros of 1-3 million are great for people like that. You can feel normal with a $70,000 income, and if you happen to have a low six-figure income and marry someone who does as well, all of sudden you can afford a pretty nice house!
Many of my friends here in Sacramento are Bay Area expats like myself, and we all notice how much less people talk about their careers here which we all find refreshing.
This makes sense. I live in a metro area of about 1 million. I make less than $70,000 wtih health benefits. It's not an extravagant life, but I can subscribe to Slow Boring and may go to a fish fry tonight!
I lived in educated Boston (vs. places like Revere or Savin Hill, which were much more working class back in the day) in my young adulthood, and the talk about jobs and where you went to college got incredibly tiresome. When I moved from Boston to Wisconsin, I discovered that most people consider the University of Wisconsin to be as great as the Ivies, and things like jobs and education were just a minor point in conversation. Moving from the Northeast to the Midwest for a few years was as eye-opening and mind-broadening an experience as traveling abroad.
For computer science and for engineering in general UW Madison is better than most of the ivies. Princeton and Cornell would rank higher, that's about it.
Yes, I work in Chicago for an employer with a large Columbus office. It’s harder to find qualified employees for teams based in Columbus and it’s harder for employees to find a comparable new job if they’re laid off.
I grew up in Denver too, but in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The 80’s was a different time with the downtown a ghost town after the shale oil bust. After college in Boulder I spent the next 25 years out of state in the military (or being a military spouse). When we decided to move back here in 2018 we took Denver off the table. It had grown way too expensive and crowded.
We settled in the Colorado Springs area before the big housing price increases starting with Covid. We couldn’t afford our current neighborhood today. We’ve got 2-4 years until the kids are grown and flown and then may move again. But that may be hard considering we have a 2.25% mortgage.
>>I would consider the Denver of my youth (from 2001 until the mid-2010s) to be a Solid B. I’d now call it a Solid A-, in the ranks of Austin, Chicago, and Philadelphia
This ranking seems off. Having never been to most of these, I would propose:
Having lived in both Denver and Austin, I'd say they should be in the same tier (along with Seattle). They're all pretty similar IMO. Austin gets a bit more media attention with SXSW and Musk moving his companies here, but I don't put too much stock into that.
I think that was true a few years ago, but the same "frozen job market" phenomenon we see nationally is happening here too. I have a lot of friends who are looking for their next job and struggling to get bites.
A quote I've mentioned here before: "If you enjoy the grit, crime, traffic congestion, and social alienation of a big city, but can't stand art, culture, museums, or tall buildings, then Los Angeles may be right for you."
I get what you're saying, but it's not completely accurate. LA has lots of art and museums! They're just, like, "*this* world-class museum is 25 minutes driving south of Downtown LA, and *that* world-class museum is 30 minutes driving north, and that's on a good traffic day!"
LA has many great museums it's just that, like everything else here, they're really spread out. It's not like you can walk between the Getty Villa, the Getty Museum, the Broad, LACMA, MOCA etc etc.
And soon to come: the spaceship-like George Lucas Tchotchke Museum!
I think an argument could be made about how much of la’s economy is just based on scale but culturally it’s number 2 in the USA and it is not particularly close, l.a. has movies and tv of course, but is also close to New York in significance in American pop /rock/hiphop music. I know less about visual arts etc though.
It's more like a Latin American metro. It has quite a bit of extreme wealth, but on the whole, is poorer than you'd think with a much higher poverty rate than its reputation.
The LA metro area has the 10th highest median per capita income (in 2022), basically the same as Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and Minneapolis/St. Paul. It's nothing like a Latin American metro.
Another issue is that its main differentiating industry (Hollywood) is in decline, with the number of jobs going down and far more competition from other parts of the US, Canada, etc.
Now LA is big enough that it's not going to collapse like Detroit, and of course it has a lot going for it geographically.
But it has not developed anywhere near as much tech or biotech as you would think a California metro of that size should.
Agreed with all of that. But I sometimes think Americans don't properly account for how iconic LA is. To the average world citizen the US is basically NYC + LA + a bunch of natural beauty.
LA has seen many core industries collapse (like defense in the 90s or oil way back when) and has kept chugging on. Entertainment is still huge. And it probably has a lot more tech and biotech than, say, New York or Chicago.
Also, Los Angeles is the lead US city for video games which, btw, blow movies away in terms of revenue.
Calling DC-BOS contiguous or dense (only by American standards, which are not dense at all) seems like a stretch to me, but I'm open to downgrading LA.
The Pacific Northwest is not contiguous! Los Angeles really is contiguous urban development over the entire area between the mountains and the seas. It doesn’t have any low density suburbs the way you have just a dozen or so miles from Manhattan or Boston - in LA it stay moderate density until you hit the mountains, and then it basically stops.
Portland to Vancouver BC is getting there, though. I get why one would call it an urban agglomeration, though there is a little bit of country in between the metros
LA is really everywhere from San Luis Obispo down to Tijuana and out to Riverside and San Bernardino, so it’s pretty big as an urban agglomeration. Not as big as Boswash, but nothing to turn your nose up at
I've driven up from Orange County several times to go to a regional practice at the central dojo in Santa Barbara, and there's a definite phase shift along the way from "we are driving through a giant metropolis" to "we are driving past a bunch of fields and prickly pear! Wave at Oxnard!"
Hey! The weather here is much more awful than that! It’s often 65, and occasionally we get above 80 briefly like we did last week and everyone fainted!
I think vibes is a good place to look but for these tiers I think it makes sense to use a combination of raw size, cultural influence, and regional/global economic impact. Austin is getting a lot of hype lately but it’s still essentially satellite spillover from sf/seattle companies. What’s the Austin equivalent of Home Depot, Coca Cola or delta airlines?
This is definitely overrating Austin and underrating some of the other cities. You can get some good $30-40 meals in Austin and go to some good music festivals, but you can’t find great $100 meals (or at least couldn’t a few years ago - there might be a few now) and you also can’t find as many different great $10 street meals as all these other cities. You can go to the university art museum but you can’t really hit a great museum or go to symphony or opera the way you can in all the other cities on this list, as well as places like Houston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas, etc.
Austin is leading the pack that includes Indianapolis and Columbus and Nashville and the like. It’s not yet quite in the big leagues like all those others.
It used to just be a college town/capital combo. Like Texas’ Madison, WI. Then tech exploded, to the world’s detriment, and so did Austin. I reckon these kinds of cultural institutions haven’t caught up.
it's not SF/LA/NYC but more exciting than almost anything else imo. SEA/PDX/BOS might have gone on the same trajectory, but they went anti-growth or whack blue governance
Not really. The busses are ok around downtown and UT, but even then transit will almost always take much longer than driving. There are a few walkable neighborhoods, but these are also more expensive, and you'll need a car to go anywhere outside the neighborhood.
To put it in context - where I live, each bus ride is $1.30 if you use a prepaid account ($1.50 without) and all rides after your third in a day are free. As of January, bus and subway fare in NYC is $3.00 with a free transfer within two hours. Not sure of the per ride fare in Chicago, but when I visit I get a 7-day pass for $20 that includes city buses and the El, but not Metra trains that go out to the suburbs.
This doesn’t grapple with the agglomeration effects that are the real drive people move to these cities. You can do the exact same job in India and San Francisco — say, a mover, or a driver — and make several orders of magnitude more money in the latter. This effect is reduced but still present when you compare Tulsa or Spokane to New York City.
Instead of telling people to spread out, we should encourage them to go to places where their work is more valuable. The important thing is that the cities they move to have the capacity, both in housing and other amenities, so that quality of life doesn’t suffer and income surplus isn’t absorbed by landlords.
A world where everyone lives in layover cities is poorer and less dynamic than one a small handful of state and local governments get their act together.
You're talking past each other. You're talking in an ideal world where that housing is built. Halina is talking about the actual US as of 2026, where housing prices in Columbus are so much cheaper than San Francisco that all those gains to income will disappear.
If housing prices in Columbus reach SF levels, then yes. People do that - there's a reason the Bay Area is consistently one of the nation's leaders in outmigration.
I used to live in Columbus, and it has a few geographical advantages in that it is surrounded by cookie cutter suburbs and farmland where developers have been rapidly putting up clusters of houses, condos, etc. Pickerington, Ohio, is a good example. The infrastructure gets stressed a bit (traffic, etc.) but there's plenty of room to sprawl in most directions, and in the city itself, for decades they have very quickly knocked stuff down and built new stuff all the time -- there's very little of old Columbus left that hasn't been bulldozed and redeveloped or turned into high end shopping or something. All the formerly cruddy/funky areas around OSU campus are mostly sanitized and full of nice apartments and fancy restaurants. I believe they also have some wide ranging water rights leverage which has helped with expansion, but I don't understand the details. The house I used to live in there tripled in value and is now being rented out as an Air BNB. And it was a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath house half a block away from a cruddy bar, a car wash, and a bodega. And if you can't a afford a house close in, you can head to the nearby boonies, but still be a 20 or 30 minute drive on the freeway from downtown. A lot of people I went to school with live in places like Lancaster, OH, Circleville, Newark, etc., and just commute.
Isn't this a rewording of gentrification? Nobody really thinks people deserve to be told to move. But plenty think you should live where you can support things. And you may be priced out.
I think that is basically potayto potahto. The point is to consider a city that is less expensive to live in. No? Would be like advice to get a budget car. Even if your family did luxury cars growing up.
If your luxury car made you a bundle more money to the point where you stand a good chance of taking a hit to your quality of life by giving it up, the choice is less obvious
Thing is, within the US, the blue collar worker in the rural Richmond or Charlottesville exurbs has a three bedroom house and retirement savings, and the one in San Francisco has an apartment and money worries.
In Central Virginia, my twenty something year old handyman (day job, junior carpenter) is buying a house, getting married, and planning kids. Don’t see that a lot in San Francisco.
Quality of life includes being able to have a house, a yard, a garden, a family, a pony for the kids, and being able to see the stars at night, without having to be rich. Quality of life is better for most people in a whole lot of other, smaller places.
Higher salary isn’t better when it’s eaten up by higher cost of living.
For sure, and that’s a big reason 90% of the country already doesn’t live in superstar cities. But for those who do, “go make a third of your current salary in Sacramento” is, like, why? You moved from Sacramento for your career!
I grew up in West "By G-d" Virginia (which is, by the way, the best Virginia). I still go back from time to time, and when I die, I will be buried there. But mountains are oppressive. Rural life is depressing, it's sad - there is nothing to envy about it. The good life, the best life, is amongst the teeming skyscrapers, surrounded by strangers whom you can befriend or ignore as it suits you. Give me the concrete jungle ANY day of the week. What the fuck use is a pony, lol?
Off topic, but I have often thought West Virginia is one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are views there that are so gorgeous they just fill your heart.
Of course. I have family members who prefer and live in “superstar cities.” Probably should also note that my spouse was born and raised in New York City, which is generally considered one of those superstars.
I don’t at all think that everyone should live outside of big cities. But - I also think that people can have remarkably good lives outside of them. You can pick what you prefer and still have a very good, fulfilling life.
I listed things that can contribute to quality of life. It’s not exhaustive (obviously) and it’s not going to be nor was it intended to be universal. Your list might include good Japanese restaurants or a particular museum. That is also part of quality of life, and also is not universal. Hope that makes the intent of the comment clearer, as at first I had no idea why you found it objectionable.
My definition of quality of life is not really supported by government, which at various levels has in many cases actively opposed remote work for political purposes, and has, at times, actively pushed policies that hurt employment in various smaller areas.
That said, there has been, of late, a big influx of people leaving cities and moving to many exurban or attractive rural areas. Prices in those places have increased, greatly, and population has increased, sometimes by large amounts. Meanwhile the inner suburbs of DC are seeing actual drops in population. Per the Census data, that is a national trend.
I do not at all disagree with making it easier to build in cities. Zero objections.
My statements have been essentially, “hey, a lot of people actually prefer to live in smaller communities”, “making it easier for them to do so would free up space for the people who do want to live in cities”, and “remote work would help this process and let more people live where they prefer.” Plus a fair number of comments clarifying that my rural neighbors actually do not resemble extras from Deliverance.
I hope this clarifies my thought process.
Since none of that opposes deregulation or allowing urban building, and since, to me, it would obviously help make space for others, I am honestly unclear as to why you think I have any opposition to those goals, much less umbrage?
The people I talk about are my family, both immediate and extended, friends, and neighbors. That includes a lot of farmers, at least one person who worked in a coal mine, and multiple blue collar workers. It also includes lawyers, researchers, business owners, university administrators, doctors, vets, judges, and graduates of Harvard, Georgetown, Duke, etc.
I don’t claim to speak for them, no one can speak for someone else, but I have known them for a pretty long time. I talk about what I see.
No you can't make "several orders of magnitude more money".
One order of magnitude is 10x. A driver or mover in India is making $150 a month. Two orders of magnitude (the absolute minimum to qualify as "several") would be $15,000 a month. No driver or mover is making $180,000 a year, even in San Francisco.
And calling two orders of magnitude "several" is already very questionable rhetoric.
The poverty line in India is about $1/day. The "average" is $150 a month, but many of those drivers are working in comparatively wealthier parts of India. The absolute upper end of drivers in the US do make $180k/year: these are company car drivers with a strong interest in safety and discretion. Not sure why you're nitpicking either: there are entire countries where the median salary is 3 orders of magnitude lower than it is in San Francisco (Angola is one example). This reply seems petty and distracting.
One other thought - this week alone, I’ve had online meeting with co workers and consultants in at least three countries and at least four US states. Upper middle class workers are not necessarily living where their company is headquartered.
In other words, people today very often collaborate virtually, not physically,
One of my friends lives this nightmare. Her job is global, e.g., in every time zone. They're also having her get rid of her own job. She's a couple years shy of vested in a very cushy retirement, but corporate progress much march on, no matter how much labor you give them.
She's smart and will probably be able to come out okay, but it's infuriating that she's spent 5 years in a hellish role where she has to manage people in 5 time zones (plus 15+ years in just the US and Costa Rica) and they've decided to outsource, consolidate, and AI her job away.
I'm all for YIMBY, letting markets, not politics, determine how much density is "too much". But I suspect that even the most dedicated bicycle-and-bodega urbanist might get a little queasy at the wall-to-wall hundred story apartment towers that would be needed to make New York somewhat affordable. So, yeah, I think it makes sense to channel growth to the "B" cities that I'm sure are developing their own agglomeration networks and have aways to go before reaching Yogi Berra status - "Nobody goes there, it's too crowded".
Some of NYC is still single family zoned, for crying out loud. We aren't going to repeal a minimum parking requirement and suddenly find out that the entire state of Pennsylvania has moved to the Queens Walled City. Being "too crowded" is a question of public amenities and transportation capacity, not some objective population density limit (what limit? Is Manhattan above it or not?)
I am not advocating some "objective" hard limit. The market - the aggregate of individual households voting with their U-Haul vans - will decide when enough is enough. And for the vast majority of New Yorkers who are not on track to be a star on Broadway or Wall Street, a nice life with some affordable elbow room in a place like Columbus is a reasonable option to consider.
I think the most important factor for solid B cities is governments not taking economic growth for granted. For example, Seattle has now spent years fighting with its largest employer, Amazon, which has had serious negative impacts, but the city is mostly doing fine. Columbus does not have the luxury of being able to pursue policies like that.
Oregon seems intent on pushing out its major companies to deleterious effects
You mean Intel? Intel is not head-quartered in Oregon. Yes, they did build locate a lot of fabs there, but they can’t really grow there anymore.
(Note maybe there could be high-rise fabs, but I don’t think so.)
That's kind of my point. Why can't they grow in Oregon anymore? It's not because of bad weather!
There is an urban boundary outside of which they cannot sprawl, but it isn’t a general “no-build” since developers can build up, which they do!
I think the fabs sort of require sprawl, that is, they cannot build too tall physically?
That's Portland. The fabs are in Hillsboro, a suburb outside of the greenbelt. The problem is the state of Oregon, which levies high taxes and delivers miserable public services for the trouble.
Hillsboro is inside the urban growth metro boundary.
I’m not aware of any particular single-floor requirement for fabs, but generally speaking yes, I’ve never heard of a cleanroom that was more.
I’d imagine, judging from my own CR experience (I was just down there as usual today!) that it’s mostly about flow and navigation. Most factory floors are set up on a single floor because it makes things simple, you only have to deal with two dimensions instead of 3.
Ayy, fellow semi guy! We have a fab floor and a subfab with a bunch of extra wiring and piping, which does make it hard to build vertically even beyond an ordinary clean room. But there are a ton of regulatory barriers to everything you'd need to build a new fab: Oregon doesn't really even have water going for it at this point.
Seattle also still has some old money sources. Not sure how instructive it is.
College town/state capital combo seems pretty resilient. Austin, Madison, Columbus...
Boise!
BOSTON!
State!
What you did here...I see it.
Go for it! I’m not aware of anything that Substack would do to prevent you from DMing me, but if there is, let me know what I need to do and I’ll take care of it.
Atlanta?
(If Florida's capital were in Gainesville, it would likely be on the list.)
Atlanta is in fact growing!
This doesn't seem true?
Albany, Springfield, Sacramento, Baton Rouge, Harrisburg, Salem, Lincoln.
Is there a state capital that doesn't have a college in it, anyway?
Neither Albany nor Harrisburg have a huge state flagship university. I can't speak for the others.
So OP didn't mean "college town" they meant "THE flagship university of the state public system"?
I guess but the whole theory strikes me as very rickety. What is meant by "resilient" here? (It isn't like Austin hasn't had long, deep crashes, for instance) How do state capitals without flagship universities do? How do state capitals with universities that aren't flagships do?
Is "flagship university in a state capital" actually doing much work here?
To me, big flagship is different from just college town.
Has Austin had long deep crashes? I've had friends there for 30 plus years and it has solidly out performed the overall US economy. I think the same is true for Columbus and Madison. The resilience comes because there is always a floor underneath the economy from the state government and the university, plus both those entities tend to incubate other businesses, and in the case of the universities, industry strong points.
I broadly agree with this, but also the state has to be at least pretty big for this to work. Nobody's moving to Columbia, SC.
They are though! Columbia's metro population has increased 70% since 2000, going from 400k to over 700k.
*per Macrotrends
Yeah, that. Thank you for putting meat on the bones of my idea.
Are you accusing me of not thinking this through all the way? Because yeah.
I think the most plausible claim is that the past couple decades have been particularly good to state capitals with major universities that weren’t already huge. This gets you Austin, Madison, Columbus, Nashville. I think Baton Rouge is probably the best potential counterexample (it has a major university but hasn’t don’t particularly well as far as I know) and there may be a few on the other side, where a state capital has done well without a major university (Indianapolis, Des Moines). I don’t know enough about the fortunes of Lincoln and Lansing to see how they’ve been doing.
I don’t know Albany but Harrisburg is very much not a college town at all. It has one small new commuter school and a community college.
Though I've been to Harrisburg briefly I don't have a strong opinion on whether it is a college town or not but just wanted to add that I didn't make that up myself and got it from "Best college towns to start a career", which is admittedly just a dumb listicle, so I'm happy to defer to your presumably more informed judgement.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-best-college-towns-in-america-for-starting-a-career-2019-7#6-harrisburg-pennsylvania-overall-score-3695-15
I'm from Pennsylvania, and this is in no way a dig at you.
Harrisburg is a nice little city, but no one in PA would describe it as a college town. Being on that list is actually somewhat comical. Penn State, the state flagship, is in its own town, State College, which is at least 90 minutes away from Harrisburg. Philadelphia and Pittsburg both have lots of substantial universities of course, and then there are a bunch of smaller towns around the state that are anchored by either a private or public college, all of which you would think of as college towns ahead of Harrisburg.
Springfield, Harrisburg, Salem - definitely no
Baton Rouge, Lincoln - yes
Albany - kind of but not really
Sacramento - I would say no, none of the Cal States count. They have large enrollments, but they don't have professional schools, hospitals, etc.
>Albany - kind of but not really<
That metro has thirteen colleges/unis including a major SUNY research school and highly regarded Rensselaer, Union College, Skidmore, etc. Sounds pretty collegey!
The UC Davis hospital is in Sacramento, so Sacramento gets half a point. It has both an undegrad institution and a medical school, just not from the same university.
Salem doesn't really have a major university. And Lincoln, Nebraska is doing… better than the average Midwestern city I guess.
There are a few colleges in the Albany area. It has a SUNY, and RPI is next door in Troy
Is Tallahassee on that level? If not, what makes it different? Honest question.
It’s actually kind of a nice place but it is very hard to get to. Few direct flights and lousy highway access. Feels very middle of nowhere for its size as a consequence e
It's doing fine, but it's kind of a weird capital city in that it isn't centrally located.
Size, I would assume - the Tallahassee metro area is only 400k, which is half Madison's and a sixth of Austin's and Columbus'. Not saying Tallahassee isn't growing (I know little about it besides an acquaintance that lives there and teaches), just that it isn't that large and doesn't have the same economic gravity that Austin does as a result.
Tallahassee appears to be growing, so I'd say yes!
Well, all of Florida is growing more or less. I don't think Tallahassee stands out there
True, at least until very recently. Most of Texas appears to be growing, but Austin still stands out. Columbus is impressive because it's a growing city in an otherwise stagnant state.
"Congress ultimately has the power of the purse. No matter what the president does, at the end of the day it can cut his funding."
Trump signs executive order saying he can fund TSA because it's an "emergency".
The emergency is that Congress decided for its own reasons not to fund them! Isn't that supposed to be their ultimate power, not to fund things?
One of the (many, many) reasons why "standing" is an idiotic, authoritarian legal doctrine is that it prevents anyone from suing over stuff like this. I could walk into any court in this country and get an injunction in two seconds to halt this obviously unconstitutional crap except that because I'm a mere peon of a taxpayer, I am deemed not to have "standing" to object that my tax dollars are being spent unconstitutionally.
Conservative judges just made that concept up-- it's nowhere in the constitution or statutes of the United States. But they wanted rich people to have more rights to sue than ordinary people, so they created rules to make sure ordinary people's rights exist only on paper.
"Conservative judges just made that concept up..."
You could check your history and speak informed about things, or you could just make stuff up based on what you assume happened.
I dislike strict standing rules, but I'm aware the modern version originate from Fairchild v. Hughes authored by Louis Brandeis to protect the 19th amendment. He was famously a leader in the progressive movement and has been a hero of many liberal jurists.
Ah yes, a 9-0 decision of the Taft Court, author of such notably [checks notes] liberal decisions as "upholding criminal syndicalism laws." Real bastion of progressivism you got there.
Fairchild itself is a remarkably unpersuasive ipse dixit, which might explain why no one bothers to read it anymore.
"Fairchild itself is a remarkably unpersuasive ipse dixit, which might explain why no one bothers to read it anymore."
Serious people who want to speak with authority on something should read the documents where it originated. Like saying you don't like how our government works, but can't be bothered to read the constitution.
That being said, I agree that modern standing rules are stretching the wording of the constitution about "cases and controversies." Just wish more people recognized that the rules created for their side are going to be used against them by the other side when in power. Thus the importance of creating good rules.
I'm not claiming the Court's current standing law is as good as it could be, but are you saying there shouldn't be any standing requirement at all, or that it should be something different than it currently is?
Because I doubt it's a good idea to let every loudmouth taxpayer with an opinion clog up the courts with what are basically op-ed lawsuits, complaining about something where Congress just disagreed with them.
The former.
If you're willing to pay for (or can obtain pro bono rep for) a suit, then you should get your day in court. If what we want is to deter frivolous lawsuits, then more aggressive loser-pays rules would be sufficient to do that. Standing doesn't-- it causes people with meritorious cases to never get justice at all.
And if the issue is that the courts themselves are overtaxed, then charge higher filing fees to cover that. So long as you have an adequate means of ensuring that fees are waived for the indigent, it works fine.
That would basically turn the courts into a sore-losers-review board for people who disagree with some political policy decision even though they're not personally affected by it.
If you can't show how it affects you, and you can't persuade elected officials that you are right, why should you be able to ask a judge to overrule what elected officials have decided?
Because it's unconstitutional, or otherwise illegal.
Again, this only matters in situations where the so-called "sore loser" is correct on the merits. We should want "what elected officials have decided" to be overruled when the party seeking the overrule is correct on the merits.
(I should add that the test is NOT that you "show how it affects you," it's that you "show how it affects you differently than the average citizen." It's trivial to show that Trump using the Treasury to bribe whoever he wants negatively affects me in the form of higher taxes and corrupt governance; it's just that it also negatively affects everyone else in exactly the same way.)
Timing doesn't line up, but: if he pays TSA entirely in ones, well, the bills have his name on them so I guess that's within the executive remit, at least for a couple more years?
More seriously, it's certainly not the ideal way to get around the "government shutdown" failure mode, but does help illustrate the ongoing gormlessness of that particular Constitutional quirk. How many has it been under this administration now, 3? 4? One loses track so easily.
I think it shows that if Congress decides not to fund Trump's war with Iran, he will simply declare that it is an "emergency" and he can move money to fund it anyway. If he does it for the TSA, he'll sure do it for a war.
Tiger Woods arrested for DUI after rolling over his car around 2 PM--and just a couple weeks before the Masters at that. This guy has not had a good history with motor vehicles at all.
Should buy himself a Waymo...
He has a billion dollars, he can afford a chauffeur. I slightly surprised he doesn't have security driving him around as it is.
How far did it roll though - was he on the fairway, the green, the rough? Can he still make par, or is it time to take a -5 and pack it in?
My brother and I were partly inspired to pick up golf as kids due to the inspiration of Tiger Woods. Had the striped club case and everything. Many Such Cases. It's sad to see your sports heroes deteriorate in later life.
What makes me sad is that many years ago, during the Obama administration, Entertainment Weekly did a poll on “top 10 most popular Americans,” and Tiger Woods made the list!
What makes me even sadder: it’s not like EW was some kind of super woke institution around 2010. But the demographics of that top 10 list were woke as heck! Only 2 of the 10 were white men: George Clooney and Tom Hanks. Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and iirc Will Smith were on it.
Clearly, the polling skewed very liberal. But my point is, a popular magazine published a list of “most popular Americans” that was predominantly Black, and people didn’t lose their entire shit over it! It was presented just kind of matter of factly. Can you imagine what the discourse would be like if this were published today?
he's so self-destructive. His mental health seems non existent.
That guy is broken and needs help. Money really doesn't guarantee happiness.
And the DUI wasn't for alcohol.
Just like the last DUI!
Was he smoking A FENTANYL?!
More likely cocaine
He's gone to rehab for Percocet and his 2017 tox report had this insane cocktail:
According to the report, the drugs in Woods' system were:
Hydrocodone, the generic form of a painkiller branded as Vicodin.
Hydromorphone, a strong painkiller commonly known as Dilaudid.
Alprazolam, a mood and sleep drug commonly known as Xanax. (The report also listed Alpha-Hydroxy Alprazolam, which is what Xanax becomes when it breaks down in the system.)
Zolpidem, a sleep drug commonly known as Ambien.
Delta-9 carboxy THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
Dude is sadly hooked on pills and has been for 15 years.
Oh that’s like every 3rd patient at some pharmacies.
He and John Daly should be buds
Gotta give him his dues. If I had all of that in my system at once, I wouldn't be breathing.
I've seen worse.
Damn that’s sad
Chicago's not an A- city in the same class as Austin or Philadephia. It's a strong A in the same class as Sydney or Berlin.
It's really unfair that Chicago's biggest problem being a superstar city is the weather. In the summer, Chicago is really one of the most fun and beautiful places to be in the country.
I know I'm in the minority on this, but I strongly prefer Chicago winters over Atlanta summers. Those summers are just brutal.
I have never in my life understood why uncomfortably hot and humid during the longest days of the year was better than cold during the shortest.
I can put on a warm jacket and venture outside in January and be comfortable. My in-laws live near Dallas, you can't get naked enough for 100 degree heat and 95 percent humidity to be comfortable.
Yeah, which I guess is why they compensate for that by driving everywhere, never walking outside, and blasting the AC in every building until you can see your breath.
You can still go for a nice stroll at night or sit on the balcony with a margarita after sunset.
You're proving my point, I don't want to wait until 9 o'clock at night for my first outdoor margarita.
Hah, well you're not having any outdoor margaritas in January in Minneapolis!
It's not that hard. You just don't wear clothing you can't sweat into and use the air conditioning.
I moved to Massachusetts a decade ago, and had lived in the South my whole life until then.
I did not expect "the weather" to be the single thing that's the most better.
Midwest winter > NC summer (research triangle)
Midwest spring, though....
A couple weeks ago, St Louis was 70 degrees in the morning, snowing in the evening, with tornadoes in the interim.
Variety is the spice of life.
But the best of the best? Nothing beats New England in the fall.
A couple two tree weeks back, we had a blizzard warning, +5F, and +77F all in the span of six days.
I wouldn't live anywhere else. (Sit down, Denver.)
Maybe not in as much of a minority as you think. Most of my family feels strongly the same. As time goes on, I hear of more and more people who feel this way. Maybe it has to do with the increasing heat, or maybe people finally feel free to admit this.
Very strong second to Chicago as the best city you can afford to live in
Philly does not want to throw down with Chicago on food or music.
Philly is land locked. Walking to Lake Michigan vs. driving to the shore is not really comparable.
Where it's always sunny!
My wife is from Atlanta and she's been here now 15 years. Here's how she thinks about it. Nov.-Dec. are awesome just with the holidays. January is bad. Feb. is horrible; peak seasonal depression. We try to travel A LOT in Feb.. March-April get rolling. May always sucks and seasonal depression kicks back in. Summer hits in June and we've been having Indian summer's deep into Oct. the past couple years which are awesome. It's not Santa Monica but for 9/12 months it's a really fun place to live.
What's wrong with May?
We've had a couple really bad Mays in a row so I might be over-reacting but you always get a couple nice weekends in March and April and you expect May to pop but it's cloudy 20 days on average and still in the 50s and cold at night so you're still wearing all your winter jackets and it just sucks. Then June hits and it's summer. It's really jarring.
I don't have any recollection of that, but I also like sweater weather. I do wish we'd stop yo-yo-ing between freezing and near-summer warm. In the same day.
Ugh. That's annoying.
Back when I lived in Chicago I attended a Cubs game on May 8. It was snowed out.
More David’s!!!
March is awesome. There’s always one like 80° weekend and then the city shines for St. Pats. April is great. May is terrible.
Chicago’s biggest problem is the corruption in both private and public spheres. It’s markedly dysfunctional in this. It feels sometimes like Mississippi.
Well here's Matt arguing how "living in a place with good weather" is overrated. https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-los-angeles-underrated#%C2%A7hedonic-adaptation-gets-us-all-in-the-end
It’s also a terrible location. Smack dab in the middle of flyover country. If it had the same weather but it was on the coast of Rhode Island it would be an easy A.
That makes some sense, but my daughter lives there now, and it is so easy to get to Chicago than many places that are closer because there are multiple daily direct flights from even smaller cities. Also, there are 26 public beaches in the city itself. I had the great opportunity to enjoy several of them this summer, and they were so joyful. A much different experience than, say, my childhood experiences at Cape Cod beaches, which were fine but much more boring. Plus the water was warmer.
In my experience, people who like Chicago LOVE Chicago
Plus, it is pretty cool that our third biggest city is right in the middle of the country and near the Great Lakes.
Is Chicago our only major city that has a beach within city limits? I think in Miami and L.A. the beaches are technically in other municipalities, but maybe that's wrong.
New York does - Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Rockaway, but if you read Robert Caro's book on Robert Moses, you will realize why you never remember this. Access to the water or even views of the water throughout NYC are cut off and obscured, whereas in Chicago, the built environment was created to celebrate the water.
Cleveland
Venice Beach is in LA city limits. Checking the map more carefully, it looks like Dockweiler Beach by LAX is also in city limits, and even the stretch of beach connecting the two is as well, despite Marina Del Rey putting the marina in a different municipality.
Also, Will Rogers State Beach in the Palisades appears to be within LA city limits.
And if you go way down south to the port, connected to the main part of the city by a tendril of land parallel to the 110, it looks like there is a beach called Cabrillo Beach in the Los Angeles part of San Pedro (though it appears to look out directly on the giant container ship ports and be inside their breakwater, so I don’t know how pleasant it is).
But yes, overall, the beaches of Malibu are bigger than Will Roger’s, and the beaches of Santa Monica are bigger than Venice, and the beaches of Long Beach are far bigger than San Pedro, and in general, the better beaches are down in Huntington and especially San Clemente.
If it were on the coast of Rhode Island, it wouldn't have the same weather. It would be milder.
...and yet the rurals seem to think it's a war zone. My stay at the Congress Plaza gives lie to that. Obviously the South Side is different but one thing rurals just don't understand is how big cities are.
I mostly agree, but the cost of housing in Chicago, although high, is much more attainable than it is in New York, Boston, San Francisco, etc. It is one reason we are toying with the idea of retiring in Chicago. That cost might also be why the bookstore/literary scene seems surprisingly stronger in Chicago than NY or Boston/Cambridge.
Last time I was there, cab drivers were like "can you believe I have to pay $600 a month for a two bedroom apartment? I'm getting ripped off!" and I wanted to scream.
I wonder which neighborhood. Until a few months ago, I had two kids going to school at opposite sides of the city, and we didn't see anything under $1,000 for a two bedroom. My daughter lives in a 3 bedroom/2 bath that costs about $2,400, which is still a great price compared to major East Coast cities. The location is meh, especially in terms of getting downtown, but she can walk to most of the essentials other than medical appointments.
Granted, I haven't been back since COVID.
That guy dodges bullets daily for $600 / month.
It’s not high in Chicago, though, right? Even compared to decidedly second-tier cities like Portland or Pittsburgh, by any reasonable metric, Chicago rents are middling
Co-sign. My brother lives in Denver. Denver is like a neighborhood in Chicago.
Chicago!! 😁
Denver may be as expensive or more than Chicago, but it's still 1/10 the city Chicago is. Cost of housing doesn't determine the tier of a city.
I recently visited Chicago and thought that maybe I'd like to move there given that it's so much more affordable than Seattle. So I figured I'd see if the pension apocalypse was as bad as people said it was. And yes it is. It's a shame because at some point they're going to have to make some really tough choices and I expect that the quality of life will get worse due to whatever choices they make.
It's too bad because otherwise the city was great.
Don't sell your parking meters to the UAE kids...
Parking meters are a rounding error next to the pensions ...
It's unconstitutional to fix those
I've been working on a joke* that nobody seems to find funny, but I like it. Basically: "People think its cool to live in NYC. Is it? Its literally the most common city to be from. Its like 'Oh, you're from New York? Yeah, you and 8.5 million other people.' There's no other American city that more people are from. I'm actually impressed when I meet somebody who lives in a small town. 'Wait, there's only 2,000 of you? And you're here!? You're rare. You're unique.' Being from New York is like being a product at Walmart. I know this is true because New York bans Walmart. They don't want people to see the similarities." Etc etc.
Yes, I live in a solid B city, and no, I'm not envious of superstar cities. Why do you ask?
*I am not a comedian.
I'm from NYC and sometimes tell that to people in other countries when they go all "oh my gawd New York!" I'm more likely to be from there than anywhere else!
I’m seeing a performance of The Sound of Music tomorrow, having only ever watched the movie. The hills are alive!
I’ve lived in a B city for my whole life… the reality is mixed. There are definitely big advantages like low cost of living and convenience with a short commute which makes it easy to raise a family plus being a big fish in a small pond.
But disadvantages are pretty significant too. Dating is bad—women are much more likely to move to big cities. I got lucky but most of my successful male professional friend group at age 40-ish are unmarried. Most jobs are run by a pretty stifling conservative corporate culture that most people are just trying to retire early from ASAP. There’s not a lot to do so I spend most of my free time playing video games, online, or planning a trip (which is also less convenient as our airport has few direct flights) Overall it just feels a bit isolating, which is fine if you have kids and one of the few interesting jobs, but those require a fair bit of luck to get in addition to skill.
If I were advising my sons I would probably advise them to go to a big city.
I would advise A- city when single, then consider a B city after getting married. Although if one can freely choose where to live without being constrained by work, most people should try to live close to their families and existing friends.
This situation happened to me by accident (lived in a A- city, my job moved me to a B city and my now-wife came with me) and I can confirm that this is a recommended route: I wouldn't want to be my age and single in my current city, but it's great to be here while married with a kiddo.
Agreed. In fact in a low immigration, low birth rate environment, as more people stay single for longer or are childless, the draw of the metropole is even stronger.
B tier cities are in a growth mirage at present. The more single households or childless households there are, the less attraction B tier cities hold.
Austin, Denver, etc are big enough that the career impacts of being in a small market are limited. You get much smaller and a sort of distinctions equilibrium can set in where employers know they can't fire someone because it will be so hard to find a replacement. And employees don't quit because finding a new job will be so difficult. For the ambitious who may need to switch jobs every 2-4 years it can be an issue.
Hmm, this might be a recommendation for one of my kids. He just wants a "regular job" and a "regular life." He is very frugal and already has more savings than most people twice his age, but says he just wants a "regular apartment" - doesn't expect to ever be able to afford to buy his own place (he doesn't want a detached single family anyway). He is a dependable and honest worker, just not particularly ambitious. Maybe I will suggest he look for work in Columbus when the time comes
I don't know where in the country you live, but metros of 1-3 million are great for people like that. You can feel normal with a $70,000 income, and if you happen to have a low six-figure income and marry someone who does as well, all of sudden you can afford a pretty nice house!
Many of my friends here in Sacramento are Bay Area expats like myself, and we all notice how much less people talk about their careers here which we all find refreshing.
This makes sense. I live in a metro area of about 1 million. I make less than $70,000 wtih health benefits. It's not an extravagant life, but I can subscribe to Slow Boring and may go to a fish fry tonight!
I lived in educated Boston (vs. places like Revere or Savin Hill, which were much more working class back in the day) in my young adulthood, and the talk about jobs and where you went to college got incredibly tiresome. When I moved from Boston to Wisconsin, I discovered that most people consider the University of Wisconsin to be as great as the Ivies, and things like jobs and education were just a minor point in conversation. Moving from the Northeast to the Midwest for a few years was as eye-opening and mind-broadening an experience as traveling abroad.
For computer science and for engineering in general UW Madison is better than most of the ivies. Princeton and Cornell would rank higher, that's about it.
Yes, I work in Chicago for an employer with a large Columbus office. It’s harder to find qualified employees for teams based in Columbus and it’s harder for employees to find a comparable new job if they’re laid off.
Halina,
I grew up in Denver too, but in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The 80’s was a different time with the downtown a ghost town after the shale oil bust. After college in Boulder I spent the next 25 years out of state in the military (or being a military spouse). When we decided to move back here in 2018 we took Denver off the table. It had grown way too expensive and crowded.
We settled in the Colorado Springs area before the big housing price increases starting with Covid. We couldn’t afford our current neighborhood today. We’ve got 2-4 years until the kids are grown and flown and then may move again. But that may be hard considering we have a 2.25% mortgage.
>>New Yorks and San Franciscos>>
*Ahem,* I believe the preferred term is "Sans Francisco."
News York!
Sans Franciscos. Noun-adjective agreement.
>>I would consider the Denver of my youth (from 2001 until the mid-2010s) to be a Solid B. I’d now call it a Solid A-, in the ranks of Austin, Chicago, and Philadelphia
This ranking seems off. Having never been to most of these, I would propose:
A+: NYC, LA
A: DC, Chicago, SF
A-: Boston, Miami, Austin, Philly
B+: Denver, Seattle, Atlanta
Having lived in both Denver and Austin, I'd say they should be in the same tier (along with Seattle). They're all pretty similar IMO. Austin gets a bit more media attention with SXSW and Musk moving his companies here, but I don't put too much stock into that.
My perception is that Austin seems like it has a much more thriving job market though. Is that right?
I think that was true a few years ago, but the same "frozen job market" phenomenon we see nationally is happening here too. I have a lot of friends who are looking for their next job and struggling to get bites.
LA is so ugly and spread out. What does it do better than the A/A- cities other than scale?
A quote I've mentioned here before: "If you enjoy the grit, crime, traffic congestion, and social alienation of a big city, but can't stand art, culture, museums, or tall buildings, then Los Angeles may be right for you."
I get what you're saying, but it's not completely accurate. LA has lots of art and museums! They're just, like, "*this* world-class museum is 25 minutes driving south of Downtown LA, and *that* world-class museum is 30 minutes driving north, and that's on a good traffic day!"
LA = 50 sprawling-ass suburbs in search of a city
LA has many great museums it's just that, like everything else here, they're really spread out. It's not like you can walk between the Getty Villa, the Getty Museum, the Broad, LACMA, MOCA etc etc.
And soon to come: the spaceship-like George Lucas Tchotchke Museum!
I think an argument could be made about how much of la’s economy is just based on scale but culturally it’s number 2 in the USA and it is not particularly close, l.a. has movies and tv of course, but is also close to New York in significance in American pop /rock/hiphop music. I know less about visual arts etc though.
Grove Street 4 Life
Weather and also LA's peak neighborhoods (e.g., Santa Monica, Bev. Hills, West Hollywood) are some of the greatest places to live on earth.
Scale is pretty important though, as it contributes to public and private amenities, career opportunities, industries it supports, etc
LA is kind of poor. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Maps-of-poverty-rates-and-percent-of-population-that-is-minorities-across-US-counties_fig3_372486936 (see top map here)
It's more like a Latin American metro. It has quite a bit of extreme wealth, but on the whole, is poorer than you'd think with a much higher poverty rate than its reputation.
The LA metro area has the 10th highest median per capita income (in 2022), basically the same as Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and Minneapolis/St. Paul. It's nothing like a Latin American metro.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropolitan_areas_by_per_capita_income
That's a lot lower than its reputation. I bet it ranks very high on Gini coefficient.
Hmm I could be convinced to downgrade it. Truthfully the last time I was there I was 8.
Another issue is that its main differentiating industry (Hollywood) is in decline, with the number of jobs going down and far more competition from other parts of the US, Canada, etc.
Now LA is big enough that it's not going to collapse like Detroit, and of course it has a lot going for it geographically.
But it has not developed anywhere near as much tech or biotech as you would think a California metro of that size should.
Agreed with all of that. But I sometimes think Americans don't properly account for how iconic LA is. To the average world citizen the US is basically NYC + LA + a bunch of natural beauty.
LA has seen many core industries collapse (like defense in the 90s or oil way back when) and has kept chugging on. Entertainment is still huge. And it probably has a lot more tech and biotech than, say, New York or Chicago.
Also, Los Angeles is the lead US city for video games which, btw, blow movies away in terms of revenue.
This is completely ignoring LA's aerospace industry.
If it’s dense. If we’re just talking contiguous urban area the DC-BOS and PNW corridors are way bigger than LA
Calling DC-BOS contiguous or dense (only by American standards, which are not dense at all) seems like a stretch to me, but I'm open to downgrading LA.
Fair. The Bay Area is a legit LA-scale megacity, though
The Pacific Northwest is not contiguous! Los Angeles really is contiguous urban development over the entire area between the mountains and the seas. It doesn’t have any low density suburbs the way you have just a dozen or so miles from Manhattan or Boston - in LA it stay moderate density until you hit the mountains, and then it basically stops.
Portland to Vancouver BC is getting there, though. I get why one would call it an urban agglomeration, though there is a little bit of country in between the metros
Tacoma to Everett is contiguous like LA.
In terms of contiguous urban density, Portland to Seattle and Seattle to Vancouver even fall slightly short of NY-DC.
LA is really everywhere from San Luis Obispo down to Tijuana and out to Riverside and San Bernardino, so it’s pretty big as an urban agglomeration. Not as big as Boswash, but nothing to turn your nose up at
Eh... Long Beach to Burbank, I'll give you that.
I've driven up from Orange County several times to go to a regional practice at the central dojo in Santa Barbara, and there's a definite phase shift along the way from "we are driving through a giant metropolis" to "we are driving past a bunch of fields and prickly pear! Wave at Oxnard!"
Yeah there’s a little agriculture in there. But I would still put that in the urban agglomeration (always round up, in other words)
In six years it'll be San Angeles, as Demolition Man forecasted.
Without a mile of HSR too, I reckon
It kind of sucks, but it's also probably the best food city in the country.
70° in the winter and the summer
Hey! The weather here is much more awful than that! It’s often 65, and occasionally we get above 80 briefly like we did last week and everyone fainted!
Boston’s an A, and Houston is at least a B+ unless it’s deteriorated a lot since I left.
Boston is too parochial to be an A. If it ever learns to embrace growth and fun it could become an A+ city.
I agree, but it wasn’t named the Hub of the Universe for nothing.
https://theonion.com/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-game-o-1819574643/
lol The Onion writer is just jealous his metro area doesn't have a Harvard or MIT 😉
What metric could possibly put Miami and Austin above Atlanta?
This is entirely based off vibes, which might very well be wrong. I'm open to learn more.
I think vibes is a good place to look but for these tiers I think it makes sense to use a combination of raw size, cultural influence, and regional/global economic impact. Austin is getting a lot of hype lately but it’s still essentially satellite spillover from sf/seattle companies. What’s the Austin equivalent of Home Depot, Coca Cola or delta airlines?
Dell
Kill Tony?
This is definitely overrating Austin and underrating some of the other cities. You can get some good $30-40 meals in Austin and go to some good music festivals, but you can’t find great $100 meals (or at least couldn’t a few years ago - there might be a few now) and you also can’t find as many different great $10 street meals as all these other cities. You can go to the university art museum but you can’t really hit a great museum or go to symphony or opera the way you can in all the other cities on this list, as well as places like Houston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Dallas, etc.
Austin is leading the pack that includes Indianapolis and Columbus and Nashville and the like. It’s not yet quite in the big leagues like all those others.
It used to just be a college town/capital combo. Like Texas’ Madison, WI. Then tech exploded, to the world’s detriment, and so did Austin. I reckon these kinds of cultural institutions haven’t caught up.
i love living in A- austin. i love growth.
it's not SF/LA/NYC but more exciting than almost anything else imo. SEA/PDX/BOS might have gone on the same trajectory, but they went anti-growth or whack blue governance
(DC area is sui generis)
Can you get around easily without a car? That is one of my main criteria.
Not really. The busses are ok around downtown and UT, but even then transit will almost always take much longer than driving. There are a few walkable neighborhoods, but these are also more expensive, and you'll need a car to go anywhere outside the neighborhood.
100% for me. Most (all?) mid-sized cities without big universities could never be on my move-to list because I refuse to be identured to a metal box.
I made Seattle and Atlanta work without a car. So, is doable. Far easier with, of course.
the city is swarming with waymos and ubers
Yeah, but how much do they cost compared to public transit?
no idea. i don't use public transit. literally ever
yeah, that's a problem i guess
To put it in context - where I live, each bus ride is $1.30 if you use a prepaid account ($1.50 without) and all rides after your third in a day are free. As of January, bus and subway fare in NYC is $3.00 with a free transfer within two hours. Not sure of the per ride fare in Chicago, but when I visit I get a 7-day pass for $20 that includes city buses and the El, but not Metra trains that go out to the suburbs.
This doesn’t grapple with the agglomeration effects that are the real drive people move to these cities. You can do the exact same job in India and San Francisco — say, a mover, or a driver — and make several orders of magnitude more money in the latter. This effect is reduced but still present when you compare Tulsa or Spokane to New York City.
Instead of telling people to spread out, we should encourage them to go to places where their work is more valuable. The important thing is that the cities they move to have the capacity, both in housing and other amenities, so that quality of life doesn’t suffer and income surplus isn’t absorbed by landlords.
A world where everyone lives in layover cities is poorer and less dynamic than one a small handful of state and local governments get their act together.
You're talking past each other. You're talking in an ideal world where that housing is built. Halina is talking about the actual US as of 2026, where housing prices in Columbus are so much cheaper than San Francisco that all those gains to income will disappear.
Say one of these policies works out and Columbus becomes a big city. Does this argument imply everyone should move out of Columbus?
If housing prices in Columbus reach SF levels, then yes. People do that - there's a reason the Bay Area is consistently one of the nation's leaders in outmigration.
I used to live in Columbus, and it has a few geographical advantages in that it is surrounded by cookie cutter suburbs and farmland where developers have been rapidly putting up clusters of houses, condos, etc. Pickerington, Ohio, is a good example. The infrastructure gets stressed a bit (traffic, etc.) but there's plenty of room to sprawl in most directions, and in the city itself, for decades they have very quickly knocked stuff down and built new stuff all the time -- there's very little of old Columbus left that hasn't been bulldozed and redeveloped or turned into high end shopping or something. All the formerly cruddy/funky areas around OSU campus are mostly sanitized and full of nice apartments and fancy restaurants. I believe they also have some wide ranging water rights leverage which has helped with expansion, but I don't understand the details. The house I used to live in there tripled in value and is now being rented out as an Air BNB. And it was a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath house half a block away from a cruddy bar, a car wash, and a bodega. And if you can't a afford a house close in, you can head to the nearby boonies, but still be a 20 or 30 minute drive on the freeway from downtown. A lot of people I went to school with live in places like Lancaster, OH, Circleville, Newark, etc., and just commute.
Isn't this a rewording of gentrification? Nobody really thinks people deserve to be told to move. But plenty think you should live where you can support things. And you may be priced out.
But these people aren’t being priced out, Halina is just telling them they might enjoy Nashville more than they might expect
Nashville is a shithole
I think that is basically potayto potahto. The point is to consider a city that is less expensive to live in. No? Would be like advice to get a budget car. Even if your family did luxury cars growing up.
If your luxury car made you a bundle more money to the point where you stand a good chance of taking a hit to your quality of life by giving it up, the choice is less obvious
Thing is, within the US, the blue collar worker in the rural Richmond or Charlottesville exurbs has a three bedroom house and retirement savings, and the one in San Francisco has an apartment and money worries.
In Central Virginia, my twenty something year old handyman (day job, junior carpenter) is buying a house, getting married, and planning kids. Don’t see that a lot in San Francisco.
Quality of life includes being able to have a house, a yard, a garden, a family, a pony for the kids, and being able to see the stars at night, without having to be rich. Quality of life is better for most people in a whole lot of other, smaller places.
Higher salary isn’t better when it’s eaten up by higher cost of living.
For sure, and that’s a big reason 90% of the country already doesn’t live in superstar cities. But for those who do, “go make a third of your current salary in Sacramento” is, like, why? You moved from Sacramento for your career!
A lot of the people I know living in smaller localities are working full salary remote. So they’re not taking an income hit.
Making the same money and having much lower expenses is generally a good thing.
But yes, if you have to take the huge career or pay cut, it’s not much of a choice.
It's a hard "no" from me.
I grew up in West "By G-d" Virginia (which is, by the way, the best Virginia). I still go back from time to time, and when I die, I will be buried there. But mountains are oppressive. Rural life is depressing, it's sad - there is nothing to envy about it. The good life, the best life, is amongst the teeming skyscrapers, surrounded by strangers whom you can befriend or ignore as it suits you. Give me the concrete jungle ANY day of the week. What the fuck use is a pony, lol?
Off topic, but I have often thought West Virginia is one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are views there that are so gorgeous they just fill your heart.
Disagree re the pony but agree to disagree. LOL.
We apparently have similar kids. My 19-year-old lives south of Charlottesville, is a junior carpenter, and is thinking of buying a house.
Oh, not my kid, just my handyman, but he’s a great guy.
Charlottesville is gorgeous. If Albemarle wasn’t so expensive I would have moved there.
Of course. I have family members who prefer and live in “superstar cities.” Probably should also note that my spouse was born and raised in New York City, which is generally considered one of those superstars.
I don’t at all think that everyone should live outside of big cities. But - I also think that people can have remarkably good lives outside of them. You can pick what you prefer and still have a very good, fulfilling life.
Hi David -
I listed things that can contribute to quality of life. It’s not exhaustive (obviously) and it’s not going to be nor was it intended to be universal. Your list might include good Japanese restaurants or a particular museum. That is also part of quality of life, and also is not universal. Hope that makes the intent of the comment clearer, as at first I had no idea why you found it objectionable.
My definition of quality of life is not really supported by government, which at various levels has in many cases actively opposed remote work for political purposes, and has, at times, actively pushed policies that hurt employment in various smaller areas.
That said, there has been, of late, a big influx of people leaving cities and moving to many exurban or attractive rural areas. Prices in those places have increased, greatly, and population has increased, sometimes by large amounts. Meanwhile the inner suburbs of DC are seeing actual drops in population. Per the Census data, that is a national trend.
I do not at all disagree with making it easier to build in cities. Zero objections.
My statements have been essentially, “hey, a lot of people actually prefer to live in smaller communities”, “making it easier for them to do so would free up space for the people who do want to live in cities”, and “remote work would help this process and let more people live where they prefer.” Plus a fair number of comments clarifying that my rural neighbors actually do not resemble extras from Deliverance.
I hope this clarifies my thought process.
Since none of that opposes deregulation or allowing urban building, and since, to me, it would obviously help make space for others, I am honestly unclear as to why you think I have any opposition to those goals, much less umbrage?
This is just a lot of blather to say "people with personal lifestyle preferences other than mine are wrong".
”People like making more money” is a better summary. I’m not sure you read or understood me.
I but don't entirely understand how replies nest but I'm pretty sure he's replying to Lisa who endlessly blathers on about her alternative lifestyle.
Working a tech job remote in an exurb is not exactly an alternative lifestyle.
And he was directly replying to Kirby.
PMC remote work is definitely an alternative lifestyle. I actually work for a living and interact daily with the chuds you often claim to speak for.
Remote work, either hybrid or fully remote, is about 35% of the workforce. That’s not fringe. Even now, years past the pandemic, 11% of new job postings are fully remote. See https://www.roberthalf.com/us/en/insights/research/remote-work-statistics-and-trends#:~:text=New%20York:%2032%25,Colorado:%2027%25
Because of that prevalence, remote work has had a huge impact on US demographics in the past six years. Source, Census data analyzed by UVa at https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
The people I talk about are my family, both immediate and extended, friends, and neighbors. That includes a lot of farmers, at least one person who worked in a coal mine, and multiple blue collar workers. It also includes lawyers, researchers, business owners, university administrators, doctors, vets, judges, and graduates of Harvard, Georgetown, Duke, etc.
I don’t claim to speak for them, no one can speak for someone else, but I have known them for a pretty long time. I talk about what I see.
No you can't make "several orders of magnitude more money".
One order of magnitude is 10x. A driver or mover in India is making $150 a month. Two orders of magnitude (the absolute minimum to qualify as "several") would be $15,000 a month. No driver or mover is making $180,000 a year, even in San Francisco.
And calling two orders of magnitude "several" is already very questionable rhetoric.
The poverty line in India is about $1/day. The "average" is $150 a month, but many of those drivers are working in comparatively wealthier parts of India. The absolute upper end of drivers in the US do make $180k/year: these are company car drivers with a strong interest in safety and discretion. Not sure why you're nitpicking either: there are entire countries where the median salary is 3 orders of magnitude lower than it is in San Francisco (Angola is one example). This reply seems petty and distracting.
One other thought - this week alone, I’ve had online meeting with co workers and consultants in at least three countries and at least four US states. Upper middle class workers are not necessarily living where their company is headquartered.
In other words, people today very often collaborate virtually, not physically,
One of my friends lives this nightmare. Her job is global, e.g., in every time zone. They're also having her get rid of her own job. She's a couple years shy of vested in a very cushy retirement, but corporate progress much march on, no matter how much labor you give them.
That’s really sad. I hope she does okay.
She's smart and will probably be able to come out okay, but it's infuriating that she's spent 5 years in a hellish role where she has to manage people in 5 time zones (plus 15+ years in just the US and Costa Rica) and they've decided to outsource, consolidate, and AI her job away.
I'm all for YIMBY, letting markets, not politics, determine how much density is "too much". But I suspect that even the most dedicated bicycle-and-bodega urbanist might get a little queasy at the wall-to-wall hundred story apartment towers that would be needed to make New York somewhat affordable. So, yeah, I think it makes sense to channel growth to the "B" cities that I'm sure are developing their own agglomeration networks and have aways to go before reaching Yogi Berra status - "Nobody goes there, it's too crowded".
Some of NYC is still single family zoned, for crying out loud. We aren't going to repeal a minimum parking requirement and suddenly find out that the entire state of Pennsylvania has moved to the Queens Walled City. Being "too crowded" is a question of public amenities and transportation capacity, not some objective population density limit (what limit? Is Manhattan above it or not?)
I am not advocating some "objective" hard limit. The market - the aggregate of individual households voting with their U-Haul vans - will decide when enough is enough. And for the vast majority of New Yorkers who are not on track to be a star on Broadway or Wall Street, a nice life with some affordable elbow room in a place like Columbus is a reasonable option to consider.
Hell yeah, another absolute banger. 10/10 would Solid B again.
Salt Lake City is a B+ I love you SLC!
I love Salt Lake City too. Liberty Park!