
Socioeconomic sorting at the metropolitan level is making America more polarized - clumsysmurf
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/how-your-social-class-affects-where-youll-move/557060/
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Thriptic
Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public
transportation in coastal cities. Boston's immediately adjacent suburbs like
Cambridge and Somerville are filled with crappy run down houses converted to
apartments serving 2-3 users or groups. No one likes them besides the
landlords, they are generally of shitty quality / falling apart, and they are
extremely expensive. If they were bulldozed and replaced with high rise
apartments, costs would greatly fall. Similarly, if the T didn't suck so much
and serviced outlying communities, people could more easily live farther away
from the city proper, which would also reduce pressures on the city and
proximal suburbs to support everyone.

~~~
existencebox
Out of personal curiosity: I was in Boston for a while maybe 10-12 years ago,
and remember thinking that the T was so far beyond what most other cities had,
and served even the outlying areas well enough via the bus connections. (And I
was previously from Philly, so no stranger to decent public transit)

In that context I'm surprised to hear you say that the T sucks. Is it that my
memory is far out of date with respect to how the city grew? Or are my
standards very low? (Also viable is that I was lucky in that the routes I
needed to take were well served, usually starting from Cambridge)

To give another point of comparison, in Seattle now, I would give an arm and a
leg for something even roughly comparable to my memory of the T, let alone
SEPTA/subways. Baltimore was similar, in having little to nothing outside of
unreliable and sparse buses, and token light rail only along 1-2 "primary"
corridors.

~~~
nostrademons
(I grew up in Boston but now live in Silicon Valley.) The T has great coverage
but shitty service. Boston is second only to NYC in terms of the fraction of
the city that you can get to via public transit. The Red Line covers most of
the densely-populated Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge neighborhoods, runs
straight into the heart of the city, and then services even the lower-income
neighborhoods in Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan/Quincy. The Green Line covers the
whole Back Bay and Brookline area. Orange Line will get you up to Tufts &
Medford, and Blue Line covers North & East Boston. All of these except the
outer reaches of the Green Line have reasonable transit times.

By contrast, SF has good public transit if you happen to live in the BART
corridor through Mission & Market streets, or around 4th & King or Potrero.
But if you're in the Sunset, Presidio, Pac Heights, North Beach, Twin Peaks &
highlands, Excelsior, or really anywhere else - you can forget about it. It
takes as long to get from the Outer Sunset to Downtown as it does to get from
Mountain View, 50 miles away, to SF.

However, BART runs _on time_ , as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless
somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART
train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when
I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped
outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance,
or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the
station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-
maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.

~~~
burfog
The MBTA's T, Red Line, in Boston around 1995: At the train approaches the
station, people in the station hear an announcement and see it on a lighted
sign. It is something like "Braintree train approaching", letting you know the
direction and final destination. Inside the train, they see and hear something
like "Approaching Park Street. Next Stop: Downtown Crossing. This is a
Braintree train.". When the train stops, there is a similar announcement,
again both voice and lighted display, both inside the train and on the station
platform. People inside the train can read the brightly-lighted station sign
through the windows, and people on the platform can read a brightly-lighted
sign on the train itself. Another announcement is made just before the doors
close, and another one right after.

The other lines were about as good, with a few oddities like a human announcer
on the Green Line.

San Francisco's MUNI, around 2015, two decades later: There is no voice
announcement or message display when I board the train underground, either in
the station or in the train. Gee, I hope I'm going the right direction. The
train pops out of the ground and runs down the eastern side of the city. It
stops only when there is a person waiting at the stop or when somebody in the
train pulls a cord, there are no station announcements in the train, and the
signs on the stations are unlighted and/or hidden. There is simply no way to
count stops to determine where you are. You have to truly recognize the city
(for me: in the dark, as an out-of-town visitor) or stay focused on a GPS-
based map display. I obviously couldn't do the former, and my phone battery
was dying so the latter was a problem as well.

So it looks to me like SF in 2015 can't match Boston in 1995.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
That's the MUNI, which is pretty shit, along with the surface street bus
system. Caltrain and BART are solid though. The streetcars are pretty but
somehow slower than biking.

~~~
burfog
Caltrain and BART would properly be compared to MBTA's commuter rail, which
runs for dozens of miles out in every direction from Boston. These are things
that are longer range and more expensive, with fewer stops along the way.

MUNI is what matches up with the MBTA's T.

~~~
joe_the_user
MBTA's commuter rail is more equivalent to Sonoma County Smart Train or maybe
Caltrain. Bart may go the distance of communter rail but it's far faster and
more frequent, taking half an hour to cross the bay from Berkeley to 16th
street mission - at the best of times with quite frequent service in busy
times.

I've had horrific experiences with MTBA Commuter Rail canceling several trains
on the weekend without announcement, literally waiting 3 hour or more at the
station more than once.

~~~
burfog
BART isn't immune to horror.

A few years back, I almost planned to take BART from the airport to a hotel on
California Street. I'm lucky I chose to rent a car and stay in a car-friendly
hotel in South San Francisco instead, because BART stopped entirely due to a
strike. That was 4.5 days, costing the region about $73 million per day.

It bewilders me that such a mess is tolerated. That properly calls for
emergency replacements (possibly National Guard) and for the strikers to be
convicted of criminal mischief endangering public safety.

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throwaway713
As someone that lives in the south, this trend is extremely frustrating. A few
weeks ago I visited SF for an interview, and it seems like every tech company
on earth is in that one spot. The whole city feels 20 years ahead of where I
presently live. But all of my family is in the south, so I’m stuck with the
unfortunate tradeoff of choosing to focus on my career or living near family.
Because it sure doesn’t look like the tech companies are moving where I am any
time soon (with the hopeful exception of Amazon HQ2).

~~~
dnomad
I always wonder why nobody asks _why_ this sort is happening. There's a kind
of willful ignorance at work here. Are the highly educated and the knowledge
economy moving to cities because they like the beach? Or is there something
else attracting them?

What's even stranger is the blame. Somehow it's the tech company's fault.
Somehow it's the fault of the rich. I've even heard illegal immigrants blamed.
Nobody ever seems to think there might be something going on in the south that
is driving _away_ the best and the brightest.

~~~
crowbahr
I moved away from the south because:

1\. Few job prospects

2\. Terrible transit

3\. Disagreeable politics

4\. Hot

In that order. I moved to Seattle (which didn't really fix #2) and much
preferred it. Born and raised in Atlanta but no desire to stay. Off to NYC in
a few months to see what I think!

~~~
someguydave
Do you help reduce polarization by speaking well about the people of Georgia?

~~~
saosebastiao
I do, though I'm not from there. I went to Shaky Knees on a whim with a friend
last year, and I loved the city and everybody I met. It makes me want to move
there. I loved going to bars and actually talking to people I didn't know,
something that feels foreign and improper in Seattle.

I'm of the opinion that liberal western US cities hate southern politics so
much that they quickly jump to the conclusion that everything in the south
sucks. Terrible mistake.

~~~
someguydave
Good to hear this. I see many comments on HN where midwesterners or
southerners living on the coasts are dumping on their friends and neighbors
back home, and I think that behavior isn't helpful.

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rumcajz
Interesting book to read on the topic is Charles Murray's Coming Apart.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_\(book\))

Very much like this article, Murray focuses only on US, however, this is a
global trend. A person born in Koškovce, Slovakia will move to Košice for high
school, to Bratislava to attend college, they'll find their first job in
Prague, second one in London and after a short while they'll arrive at San
Francisco.

It wouldn't take a big stretch of imagination to write a dystopian Sci-Fi
about a future where members of Mensa live in extremely liberal city states in
Bay Area while the dumb are gradually pushed out to failing hellholes with mad
dictators in control.

~~~
madengr
The movie Elysium was essentially that. Though you did not mention the
homeless population in the Bay Area. Wealth does not make a place clean; the
Bay Area is filthy. Of course that’s liberalism for you.

~~~
thrav
The filthy parts are well known and mostly keep to themselves. The non-filthy
parts are some of the most beautiful city living in the world, with outdoors
access that rivals a resort town. (I lived in Park City before)

~~~
exolymph
Are you kidding? Have you been to SOMA?

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niftich
This data is great to back up processes one can empirically observe -- none of
this was a particular shocker, but the data quantifies the relative
differences between metros' fates very well, such as Chicago punching above
its weight in terms of balancing affordability with desirability among the
highly-educated.

In my opinion, the one surprise is Pittsburgh's particular set of
circumstances: in-migrants being less educated than out-migrants, but this can
be an artifact of Pittsburgh being a destination for education, which then
struggles to attract higher numbers of well-educated to stay or relocate there
for work.

~~~
nugget
UPMC educates so many medical professionals it's not surprising that there's
an imbalance. I don't think Pittsburgh could absorb all of those MDs even if
they wanted to stick around (which most don't). I'm surprised Boston isn't
similar.

~~~
Texasian
Boston is similar.

With so many universities, local leaders are always bemoaning he fact that
more of them don’t stay. For any type of specialized field, we’ve got the
school... in triplicate. God knows how many law schools and business schools
we’ve got scattered around the metro area.

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labster
I'd like to be thank the submitter for modifying the title of the article for
HN. The original title refers to social class, but nearly the entire
discussion thereafter is about economic class.

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Spooky23
I wonder what happens as things get worse and the foreign money dries up?

~~~
gcb0
you get a new rustbelt

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csense
So how do we reverse this trend? How do we get more educated people to choose
to move to, or stay in, the Rust Belt?

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internetman55
Charles murray has a whole book abiut this stuff (Coming Apart) and its lit

