There are plenty of places to live in America. You have to adjust your standard of living and your expectations according to your income and desires.
First off, you are dismissive of the issue with that bit of exaggeration. It is not as if this group wants all the good things in life that only a tech salary afford. Perhaps a dignified life would be sufficient.
You also place NYC, SF, Boston, DC, etc. into a category of city that is naturally not available to the middle class. Is NYC a luxury like a 3500 sq ft house and boat? Housing scarcity and the resulting price inflation is actually a situation that residents of cities accidentally created, something highly unnatural.
Working class and middle class people are critical to the economy and wider culture of cities. Teachers. Police officers. Artists. The guy who makes your coffee. The gal not from a wealthy family who wants to start a business.
It is not enough that a certain group can just live somewhere in America. Critical workers must live within a reasonable commute to their jobs.
There should be plenty of places in each city for them to live in, and there should plenty of infrastructure in place to move them about.
Once those cities are unaffordable for the very people you mention, they will just move to more affordable places where they have a better cost of living, and then they will bring ideas, creativity, and resurgence to these areas and make them better.
If you're a critical worker, then surely you can demand a pay raise. If not, move. If somebody can replace you, you're not critical. If somebody can't replace you, they'll have to pay more.
I'm not dismissive of the cost of these cities at all, nor the plight of those living there, but you get what you pay for. If you're a teacher in New York and you can't afford rent, move somewhere else instead. What else are you going to do? Rent control? Then you just have people who can never afford to build lasting wealth because they will just rent for life.
There isn't a 'solution' to this 'problem' because it's just a basic fact of human organization. I'd love to live in Colorado, maybe Breckinridge, but I can't afford that. So I live somewhere else and visit. Does that suck? Yeah sure, it also sucks I can't buy a Ferrari.
Ideally we want mixed-use development neighborhoods with differently priced homes for people with different income levels to live in. But it looks like without the government enforcing it, that isn't going to happen.
While it is beneficial to improve districts, the migratory upgrading of urban areas is an economic model that may be problematic for the population. People need to get work done and take care of their families, not constantly deal with a series of dismal choices and life-uprooting changes.
Instead of waiting for price bubbles, wage bubbles, hostile populations causing problems due to inadequate conditions, perhaps cities should work on the infrastructure of growth.
There are many necessary conditions for civilization that governments enforce or produce. I argue that generating NYC conditions for the general population is one of them.
OMG, I certainly hope not. They'd certainly better not try to generate NYC conditions for me.
Whatever the category of neighborhood -- big city or small town or even country -- there are minimum requirements for a decent life that IMO the community is morally obligated to create.
The difference is scarcity.
Computers and internet are can be produced at very cheap costs. Whereas, almost by definition, urban real estate is scare and in high demand. If it weren't, it wouldn't be crowded.
Often scarcity can be addressed if the community decides that it is harmful or not necessary.
It's just unrealistic. The pragmatic thing to do is just make one move and move out of the big city. You can lead a nice life in many places. Move to Alabama or something.
I can't afford a big city and I have a great life where I live. I visit those big cities when I want instead of dealing with the hour commute and sky-high prices.
That's what I keep saying about Paris. One should put down the Eiffel Tower, it will make rent and buying cheaper for everyone. Don't care about that big building.
Didn't choose the shop, the people, the luxury... Just forced to be in the capital to have a job.
But it seems to me that each of us is born in a place, and that place, having a government and resources, is obligated to foster a decent and productive existence for that person as they pass through life.
A family is definitely more costly than a single person, and may be more difficult. But the article defines middle class as $50-$125k / year. With a $125k salary, you could afford 3 people living like me (including each having their own apartment). So I think the article is a bit extreme. On $50k, it'd be harder, but definitely do-able with some effort.
The trend in US wages/employment for youths doesn't seem to signal that. The trend in wages/employment for youths in nations with even lower fertility rates (Spain, Italy, Portugal...) doesn't seem to signal that. Even Japan, where absolute population decline is already underway, has good-but-not-amazing trends in wages and unemployment for youths. Where's the race to bid up the prices for young workers, and buy all their labor that's for sale, if an aging work force really is leading to crisis-level worker shortages? If the market expects a huge impending shortage of (e.g.) coking coal, you don't see the same lackluster demand for the output that's currently available.
Maybe you meant that the shortage isn't coming in the next couple of months or years, but in a generation or so, so the market reaction isn't there yet. The view that I subscribe to, which seems common here on HN, is that technological change is going to significantly reduce the market demand for human labor in a generation or so. I expect that automation will generally deflate the market price of human labor faster than an aging work force can inflate it.
Social Security solvency currently depends on lots of middle class workers earning wages, because its funding is structured that way. But that's a policy choice that is more easily reversed than fertility rates or technical progress in automation. If the problem is more about paying for retirees than lacking warm bodies to do work, higher fertility just makes government funding problems more severe: you end up with more people who need non-market support mechanisms if the market demand for additional human labor isn't there.
- 15% on "luxury" goods and services such as travel, coffee shops, restaurants, event tickets, and my car, all of which I can do without at slight to moderate annoyance.
- 5% on necessary goods and services such as groceries, household supplies, and transit across the Bay.
- 80% on rent, including parking.
The cost of production isn't entirely absent from my true expenses; I do need groceries, and some tiny proportion of my rent pays for the actual materials, construction, and maintenance on the structure and associated infrastructure. But my dirt parking space next to BART certainly didn't need producing (the most produced thing in that lot is the fee collection machine), and I spend as much on that as I do on food.
So, I would not mind even a massive increase in the cost of goods and services, if it came with more money overall (which I can also use for space) and/or a decrease in the cost of space (i.e. fewer people contending for it).
OTOH, all Bay Area tech jobs ultimately rely on consumer spending, so if there is not enough of that going around, probably no paycheck.
I think there is a reason why everyone is railing/downvoting on Ryan here, and it's because of a difference in definition. There's two ways to define "middle class". One is by what you can afford: house, car, but not stuff like a private boat, etc. The other way is just by taking some middle percentage of the income brackets (middle 60% or whatever).
Historically[1], Ryan is actually right here. For the baby boomers, both groups are right because they overlap.
Much of the societal issues were seeing and will continue to see for the near future are because those groups are once again starting to not overlap (in certain areas, as highlighted by the original article).
[1] Right by historically, I mean that centuries ago the lower class was like 90% of the population or something... Middle Class was mostly not a thing.
Nationwide the middle class is more like $40-50K (household income).
If your household (how many earners it is comprised of) is over $100K in annual earnings then you're in the top quartile (25%!) of the entire country in income, and decidedly not "middle class" (though, depending on where you live, you may or may not have enough to afford a home, much less a boat, a beach bungalow, eating out, going to the bars, etc.). Keep in mind that a lot of these cities are okay for singles, but once those singles get married and have kids they rapidly discover they can't afford the big city anymore and have to leave.
Perhaps another way of thinking about the situation, is not that the middle class can't afford traditional middle class amenities, but that the proportion of people who can afford those amenities is shrinking.
<pedant>That's not how this works. Middle-class, is by definition, somewhere in the middle of the household income range. Exact position is open to debate, but you can't just declare "only the top 6% are middle class!"</pedant>
Throwing out $200k as a typical middle-class income just demonstrates the bubble the OP lives in. I live in one of the wealthiest counties in the nation (Fairfax) and we don't come anywhere close to a $200k median household income.
But I agree; 200k is not the bottom bar or average for middle class.
Of course, all the space also has massive drawbacks... car-centric culture, sprawl, long commutes, harder to implement public transit, etc.
In 1973 average house size was ~1500 sq ft. In 2010 it's ~2200 sq ft.
In the area I live in -- not even a big city -- you're basically forced to choose house size and house age at the same time. If you want only 1400 SF you're buying an old house with old quirks (asbestos, a history of lead paint, old wiring...) If you want a new house you're buying more square feet and the additional burdens thereof (more space to heat and cool, more space to clean). There's practically no such thing as a new well built small house, or at least none that I could find when I was buying. I ended up in a 1940s house because all the newly built houses were too large for my tastes. And those huge new houses often had huge lawns that needed a riding lawnmower and ridiculous amounts of water (why is everyone landscaping a desert climate like we live in rainy England, argh...)
Is there some weird feedback loop going on? "Our sales indicators show that buyers preferred even-larger new houses this year than last! (Because we didn't give buyers any options to buy smaller new ones.)"
Wages have not been keeping up with costs or you might have a point.
You realize the median household income is 50000, right? So, in a small city you have to make 4x the national median to just survive?
Wow, I know the West Coastians live in a well-protected self-imagined bubble, but this comment really brings it to light.
Glibly saying that having fewer kids on average is better is awfully bold, verging on ignorant (as would the opposite argument).
It is true that in order to make ends meet in a big city, many families have many fewer kids (one or two, from what I saw in San Diego).