Broke, crowded & hot: Top 3 reasons to flee big cities

[논둑길맨발로]

Broke, crowded & hot: Top 3 reasons to flee big cities

by Erik Curren, originally published by Transition Voice  | TODAY

Don’t worry, it’s just a movie. Scene from the 2010 film “The Book of Eli.” Photo: Warner Bros.

It’s a staple of summer disaster flicks: the scene of a panicked populace trying to get the hell out of Dodge. Or, after the bomb is dropped, a band of bedraggled survivors picking their way out of smoking ruins, hobbling along a shattered freeway littered with dead cars, empty except for the decaying remains of their occupants.

It’s all good fun in a movie like The Book of Eli. But Escape from New York is just a movie after all.

In the real world people aren’t fleeing the top cities like New York, Paris and Shanghai. Instead, they’re pouring in. And who can blame them?

In the United States alone, winning cities still have a lot to offer: Hot jobs with investment banks or at top medical centers; Foreign films, indie rock shows and used bookstores with quirky cafes; Ethnic restaurants, ethnic festivals and ethnic markets; World-class museums, art galleries and universities. And a hefty dose of people watching.

But for an increasing number of homesteaders, greenhorns and back-to-the-landers, the excitement of being right at the center of things is outweighed by the growing challenges of living in a megalopolis in an age of permanent economic decline.

As a weakened economy starts to rub up against the natural limits of life on Earth — such as peak oil and climate change — the biggest cities may become less and less attractive places to live. Here are the top three reasons why.

Photo: o palsson/Flickr.

1. Going, going, going…broke

So far, only rusted-out industrial towns like Detroit and Stockton, California have gone broke to the point where they’ve had to cut back big on municipal services such as schools, streetlights and police. By contrast, even in today’s tough economy, somehow New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other glam cities have managed to look more sparkly than ever.

City Hall may be covered in marble, the convention center may be booked solid through 2025 and corporate profits may be up. But ordinary workers in these winning cities could still be going broke, due to high costs for housing, parking and incidentals required to keep up with the Joneses. As the most attractive cities become playgrounds for the rich and privileged, the middle and working classes are being priced out.

And while essentials like food and water may still account for only a small part of a megacity dweller’s monthly budget, in a peak-oil future of higher energy costs and strained water resources, pumping in water and trucking in food from hundreds of miles away will start to break the bank, requiring more and more families to have to choose between putting food on the table and paying the (rising) rent.

Photo: Thomanication/Flickr.

2. Crowd on in, there’s room for everybody

Even as megacities more difficult to afford, they’ll continue for some time to pull in desperate immigrants and wide-eyed strivers from rural areas. It will take decades for reality on the ground in expensive, dead-end megacities to halt a century of get-rich-quick wishful thinking pushed along by continual advertisements for the allures of big city life in the form of movies and TV shows set in cultural and shopping capitals such as Los Angeles and Miami.

Even as the Internet allows more and more people to work outside of big urban centers, the advantages of “clustering” for certain technical and white collar jobs will continue to draw in highly paid professionals to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley or Boston’s Route 128 biotech corridor.

And because corporate offices will require receptionists, janitors and window washers while upscale families will need maids, dry cleaners and nannies, big cities will also continue to attract low-paid workers, who will find themselves either relegated to a shrinking urban ghetto or to cheap suburbs further and further away from their jobs in town.

Photo: 7 july /Flickr.

3. Hot today, hotter tomorrow

Everybody’s heard of the urban heat island effect, where cities of one million people or more can be up to 6 degrees higher than surrounding rural areas during the day — and up to 22 degrees higher at night. With climate change, big cities could get hotter faster than everywhere else making it even more expensive to live there because you’ll have to run the AC more.

This will be especially true in the new, sprawling cities of the West and South that were only made possible by air conditioning and cheap oil. Sunbelt sprawltowns such as Las Vegas, Houston and Phoenix — which recently sweltered under record 119 degree temperatures — will experience increasing numbers of heatwaves which may ultimately make them unlivable for children, the elderly and others susceptible to heat stroke.

But Boston, New York and Washington won’t be spared. More temperate megacities will also suffer hotter, stickier summers, requiring more AC. That will drive up electric bills and stress already overtaxed power grids, likely ushering in an era of brownouts and widespread blackouts as in 2003 — in turn, disrupting business and adding yet more costs.

East Coast cities will also have to contend with a future of increasingly weird weather, with regular repeats of the two deadly storms of 2012 — the derecho and Superstorm Sandy. As hundred-year storms start to hit every decade (or more often), many coastal cities will lose some of their most valuable waterfront real estate to sea-level rise.

When will FEMA run out of funds to keep (poorly) rebuilding New Orleans? And what will happen to Miami when South Florida begins to merge with the Caribbean?

Photo: Dougtone/Flickr.

Your small city future

Sounds bleak, doesn’t it?

Well, don’t despair. If you can’t abide suffocating in traffic on the 405 in L.A. or shelling out $4,000 a month for a studio apartment in Manhattan, and if you want to enjoy a future that’s more resilient in the face of rising energy costs and climate change, there is another way. Consider these alternatives to the megacity:

• One of those rust-belt cities like Cleveland or Pittsburgh that lack the luster of New York or San Francisco but are both affordable and located safely inland, far from the sea coasts that will be so vulnerable to storms and sea-level rise caused by climate change. Many of these cities have enjoyed a partial recovery that has reduced crime while increasing livability. And talk about resilience — their lower density offers more space for growing your own food (even parts of Detroit are coming back, thanks to the grit of their residents and their urban farms).
• If you’ve got the money, you can join George Soros and other rich guys in selling your gold and buying farmland. Urban retirees with more modest net worth may be able to afford enough land to start a hobby farm. Young people can apply for a farm internship or a fellowship at a rural folk school to learn skills and make contacts to help them get back to the land.
• A few dozen small cities like my hometown of Staunton, Virginia (pop. 24,000) offer the best of both small town and big city: no traffic, low crime and high quality of life with enough big city cultural offerings including live theater, ethnic restaurants and an edgy art and music scene, to keep you busy every Saturday night. And while small cities lack big corporate or government offices and thus offer few high-paid jobs, they’re friendly to Internet-connected telecommuters and entrepreneurs alike who appreciate the low costs and high charm that small cities offer in spades.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Tags:  

air pollution

back to the land movements

climate change

economic contraction

megacities

peak oil

About Erik Curren:  

Erik Curren is the publisher of Transition Voice. He co-founded Transition Staunton Augusta in December 2009 and serves as managing partner of the Curren Media Group, an online marketing company. He is also …

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-07-05/broke-crowded-hot-top-3-reasons-to-flee-big-cities

Report: Americans fleeing nation's big cities

People moving further from metropolitan areas in search of cheaper homes

 

Mario Tama  /  Getty Images file

A new survey suggests Americans increasingly are leaving big cities like New York in the search for more affordable living.

updated 4/20/2006 11:00:44 AM ET 2006-04-20T15:00:44

• Print
• Font:
• +
• -

WASHINGTON — Americans are leaving the nation’s big cities in search of cheaper homes and open spaces farther out.

Nearly every large metropolitan area had more people move out than move in from 2000 to 2004, with a few exceptions in the South and Southwest, according to a report being released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

Northeasterners are moving South and West. West Coast residents are moving inland. Midwesterners are chasing better job markets. And just about everywhere, people are escaping to the outer suburbs, also known as exurbs.

“It’s a case of middle class flight, a flight for housing affordability,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “But it’s not just white middle class flight, it’s Hispanics and blacks, too.”

The Census Bureau measured domestic migration — people moving within the United States — from 1990 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2004. The report provides the number of people moving into and out of each state and the 25 largest metropolitan areas.

The states that attracted the most new residents: Florida, Arizona and Nevada. The states that lost the most: New York, California and Illinois.

Among the 25 largest metropolitan areas, 18 had more people move out than move in from 2000 to 2004. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — the three biggest metropolitan areas — lost the most residents to domestic moves. The New York metropolitan area had a net loss of more than 210,000 residents a year from 2000 to 2004.

Advertise | AdChoices

Advertise | AdChoices

Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, said smaller, wealthier households are replacing larger families in many big metropolitan areas.

That drives up housing prices even as the population shrinks, chasing away even more members of the middle class.

“Because they are bidding up prices, they are forcing some people out to the exurbs and the fringe,” Florida said. “Other people are forced to make moves in response to that. I don’t have any sense of this abating.”

Riverside, Calif. a burgeoning city
The metropolitan area that attracted the most new residents was Riverside, Calif., which has been siphoning residents from Los Angeles for years. The Riverside area, which includes San Bernardino and Ontario, had a net gain of 81,000 people a year from 2000 to 2004.

Riverside has grown to become the 13th largest metropolitan area in the nation. It’s a short drive to several mountain ranges, and it’s within driving distance of the beach. Locally, it is known as the Inland Empire.

“When you look at housing prices in Southern California, along the beaches and coastlines, you’re able to obtain a very large home for a much lower price” in Riverside, said Cindy Roth, president and CEO of the Greater Riverside Chambers of Commerce.

Homes in Riverside aren’t cheap. The median price — the point at which half cost more and half cost less — was $374,200 in 2005. But they are less expensive than Los Angeles, where the median price was $529,000.

Other areas that attracted a lot of new residents also have relatively inexpensive homes, even if they are not the cheapest in the country. Phoenix, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth round out the top five metropolitan areas.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/12395115/ns/us_news-life/t/report-americans-fleeing-nations-big-cities/

Crazifornia exodus: People fleeing dense cities, regulations

Oct. 1, 2012

By Laer Pearce

In The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look, the Manhattan Institute has chronicled California’s fall from “the state with more jobs, more space, more sunlight, and more opportunity” to, well, the state with more sunlight.

In documenting the 3.4 million people who left the state in recent years — that’s just about enough to double the population of Oregon — the study identifies three reasons why California has been transformed from a “pull in” state to a “push out” state. Of course, one reason is the state’s pathologically unfriendly treatment of business. The second is the related collapse of its state and municipal finances. The third reason is less familiar to most, and shows just how good California has become at inflicting economic wounds upon itself.

It’s the state’s high density. While less than 6 percent of the state’s landmass is developed — about 50 percent is government-owned and about 45 percent is agricultural — to most Californians, it feels like a very crowded state.

In my home of Orange County and neighboring Los Angeles County, the density is hovering just below 7,000 people per square mile.  That makes the LA/OC megalopolis the most densely populated metro area in the country. San Francisco/Oakland is second, and San Jose is third. New York City is fourth, with a meager 5,319 people per square mile. Chicago is 25th.  Of the 50 densest metro areas in the country, 20 are in California.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, when places get too crowded, people (including business owners) move if they have the chance. In the late 19th century, America’s largest cities had densities of 50,000 or even 100,000 people per square mile.  When streetcars and trains, then cars, opened the door to suburbia, urban densities plummeted. Philadelphia is a case in point; its density fell from 56,000 people per square mile to 12,000 during those years.

As California’s expensive coastal counties started getting uncomfortably crowded in the 1990s, many moved one or two counties to the east to get more room for less.  Of course, those are the very areas that were the hardest hit by the housing and job market collapse. So now they are the California counties losing the most people to other states.

Higher density

What is progressive California doing about this? It should come as a surprise to no one that it’s doing exactly what it shouldn’t be doing:  Crusading Sacramento bureaucrats are forcing higher density on everyone.

The tool of this latest round of madness is 2008’s California Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act, or SB 375, authored by Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, now the Senate president pro-tem. SB 375 stepped up California’s regulatory game from just controlling every aspect of how houses are built to dictating where they can be built.

The law mandates regional sustainable growth plans, and definitely doesn’t include suburbia in the “sustainable” column.  The Brown administration is using it like a hammer in its Quixotic campaign to single-handedly free the world of global warming.  For example, Attorney General Kamala Harris recently sued San Diego under SB 375 because its long-range plan did too much for highways, the transportation system that supports suburbia, and not enough for mass transit.

More to the administration’s liking is the Bay Area’s “Initial Vision Scenario for 2035,” which proclaims that, by 2035, the Bay Area’s population will grow by 2 million people, yet there will be fewer cars there than there are today.  That will only happen if yards, tree-lined streets and a car commute to work are traded in for lofts by the train station.

But, as the Manhattan Institute study illustrates, when faced with a choice between already too-dense cities and less dense (demographically and politically) places like Arizona, Texas, Oregon or Utah, more and more Californians are opting out of the craziness.

A number of years ago, New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbook wrote, “Sprawl is caused by affluence and population growth, and which of these, exactly, do we propose to prohibit?” California’s Progressive leadership has apparently chosen both, firing one more shot into its suffering economy in the process.

Laer Pearce is the author of the new book, “Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State.” Portions of this column are excerpted from the book.

Tags: Crazifornia, darrell Steinberg, Laer Pearce, Manhattan Institute, SB 375, The Great California Exodus: A Closer Look

http://www.calwatchdog.com/2012/10/01/crazifornia-exodus-people-fleeing-dense-cities-regulations/