I visited Portland for the first time last month, and was struck by how much it reminded me of San Francisco minus the worst things about San Francisco.
1. San Francisco is a right bastard to get around since the various districts are spread out and separated by huge hills. Portland is easily walkable.
2. San Francisco has slow, dirty, overpriced public transport. Portland has a convenient light rail system which is free in the downtown core area, and drops you right at the airport for a buck fifty.
3. San Francisco is filthy. Portland is clean. San Francisco has aggressive panhandlers and crazy people everywhere, Portland somehow keeps most of 'em out.
4. San Francisco is insanely expensive and only those earning multi-hundred-K a year can afford to actually buy there. Portland is nice and cheap.
5. San Francisco has great scenery which is spoiled by tourists. Portland has perfectly adequate scenery which isn't.
Another nice thing: no sales tax. That means that you wind up paying what it says on the label and don't have to do the "compute in head and fumble with loose change" thing. Plus they've got good food, funky bars, and a classic video game arcade.
What they unfortunately don't have is a first-rate university, or anywhere else that might be likely to employ me.
Part of that's due to its comparative lack of suburbs, though, so unlike in most major cities, whites actually live in the city instead of the suburbs. For example, Boston is 55% white within the city limits, but Greater Boston is closer to 70% white, which isn't far off of Portland's 78%.
Edit: Actually it looks like Greater Boston is more like 80% white. The state of Massachusetts overall is ~88% white, and the Greater Boston area has about 60-65% of MA's population. Even if we assume every single non-white person in MA lives in the Boston area, they'd make up <20% of the metro-area's population.
If any hn readers go, be sure to hit up the technical bookstore a couple blocks away from the giganto bookstore. It is amazing. There are over a dozen rows of programming books, many with used copies right there beside them. Not just of old books, either. Last time I was there, I picked up a used copy of a book that had been published only four months earlier.
This is a how a once-venerable tech city loses its significance. Suffocated by incompetent governments and an unwillingness to build, talent is forced to move elsewhere and ultimately shifts the center of gravity toward their chosen destinations.
I for one look forward to Portland, Austin and the rest picking up where San Francisco left off.
The Boston area has been hurt pretty badly by high real estate prices. Young, talented professionals feel that if they're going to be unable to afford a home, they might as well move to SF/BayArea, where they're still unable to afford a home but at least have the chance to work on interesting projects that may one day let them afford a home.
Vancouver BC is having serious trouble with out-of-control real estate prices, where a huge volume of purely speculative transactions overwhelmed anyone actually trying to live there.
Crime didn't kill cities, crime is the result of their death. White Flight to the suburbs wasn't fleeing crime, it was concentrating it.
Vancouver BC is having serious trouble with people whining about real estate prices. My younger sister bought 6 months ago. My older sister bought last month. My parents are buying this month.
The problem with Vancouver is that Vancouverites don't save their money for a down payment.
For example, my parents have worked modest, blue collar jobs all of their lives and moved to Vancouver 2 years ago and are able to purchase. My younger sister is a financial advisor and diligently saved with her husband to purchase a home in their mid twenties. My older sister is at the other end of the spectrum. She's a C-level executive and was able to save and purchase on one income.
The out-of-control prices comment is ridiculous. Work hard, save your money, and it is possible.
The out-of-control prices comment is not ridiculous. I also think people probably don't save as much as they should for a down payment (and not just in Vancouver), but even if they did it is hard to look at home prices in Canada and not think we also have a bubble of our own waiting to pop. Our average household income grew at a much slower pace than real estate prices over the last ten years (adjusted for inflation the growth is virtually flat or negative for some professions), and our debt has increased considerably. This is not sustainable over the long term. I mean, the average home price in Vancouver is what, 600K? This is definitely out of control in my book.
I think that if people pay taxes, they have the right to complain that their government isn't keeping a proper lid on real estate prices. We pay taxes, among other reasons, to be protected from barbarians and invaders-- and what exactly are real estate speculators, after all?
Replace "too crowded" with "too popular". Real estate prices will rise and fall to reflect demand. If prices are ridiculously high, that's because lots of people really want to live there.
(By the way, I'm not disputing anything you said. pg's point about real estate prices is what reminded me of the Yogi Berra quote.)
Real estate prices will rise and fall to reflect demand. If prices are ridiculously high, that's because lots of people really want to live there.
Or:
1. It's extremely difficult to build. Only moguls can build new properties in New York, hence the emergence of the massively overpriced "luxury buildings" with unnecessary and expensive conveniences.
2. Government irresponsibility. The New York government should be barring the parentally-funded nonproductives
(e.g. fashion interns who whine to their daddies and get $5000/month apartments and useless hipster idiots) from living here, because of their effect on the rents, but right now that isn't happening.
We, as a society, are paying dearly for the sin of forgetting that not everyone deserves to live in nice places, and that culture rather than money should be the deciding factor (the mortal enemy of the good are those who are both uncultured and wealthy, who are like blind, rampaging, destructive animals).
I would much rather deal with a bureaucratic inconvenience such as this than get robbed blind on rent, and have absolutely no recourse. In other words, my answer is yes, because that would be an absolute improvement over the current, disastrous arrangement.
> Empirically, what seems to kill cities is crime, or the death of some industry they depend on.
That second cause is interesting. What if, instead of dying, the industry were to just leave? San Francisco's benefits are built on network effects, and if the network shifts away, why remain?
I've never heard of an example of a city that died from high real estate prices. Do you know of any?
New York in the '70s. I wouldn't call this "death" since the city came back, but I wouldn't want to repeat that debacle.
It's not high real estate prices per se that kills a city per se, but real estate volatility. When real estate prices are high, repairs aren't made because there's no need to-- apartments sell themselves. When they're low and vacancy rates are high, repairs aren't made because there is no point.
High real estate prices and rents also impoverish a city; they draw money out of it, since most of the ownership is outside of it (cf. New York, where absentee assholes own most of the rental property). Some people in the city benefit, but the net effect is negative, especially since the young and talented are invariably on the butt-end of property prices/rents. During the boom, this isn't a problem, but after the boom ends, prices and rents remain high ("sticky" is the economic term) and this drains the city like a vampire.
Ten years later, due to disrepair, poverty, and exodus of talent, you have a shell of a city. Then the crime starts, and the city falls into an arrangement like New York in the 1970s nightmare.
What's difficult, if not impossible, to predict is when this transition will take place. It's likely to hit New York, but I have no idea if that will happen in 2011 or 2030. The tricky problem with bubbles (and New York real estate is still in a bubble, despite the semi-collapse of the national property bubble) is that it's very difficult to predict when they pop, although inevitable that they will.
What happened to NYC in the 1970s was the same thing that happened to most other US cities at the same time. It wasn't caused by the high cost of living there. And in fact NYC has bounced back better than almost any of the others.
When real estate prices are high, repairs aren't made because there's no need to-- apartments sell themselves. When they're low and vacancy rates are high, repairs aren't made because there is no point.
How does that make sense? You're arguing that repairs are not worth it if it's easy to sell apartments (what does that mean? That the new tenants do repairs, or that everyone is willing to live with a leaky sink as long as they pay for it?). Or that repairs only happen when apartments can sell (so you'll only let the sink leak if you're going to live with it for a long time).
The utility of repairs can be positively or negatively correlated with real estate prices, but it's ridiculously unlikely for it to be both.
For what it's worth, I've lived in cheap and expensive parts of New York, and, miracle of miracles, people took better care of apartments they paid more for. As it turns out, it really stings if you'd be able to rent someone a loft for $8,000 a month, but you can't because they saw that that ceiling was cracked. People paying $400/month for a room aren't nearly as picky.
I think it has more to do with relative demand than SF having too much regulation, although other cities might have better regulation. One of the cities mentioned here, Portland, is actually one of the most strongly central-planned cities in the U.S.: http://www.oregonmetro.gov/index.cfm/go/by.web/id=277
It is certainly possible that the center of gravity may eventually shift to Portland and Seattle. However, I'm not sure what you mean by "unwillingness to build": Twitter, the main company in the story, is located in a repurposed warehouse/industrial district where you can't walk a block without passing residences and offices built or renovated within the last ten years.
Renovations may well be occurring, but residential housing is scarce, and housing density is low at least in part on account of zoning limitations on building height. San Francisco is unwilling to build up.
The high housing costs are a sign that the region's significance has outgrown its supply of housing stock, which will naturally send folks looking elsewhere.
Right, and why is it full of converted warehouses instead of full of forty-storey skyscrapers? Because the city won't give the owners of the warehouses permission to knock them down and build something that makes economic sense.
Somewhat OT, but I got weirded out by the story for a moment. It turns out that Scott McNeely != Scott McNealy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McNealy -- who almost certainly does not have any money woes whatsoever)
It's not just in high tech that you're seeing that either. I work with several nurses that commute in from Houston, Austin and Portland. They make more working 12 hour shifts for 6 days in a row in the Bay area than they can make working a whole month in their home towns.
I'm quite aware of that. I just think it's too bad that the majority of America is a vomit of worthless and aggressively ugly sprawl full of lazy slobs that drive away any talent.
This "majority of America" has good mid-size cities that could be great but have a critical mass problem due to the suburban mistake (e.g. Minneapolis, Madison). The cities themselves are competitive with the nicest coastal places, and the people in them are smart, talented and interesting (although not quite as ambitious as on the coasts). The suburbs are depressing and hideous, as you described.
Mentioning Madison and Minneapolis in the same breath is silly. Sorry Madison, you are in no way comparable. Minneapolis is about twice the size , harder to spell, and prince can be seen here.
Yes, damn those parasites. All those people working elsewhere and living in the Northwest are stealing jobs and not putting any money into the local economy. Err, wait...
1. San Francisco is a right bastard to get around since the various districts are spread out and separated by huge hills. Portland is easily walkable.
2. San Francisco has slow, dirty, overpriced public transport. Portland has a convenient light rail system which is free in the downtown core area, and drops you right at the airport for a buck fifty.
3. San Francisco is filthy. Portland is clean. San Francisco has aggressive panhandlers and crazy people everywhere, Portland somehow keeps most of 'em out.
4. San Francisco is insanely expensive and only those earning multi-hundred-K a year can afford to actually buy there. Portland is nice and cheap.
5. San Francisco has great scenery which is spoiled by tourists. Portland has perfectly adequate scenery which isn't.
Another nice thing: no sales tax. That means that you wind up paying what it says on the label and don't have to do the "compute in head and fumble with loose change" thing. Plus they've got good food, funky bars, and a classic video game arcade.
What they unfortunately don't have is a first-rate university, or anywhere else that might be likely to employ me.