I’m not sure you all on the coasts understand the incredible pettiness of midwesterners towards their neighbors and I flatly refuse to believe there is something nice in Tulsa
Damn skippy. The only nice architecture is in STL. Chicago manages to occasionally not be completely shitty. And fuck KC with Satan’s million-horned cock.
It is! People (FOX News, mostly) shit on Chicago, but it’s a world-class city without the rudeness of New York and the pretentiousness of Los Angeles. I will give New York respect for its pizza (although our tavern-style pizza is very good; it’s just a secret we don’t share with outsiders). And for most people, LA’s weather is superior. But I like having 4 distinct seasons and waterfront access, so Chicago is my sweet spot.
The Art Institute and Field Museum are awesome! Sue the T-rex for the win!
Anyone reading this, if you're visiting Chicago and have some spare time, I recommend you go up to Evanston and check out the Baha'i temple, it's beautiful! Great place for silent contemplation.
Another bad impact from the decline in remote work. In a world with a more mobile workforce stationary bandits have that much less power. Interesting counterfactual if remote work had remained dominant is local governments intensely competing to build desirable communities.
Not if you turned Tulsa into a miniature Coruscant, with 100+ vertically stacked residential levels connected by elevators and hover cars/airships, the rich elite near the top, the seedy underworld at the bottom, it would be rad! Tourists would come from all over to visit! Beware shady characters in cantinas offering to sell you death sticks.
Tulsa's current sprawl radius is about 30 km. At a billion people that's 350K people per sq km, compared to 28K for Manhattan. But if we double the radius it drops to 88K, which seems theoretically possible with current technology.
I would not for a few reasons. Fully remote doesn't work for most roles long term in terms of the health of the business. While some roles will remain remote the chances of getting a new one after a layoff are getting pretty slim.
Which brings up the next issue - I've seen in markets like Tulsa employees and employers fighting to a draw. Employees can't leave as there are no comparable roles within a commutable distance. Employers know there are also no potential candidates within a commutable distance either. So it ends up in a not healthy place employment wise.
That's stronger language than I'd use. More like "it's hard-to-impossible to create and maintain company culture when you're all in your separate living rooms, you're accumulating all sorts of technical debt, and the longer you let people think this is the new normal, the more they will believe you".
That’s fair. I work remote for big tech, I think something like 80% have RTO’d. It’s a funny equilibrium where all of my meetings have ~50% of people dialing in from different locations, whether that’s home, an office in a different city, or just a different building at the ”same” office. And because of this distribution, going into the office doesn’t feel like it adds much to the experience. Some teams are different though and I would bet they are more productive.
I am at a big tech company that is still very remote friendly and I just happen to live ten minutes away from HQ. All my teammates are spread out around North America, so there’s no collaboration happening in the office. I go in 1-2x/week and treat it like a WeWork; get away from the pile of laundry and kids crap piled up and focus for a 1/2 day and partake of the snacks
Agree! As somebody who does niche IT consulting and basically becomes an expensive temp employee for 6-24 months at places all over the country - there are definitely smaller cities like Tulsa that have like 3 big companies that end up being the options for specialized professional roles. You're an internal auditor or database administrator - you basically can only work at those 3 companies. Wages end up being so much lower than nationally.
The healthcare analytics company I work for has been remote since 2014 and we're landing blowing up right now despite none of the executive team or the data science group living in the same city.
I have a buddy who works for FINRA and said that since they mandated people come back to work a couple times a week, they're losing a massive amount of talent (mostly analysts and IT) that got used to working remotely.
I'm extroverted and loved working in person, but (at least for programmers) it seems like it's remote or bust.
Yeh but every article I read says the job market is terrible. So it's at least plausible that he's not a reliable narrator?
I'll give you a funny example - keep in mind the average manger is average and half of them are even worse. Anyway at a customer someone who was fully remote quit and never told anybody - they just stopped doing any work. 9 months later they were found and their manager sent them a meeting invite to discuss they emailed back - "I quit."
We certainly had more than a few grumpy departures when we brought our last cohort back full-time in summer of '21. Call it one engineer or developer in twenty.
Interestingly, they were all of the people we could very most afford to lose.
IIRC J.P. Morgan found the vast majority of its top performers were already in the office so they figured what have we got to lose. And they were right - the worst performers were also the ones most likely to quit is asked to come in.
He (and many others) moved out of DC when they went full remote, then they asked them all to make 2+ hour commutes each way. His boss left and so did many of his best coworkers. He took a buyout after working there for 17 years.
I do know another guy who totally ghosted his company (may have been Wells Fargo?) when he was totally remote and his boss left for another gig. His co-workers didn't know what his assignment was or who he was reporting to and it took a few months for them to catch on. He's not there anymore (don't know if quit or fired).
Our company is still small enough ~200 employees) that we have daily scrums companywide and within our group. Everyone also has multiple weekly meetings with various clients. I can't imagine getting away with not showing up unannounced for even a week.
They’d *really* need to get rid of the job protections, though I guess they don’t have those post-DOGE? If you can’t easily be fired for not doing shit, you really don’t need to be doing remote work. (For the record I’m mostly against fully remote work, there should be an expectation that everyone’s in the office but flexibility when possible)
Most feds theoretically still have job protections, but yeah...kind of hard to tell what will happen a year from now. A lot of the schedule F stuff is still getting worked out, at which point Trump can fire rank and file people for whatever. If anything, assuming schedule F sticks, you'd imagine the feds needing to pay a wage premium to make up for the loss in stability, but that won't happen given the way the scale works. I think the most likely scenario for feds is 0% pay raises for the next 4 years.
I used to work for the feds in a field that recruits a lot of PhDs/MDs, and remote work was a major blessing. Many people with PhDs/MDs also have spouses with doctorates, so you pretty regularly encounter two-body problems when recruiting. It's really hard to get a health physicist to move their entire family across the country when you can only pay $100k, but it's a great deal if one spouse is already locked into a university and you can offer the other a remote position.
Setting aside the merits of in-person/telework, the current admin has been a complete nightmare, and it doesn't really seem analogous to private sector RTO. I have a friend who was assigned office space in a building without internet. They were remote to begin with, so none of their coworkers are even located in the same state. There doesn't really seem to be any point to it beyond trying to get people to quit.
eh, I moved from Southern CA to South West Oregon. Town of 20k people, and I live about 30 mins away in an area with less than 1,000 people.
Yeah, there's not a lot of opportunity here, but I like my job and there's no way I could have a similar quality of life moving somewhere else because of the cost of housing.
Well, from where I moved I actually spent a bit more, but that's because we sold our track home, and bought a 20 acre ranch (with a house almost twice as big)
If we moved back to a bigger city, we would be back in a much smaller track house.
That's not a trade we want to do. Not to mention there's multiple lakes and rivers here within a short drive we can take the kids swimming or wake boarding in. And no GATORS!
I’m tentatively in favor of basically making most support roles remote. Core operations, no. But payroll? Have a couple reps onsite and outsource the rest to some B2B SAAS grindset asshole.
Not payroll you want the people doing the work to fear being dragged to the parking lot for a good beating if the direct deposits don't go through. Seriously when people are remote they begin to thing it's all not real - that there aren't people at the other end of the ACH.
I grew up near Tulsa and still have lots of family and friends there. There are many things that I really love about the area, including cultural opportunities, a lot of the people, recreational opportunities, etc.
But there are also some significant reasons I would never move there or encourage people I cared about to move there.
1) Sate politics are so extremely right wing. I was a republican until 2016, and I’m still a relatively conservative independent, but Oklahoma politics make me ill. In particular what they are doing to education in Oklahoma is really disgusting. Also the impacts state politics have on healthcare available in the state are negative.
2) The religious climate. I’m a Christian and my faith is really important to me. Tulsa has the biggest concentration of terrible Christian hypocrites I have ever encountered. I mean, really all the stereotypes you hear about people going to church on Sunday and then abusing their families or cheating in their business. Where I live now in Massachusetts, nobody bothers to claim to be a Christian unless they actually care about it, but in Oklahoma it’s really culturally expected that you are and so a lot of people claim faith is something important to them, but don’t at all live it out.
3) Tornadoes. Tornadoes are unpredictable and scary and pretty common. My high school was destroyed by a tornado, the school that my mom taught at was destroyed by another, the church I attended, was destroyed by yet another, and my stepsister barely escaped being killed by another (she just got out of her car in time and when they found it later, it was on top of a three-story building nearby and completely crushed). I really love living in a place without natural disasters!
I lived in Fort Worth for 15 years, one of my friends there was from OK and said about the same thing about politics and religion. Concerning item #3: my wife and I were driving through Duncan or Moore somewheres (we both remarked how beautiful OK was, seemed greener once we crossed the Red River TX state line). My wife said OK looked so much cleaner than TX...maybe, she said, its because people keep things picked up because they dont want things blowing around in tornadoes. I said, I think its the other way around, theres so many tornadoes they've clear everything out that wasnt bolted down 😂
I usually list Houston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as the most underrated cities, but Pittsburgh probably fits too (except that in my world, U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon are so prominent that Pittsburgh gets a lot more attention than Philadelphia, and I sort of thought that Uber buying the whole robotics department from CMU did this more broadly).
I live in Baltimore and am a Baltimore Evangelist! This place has everything you need, whet you are single, in a childless relationship, or have children! I absolutely love it! But it's probably not as cheap as Tulsa...
Detroit can mean a lot of things. It can mean the actual City of Detroit, which is certainly better now than when I moved there in the late 90s. But it still has plenty of issues, number one being the schools. Detroit can also mean Metro Detroit, which I moved to when the City of just wouldn’t cut it, and that’s basically just a variation of midwest suburbs. Detroit at a stretch could even include the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor, just 20 minutes or so away.
Seattle-area summers are basically paradise for outdoorsy types. 80-degree highs, low humidity, light out until 10PM, and all the mountains you can hike and/or bike trails that you can ride. Unfortunately that only lasts about 4-5 months of the year (although the skiing is also pretty great in winter in the Cascades).
Everyone's got their preferences, but I was always fine trading off some sunshine in exchange for just misty rain as opposed to brutally cold and humid weather.
Brutal cold is great *if* it snows. The worst type of winter is what you get in New Jersey: cold enough that you have to put on layers and all the trees are bare and the grass is dead, but not cold enough that is snows, so instead of a winter wonderland you end up both cold *and* wet.
I grew up with it, more or less. It's authentically pretty bad. It's not that a day or even a week of it is bad, but when you go three weeks without seeing the sun or the blue of the sky, and the clouds have been hanging featureless at 2000ft...
I went to Tulsa for work and was pleasantly surprised. Downtown is reasonably compact for a city in the great plains, it's green and leafy, and they have some nice amenities like the Gathering Place park. It has a much more distinct feel as a city than, say, OKC.
When I went in ~2016 I had also never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre; I feel like it's entered the national consciousness a lot more after the Watchmen HBO series and post-Floyd racial reckonings. Still they had a very thoughtful memorial that was educational, I remember walking around thinking "how have I not heard of this before?"
But to answer your question no, I would not move to Tulsa. I am a coastal elite and wide open spaces disperse my farts too quickly, which I need to smell to survive.
And I'm not sure there's any markers or remembrances. At least nothing is in the popular consciousness of these violent attacks against strikers and labor organizers, many of which claimed dozens of lives. In what was perhaps the worst, US Army planes dumped chemical weapons on striking miners in WV.
I came across the Ludlow massacre while reading an SB book referral about the peak of the anarchist movement in the US (The Infernal Machine). It was a pretty crazy period and I agree that not much has seeped into popular culture outside of vague references to the Pinkertons.
Honestly, think more Millennial and Gen Z folks should consider the longer term horizon benefits of setting roots down in one of the many mid-sized regional cities in / around the top 50 - 100 for population sizing.
Absolutely agree. I grew up in one of those cities and live in another. They are manageable, affordable, and have enough pro sports, cultural opportunities and diversity to keep life interesting. Great places to find community and raise a family.
That said, my personal theory is that a lot of people don’t actually want community and family when they factor in the trade-offs. One of those trade-offs might be living in an unfashionable city with more parochial neighbors.
I live in Baton Rouge, and thought it wasn’t my hometown…it was the largest city I have ever lived in (lived in many more smaller, in many states), and it’s fine.
Plenty of people who only ever lived here felt constricted and often fled to either NYC or New Orleans. 9 out of 10 who left for NYC in the 00s and ‘10s (for social reasons, not work reasons, exclusively mind you…) ultimately never found sustainable work and wasted a decade or more on rent before coming back (often to NOLA, where they still can’t afford to buy a home…in a city that has its own affordability crisis, among other issues).
Folks who just stayed here are mostly content and basically a decade ahead of everyone else in having homes and savings, living in the hip mid city area of the city that recently saw a lot of infill development (and price appreciation). Oddly enough, people always cite conservative politics as the reason to leave BR…but it’s been Democratically controlled basically for two decades (it is majority black city, 44%) …but because even white liberal / progressive social is still VERY segregated…people just never “felt” that, i guess.
This anecdotal evidence is sorta why i eye roll when people cite jobs as the reason lots of kids from mid sized cities move to big urban areas, from my experience the vast majority of college educated (graduate or drop outs) 20 something were 100% just moving for entertainment and social reasons…
I mean, I can easily see a city dominated by an older black Democratic cadre + what Republicans and white moderates exist being too conservative for people who are already politically minded and left-leaning on various social issues.
Sure, but this often just came from people who never even ventured into the black spaces to begin with and so it was a very odd way to frame that criticism (which really wasn’t about politics so much as it was about culture, i assure you)
- Land prices much less expensive, you can get more housing / land at an earlier age.
- Often significant populations of highly educated people to socialize with, thanks to cities often having state or private universities.
- Many are within reasonable driving distance of top 10 population centers for access expanded entertainment options.
- Internet / cultural turnover is such that popular cultural trends or amenities that first appear in tier 1 cities now appear much sooner in these regional cities, where it used to take like a decade for ramen restaurants to make it to town it now takes a year or two.
I’m not sure about that last point - when I lived in College Station, TX, two years ago, I usually got two day deliveries from Amazon, but a few things were next day. But moving to Southern California, most things are next day, and a reasonable number are available for 7 am, or even same day if you order in the morning. There are some ways that Internet services are actually producing more advantages for central locations.
As a LSU Alum (and Baton Rouge, somewhere in the mid 60s rank for metro areas) i am obligated by the SEC bylaws to to dunk on College Station by observing that it’s somewhere in the 180s on the list of metro areas sizes… and note that when I lived in Texas all the other residents joked that they didn’t even know where College Station is in on the map of Texas (frankly, I still can’t point it out!)
I didn't really like A&M or College Station, but College Station being small and obscure has been a weird meme for a long time. It's not an unusually small place by state college town standards. Compared to a few others:
The thing that always confuses me about Baton Rouge is that I can't remember which of Cain's or Layne's is the one from College Station and which is from Baton Rouge. As a non-meat-eater, I can't even tell the difference between them - they're rhyming chicken finger restaurants with the same black pepper and mustard sauce.
(But also, College Station has been growing at over 20% per decade for every single decade it has existed, while Baton Rouge hasn't hit that rate since the 1970s, and has even been negative in two recent decades. At that rate, it's only about 3 decades before Bryan/College Station passes Baton Rouge.)
Also, i didn’t mean delivery from Amazon so much as just chain restaurants or non-chain trend restaurants or non-chain businesses that often filter out from too tier cities to other regions.
Yeah that sort of thing definitely seemed about 20 years behind the times in College Station - there was one mediocre Indian restaurant while I lived there, and several mediocre Thai restaurants, but I hear there's a decent Indian restaurant or two now. But new businesses were still mostly burgers, tacos, or kolaches.
I disagree that NIMBYism really even comes into for most cities, though those folks exist, because in general the trend has been for folks to move out of them.
It’s certainly not hard to build in many of them, the real issue is that there is a ton of competition for jobs and many states lose because other states are more willing to cut much better tax deals for companies, etc.
Unless you come in sufficient numbers to turn a very solidly red state into something more politically livable, stay where you are. I speak as a Texan, and it's pure hell in this part of the world. Texas actually copied Oklahoma on putting the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms. My profession/vocation is Christian ministry, and this kind of crap is almost enough to make me want to renounce my faith. Tulsa has some lovely qualities and places, but if you live in Tulsa, you're in Oklahoma--can't unyoke those two.
I was one of the few people who stayed in my average hometown still bigger than Tulsa from my high school honors class instead of going to SF/NY and while it worked out fine I attribute it largely to one specific lucky break. The modal outcome of the other people who stayed is stuck in middle-class version of dead end job, single approaching 40, basically an upscale version of a NEET, and every day I feel like “there but for the grace of God go I.” Average cities are great if you already are married with kids and appreciate the affordable housing but it’s a trap for people just starting out.
Would you consider a place like Sacramento average, or not-average because of its proximity to the Bay Area? Because other than summer heat waves, it's a really great place to have a moderately-above-average income, even in your 20s.
I, personally, can't imagine myself ever moving to Tulsa or anywhere else in Oklahoma--seems very low on places I'd like to go to.
But while it would be nice to say that, if this is successful, it's an indication of the value workers place on working remotely, it's more likely a Housing Theory Of Everything result that would not be as successful if popular cities did the work to change their laws to allow more housing to be built and thus be more affordable to live in.
Setting aside anyone’s personal feelings about Tulsa, what’s the point? At $80k+, the best use of a marginal $10k is to…take vacations to wherever you’d live without that extra $10k.
One point is being able to own a home that is a size you are happy with by the time you want children, instead of "having to" delay one or both of them (you don't have to delay children, but many upper middle class people choose to until they own a home)
The average age of first birth for college educated women is less than 2 years younger in the county that includes Tulsa compared to Manhattan. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html. The lower cost of living does make a difference but it’s not a huge one. Finding a partner is probably the bigger challenge if you aren’t already married and that could be harder in Tulsa with the smaller dating pool.
Both my fellow lefties and the Right overrate cost when it comes to having kids. It's that we actually conquered teen pregnancy and people are marrying later.
People use the cost argument, but in reality, they like their kid-free life and want excuses. Sure, I think there are people w/ legitimate money issues and a small cadre of 1-2% of women who aren't because of climate change, but beyond that, its because having a child is hard work and waking up at 11 AM on a Saturday is easier.
I'm not sure why people don't view the money spent on kids the same way they view money spent on other things you enjoy. Spending money for kids is actually fun and satisfying to the point where I end up not spending it on other hobbies by choice.
Imagine how fun it is to buy a greenhouse for your garden/add a powertrain mod to a car/upgrade your PC and then imagine that object telling you how much they love you and bringing it up again years later and upgrading itself for you because you taught it how. This sounds dumb when I type it but whatever it's close.
There's just a crazy disconnect where I feel like a lot of my 'proudly child-free!' progressive friends simply can't imagine that spending money on their family would be more rewarding than a vacation or clothes or fine dining or whatever things they would buy with those dollars.
"Spending money for kids is actually fun and satisfying..."
That depends *a lot* on what you're spending the money on. Something the children will enjoy, that will make them squeal with delight, like "Surprise, Mommy and Daddy got you this 1200-piece Millennium Falcon LEGO set/tickets to Frozen: The Musical"? Sure. Something like 3 months' worth of diapers, copay for a dentist visit, or $2000 for your friendly neighborhood daycare? Not so much.
Right, like, I don't like spending money on _myself_ that I think is sort of wasted. I know that health insurance premium is useful in theory, but I'd sure like that couple of hundred bucks in my bank account instead (and before somebody jumps in and calls me a hyprocrite, I realize that's dumb and its good for society people have health insurance, I just wish we had cheaper, nationally-run insurance as an option).
I agree that kids are great but they are really expensive. My average annual spending has more than tripled with two kids compared to when I didn’t have any. You could buy a lot of hobby stuff with that. And if you’re more income-constrained it could make sense to buy hobby stuff instead of trying to raise kids on a budget which means a lot more stress and less fun.
I hope these people still love their kayaks and Funko in 20 years as much as parents love their children. Otherwise they spent their money on empty consumerism.
‘it could make sense to buy hobby stuff instead of trying to raise kids on a budget which means a lot more stress and less fun’ is wild. It doesn't ‘make sense’ at all, actually. I was raised by people who were most definitely income-constrained (kinda poor).
You're saying that poor people should buy stuff for themselves instead of having children.
Because they know and grew up with a lot of parents who sure seemed like they hated the money they had to spend on their kids instead of their interests.
Not everybody actually likes their kids. It's sad, but its true.
I think a lot of people are being honest that yes, they do like spending money on a vacation to Brazil than on swimming lessons for a 4 year old.
"Spending money for kids is actually fun and satisfying to the point where I end up not spending it on other hobbies by choice."
For you - a lot of people don't have the same experience. You're assuming if the average person had a kid they would have the same experience - that very much depends on the parent, the kid, and a whole host of other variables.
I think the average person does have a similar experience though, my peers with kids pretty much universally have that experience, and I know families with deeply troubled kids and not much money.
Money makes raising kids a lot easier and more fun though. You can keep more of the nice stuff about childfree life if you can pay to outsource more of the less pleasant stuff. And a lot of the fun things to do with kids cost a lot of money like traveling. Like you could afford multiple kids making $40,000 a year in the sense of meeting all of their physical needs but it doesn’t sound very pleasant.
Right - being rich means and I'm not trying to be mean here, just like many middle class people can afford somebody to walk their dog or groom them and take care of a lot of the annoying stuff and only to get to do the fun stuff, you can do the same thing w/ your children.
Like, outside of super religious rich people, are the wives of CEOs doing more mothering than nurses or HR administrators who live in Sheboygan?
If housing was more than a minor part of it, as opposed to general cultural shifts (and the basic end of teen pregnancy), we'd see places like Texas and Florida doing better on these measures.
Instead -
Texas TFR in 2008 - 2.36 ; TRF in 2023 - 1.85
Florida TFR in 2008 - 2.05 ; 2023 - 1.60
California TFR in 2008 - 2.15 ; TFR in 2023 - 1.48
New York TFR in 2008 - 1.89 ; TFR in 2023 - 1.53
About a 25% drop in the two biggest states where we can't built housing and a...22% drop in the two biggest states where we have built housing.
So yeah, housing prices I'll be fair might have a 5-10% difference in the drop from 2.07 to 1.62 overall and we should obviously build more housing in general, but I think it's highly overrated by the very people its effecting.
Even if you want to say, OK, if we had TX & FL's policies nationwide, we might be at 1.72 nationwide in 2025 - aka, where we were in 2018.
TX and FL cities aren’t that cheap! What’s the TFR in Memphis, I wonder. I’m here in north MS with my mom and sister’s family (3 kids) right now. They live at a very high standard of living relative to income compared to what you could do in even Atlanta or Dallas.
You make excellent points, but, taking me as an example, I value my career and want to keep working, not being a SAHM, and my husband feels the same. That means shelling out for daycare, and the difference between $2k/month/1 kid vs. $4k/month/2 kids is huge, even for an UMC couple like us. Add in the need to buy a bigger car to accommodate those effing car seats that California mandates until age 10 (!) and there’s a real sense in which I can’t afford another child (without going into debt or dipping heavily into retirement savings).
I agree it'd be difficult, but people for generations popped out more kids in far worse conditions.
Obviously, I think we should do more to help parents, have a larger welfare state in general, etc and obviously, it's fine to believe another kid would be too expensive to keep your current QOL and as a result not have one, but there's a difference between your argument which is perfectly reasonable and the stories from both my fellow lefties ("everyone is so close to being on the street they can't afford a child) and the Right ("the real American's have had all the good jobs stolen by foreigners so we need to subsidize so they have more of the right kind of babies").
But, this does lead back to the problem that the Swedes and other have lots of programs that supposedly help people have more kids, and they're not working either. Then again, even very reactionary religion (Iran & Saudi Arabia) isn't working either, so it comes down to the same problem - a combination of humanity getting far richer in general and you dang women getting educamacated. :)
2-3 years (the difference with the Bay Area is over 2) is significant in ones 30s when it comes to childbearing. I agree it's not a "huge" difference but it's not zero.
"If you want kids, you usually have to find someone with whom to have them. For most of history, this person was not necessarily the love of your life. Maybe some people were in love, but it wasn’t seen as a requirement. The idea of dating multiple people for multiple years or breaking off relationships because there wasn’t a perfect alignment of values or chemistry, was not done. You picked some guy (or girl) who lived within horse distance, and married them within a few months of meeting."
500,000 people in your age range, single, compatible in personality, plus the fact that women are more likely to leave for bigger cities leaving skewed sex ratios in smaller ones and the fact that most people will only date within their own social class and race, gets small pretty quickly. I’m in an even larger metro and have talked about the experience of with friends of reaching the “end of Tinder” when you’ve literally exhausted all matches in your area…
Yeah, I'm sure that gay people and gay bars exists in Oklahoma, but I live in New York City and the scenes in Tulsa or OKC would be pretty depressing downgrades.
Incredible collection of art deco architecture in downtown Tulsa
I’m not sure you all on the coasts understand the incredible pettiness of midwesterners towards their neighbors and I flatly refuse to believe there is something nice in Tulsa
Damn skippy. The only nice architecture is in STL. Chicago manages to occasionally not be completely shitty. And fuck KC with Satan’s million-horned cock.
**glares in Chicago**
Chicago is a wonderful place
It is! People (FOX News, mostly) shit on Chicago, but it’s a world-class city without the rudeness of New York and the pretentiousness of Los Angeles. I will give New York respect for its pizza (although our tavern-style pizza is very good; it’s just a secret we don’t share with outsiders). And for most people, LA’s weather is superior. But I like having 4 distinct seasons and waterfront access, so Chicago is my sweet spot.
And the alleys really are the straw that stirs the drink!
The Art Institute and Field Museum are awesome! Sue the T-rex for the win!
Anyone reading this, if you're visiting Chicago and have some spare time, I recommend you go up to Evanston and check out the Baha'i temple, it's beautiful! Great place for silent contemplation.
I thought that boat tour they do there was going to be corny, but it turned out to be pretty great.
“4 distinct seasons”
Another bad impact from the decline in remote work. In a world with a more mobile workforce stationary bandits have that much less power. Interesting counterfactual if remote work had remained dominant is local governments intensely competing to build desirable communities.
Let's talk about it on Substack live
Sir, this is a Wendy's.
“Sir, this is a Yimby’s.”
I know Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and you, sir, are no Bruce Willis.
ONE. BILLION. TULSANS.
Somehow I get the feeling that would actually ruin the neighborhood character… for once.
Not if you turned Tulsa into a miniature Coruscant, with 100+ vertically stacked residential levels connected by elevators and hover cars/airships, the rich elite near the top, the seedy underworld at the bottom, it would be rad! Tourists would come from all over to visit! Beware shady characters in cantinas offering to sell you death sticks.
Tulsa's current sprawl radius is about 30 km. At a billion people that's 350K people per sq km, compared to 28K for Manhattan. But if we double the radius it drops to 88K, which seems theoretically possible with current technology.
I hate you.
Hey, don’t blame me for taking Yglesias YIMBY/Abundance thought to its logical conclusion! 😆
I would not for a few reasons. Fully remote doesn't work for most roles long term in terms of the health of the business. While some roles will remain remote the chances of getting a new one after a layoff are getting pretty slim.
Which brings up the next issue - I've seen in markets like Tulsa employees and employers fighting to a draw. Employees can't leave as there are no comparable roles within a commutable distance. Employers know there are also no potential candidates within a commutable distance either. So it ends up in a not healthy place employment wise.
It still amazes me, utterly amazes me, that it took some organizations five years to figure this out. And some still seemingly haven't!
It’s like several other topics: people really, really *wanted* to believe it, and felt like good people while wanting to believe it.
Which part, that companies took a long time to realize “remote doesn’t work”?
That's stronger language than I'd use. More like "it's hard-to-impossible to create and maintain company culture when you're all in your separate living rooms, you're accumulating all sorts of technical debt, and the longer you let people think this is the new normal, the more they will believe you".
That’s fair. I work remote for big tech, I think something like 80% have RTO’d. It’s a funny equilibrium where all of my meetings have ~50% of people dialing in from different locations, whether that’s home, an office in a different city, or just a different building at the ”same” office. And because of this distribution, going into the office doesn’t feel like it adds much to the experience. Some teams are different though and I would bet they are more productive.
There's a special place in Hell for people who call in from a different room in the same building.
Maybe not in Hell. There's a special place in Heck.
In principle true, but some of these buildings are at least 1/2 mile long…
I am at a big tech company that is still very remote friendly and I just happen to live ten minutes away from HQ. All my teammates are spread out around North America, so there’s no collaboration happening in the office. I go in 1-2x/week and treat it like a WeWork; get away from the pile of laundry and kids crap piled up and focus for a 1/2 day and partake of the snacks
Do you think this will ever change? Was it like this in the before times?
Agree! As somebody who does niche IT consulting and basically becomes an expensive temp employee for 6-24 months at places all over the country - there are definitely smaller cities like Tulsa that have like 3 big companies that end up being the options for specialized professional roles. You're an internal auditor or database administrator - you basically can only work at those 3 companies. Wages end up being so much lower than nationally.
And it can end up like some kind of bad codependent marriage - I hate you but I can't quit. Well I hate you more but I can't fire you.
The healthcare analytics company I work for has been remote since 2014 and we're landing blowing up right now despite none of the executive team or the data science group living in the same city.
I have a buddy who works for FINRA and said that since they mandated people come back to work a couple times a week, they're losing a massive amount of talent (mostly analysts and IT) that got used to working remotely.
I'm extroverted and loved working in person, but (at least for programmers) it seems like it's remote or bust.
" they're losing a massive amount of talent"
Yeh but every article I read says the job market is terrible. So it's at least plausible that he's not a reliable narrator?
I'll give you a funny example - keep in mind the average manger is average and half of them are even worse. Anyway at a customer someone who was fully remote quit and never told anybody - they just stopped doing any work. 9 months later they were found and their manager sent them a meeting invite to discuss they emailed back - "I quit."
Some companies and employees are successful with it and some are not.
We certainly had more than a few grumpy departures when we brought our last cohort back full-time in summer of '21. Call it one engineer or developer in twenty.
Interestingly, they were all of the people we could very most afford to lose.
IIRC J.P. Morgan found the vast majority of its top performers were already in the office so they figured what have we got to lose. And they were right - the worst performers were also the ones most likely to quit is asked to come in.
He (and many others) moved out of DC when they went full remote, then they asked them all to make 2+ hour commutes each way. His boss left and so did many of his best coworkers. He took a buyout after working there for 17 years.
I do know another guy who totally ghosted his company (may have been Wells Fargo?) when he was totally remote and his boss left for another gig. His co-workers didn't know what his assignment was or who he was reporting to and it took a few months for them to catch on. He's not there anymore (don't know if quit or fired).
Our company is still small enough ~200 employees) that we have daily scrums companywide and within our group. Everyone also has multiple weekly meetings with various clients. I can't imagine getting away with not showing up unannounced for even a week.
I'm going to be very curious what the next administration does about remote work/teleworking in the Federal government...
Makes a lot of sense for feds since they can't compete on pay.
They’d *really* need to get rid of the job protections, though I guess they don’t have those post-DOGE? If you can’t easily be fired for not doing shit, you really don’t need to be doing remote work. (For the record I’m mostly against fully remote work, there should be an expectation that everyone’s in the office but flexibility when possible)
Most feds theoretically still have job protections, but yeah...kind of hard to tell what will happen a year from now. A lot of the schedule F stuff is still getting worked out, at which point Trump can fire rank and file people for whatever. If anything, assuming schedule F sticks, you'd imagine the feds needing to pay a wage premium to make up for the loss in stability, but that won't happen given the way the scale works. I think the most likely scenario for feds is 0% pay raises for the next 4 years.
I used to work for the feds in a field that recruits a lot of PhDs/MDs, and remote work was a major blessing. Many people with PhDs/MDs also have spouses with doctorates, so you pretty regularly encounter two-body problems when recruiting. It's really hard to get a health physicist to move their entire family across the country when you can only pay $100k, but it's a great deal if one spouse is already locked into a university and you can offer the other a remote position.
Setting aside the merits of in-person/telework, the current admin has been a complete nightmare, and it doesn't really seem analogous to private sector RTO. I have a friend who was assigned office space in a building without internet. They were remote to begin with, so none of their coworkers are even located in the same state. There doesn't really seem to be any point to it beyond trying to get people to quit.
eh, I moved from Southern CA to South West Oregon. Town of 20k people, and I live about 30 mins away in an area with less than 1,000 people.
Yeah, there's not a lot of opportunity here, but I like my job and there's no way I could have a similar quality of life moving somewhere else because of the cost of housing.
How much less did you end up spending on housing as a percentage of gross?
Well, from where I moved I actually spent a bit more, but that's because we sold our track home, and bought a 20 acre ranch (with a house almost twice as big)
If we moved back to a bigger city, we would be back in a much smaller track house.
That's not a trade we want to do. Not to mention there's multiple lakes and rivers here within a short drive we can take the kids swimming or wake boarding in. And no GATORS!
Either the reptile kind or the UF kind are a no go, I agree
I’m tentatively in favor of basically making most support roles remote. Core operations, no. But payroll? Have a couple reps onsite and outsource the rest to some B2B SAAS grindset asshole.
Not payroll you want the people doing the work to fear being dragged to the parking lot for a good beating if the direct deposits don't go through. Seriously when people are remote they begin to thing it's all not real - that there aren't people at the other end of the ACH.
Oof good catch bro! Yeah i guess that’s a good exception.
There are no exceptions - if there are lay their ass off.
I grew up near Tulsa and still have lots of family and friends there. There are many things that I really love about the area, including cultural opportunities, a lot of the people, recreational opportunities, etc.
But there are also some significant reasons I would never move there or encourage people I cared about to move there.
1) Sate politics are so extremely right wing. I was a republican until 2016, and I’m still a relatively conservative independent, but Oklahoma politics make me ill. In particular what they are doing to education in Oklahoma is really disgusting. Also the impacts state politics have on healthcare available in the state are negative.
2) The religious climate. I’m a Christian and my faith is really important to me. Tulsa has the biggest concentration of terrible Christian hypocrites I have ever encountered. I mean, really all the stereotypes you hear about people going to church on Sunday and then abusing their families or cheating in their business. Where I live now in Massachusetts, nobody bothers to claim to be a Christian unless they actually care about it, but in Oklahoma it’s really culturally expected that you are and so a lot of people claim faith is something important to them, but don’t at all live it out.
3) Tornadoes. Tornadoes are unpredictable and scary and pretty common. My high school was destroyed by a tornado, the school that my mom taught at was destroyed by another, the church I attended, was destroyed by yet another, and my stepsister barely escaped being killed by another (she just got out of her car in time and when they found it later, it was on top of a three-story building nearby and completely crushed). I really love living in a place without natural disasters!
I could live next to BYU. I couldn't live next to Oral Roberts.
Ha both of my parents in law went there. They’re both MSNBC liberals, surprisingly enough. Hey, it was a place to hide from the draft
Even my cousin's husband who was a pretty conservative Baptist pastor from Tulsa thought the Oral Roberts people were crazy.
Your #2 describes a fascinating phenomenon I had not previously thought about. Thanks for sharing!
As a Northwesterner, it's fascinating and also completely foreign to me.
I lived in Fort Worth for 15 years, one of my friends there was from OK and said about the same thing about politics and religion. Concerning item #3: my wife and I were driving through Duncan or Moore somewheres (we both remarked how beautiful OK was, seemed greener once we crossed the Red River TX state line). My wife said OK looked so much cleaner than TX...maybe, she said, its because people keep things picked up because they dont want things blowing around in tornadoes. I said, I think its the other way around, theres so many tornadoes they've clear everything out that wasnt bolted down 😂
You should encourage people to move there to flip their electoral votes.
Pittsburgh tops my underrated US cities that I would move to list. (Based on one visit on a beautiful September weekend).
I usually list Houston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as the most underrated cities, but Pittsburgh probably fits too (except that in my world, U of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon are so prominent that Pittsburgh gets a lot more attention than Philadelphia, and I sort of thought that Uber buying the whole robotics department from CMU did this more broadly).
I live in Baltimore and am a Baltimore Evangelist! This place has everything you need, whet you are single, in a childless relationship, or have children! I absolutely love it! But it's probably not as cheap as Tulsa...
"But it's probably not as cheap as Tulsa" Depends on the neighborhood LOL
I second Houston, the Museum District is great! Also lots of good places to eat.
Similarly, I can see why Detroit gets crap but I had a really nice work trip there and managed to fit in a lot of touristy stops. Really lovely city.
I've found that Detroit has improved dramatically over the last 15 years. And there's still room for improvement!
Unfortunately, they've still got a bad case of Lions.
It's way better to be a Lions fan today than 15 years ago!
The Tigers are good, to boot!
I believe you mean the DERTROIT BEISBOLCATS
Detroit sports are starting to emerge from a real nasty low for all four major teams.
Love hearing that, I hope they continue the trend.
Detroit can mean a lot of things. It can mean the actual City of Detroit, which is certainly better now than when I moved there in the late 90s. But it still has plenty of issues, number one being the schools. Detroit can also mean Metro Detroit, which I moved to when the City of just wouldn’t cut it, and that’s basically just a variation of midwest suburbs. Detroit at a stretch could even include the People’s Republic of Ann Arbor, just 20 minutes or so away.
I too had a similar reaction to Pittsburgh, except it was October I was there.
Feels similar to me not understanding why everyone in the world hasn't moved to Seattle yet, on an 80-degree August day
Seattle-area summers are basically paradise for outdoorsy types. 80-degree highs, low humidity, light out until 10PM, and all the mountains you can hike and/or bike trails that you can ride. Unfortunately that only lasts about 4-5 months of the year (although the skiing is also pretty great in winter in the Cascades).
Everyone's got their preferences, but I was always fine trading off some sunshine in exchange for just misty rain as opposed to brutally cold and humid weather.
Brutal cold is great *if* it snows. The worst type of winter is what you get in New Jersey: cold enough that you have to put on layers and all the trees are bare and the grass is dead, but not cold enough that is snows, so instead of a winter wonderland you end up both cold *and* wet.
Snow is such a pain to get around town with when it's around, though. Leave it up in the mountains. I do agree that sleet is even worse, though.
Yeah, I want to be a snowbird someday
How bad could the winter gray rain be? Isn't it just time for indoor hobbies?
I grew up with it, more or less. It's authentically pretty bad. It's not that a day or even a week of it is bad, but when you go three weeks without seeing the sun or the blue of the sky, and the clouds have been hanging featureless at 2000ft...
The rain, as such, is fine. It's the dreariness.
My brother got seasonal depression and moved out after 3 winters, YMMV
Rain
I lived there for five years. If there were good jobs in my field there, I might well have stayed.
We just visited for the first time and loved it - decent access to the NE still as well
I went to Tulsa for work and was pleasantly surprised. Downtown is reasonably compact for a city in the great plains, it's green and leafy, and they have some nice amenities like the Gathering Place park. It has a much more distinct feel as a city than, say, OKC.
When I went in ~2016 I had also never heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre; I feel like it's entered the national consciousness a lot more after the Watchmen HBO series and post-Floyd racial reckonings. Still they had a very thoughtful memorial that was educational, I remember walking around thinking "how have I not heard of this before?"
But to answer your question no, I would not move to Tulsa. I am a coastal elite and wide open spaces disperse my farts too quickly, which I need to smell to survive.
Kind of a tangent - but anytime I've dug into history I have the reaction of "why haven't I heard of this before"?
I live very close to where several of the worst of these took place:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes?utm_source=chatgpt.com
And I'm not sure there's any markers or remembrances. At least nothing is in the popular consciousness of these violent attacks against strikers and labor organizers, many of which claimed dozens of lives. In what was perhaps the worst, US Army planes dumped chemical weapons on striking miners in WV.
I came across the Ludlow massacre while reading an SB book referral about the peak of the anarchist movement in the US (The Infernal Machine). It was a pretty crazy period and I agree that not much has seeped into popular culture outside of vague references to the Pinkertons.
Subscribed just to comment. Yes--you should all move to Tulsa.
Matt, it seems like you should commission a defense of moving to Tulsa piece from me. (I'm cheap.) I moved from DC to Tulsa in Dec 2023.
And here I am living in a similar sized city for free, like a chump.
Honestly, think more Millennial and Gen Z folks should consider the longer term horizon benefits of setting roots down in one of the many mid-sized regional cities in / around the top 50 - 100 for population sizing.
Absolutely agree. I grew up in one of those cities and live in another. They are manageable, affordable, and have enough pro sports, cultural opportunities and diversity to keep life interesting. Great places to find community and raise a family.
That said, my personal theory is that a lot of people don’t actually want community and family when they factor in the trade-offs. One of those trade-offs might be living in an unfashionable city with more parochial neighbors.
I live in Baton Rouge, and thought it wasn’t my hometown…it was the largest city I have ever lived in (lived in many more smaller, in many states), and it’s fine.
Plenty of people who only ever lived here felt constricted and often fled to either NYC or New Orleans. 9 out of 10 who left for NYC in the 00s and ‘10s (for social reasons, not work reasons, exclusively mind you…) ultimately never found sustainable work and wasted a decade or more on rent before coming back (often to NOLA, where they still can’t afford to buy a home…in a city that has its own affordability crisis, among other issues).
Folks who just stayed here are mostly content and basically a decade ahead of everyone else in having homes and savings, living in the hip mid city area of the city that recently saw a lot of infill development (and price appreciation). Oddly enough, people always cite conservative politics as the reason to leave BR…but it’s been Democratically controlled basically for two decades (it is majority black city, 44%) …but because even white liberal / progressive social is still VERY segregated…people just never “felt” that, i guess.
This anecdotal evidence is sorta why i eye roll when people cite jobs as the reason lots of kids from mid sized cities move to big urban areas, from my experience the vast majority of college educated (graduate or drop outs) 20 something were 100% just moving for entertainment and social reasons…
I mean, I can easily see a city dominated by an older black Democratic cadre + what Republicans and white moderates exist being too conservative for people who are already politically minded and left-leaning on various social issues.
Sure, but this often just came from people who never even ventured into the black spaces to begin with and so it was a very odd way to frame that criticism (which really wasn’t about politics so much as it was about culture, i assure you)
Many (most?) people absolutely do not want the mutual obligations that community and family entail.
Apparently Tulsa is 60th! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_areas?wprov=sfti1#2020_urban_areas
I would have assumed it was smaller, but it’s comparable to Albuquerque or Birmingham or Fresno or Rochester.
- Land prices much less expensive, you can get more housing / land at an earlier age.
- Often significant populations of highly educated people to socialize with, thanks to cities often having state or private universities.
- Many are within reasonable driving distance of top 10 population centers for access expanded entertainment options.
- Internet / cultural turnover is such that popular cultural trends or amenities that first appear in tier 1 cities now appear much sooner in these regional cities, where it used to take like a decade for ramen restaurants to make it to town it now takes a year or two.
I’m not sure about that last point - when I lived in College Station, TX, two years ago, I usually got two day deliveries from Amazon, but a few things were next day. But moving to Southern California, most things are next day, and a reasonable number are available for 7 am, or even same day if you order in the morning. There are some ways that Internet services are actually producing more advantages for central locations.
Honestly not sure that extra day for most items from Amazon is a deal breaker for me, to be frank…
Yeah I still don't have Prime. It's totally fine!
As a LSU Alum (and Baton Rouge, somewhere in the mid 60s rank for metro areas) i am obligated by the SEC bylaws to to dunk on College Station by observing that it’s somewhere in the 180s on the list of metro areas sizes… and note that when I lived in Texas all the other residents joked that they didn’t even know where College Station is in on the map of Texas (frankly, I still can’t point it out!)
I didn't really like A&M or College Station, but College Station being small and obscure has been a weird meme for a long time. It's not an unusually small place by state college town standards. Compared to a few others:
Ann Arbor, MI 150
Gainesville, FL 157
College Station, TX 176
Tuscaloosa, AL 178
San Luis Obispo, CA 179
Urbana-Champaign, IL 200
State College, PA 272
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
The thing that always confuses me about Baton Rouge is that I can't remember which of Cain's or Layne's is the one from College Station and which is from Baton Rouge. As a non-meat-eater, I can't even tell the difference between them - they're rhyming chicken finger restaurants with the same black pepper and mustard sauce.
(But also, College Station has been growing at over 20% per decade for every single decade it has existed, while Baton Rouge hasn't hit that rate since the 1970s, and has even been negative in two recent decades. At that rate, it's only about 3 decades before Bryan/College Station passes Baton Rouge.)
Also, i didn’t mean delivery from Amazon so much as just chain restaurants or non-chain trend restaurants or non-chain businesses that often filter out from too tier cities to other regions.
Yeah that sort of thing definitely seemed about 20 years behind the times in College Station - there was one mediocre Indian restaurant while I lived there, and several mediocre Thai restaurants, but I hear there's a decent Indian restaurant or two now. But new businesses were still mostly burgers, tacos, or kolaches.
Mid-sized regional cities are mid-sized for a reason (super NIMBYs)
I disagree that NIMBYism really even comes into for most cities, though those folks exist, because in general the trend has been for folks to move out of them.
It’s certainly not hard to build in many of them, the real issue is that there is a ton of competition for jobs and many states lose because other states are more willing to cut much better tax deals for companies, etc.
Sweet - exactly on schedule and all is right with the world.
Unless you come in sufficient numbers to turn a very solidly red state into something more politically livable, stay where you are. I speak as a Texan, and it's pure hell in this part of the world. Texas actually copied Oklahoma on putting the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms. My profession/vocation is Christian ministry, and this kind of crap is almost enough to make me want to renounce my faith. Tulsa has some lovely qualities and places, but if you live in Tulsa, you're in Oklahoma--can't unyoke those two.
I would argue it never should have come out in the first place. It was the glue holding our country together,
The Ten Commandments in classrooms was the glue holding our country together? I don't think they were ever in even a majority of classrooms.
No the dominant christian culture was
Bring back prayers in classrooms. Bring back to ten commandments
Even if you did that you wouldn’t bring back the dominant Christian culture! She gone.
Or in any of them
Personally I think church and state are separate for very good reasons, but I’d go for the Sermon on the Mount before the Ten Commandments any day
I was one of the few people who stayed in my average hometown still bigger than Tulsa from my high school honors class instead of going to SF/NY and while it worked out fine I attribute it largely to one specific lucky break. The modal outcome of the other people who stayed is stuck in middle-class version of dead end job, single approaching 40, basically an upscale version of a NEET, and every day I feel like “there but for the grace of God go I.” Average cities are great if you already are married with kids and appreciate the affordable housing but it’s a trap for people just starting out.
There is nothing wrong with moving away when you are young and single and then moving back once you are older and have a family.
Yeah that’s probably the best way to do it. Main obstacles are job continuity and convincing your SO.
Would you consider a place like Sacramento average, or not-average because of its proximity to the Bay Area? Because other than summer heat waves, it's a really great place to have a moderately-above-average income, even in your 20s.
I, personally, can't imagine myself ever moving to Tulsa or anywhere else in Oklahoma--seems very low on places I'd like to go to.
But while it would be nice to say that, if this is successful, it's an indication of the value workers place on working remotely, it's more likely a Housing Theory Of Everything result that would not be as successful if popular cities did the work to change their laws to allow more housing to be built and thus be more affordable to live in.
Setting aside anyone’s personal feelings about Tulsa, what’s the point? At $80k+, the best use of a marginal $10k is to…take vacations to wherever you’d live without that extra $10k.
One point is being able to own a home that is a size you are happy with by the time you want children, instead of "having to" delay one or both of them (you don't have to delay children, but many upper middle class people choose to until they own a home)
The average age of first birth for college educated women is less than 2 years younger in the county that includes Tulsa compared to Manhattan. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html. The lower cost of living does make a difference but it’s not a huge one. Finding a partner is probably the bigger challenge if you aren’t already married and that could be harder in Tulsa with the smaller dating pool.
Both my fellow lefties and the Right overrate cost when it comes to having kids. It's that we actually conquered teen pregnancy and people are marrying later.
People use the cost argument, but in reality, they like their kid-free life and want excuses. Sure, I think there are people w/ legitimate money issues and a small cadre of 1-2% of women who aren't because of climate change, but beyond that, its because having a child is hard work and waking up at 11 AM on a Saturday is easier.
I'm not sure why people don't view the money spent on kids the same way they view money spent on other things you enjoy. Spending money for kids is actually fun and satisfying to the point where I end up not spending it on other hobbies by choice.
Imagine how fun it is to buy a greenhouse for your garden/add a powertrain mod to a car/upgrade your PC and then imagine that object telling you how much they love you and bringing it up again years later and upgrading itself for you because you taught it how. This sounds dumb when I type it but whatever it's close.
There's just a crazy disconnect where I feel like a lot of my 'proudly child-free!' progressive friends simply can't imagine that spending money on their family would be more rewarding than a vacation or clothes or fine dining or whatever things they would buy with those dollars.
"Spending money for kids is actually fun and satisfying..."
That depends *a lot* on what you're spending the money on. Something the children will enjoy, that will make them squeal with delight, like "Surprise, Mommy and Daddy got you this 1200-piece Millennium Falcon LEGO set/tickets to Frozen: The Musical"? Sure. Something like 3 months' worth of diapers, copay for a dentist visit, or $2000 for your friendly neighborhood daycare? Not so much.
Right, like, I don't like spending money on _myself_ that I think is sort of wasted. I know that health insurance premium is useful in theory, but I'd sure like that couple of hundred bucks in my bank account instead (and before somebody jumps in and calls me a hyprocrite, I realize that's dumb and its good for society people have health insurance, I just wish we had cheaper, nationally-run insurance as an option).
I agree that kids are great but they are really expensive. My average annual spending has more than tripled with two kids compared to when I didn’t have any. You could buy a lot of hobby stuff with that. And if you’re more income-constrained it could make sense to buy hobby stuff instead of trying to raise kids on a budget which means a lot more stress and less fun.
I hope these people still love their kayaks and Funko in 20 years as much as parents love their children. Otherwise they spent their money on empty consumerism.
‘it could make sense to buy hobby stuff instead of trying to raise kids on a budget which means a lot more stress and less fun’ is wild. It doesn't ‘make sense’ at all, actually. I was raised by people who were most definitely income-constrained (kinda poor).
You're saying that poor people should buy stuff for themselves instead of having children.
Yup. Nothing gives me more happiness than giving gifts and spending time with my sister’s kids.
Because they know and grew up with a lot of parents who sure seemed like they hated the money they had to spend on their kids instead of their interests.
Not everybody actually likes their kids. It's sad, but its true.
I think a lot of people are being honest that yes, they do like spending money on a vacation to Brazil than on swimming lessons for a 4 year old.
Most of these people had pretty great parents in my experience.
"Spending money for kids is actually fun and satisfying to the point where I end up not spending it on other hobbies by choice."
For you - a lot of people don't have the same experience. You're assuming if the average person had a kid they would have the same experience - that very much depends on the parent, the kid, and a whole host of other variables.
I think the average person does have a similar experience though, my peers with kids pretty much universally have that experience, and I know families with deeply troubled kids and not much money.
Money makes raising kids a lot easier and more fun though. You can keep more of the nice stuff about childfree life if you can pay to outsource more of the less pleasant stuff. And a lot of the fun things to do with kids cost a lot of money like traveling. Like you could afford multiple kids making $40,000 a year in the sense of meeting all of their physical needs but it doesn’t sound very pleasant.
Fertility actually starts ticking up again above $250,000 income and especially above $500,000: https://medium.com/@lymanstone/fertility-and-income-some-notes-581e1a6db3c7. Most people would have kids if they had more money but it has to be a lot more.
Right - being rich means and I'm not trying to be mean here, just like many middle class people can afford somebody to walk their dog or groom them and take care of a lot of the annoying stuff and only to get to do the fun stuff, you can do the same thing w/ your children.
Like, outside of super religious rich people, are the wives of CEOs doing more mothering than nurses or HR administrators who live in Sheboygan?
disagree. A lot of people won't consider kids until they own their own home (I know my wife and I wouldn't)
high cost of housing definitely delayed things
If housing was more than a minor part of it, as opposed to general cultural shifts (and the basic end of teen pregnancy), we'd see places like Texas and Florida doing better on these measures.
Instead -
Texas TFR in 2008 - 2.36 ; TRF in 2023 - 1.85
Florida TFR in 2008 - 2.05 ; 2023 - 1.60
California TFR in 2008 - 2.15 ; TFR in 2023 - 1.48
New York TFR in 2008 - 1.89 ; TFR in 2023 - 1.53
About a 25% drop in the two biggest states where we can't built housing and a...22% drop in the two biggest states where we have built housing.
So yeah, housing prices I'll be fair might have a 5-10% difference in the drop from 2.07 to 1.62 overall and we should obviously build more housing in general, but I think it's highly overrated by the very people its effecting.
Even if you want to say, OK, if we had TX & FL's policies nationwide, we might be at 1.72 nationwide in 2025 - aka, where we were in 2018.
TX and FL cities aren’t that cheap! What’s the TFR in Memphis, I wonder. I’m here in north MS with my mom and sister’s family (3 kids) right now. They live at a very high standard of living relative to income compared to what you could do in even Atlanta or Dallas.
I mean, yes and no.
You make excellent points, but, taking me as an example, I value my career and want to keep working, not being a SAHM, and my husband feels the same. That means shelling out for daycare, and the difference between $2k/month/1 kid vs. $4k/month/2 kids is huge, even for an UMC couple like us. Add in the need to buy a bigger car to accommodate those effing car seats that California mandates until age 10 (!) and there’s a real sense in which I can’t afford another child (without going into debt or dipping heavily into retirement savings).
down with car seats after just a couple of years!!!
They don't matter
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-car-seats-as-contraception
I agree it'd be difficult, but people for generations popped out more kids in far worse conditions.
Obviously, I think we should do more to help parents, have a larger welfare state in general, etc and obviously, it's fine to believe another kid would be too expensive to keep your current QOL and as a result not have one, but there's a difference between your argument which is perfectly reasonable and the stories from both my fellow lefties ("everyone is so close to being on the street they can't afford a child) and the Right ("the real American's have had all the good jobs stolen by foreigners so we need to subsidize so they have more of the right kind of babies").
But, this does lead back to the problem that the Swedes and other have lots of programs that supposedly help people have more kids, and they're not working either. Then again, even very reactionary religion (Iran & Saudi Arabia) isn't working either, so it comes down to the same problem - a combination of humanity getting far richer in general and you dang women getting educamacated. :)
2-3 years (the difference with the Bay Area is over 2) is significant in ones 30s when it comes to childbearing. I agree it's not a "huge" difference but it's not zero.
The difference is over 2 only for the City of San Francisco, all the other Bay Area counties have a smaller difference.
It's 500,000 people, you can't find a mate there???
People have been dating and marrying in MUCH smaller places since literally forever.
True, but maybe that was when they had *lower standards* for whom to marry?
Recommended reading: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-about-high by Friend-of-SB CHH
"If you want kids, you usually have to find someone with whom to have them. For most of history, this person was not necessarily the love of your life. Maybe some people were in love, but it wasn’t seen as a requirement. The idea of dating multiple people for multiple years or breaking off relationships because there wasn’t a perfect alignment of values or chemistry, was not done. You picked some guy (or girl) who lived within horse distance, and married them within a few months of meeting."
I do think modern culture has created a bunch of unrealistic standards
At the end of the day, the average man and the average woman have to be willing to date and marry each other
We can't all marry somebody above average
That means people need to have a realistic viewpoint. Um, what type of worth, they bring to a relationship
And then yes be willing to settle
Yep. And nobody wants to go back to that and even if you did other people don’t want to.
500,000 people in your age range, single, compatible in personality, plus the fact that women are more likely to leave for bigger cities leaving skewed sex ratios in smaller ones and the fact that most people will only date within their own social class and race, gets small pretty quickly. I’m in an even larger metro and have talked about the experience of with friends of reaching the “end of Tinder” when you’ve literally exhausted all matches in your area…
"most people will only date within their own social class and race"
Is this still true about race nowadays? Very untrue among my social circle at least
Sure, but a one time payment of $10k doesn’t make or break that either.
Houses for $300K does, though.
I’m really amazed at how much less I am traveling now that I live in Southern California rather than central Texas.
Sure, you can't afford to go anywhere...
Better than all moving to Tulsi.
Holy basil is great in Thai curries and in tea, just not so great in the cabinet or congress.
No, because I’m a single gay man and would only live in welcoming, socially progressive places with large LGBT populations, and … Oklahoma isn’t that!
(I’m sure Tulsa has some nice attributes and like most US cities has been treated very poorly in the post-WW2 era.)
There’s a neighborhood in Oklahoma City called Sparkleville. It used to be called the Gayborhood.
Yeah, I'm sure that gay people and gay bars exists in Oklahoma, but I live in New York City and the scenes in Tulsa or OKC would be pretty depressing downgrades.