This is terrible.
I'm Portuguese and lived in Lisbon for 12 years before moving to northern Europe.
I lived in this exact neighborhood (C. de Ourique) in fact I lived meters away from where the photo was taken. Half my family was born and raised there.
Each time I go back I get sick to my stomach because it's obvious that society is getting segregated into two independent and very different groups with very different wealth levels and purchase power. The locals are just servants to these "expats".
I blame the local politicians of course. They always wanted to get rich on the real estate and they have pulled it off.
I heard Portuguese elected officials started rolling back a lot of legislation that was tourist/investor oriented like the investor visa and digital nomad oriented legislation due to political blowback. Is that not the case?
Ah that makes sense. Honestly really sad to see the political mismanagement in Portugal.
I've met a couple Portuguese diaspora members and they are great people, but it's so sad how the only option to build a strong career is to go abroad to London, Spain, or France despite Portugal having increasingly decent higher educational programs.
Too bad America bulldozed all their beautiful cities to put in highways. Imagine the prosperity and culture the US would have if every city was as walkable/transitable as New York.
America has one city that allowed itself to grow naturally and it became the economic Mecca of the world.
Yeah no this is BS. Pretty much nothing already established got bulldozed save a scant few downtown highways. What happened is that growth got "planned" either explicitly or implicitly via zoning and places like California and the Southeast that weren't really built up previously got built out in the form of this new sprawling system.
Those who think they can city plan the utopia of tomorrow with "zoning but with different priorities than last time" would do well to learn the lessens therein.
At least in my area of Kansas City, and I believe many other cities, this is simply not true. Downtown Kansas City before WWII was similar to many European cities. It still has boulevards and parks, but it had 300 miles of electric street cars, row after row of mixed use business with housing above stores, and a train hub that carried passengers to about any town in the region. It was a vibrant city similar to European cities today.
Under the guise of urban renewal after WW II, they literally bulldozed rows of downtown business' to install the interstate loop. The interstates chopped the neighborhoods apart making it nearly impossible to walk from one to another. They tore down about half the other buildings to accommodate parking for all the people that now lived in suburbs and drove in. They widened roads and shrunk sidewalks. They tore out most of the passenger train service and all of the street car lines. The effect was the downtown area of KC all but died, with many boarded up buildings. It became a place nobody wanted to live with a family.
With several major infrastructure projects it is just now starting to come back. But it is still a far cry from what it was. It is still not that walkable. There is still little public transportation, with only one short street car line and one or two slow and clunky Amtrak trains a day. Most people still live in suburbs and drive in, so we have never deleted all the parking lots and rebuilt the buildings to make space for a vibrant business scene or ample housing.
You know, I almost hedged by initial comment by saying "except for the obvious exception of Detroit which got less dense as population of the entire metropolitan area fell off a cliff and never recovered".
I should have known better than to leave an opening for types like you.
Most T2/3/4 North American cities (even the rust belt ones) have Economic indicators comparable to T1 cities in other European countries.
Using State+Provincial Level HDI as a proxy, entire States+Provinces [0][1] are comparable to entire Tier 1 European countries [2] on a socioeconomic basis.
When you look at purely economic indicators such as GDP/GDP Per Capita the same story holds [3][4][5]
If you're complaining about urban planning around walkability, you will need to specify which European cities you are comparing to, and which American cities as well.
It's unfair to compare a Tier 2/3 North American city like SLC or Phoenix or Vancouver to London or Paris when those cities are the Primate Cities of their entire country. Comparing cities like London/Paris/Frankfurt to NYC or Berlin to DC or Munich to the SF Bay makes more sense.
And finally, the kind of suburbanization you're complaining about is VERY common in Europe as well.
HDI is the primary metric used to compare quality of life and development between different governments.
As I shared in the comment above, HDIs of all 50 states in the US are comparable to Western Europe. The worst state, Mississippi, is comparable to Portugal, and the US average is comparable to the UK, Luxembourg, and Slovenia (on a separate note I'm very surprised by how Slovenia delevoped after the Iron Curtain fell) and well above France.
There are of course issues in the US that we need to tackle, but fetishizing European countries makes no sense when at best they are roughly middle of the pack if they would have been states in the US.
>As I shared in the comment above, HDIs of all 50 states in the US are comparable to Western Europe. The worst state, Mississippi, is comparable to Portugal, and the US average is comparable to the UK, Luxembourg, and Slovenia and well above France.
Which goes to show how official indexes can be worth nothing!
Anybody who has been to both Mississippi and Portugal can attest to that...
I've had a great time eating ribs in Tupelo and hiking in Peneda-Geres National Park near Porto.
Lisbon and Porto is a pretty city but Portugal as a whole has historically been an underdeveloped laggard in Europe due to political mismanagement (just like Mississippi) and only developed thanks to massive cash+infrastructure transfers by the EU, just like how Mississippi and other southern states were transformed via FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society.
Not sure what the relevance of those eras is to what we're discussing. Mississippi was also very afluent back in much darker days, but that was close to two centuries ago, and the New Deal is a century ago.
Modern day Mississippi is not even comparable with Portugal, even though the latter is still an "underdeveloped laggard in Europe".
And Mississippi has been that way (developing-worldish) for many decades.
> HDI is the primary metric used to compare quality of life and development between different governments.
It most definitely isn’t. It’s a very flawed metric which has rightfully been heavily criticised and it isn’t obvious it measures anything interesting at all. For all its flaw, a combination of GDP PPP and Gini index is a lot more interesting and trustworthy.
Jesus Christ, this is literally peak Hacker News. You realize you are saying what is the equivalent of "Big O notation is unnecessary for Computer Science".
The default HDI formula devised by the UN is a mix of GNI per Capita ADJUSTED TO THE PRICE LEVEL OF THE COUNTRY; expected years of schooling of children at school-entry age and mean years of schooling of the adult population; and life expectancy.
Literally in any Developmental Econ 101 class HDI is pointed to as the primary metric to compare regions.
Of course there are valid criticisms with weightages in HDI, but no one and literally no Economist or Policymaker worth their salt has straight ignored it.
GDP PPP per Capita and Gini are critically important as well, and are factored into modified HDI indexes as well, for example Inequality HDIs which add the GINI, and the post-tax Gini Ineqaulity HDI because the naive Gini formula didn't take taxation and income transfers into account.
>Literally in any Developmental Econ 101 class HDI is pointed to as the primary metric to compare regions.
Doesn't stop it from being useless.
>literally no Economist or Policymaker worth their salt has straight ignored it.
They should. No Economist of Policymaker has ignored the GDP either, but that's another bona fide BS metric. The job of the majority of economists and policymakers working for governments and related organizations is more as political careerists and representatives of power interests - and their predictions and results have a horrible track record.
Economists actually doing serious research look down on such metrics.
> Jesus Christ, this is literally peak Hacker News. You realize you are saying what is the equivalent of "Big O notation is unnecessary for Computer Science".
Sorry but it absolutely isn’t. Pointedly, the HDI is a composite indicator weirdly mixing together criteria with a formula which doesn’t make sense. It’s a total ass pull from the UNDP and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
> ADJUSTED TO THE PRICE LEVEL OF THE COUNTRY;
No need to all caps. As stated the issue of the HDI is that it’s a non sensical composite aggregating together correlated variables using arbitrary weights, not that it doesn’t adjust for price level.
> Literally in any Developmental Econ 101 class HDI is pointed to as the primary metric to compare regions.
Of course there are valid criticisms with weightages in HDI, but no one and literally no Economist or Policymaker worth their salt has straight ignored it.
I have a degree in economics and I have yet to meet someone taking the HDI seriously.
I did appreciate your comment about ”valid criticisms”. It did remind of one of my friend mentioning his “little issue” with alcohol. I will concede that the HDI is a composite indicator for which there are valid criticisms regarding variables selection and weights and by that I mean that it is a garbage indicator.
> GDP PPP per Capita and Gini are critically important as well
Yes, it helps that they actually make sense.
Equivalently, one could also look at proper metrics for the rest of the HDI components if they wanted but most of them are tightly correlated to GDP PPP anyway.
Pretty obvious solution, and not taking it (or something else of similar effective reach - ie.: something that yields more housing for ordinary people to live in, ASAP), makes it very difficult to falsify the thesis that officials and politicians just work for their own personal direct interest, rather than the interests of their voters.
It was exactly the same thing with the EU contracts with the Covid19 vaccine manufacturers.
I lived in expat-friendly suburb of Lisbon, Cascais, and commuted into Lisbon or airport as needed. Terrible rush hour traffic, though it was years ago.
>Since arriving in Lisbon, he joined a father’s group called Expat Dudes and Dads, and his son is learning Portuguese in preschool. “Lisbon means safe harbor,” he said. “My family needed safe harbor and we found it here.”
This is a very poorly thought-out statement. There's no reason why an upper middle-class family shouldn't be able to move to Europe, but claiming to need a "safe harbor" is a bit of a stretch.
Don't read too much into it. I doubt he would have thought to say that had he not lived in a town where the remark was possible. And something like that is irresistible to a reporter.
The main hindrance for U.S. remote workers is the timezone difference. I suppose you can rectify it with mostly asynchronous work, but it would be hard with a meeting-heavy job to work nights and sleep during the day.
Lisbon is only 5h later than NYC (except right now when it's 4h due to DST change mismatch between Americas and Europe). If your office in NYC could start at 7AM, you would start at noon and finish an 8h day at 8PM, just in time, or maybe a little early, for portuguese dinner time.
But doesn't work out as nicely if you're trying to match a California time zone
Always interesting to read about why Americans move to Europe. I noticed nobody said anything about healthcare. Instead, it seemed to be more about culture and walkability.
Lack of universal healthcare in the US isn't that big a deal to the upper-class/upper-middle class people we are talking about becoming expats because the professional jobs they tend to hold generally have very good health plans. Obviously it's a big deal for working class people as their jobs generally come with limited or no health care plans, but they don't seem to be moving to Europe.
I wonder how much further the situation in the US has to deteriorate until we stop referring to those moving to Europe as Expats and call them Refugees?
This term seems to be reserved (with an often racist/classist connotation) for people from the global south.
I've found that it's the other way around, Europeans want to call Americans refugees because they themselves use it as an insult. If I started introducing myself as a refugee/migrant worker at my tech job, people would think I'm making some kind of sick joke.
Or immigrants! I moved to NL (but took a local job at a local salary) and I don't plan to go back to the US. Obviously life happens and I can't predict the future, but I would not be surprised if I am applying for citizenship after my children become adults.
Check whether it might make sense to apply before. I don't know the situation in the Netherlands, but it might simplify your children acquiring Dutch citizenship.
It's been used whenever there were people moving out of real need rather than convenience or adventure. There was no question that Jews fleeing Europe in the 1930s/1940s were refugees even if they were white and upper class.
Officially you don't have that universal healthcare as a non-resident. Reality is hit or miss.
As most EU medical systems are not really geared toward private billing, if you go to a government-run medical centre for something small, it's going to be more effort for them to figure out how to bill you, so they don't.
Sometimes tourist-heavy places will definitely be set up to get you to pay, other times they just see treating actually minorly-ill tourists for low/no-cost as a cost of being a tourist-dependent area.
Sometimes the anecdotes about only having to pay 20 EUR at the hospital were really the salaried clinic doctor squeezing some EUR out of you that really should have been paid to the state.
Other times, if you go to a private-clinic doctor solo, they'll likely make you pre-pay. But if it's your local family's doctor, they may see you for free on a goodwill-basis, or fraudulently bill your local family member's plan and/or write any prescription in their name.
I went to the medical center and then a hospital multiple times while on a month long trip in Spain and Portugal -- came down with a weird bronchitis thing affecting my breathing.
It was 100% free. So I definitely got free health care on a tourist visa as an American.
Officially, they will only treat life-treatening problems for free, for tourists.
In reality, if the person doesn't seem to be trying to take advantage of the system, I'd not be surprised that hospital staff don't bother sorting out billing the patient.
I'm not sure why there is an assumption that the health care is good in Portugal. Purely annecdotal, the only Portuguese person I know moved to UK to work as a cleaner. She couldn't find work in Portugal that would pay enough to allow her to survive. Also she moved her dad over too because he need health care and needed to be near family. I've never looked into, I just assumed that the economy and it's health care aren't great.
Good so America creates individualist wealth so that it can pick up and leave, taking assets with it. Im certain americans are happy to pay the price of privatized healthcare for this sake.
I lived in this exact neighborhood (C. de Ourique) in fact I lived meters away from where the photo was taken. Half my family was born and raised there.
Each time I go back I get sick to my stomach because it's obvious that society is getting segregated into two independent and very different groups with very different wealth levels and purchase power. The locals are just servants to these "expats".
I blame the local politicians of course. They always wanted to get rich on the real estate and they have pulled it off.