This Is Your Life in the Midwest
medium.com
medium.com
You try out cost of living calculations and they say you'd need to make 250% your current salary on the west coast. Annoyed at the seemingly impossible move, you tell yourself they'll be rioting over water shortages soon anyways. After all, do you even want to be near the coast when the oceans rise?
Then I read this one and cried. There's a lot of truth here (I live in WI).
>You try out cost of living calculations and they say you'd need to make 250% your current salary on the west coast. Annoyed at the seemingly impossible move, you tell yourself they'll be rioting over water shortages soon anyways. After all, do you even want to be near the coast when the oceans rise?
And this. This is so true.
This was taking parts of people's lives I know and have met and throwing on a huge pile of satire.
The problem isn't the Midwest, it is suburbia. I've know contractrs at MS like in the article. Plenty of folks in Boston or Northern Virginia or RTP are living in the far suburbs and working in unsatisfying jobs they aren't good at... nothing to do with the Midwest.
It's really all about suburbia. It's isolating, expensive, and unproductive. The places that come to grips with this fact soon (or already) will face a much less painful contraction in the future. And they won't find themselves with a bunch of impoverished people stuck out in suburbs that no one else will live in.
At least in the US, we're not exactly constrained by land availability. And as you may notice, the sustainability of NYC and SF style property prices isn't guaranteed.
I have nothing against people living in sparsely populated areas, but the people living there now are mostly not seeing true costs of their lifestyles. If they weren't so heavily subsidized, they would probably have a lot more wells, septic tanks, and gravel roads; the school buses would not run to their houses; and they would have slower emergency response times and less police presence.
Faced with those painful realities, I expect more people would choose dense living. That's not to say they'd have to. Me personally, I just hate driving and love eating, in both cases too much to commute by car.
Productive density is constrained by things like how accounting works, how we can't get out of our own way, by other things that are like public choice economics. At each job I've had, I've seen people walk away from millions of dollars, either in increased sales or reduced cost because somebody just didn't understand it ( or rather, did understand it all too well ).
I couldn't agree more - people who live farther out should expect less services unless they're prepared to pay what they actually cost. In cases like California, the Pubic Choice Theory stories about water are ... interesting enough that it's a central plot element from a movie from the 1970s - "Chinatown".
I've lived on well water and septic.
This being said, I don't think real estate development public debt is even on the radar as a threat to anything. They can always raise rates...
As to the policy questions, I admit that I don't know how to solve that one. I know a start would be to clean up the mess made by FHA standards. And I think a lot of places have moved, or are starting to move, away from Euclidean zoning, which is a step in the right direction, if not a very large one.
You do? Even when it's -40? I find this very, very hard to believe.
I can bike in the drizzling rain with little trouble. Biking when it's -40 is a no-go, it's a good way to get frostbite and hypothermia.
Kids' college? They'll have to do it themselves. Hopefully, there's one near enough to work out, or they can qualify for scholarships.
But, of course, drinking beer at work outweighs all that...
Also, startups are infamous for demanding very long hours, in exchange for the vague promise of your stock becoming valuable. Parents don't have that much extra time.
Kids are a big distraction. One of the magical things about my wife is that she handles a lot of distractions for me. Most women just won't. It's slightly unfair to her, but she's a Professional Mom and extremely good at it. As has been noted in literature, it's all but impossible to price this.
The downside is - one stream of income. And it's been pretty scary when I've gotten laid off.
I understand the sentiment, but this lines has always bothered me. I try to find ways to incorporate my children into the things I enjoy and want to do...
I like to go hiking and road biking on weekends. You can't do this with kids; they just can't keep up. A 6-year-old isn't going to be able to do a 10-mile hike or a rock scramble with you, nor will she be able to ride 40 miles. You can do really easy hikes or bike rides, but those are pretty boring and do little for physical fitness (which is the other reason I do them, so I don't have to spend hours a week at the gym to avoid health problems). When the kids get to be teenagers they can probably handle that stuff, but that means there's 12+ years where you either don't do that stuff at all and get fat, or you hire a babysitter.
If you have other interests like listening to classical music concerts, or rock concerts, you can't bring kids to that stuff either; at one they'll be a disruption and at the other they'll be miserable. Again, when they become teenagers, they may be interested in those things (maybe, doubtful though because you're interested in them), but again that's a long time to wait, and now they're almost in college!
Honestly, having kids would be fun if it weren't such a huge time-sink, and you actually had help doing it instead of having to do it all by yourself (as with most parents I see these days), or if you're really lucky, with one partner who's also really busy with work.
It's no wonder the birthrate is so low these days in developed nations. I really think society needs to rethink its social norms and customs if it wants to reverse this, unless they can figure out how to greatly increase lifespans so it becomes normal and feasible to have kids at ~50-75 years old after you've established yourself financially and can afford to take off 5 years or more and only work part-time or not at all without ruining your future career. Also, polyamory would be a lot more sensible for raising kids; having adult time is easier when there's, say, 4 adult people in a household so one of them could volunteer to be babysitter for the group's kids, and there's more hands to share chores, and more incomes to share among the family.
(Also, having kids doesn't mean you can't be hip and urban. Urban centers are full of kids! We went trick-or-treating in Capitol Hill last year, and it was hard to fit in the sidewalk with all the parents and kids.)
Apparently the secret to happiness is not having kids. And not spending more than you make. Actually that last one is true.
Not spending more than you make is a big, big factor too, that many Americans seem to have a big problem with. From what I can tell, they simply do not understand the concept, at all. They basically seem to think they "deserve" a certain lifestyle and level of spending, and just do that, regardless of how much actual money is coming in, and simply refuse to look at ways to economize or maximize the value they get for their spending (such as by not eating out all the time because they're too lazy to cook).
There are a lot of articles here that try to isolate and analyze pivotal traits or habits. This is the opposite, throwing everything you can imagine into one big, confused soup of "what caused what?".
It could also be that this is a common mindset, but I just haven't met these people.
I just wish the suburban experiment would die already: it's quite a hellish existence to have to endure, just because you didn't take the time to learn about all the odd artificial incentives that push people toward that unproductive and isolating pattern of life.
The main thing he: he depends on credit vendors for establishing limits on spending.
I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's nice to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical and hard to substitute for.
Given the obesity epidemic in America this days, I think you're wrong here about the criticality of walkability. Go to Manhattan sometime and see if you can find any fat people. Now go to suburban Atlanta and see how many people are so fat they need motorized carts just to shop at Walmart.