As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study

https://santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-study-prosperity-cities-benefits-few

by hhs • 5 years ago

181 276 5 years ago

He speculates that poorer city dwellers are missing out on the increased social interactions that are credited with driving innovation and wealth creation in large metropolises.

I don't disagree, but it seems a little strange that the article highlights this point rather than the endemic rent-seeking of the urban upper-classes?

Ensorceled4• 5 years ago

It does seem strange to relabel the accelerating trend of converting housing into speculative investment vehicle as "wealth creation" and wondering why the poor are "missing out".

sgregnt3• 5 years ago

IMO, the eeath creation happens almost by definition from increased efficiency of resource allocation in the society: Thebl free market forces drive more efficient allocation of scarce resources, so the weath is created in a sense, that there is the least amount of waste compared with other alternatives.

CryptoPunk6• 5 years ago

Investing in housing is GOOD for society, because housing is not a scarce resource - the more is invested the more is built. It's precisely those places that have put up the most barriers to investing and building housing that have seen the greatest deterioration in housing affordability:

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

Beware of the anti-profit bias:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-an...

pasquinelli• 5 years ago

maybe it's strange, or maybe the santa fe institute's funding would be in danger if they published that sort of analysis. i tried to get in idea of what they were about briefly, but it made my eyes cross.

throwawaylinux4• 5 years ago

What are the urban upper-classes, and what is the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in?

BirdieNZ4• 5 years ago

Urban upper-classes are landowners, the endemic rent-seeking they are engaging in is via monopoly control of land, which people need for living and working. They are able to extract high proportions of people's income for rent from those who are unable to afford to join the land-owning upper class.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Would this hold true factoring in other sources of resources?

A soup kitchen wouldn’t show on an income statement and nor would a food bank or a free clinic, but I imagine that there are more support services in cities.

As poor people seem to flock to cities.

DoreenMichele5• 5 years ago

The article doesn't seem to have any real substance. Poor people have an inherent incentive to agree with you that "Yeah, dude, it sucks to be me and life is unfair and I get nothing but shafted! I need relief!"

And they aren't wrong to do that. Plenty of people were willing to take advantage of me and get free benefits from my knowledge, expertise etc when I was literally homeless and going hungry regularly while they did nothing for me. I still go hungry regularly and still add value and still can't figure out how to get my fair share.

I don't know what the solution is for me and I don't know what the truth is about cities, but I'm wholly unimpressed with this piece.

burlesona4• 5 years ago

I hope this doesn’t sound trite, and I suspect you’ve already done/tried this, but just in case it can benefit you or anyone reading…

At a certain point in my life I was strapped, and I really related to your statement: I was trying hard to make a living freelancing / gigging etc and had accumulated a lot of skill and knowledge that I was offering far and wide. I found lots of takers for free or super cheap labor, but I was having a hard time paying my bills and really needed to get paid.

Somewhere along the line I realized I had to just stop doing anything for free. I started telling people up front something like “I could definitely solve X for you. I bill $50/hour.” Some things that I had previously worked on went away, but others surprisingly started paying. Over time I was able to raise my rate.

I eventually realized that, before, I hasn’t valued my own time enough, and I had been much too generous in doing things pro-bono just because they interested me, or I hoped that they would open doors down the line. And I realized that other people would never value my time for a penny more than I valued it. And again, part of it was that I was chasing some work I really wanted but was _never_ going to pay, and when I started having pay as a requirement, it stripped some of that stuff out of my life but ultimately replaced it with more productive and satisfying work.

I know that’s easier said than done, but it was a true ephiphany and major life breakthrough for me. So, again just in case that’s helpful or encouraging to you or anyone else reading, thought I’d share.

teorema• 5 years ago

There's definitely a rural poor but the lack of social and physical infrastructure puts a baseline on what's survivable as you get more rural. I don't know they flock there as much as they can't leave.

Probably too more opportunities, which means more opportunities to go sour.

werber3• 5 years ago

I live in Detroit and as our downtown core and few other inner ring neighborhoods have grown exponentially the rest of the city has not changed or lost population. Our mayor is currently challenging the last census, but it’s looking pretty clear that the growth of the now largely white downtown core has been at the expense of the largely black greater city. Obviously anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean much, but my lived experience reflects what this article is saying.

bluedino• 5 years ago

How has it been at the expense of the others?

werber3• 5 years ago

Things like the district Detroit, the Hudson site, going back farther Comerica. These projects all used public funds and over promised, and undelivered.

semperdark2• 5 years ago

I agree with you that some neighborhoods are being left behind by growth, but what is the alternative?

Leaving aside race, Detroit needs to densify or die - nothing sustainable about supporting services in neighborhoods with one occupied house per block. Duggan has no choice but to chase downtown growth for tax revenue. It's a city with infrastructure built for millions and a population of half a mil.

werber3• 5 years ago

I’m just not sure that the investments being made downtown will be successful long term. There’s very little high density housing for sale, it’s easier to buy in the loop in Chicago than in downtown Detroit. And at the same time, non visitor amenities are lacking. It’s a weird situation

Ensorceled4• 5 years ago

When I was a poor student in Toronto there were lots of rooming houses and cheap hotels; those have all been fire coded, by-lawed and gentrified. Even a basement, single bedroom apartment is pretty much out of reach of somebody making minimum wage, let alone somebody scrapping by working odd jobs and odd hours.

It's not just the size of cities, as a culture we are deliberately exacerbating the impact of wealth disparity.

dghlsakjg3• 5 years ago

Canada is especially pernicious. Right now I live in a sort of nothing town on Vancouver Island 3 hours from Victoria or Vancouver and rent is STILL unaffordable if you can even find a place. As bad as it is in the states, I feel like it’s even worse up here.

The upside is that after having lived in both places, I’d still rather hit a rough patch in Canada. The healthcare, policing, and social services are all way more friendly in Canada.

waterside81• 5 years ago

Hey you got Tacofino so there’s that.

No but seriously it’s nuts how expensive the island is and I’m from Toronto

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

It's a fascinating mind trick:

1. Poor people are living in crappy rooms and hotels.

2. We must do something, so we ban those forms of housing.

3. Now poor people are sleeping in the street. We solved the problem!

Extra credit question:

Which problem was actually solved?

criticaltinker• 5 years ago

From the cited paper [1]:

We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent
For the poorest income deciles, cities have no positive effect over the null expectation of a linear increase
we find that mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of income distributions all increase with city size.
the Kullback–Leibler divergence between a city’s income distribution and that of the largest city decreases with city population, suggesting the overall shape of income distribution shifts with city population
Our results show that the increasing benefits of city size are not evenly distributed to people within those cities.
our analysis including housing cost demonstrates that despite agglomeration effects on income, bigger cities are less affordable for people of all deciles in the sense that they spend proportionally more of their income on housing; this is especially true for lower income people

IMO this presents evidence that dense and well developed cities attract wealthy individuals and businesses. Perhaps this attraction can be attributed to the diversity in food, entertainment, transportation, and labor force. The paper does not attempt to explain why the poorest income deciles do not scale with city population - but take a look at the other comments here for plenty of speculation on the dynamics of income inequality.

[1] Scaling of urban income inequality in the USA https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.13150.pdf

burlesona4• 5 years ago

I would love to see how Houston fares in this analysis, as AFAIK it’s the only large city in North America that is quite permissive towards residential development, including lower-end development. I suspect that a lot of what’s happening in general is the unavoidable scarcity of _land_ in prime urban locations manifests as a scarcity of _housing_, and development in general, due to the hyper-regulatory environment in most cities. And of course if you make housing scarce everyone is worse off, most of all the poor, but at every point in the income ladder people are paying much more per square foot of space than is necessary or desirable.

beebmam• 5 years ago

And for homeowners, that means more equity for them. It's a massive wealth transfer to homeowners

nitrogen• 5 years ago

It actually sucks when your house goes up in value, if you don't plan on moving, because everything else nearby has also gone up in value, so you'd be force to leave if you ever sold, and because your property taxes go up (in some places).

larsiusprime2• 5 years ago

You might be interested in learning about J. J. Pastoriza, Houston's first Hispanic mayor, and proponent of an ambitious and short-lived land reform movement for the city back in the 1910's

https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1427107150053183505

burlesona4• 5 years ago

Hey Larsius, thanks for sharing, that was very interesting! Maybe mistaken identity but I think we might know each other… we’re you in John Fairey’s studio spring ‘03? :)

ashtonkem• 5 years ago

My understanding is that Houston is facing different issues due to sprawl and transit. Housing is cheap if the commute is bad, but very expensive closer to the job centers.

If that’s true (I’m not from Houston!), then it does seem like zoning reform is probably not enough to solve America’s housing issues.

burlesona4• 5 years ago

I lived there for a while and owned an okay condo in a very central / prime location. 2bd 1ba. It cost $100k at the time (peak recession). I checked recently and saw it last sold in 2021 for $140k. From my later experience living in SF I’d guess that place would go for $800k-1.2M in SF. So, I think Houston is still pretty affordable, even in the urban core, compared to most cities.

stephenhuey• 5 years ago

It's hard to compare to some cities in the north since a lot of what is now considered Houston were actually numerous different towns separated by open fields earlier in the 20th century, and now they've all been swallowed up. But the inner part of Houston has famously (infamously?) had minimal zoning restrictions and the inner 610 loop had quite a bit more affordable housing than comparably-sized cities such as Chicago. Nowadays people get pretty annoyed at large new apartment buildings (even luxury ones) being built in the inner loop, but that's just because Houstonians have been so used to having far more houses in the urban center than other large cities (I'm thinking of walking down shadowed streets in NYC where you don't see the sun because the residential buildings are several stories tall--something uncommon here). But the lack of zoning is making it easier to quickly fill in with denser housing such as 3-story or 4-story townhomes and large new apartment buildings, so I'm curious if it will be incredibly dense in the center a century from now.

thebradbain2• 5 years ago

It's even crazier to think about that Houston isn't an example of zoning reform – they've never had any zoning to begin with! You can essentially build anything you want, anywhere, of any density. Yes, even skyscrapers in a residential area [1] or an industrial crematorium in the middle of a neighborhood [2] or, most famously, an amusement park-house-hybrid [3].

The problem is just that Texas, as a whole, has a planning philosophy of outwards, not upwards. Things are densifying in job rich areas now that they've just about expanded as far as they can (the city proper 669 square miles, or about twice the 5 boroughs of NYC, twice the geographic size of its sibling city Dallas, and 150+ square miles larger than Los Angeles; none of these sizes include surrounding suburbs, by the way).

All of this is long way to say that you're right – it's not just about zoning. It's equally about ending the grip of car-centric planning and not just allowing, but incentivizing densification and walkability. The fact 2/3rds of Houston is in (increasingly-frequent, due in part to the sprawl itself not allowing anywhere for water to runoff to) flood zones, too, is apparently not incentive enough.

[1] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/51/06/32/10774164/4/1200x0.jpg [2] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/51/07/70/10780179/4/1200x0.jpg [3] https://s.hdnux.com/photos/51/07/64/10779939/4/rawImage.jpg

splitstud• 5 years ago

To really understand Houston you would need more data. Chiefly, the rampant influx of illegal aliens driving massive growth, higher rents when construction can't keep up, pressure on unskilled wages, and rapid building of schools a d other infrastructure driving up property taxes. But some truth is not allowed to be voiced in polite society.

ryanianian• 5 years ago

Weird.

pas2• 5 years ago

Huston has many kinds of regulations on new developments. "Zoning" is just one of them, that Huston has a laxer version of. (Compared to let's say SF/LA.)

The problem is that there's an enormous missing middle (and high) density development regime in the US that would allow cities to adequately track the changes in housing needs.

pas2• 5 years ago

Huston is not that different, because it has a lot of other regulations that in effect do the same. (There's just less traditional land use "zoning".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k

Not just scarcity, but the lack of mixed use development, the lack of high efficiency city logistics (moving people, people's belongings, food/freight/cargo to shops/restaurants and bigger stores) prevent most US cities from being adequately flexible enough to adapt to changing economic patterns. (And to allow innovating new patterns, etc.) Not to mention that most metro areas are a zigzag patchwork of planning jurisdictions, and all of these municipalities are incentivized to push certain stuff away from them.

tbihl2• 5 years ago

Misleading title. The study (based on the abstract as I don't have access) doesn't track anyone in this study; it just compares deciles over time, ignoring movement between these. So 'the poor' may very well be getting something, but then they're not 'the poor' anymore.

In essence, the study rediscovered that division of labor proliferates as economies grow.

refurb• 5 years ago

Yup. Not a very convincing analysis.

There was another study that determined that gentrification actually benefited low income, in particular those who owned property (which is not a small number).

arc-in-space2• 5 years ago

Right. Furthermore, from the very abstract:

We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent.

Perhaps suboptimal if you believe income inequality is a massive problem, but scaling linearly with population? That's actually better than what I'd expect, and certainly not as tragic as the cherrypicked wording of the headline/news publication seems to imply.

It's another episode of an editor using a result to say literally anything they already wanted to.

Meta point: Nothing against the study itself here, but growing increasingly tired of this sort of truth-twisting nonsense. It seems like it will never end. How can we fix anything if we can't at least agree to not outright lie to each other?

NineStarPoint2• 5 years ago

There’s a fair quantity of research out there exploring how higher inequality between income brackets tends to come hand in hand with there being less mobility between those income brackets (both in an intergenerational and individual sense). I couldn’t say the extent that is true of cities specifically, but without reading the paper to see exactly the arguments made I wouldn’t out of hand be willing to say the title is misleading.

tbihl2• 5 years ago

Can you recommend any particular studies of those you mention about downward mobility?

bmmayer1• 5 years ago

This seems suspect.

Almost anywhere you look throughout all of history, in countries with rural areas and urban areas, poor people flock from rural areas to urban areas for the opportunities and wealth that urban environments offer. This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city.

This study purports to show that "inequality" is worse in cities, but of course it is. The richest person in the small village is not going to have many multiples of wealth than the poorest, because they simply can't due to limited opportunities to build wealth overall. But that doesn't mean the poorest person isn't worse off in the village than the poorest person in the city.

People voting with their feet make it plain that this is not so.

jollybean2• 5 years ago

"This is even an entire trope in literature: the hero from a small village makes a name for themselves in the big city."

That trope is a little bit of a trope.

It's one thing for young people from small towns to jump to a nice spot in the bigger city pyramid, but that doesn't speak to the fact that the poor, in cities, are still quite poor and have a low standard of living.

And frankly, nobody from a small town is impressed by someone 'making' it into a middle class lifestyle in the city anyhow.

Part of my family lived in a nice enough home in a small town, everyone knew each other, living was very cheap. Most people were actually technically poor, but how poor can you be if you own your own home, have access to basic resources, and material things, and very full social lives and hobbies, arguably more so than most city people?

The problem is that 'economic standing' is a crude assessment.

Toronto has these vast areas of older, ugly residential high rise buildings, you can hardly walk anywhere, there's maybe a crappy local strip mall nearby. No culture, no local institutions, no way to get away - you're just 'stuck at the bottom' in a pile of ugly concrete. Canadian winters are 'hard' but it's made 'ok' if there's space, places to play, trails and other activities which these areas tend not to have for both material and cultural reasons.

At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors.

All the 'working class' I know in small towns have either boats, RVs/Campers, often cottages while their peers in the city live in concrete jungles.

I feel that cities are far more likely to have fragmented communities, people are more individualist, which also means more opportunity in the technical sense for prosperity, but on the other end of the Bell Curve ... it's also bad.

The cities with less transient populations are probably a little better.

Cost of housing is probably a very fundamental factor.

taurath3• 5 years ago

At least in small towns you have community centres, people know who you are, often a local identity, vibrant social networks and access to the outdoors.

Other than access to the outdoors I would say the rest of that doesn't apply to almost any small town in the USA - may just be a canadian thing. In the USA we have meth, heroin, and a 2/1 church to local business ratio.

mc32• 5 years ago

As a city grows it accretes those looking for opportunity. Businessfolk look for opportunity in a large market where they have more buyers. Laborers look for work opportunities. People from the hinterlands who may contribute at the margins are the main contributor to population increase (vs newborns or arriving wealthy). This dynamic will put pressures on resources (in far flung Beijing satellite cities you have “ant houses” to house these folk who given their meager earnings cannot afford better dwellings in more convenient locales.

Even centralized government systems cannot provide an idealistic solution to the pressures growing populations put on cities; however, given that people never the less pursue those opportunities even at a local disadvantage will take it because it’s better than their home opportunities.

hhs• 5 years ago

If interested, a link to the 19-page study paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.13150

eric4smith• 5 years ago

I compare my time living in New York City in 1994 to now living in Bangkok, Thailand, 2021.

Both very large cities with about 8 million people each.

New York City (5 boroughs) has become almost unaffordable for someone on the mean wage and salary USA personal income, which is $66K USD in 2019. You more or less have to share your apartment.

If I'm renting an apartment in any of the 5 boroughs that is anywhere near decent, I'm probably going to pay over $2,000 p/m.

Even in Bangkok, although rents are lower, salaries are also lower for the people at the bottom, so in the end, it comes down to the same problem. Most office workers making under USD$1,000 per month will be living in substandard accommodation or with family.

I would say, that in cities, food and transportation are still relatively cheap. But rents are driving out a lot of people now. We will see the soft white underbelly of all of this when the rent moratoriums finally end. (Winter is coming!)

oh_sigh2• 5 years ago

Why use the median wage nationally, when almost everyone living in NY benefits from higher wages there? Even the jobs which require no skill and no work experience pay $15/hr

mjmahone17• 5 years ago

Exactly. $15/hr with $2k/mo of rent is entirely unaffordable (that would mean $2,400/mo in wages, or 80% of total pay). And that’s less than half the median wage nationally.

That makes the argument that NYC is unaffordable even stronger.

NineStarPoint2• 5 years ago

Crazily enough, the median household income in New York City isn’t significantly different than the national average. In 2017 it was about 1k lower than the nation, and in 2018 it was 2k higher. The mean income in NYC is of course a fair bit higher than the national average, but in general that higher minimum wage doesn’t mean that people in NYC make much more than anyone else in the US, despite the significant cost of living there.

yarky• 5 years ago

Median wage in ny was 68k according to the US census bureau (2015-2019). OP was talking about a mean instead of a median btw.

dragonwriter4• 5 years ago

the mean wage and salary USA personal income, which is $66K USD in 2019.

No, the mean wage and salary personal income in 2019 was $51,916.27 (the median was $34,248.45.) [0] Both of those are across the employed population, whole population figures will be lower.

66K is roughly (but not exactly, but maybe a ”real” figure using earlier base year constant dollars) 2019 median household income.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/central.html

fy202• 5 years ago

When I was younger I lived in a few different cities and the usual thing to do was share the rent with others. So yes $1500/mo for an apartment may have been unaffordable, but that's an apartment with 3 rooms so find some people to share it with and you are paying $500/mo each. If you get along with said people there are other benefits too vs living on your own, so it's a win-win.

The problem I see with this In my city today is almost all new developments are smaller, being studios or 1 or 2 bedrooms. As the older housing stock is replaced, it means at sometime in the future it's not going to be possible to share as I did. Most people who have families move to the suburbs when they outgrow their apartment, so there isn't much demand for larger properties amongst people who can afford to buy them.

tootie• 5 years ago

This just seems like a microcosm of wages not keeping pace with GDP. Anyone who doesn't own equity (real estate, stocks or whatever) aren't reaping the rewards.

cubano6• 5 years ago

Due to my BG check issues, I am currently quite poor. I can't really afford housing so I sleep outside on land owned by the Post Office.

Why they don't kick me off is something I haven't been able to figure out, but I'm grateful they let me stay so I clean up their parking lot and common area 3-4 times a week.

Trust me...the poor get the barest of scraps already, so of course they get nothing "when cities grow". What I've seen is that a few people with very large hearts and a ton of compassion make regular stops with a big pot of pasta and ice cream and maybe a pack of socks, under ware, and t-shirts.

To be honest, I've always been very much a loner so I don't really make friends with other poor people as most poor do in order to keep up to date on where the free places to eat are and all that kinda stuff.

I really don't want to be poor like this, but I guess it's no one's fault but mine why I'm in this predicament.

What I want more than anything is a job, but at last look I have 7 felonies (6 possession charges and a 2nd degree "Escape" charge that's always kind of fun to explain), but when you run a BG check on me thru some of the very popular and cheap apps out there, due to bugs in their systems and the way I've moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies because apparently these sites create duplicates that are missing info and then since they don't "match" to the real charges, the database logic inserts them as different charges.

I tried contacting the companies, but they refuse to even look at the issue and I'm sure think I'm a super junkie who has 50 felonies.

I don't really think it's fair to not give me a chance to work because of stuff that's happened 30 to 8 years ago. Don't you guys feel like a totally different person than you were 8 years ago? Like aren't we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways?

I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence!

It's SUCH a shit grind to go thru 3 to 4 long interviews, and to feel like you did well enough to get hired, and then never get called back about what happened. The last 10 jobs I've applied for I've gone through this same exact thing, and even though I hate being poor like I am more than anything, being the victim of a silent discrimination is worse.

metiscus• 5 years ago

Have you looked into expungement? I'm not super familiar with how it works and it does vary state to state but you may be able to fix some of the issues via that route. There might be some public legal aid available to help because I have heard the process can be expensive and time-consuming.

nostrebored• 5 years ago

Yes, at 8 to 30 years most of these should be expunged.

cubano6• 5 years ago

Expungement is one of those things..like "the year of the linux desktop" that always get brought up but never can actually happen.

The problem is the way the law is actually written...it 's written for a very specific use case (at least the one in Florida is) for people who committed ONE and ONLY ONE felony in their entire life (I think the Florida statue say that you can't even have another misdemeanor on your record, but perhaps I'm disremembering that).

It was never made to throw a big blanket over a lifetime of impulsive decisions like I have done. Plus, there is the problem of actually purging the perhaps 100s of private BG check database out there that various companies use that do not even advertise to the public.

Man I wish more than anything that I could just be given one chance to "start over"...you would see perhaps the most law abiding, risk adverse person you have ever seen.

I've been thru true hell with all this stuff, and people actually do change when the pain of staying the same crushes the pain of making changes.

In fact, that's the only time they do change if you ask me.

Clewza3133• 5 years ago

For most employers 7 vs 50 felonies will make no difference, any number that's not zero will disqualify you.

Being upfront about your criminal record (including that it looks worse than it is) and/or explicitly targeting companies that have signed up to Ban the Box and/or the Fair Chance Pledge might help.

DoreenMichele5• 5 years ago

A. I hope someone working on such apps reads this and does something about it.

B. I wonder if you can get some kind of gig work income that doesn't involve background checks.

C. I wonder if you might be able to develop some other source of income that doesn't involve background checks. (For example, I looked into panning for gold at one point.)

I'm sorry you are in such a pickle.

cubano6• 5 years ago

Hey man thanks for this...one thing I never want to do is to make a spectacle of myself and my predicament, so I am always really hesitant to bring it up bcuz, yeah, I get it I fucked up my life pretty damn good and people in general have plenty of problems themselves.

Yes I'm looking into perhaps putting together a classroom on one of those pretty killer live educational apps that are available these days. I used to teach guitar 30 years ago and I really enjoyed it, although I'm not sure I'm the best teacher ever.

trhway• 5 years ago

a life fucking sentence!

reading stories like that i wonder whether in such situations it may be simpler to just start a new life by like moving to a 2nd-3rd rate country where society isn't that cruel/unforgiving wrt. priors (at least not badly violent ones) and where English (plus US passport which alone places one into higher caste out there) and technical skills take you at least into minimally comfortable existence or even much further. Countries like Ukraine and Russia naturally come into my mind, and anecdotally on a trip to Mexico i met a local consulting shop owner who was telling me how hard it is to hire there.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS4• 5 years ago

That takes money to accomplish, and to get money OP needs a job. Which they can't get.

_carbyau_3• 5 years ago

At one stage wasn't it:

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

...

jandrewrogers• 5 years ago

Anecdotally, the State of Alaska sometimes serves that purpose in the US, a place where you can go to escape your past and get a fresh start. It isn’t the easiest life but it is common enough that people there are tolerant of it, because there are so many examples among people they know. It used to be a bit like that in the rural West but I’d say less so now.

nick__m• 5 years ago

So your basically being shadow banned, for unjust reasons, from working. Contrasting with here, you cannot email hn@ycombinator to fix those issues... The Kafkaesque multiplication of felony counts done by those apps must add a layer of insults to the injury.

cubano6• 5 years ago

Yeah...the just/unjust aspect is kinda of hard for me to judge fairly. I did some extremely careless crap in my life, and obviously never considered the pain of the consequences of my actions.

I totally accept that many of not most people who read my BG think I'm getting exactly what I deserve...to never be given the chance to redeem myself or to pull myself out of my shit situation.

I think that's an extremely harsh way to judge someone, and that everyone should be given an opportunity to make a living if they show they have learned from the pain of the past.

Also, considering that hiring is such a crap shoot anyway, (I read somewhere that over half the people hired as programmers today won't be at that job in a year) what is the huge deal with giving someone like me who has been in recovery for 2.5 years a shot to contribute to the bottom line?

I really am a damn good programmer, and I still have an amazing passion for building new systems using modern stacks. I am fortunate as hell that I'm apparently a "natural learner" defined as someone who spends their entire life always chasing new knowledge.

meowkit• 5 years ago

Like aren't we supposed to forgive people who have been through a lot of pain and suffering and who have learned new ways? I mean...these possession charges are a life fucking sentence!

Its cheaper to lock you up, give you a record; its more lucrative to sell that data - then it is to rehabilitate, reintegrate, and forgive.

I’m sorry you’re in this situation because it is bullshit. I’m not an expert on this, but I believe there are employers who will hire/help people with felony charges and hopefully you can find one near you.

weq• 5 years ago

Its complete BS that you cant stand on the merits of now. Just so some white men can hold onto political power and insight fear into the masses to get them votes.

pomian• 5 years ago

That's horrible. I think all of us agree and wish we could help. I would add, don't take it too personally that they don't phone back or explain. That happens at all level of job hunting. It feels offensive and rude, but it happens all the time. Keep trying and good luck.

cubano6• 5 years ago

Thank you very much for your insightful and kind words...they really do inspire me.

Chris20483• 5 years ago

due to bugs in their systems and the way I've moved around a lot, it literally looks like I have about 50 felonies

I think this should be illegal - it's basically slander.

jcims• 5 years ago

I ran a small consultancy for about 15 years and came away convinced that is the way to go for folks that can't get work because of a criminal record. Even though we were entrusted with some pretty serious information (we were in infosec), none of our customers except for one large bank and the federal government did any kind of independent background checks or insisted on any specific hiring practices. I think you probably need the facade of a brand instead of just Joe Blow, independent contractor, but most people just trusted it. We did have a few customers insist on E&O insurance, which may present some challenges, but most didn't care about any of that.

This might seem like a million miles away from where you are now, but if the skills you have or can develop are marketable it might be something to look into...if for no other reason than to give you some hope.

cubano6• 5 years ago

You have to know that I've tried, and continue, to try this, but apparently it seems like my addictions are almost certainly tied to my inability to create relationships like the ones needed to get hired like this.

Loner-ism isn't exactly the best trait for landing contract jobs, or for sales in general...just in case you were perhaps wondering.

I had a fair amount of success on the Upwork platform until some real dickweek in New Jersey destoryed my JSS score because I wouldn't violate federal law and allow them to dictate the exact hours I was to work as a 1099 IC.

Worse, I feel, is that Upwork agreed with them (of course because they have the money) about this situation that could not be more plainly written on the IRS website.

I don't know exactly how you landed the contracts you did in order to pay the bills and such, but I don't seem to have any skill with that, so while I really appreciate the brainstorming everyone is doing, people should know that I'll never give up trying to better my life and make a living doing what I love.

Clewza3133• 5 years ago

This study only covered US cities, and the main factor seems to be housing prices. It would be interesting to replicate this in places where cheap housing is more abundant, be it through liberal zoning (Tokyo), subsidized public housing (Singapore) or shantytowns (much of the developing world).

boplicity5• 5 years ago

For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society, income inequality, particularly as it relates to housing, should be front-and-center in our list of things to address.

Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work.

In many cities, people have been pushed further and further away from the city core because of high housing costs. This leads to more and more driving. It's not like driving is a choice, either. It's easy to say "stop driving so much, you're destroying the planet!" But, people have bills to pay, mouths to feed. So they drive (long distances) to work.

Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality. These things are a major problem directly related to climate change. By addressing these things head on, we can make the world much safer, in terms of climate change, and much better, in terms of actual quality of life for the majority of people living and/or working in cities.

lotsofpulp10• 5 years ago

The solution is quite simple too. Make fuel $10/gallon. If that is not sufficient, then $20, or $30. And so on.

jacobolus3• 5 years ago

This is a good solution, but it needs to come with some significant cash transfers for people most immediately harmed (e.g. via universal basic income), and with a significant public commitment to build affordable walkable neighborhoods with world-class public transit.

dragontamer• 5 years ago

So your solution to include poor people in cities is to have the poor pay more money for gasoline?

Wouldn't the more immediate effect be that the poor stop coming into cities?

patothon• 5 years ago

great way to make the poors poorer and make poors pay for a problem that richer folks tend to create. This would effectively create a tax on the poor, as poors are the ones that live further away the pockets of work.

bluefirebrand3• 5 years ago

All this does is siphon money from people, and increase people's desperation.

It's not like you can just choose to not work anymore. If your job is a long commute away that's money you have to spend no matter what on transport.

There often aren't other options. Most transit in North America sucks inside cities and doesn't serve outlying areas very well at all.

Long commutes are an effect of companies centralizing in big urban areas. They don't care how long it takes their workers to get to the office as long as they don't have to pay for it.

Maybe make companies responsible for their employees gas, insurance, and commute times, you might see satellite offices spring up all over the place in more rural areas so their workforce has smaller commute times.

lumost5• 5 years ago

This assumes that people have a choice in their daily commutes. Unfortunately the majority do not, if gas went to 30 dollars a gallon many would be forced to sleep in cars/tents closer to the office.

Starbucks won’t cover 400 dollar daily commutes for baristas in downtown SF.

riversflow• 5 years ago

This is a fantasy and completely regressive. How do you plan on dealing with the ensuing riots? Housing supply doesn't appear overnight, especially in the US where building, worker safety and environmental standards slow the process down to a crawl. Most of the new urban housing is 4 story wood construction because of the above reason, not nearly the density needed to eliminate cars without massive mixed rezoning efforts that are politically unfeasible or massive mass transit infrastructure investments that would also suffer the same issues as higher density housing developments listed above, also throw into the mix that there is a cultural aversion to mass transit in the US that won't likely get resolved in time to fight climate change effectively.

You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.

closeparen2• 5 years ago

As long as the housing stock is what it is, most people need to drive in order to live.

We can and should transition towards walkable and transit-connected apartments, but the problem there isn't a lack of demand.

goatlover3• 5 years ago

Do you think this is politically viable, particularly in the US, which has a lot of open space and long commutes? Are you going to apply this tax to rural communities and farmers as well?

ineedasername4• 5 years ago

That would have a particularly large impact on food prices. Increasing the portion of food cost attributable to fuel by between 3x and 10x would hit poorer people particularly hard. It would raise the price of pretty much everything else too, all of which hits people harder the lower they are on the economic ladder.

Maximizing the speed of implementing renewable energy that can power EV's, and scaling EV production to more affordable levels are much less likely to stomp on the poor. And unlike trying to raise gas prices to $30 it's actually realistic from a social/political standpoint, especially since we're already on that path, just not as fast as we could be.

This is not a simple problem, and it's exceedingly rare that a complex problem has such a simple solution as this. Even the renewable/EV combo has inumerable variables behind it that have taken decades to get us to the point we're at now.

heavyset_go4• 5 years ago

The market didn't find an efficient solution to this problem, so you want to use non-market forces to influence the market and then double down on relying on the market to find an efficient solution again?

How much do we have to sacrifice to the market before we'll admit that maybe we should consider other solutions?

oblio2• 5 years ago

Well, it would actually be a good start and maybe push Americans to smaller and more efficient cars. The average price of gasoline is ~$7 in Europe, in poorer countries, and people seem to make do.

But I doubt the average American will give up the quality of life of owning a car that probably weighs have half a ton more than the average European car.

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

My Dad recently needed a place to live. No matter how far I drew the circle on Zillow in our part of the state, there were no rent houses, for any price. I texted my realtor about it and asked if it was the Airbnb effect. She said “Yes, probably.”

Infuriating.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 5 years ago

Does that just mean landlords aren’t putting houses on Zillow? Unless you are suggesting there are literally no houses for rent in your city?

Usually I found Craigslist had a lot more inventory when I was looking for a house to rent.

smabie• 5 years ago

You can just talk to the airbnb owners. I've been pretty successful in finding housing inventory that way.

Or maybe Zillow just doesn't anything listed.

epistasis10• 5 years ago

I would say a much bigger problem is the lack of building, and the lack of new houses.

The population grows about 2% per year. We have not been building nearly enough to keep up. Even if Airbnb is taking 5% of the units in a huge metro area (how?), then that is still just a few years of building that have been missed.

The root of the problem is that we let people hoard land by severely limiting what can be done with a plot of land. By doing this globally over metro areas, we cause a huge shortage of land which drives up land "rents" (rent in the economic sense, not as much in the apartment leasing sense).

zdragnar• 5 years ago

I'll second the recommendation for Craigslist. Zillow is probably the last place I would look for a house to rent.

Short term rentals may end up being more profitable, but are also seriously more work, and a lot of the smaller landlords don't want that.

Then again, with the eviction moratorium and other regulations that make dealing with problem tenants becoming heavy handed, I dont think I would ever want to have long term renters either, so... good, long term renters get the worst end of the deal, I guess.

hattmall• 5 years ago

A rental would only be on Zillow if it's listed with a real estate agent on the MLS. Which is pretty rare for most rentals in my experience. They are also usually more expensive.

xyzelement• 5 years ago

Well that sounds a little weird - you're saying people aren't renting out houses on platform X because they rent them out on platform Y?

It depends on where you live of course but my wife and I recently house shopped and inventory was super-tight because (a) fewer people were willing to have people in to see the place due to COVID (b) fewer people were moving out of houses and into apartments due to WFH and (c) many people were looking to move from apartments into houses.

There was also a big move out of cities - you could easily rent/buy in NYC but good luck finding something in the suburbs.

All of these factors would affect rental tightness/availability where you are. I'd look into that more, rather than accepting a vague "yes, probably" as an explanation.

jazzyjackson2• 5 years ago

You can rent monthly on Airbnb. If I can get a house for 1200/month on Airbnb vs what used to be available on Craigslist for 800 or 600 a month, is that Airbnb’s fault, or is it just the market rate now and it happens that Airbnb is the platform de jour ?

mogadsheu• 5 years ago

Agree with most of the observations but... what does climate change have to do with metropolitan inequality?

All other factors being equal, high city populations relative to the countryside should be more resource efficient.

jacobolus3• 5 years ago

The point is that moving people to far-flung low-density suburbs with >1-hour car commutes (and a need to make all other trips by car) is also very polluting and resource inefficient, compared to locating people where they can commute quickly on foot, bicycle, or public transit.

Better is to build a serious transit network with regular fast access to the city center, with dense neighborhoods near transit stations (3–6 story apartment buildings for at least a couple blocks surrounding each station). Look to Japan for an example of how to do zoning and urban planning at a national scale.

ninthcat• 5 years ago

Higher density indeed tends to be more resource efficient. The problem is much of what is called a "big city" in the US is a sprawl of low-density suburbs that, due to their city planning, require more driving to get to anything than, say, if you lived in a small town.

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

Because some people believe that a major part of solving climate change is having people live in dense cities.

garmaine6• 5 years ago

Why? People need to get to work, so they drive. Two hour commutes in carbon-spewing cars happen because people can't afford to live near their work.

The emissions of all consumer cars together is a drop in the bucket compared to other CO2 sources.

boplicity5• 5 years ago

Source?

"Light Duty Vehicles", which are presumably cars, make up over half the "transportation" emissions in the US, and transportation is the leading source of emissions.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

makeitdouble2• 5 years ago

Housing inequality, income inequality, transit inequality are major problems that have deep effects on our societies and our future as nations.

For those concerned about the potential of climate change to severely harm our society

IMHO they should heavily focus on the most impacting forces to climate change, which are industrial emissions. Or really, we could try to think of any huge impact environmental crisis, and come to the conclusion we should do something about industrial accountability as they represent more than 90% of the volume in most cases.

boplicity5• 5 years ago

Can you cite your source for this?

Transportation, in 2019, was the leading source of emissions, with industry ranked third, behind electricity.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

quickthrower2• 5 years ago

I think the “they” is different when looking at different aspects of the problem.

xwdv• 5 years ago

The only thing that should be front and center for climate change is the large scale adoption of nuclear energy across the globe. And then, carbon recapture.

Everything else, is a pet project riding on the coat tails of a larger crisis.

boplicity5• 5 years ago

Can't say I disagree!

epistasis10• 5 years ago

If you spend a small amount of time investigating nuclear and the recent failures in construction across the globe, and compare it to the successs of renewables and storage, I think you'd change yourself mind fairly quickly.

Nuclear was a technology that was overhyped in the 20th century but never delivered on its promise. We have far better, cheaper, and more flexible tech now to replace it.

Valgrim2• 5 years ago

I agree nuclear could be part of the solution, but nuclear is a dead horse and we can't just continue to beat it. It won't be revived as long as people don't feel secure about it. Beside the obvious reasons for it's rejection (catastrophic failure modes, WMD proliferation, costs overruns, building delays, waste management, vulnerability to social instability, rising sea levels and freshwater shortage), we have to think about what it means to go full-on nuclear and enable the same kind of consumption growth that put us in this position in the first place. We're just going to create another environmental crisis down the road (which may or may not be related to all those reactors).

We need to find how we can continue to improve our quality of life while reducing our consumption.

gravypod3• 5 years ago

Just to demonstrate, because I've met people who've never been in this sort of situation, this was my commute for ~2 semesters of college: https://goo.gl/maps/8deDf74vRGDkeovRA

My mom had recently begun using again and I said "enough" and moved in with a relative. ~3 months in I had gotten a job in Hoboken, NJ (https://goo.gl/maps/ruU5Ppz746xv5ZeXA) and would have to drive from my relative's house to my college/job every day and drive back. I couldn't afford the boarding costs for on campus residency especially with the added pain of having to move in/out every semester.

Each day I drove ~80 miles and had to fill up my tank. It was still some how barely cheaper than renting in the area and all I could afford.

This kind of thing really kills you inside. It's truly painful. For me, I would wake up at 5AM each day to drive west to east with the sun in my eyes. Then I would stay at school and work until around midnight where I'd drive back east to west with the sun in my eyes. I was surviving with ~4hr/night of sleep. I wish we lived in a world where no one else had to go through that torture (for lack of a better word).

rexreed• 5 years ago

How was the sun in your eyes during the midnight drive back east to west in NJ? Even during the summer solstice, sunset is around 9pm in NJ.

I get your point though, driving bleary eyed is not only soul sucking, but very dangerous for yourself and others on the road. Not to mention the ecological and time waste issues. Although I would note a 40 mile each way commute is sadly not out of the ordinary for America. Turns out the average commute distance for NJ is 40.9 miles. See stats here: https://www.answerfinancial.com/insurance-center/which-state...

heavyset_go4• 5 years ago

For reference, and to show how much it adds up, that area you commuted in has the longest average commute in the US[1]:

In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.

They're using full days in that calculation. The average commute there results in ~40 8-hour work days of driving a year.

[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator

abc_lisper• 5 years ago

I am sw engineer in the bay area, and I have a 3 hour commute with sun in my eyes, and I am actually paid well! Even getting paid well won't suffice here :). I have thought of moving to a different area, just for avoiding the sun, not the commute, but pandemic threw a wrench in my plans. House prices reached the stratosphere. Few more years I guess

fy202• 5 years ago

It's often suggested to increase fuel taxes to force people to drive less. I guess you were spending around $400 per month on fuel for this commute. Would you have done anything different if fuel costs were double that? (And let's assume getting a more efficient car wasn't an option)

jader2012• 5 years ago

Many on HN seem to forget that not everyone lives near the city or works in a city, where “city” is defined by an area with enough commercial, residential, and industrial within walking distance of each other to support a car-less lifestyle.

But in fact, only a portion (of the US, at least — 31% [1]) live in urban areas that would allow them to go car-less, even if you take the housing issues out of the equation.

If the rest (69%) even lived right next to work (which many couldn’t, since in many areas, there isn’t housing close to their workplace), they’d still have to commute everywhere else.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...

amanaplanacanal2• 5 years ago

The term “commute” is typically used for the daily drive to work. You seem to be using it for something else.

sershe• 5 years ago

It has much less to do with inequality, and much more with zoning patterns in North America (and few other countries). I am not so sure about that, but it may actually be reverse - the richer people may choose to live far away, and drive, in most cities.

If inequality had anything to do with it, you would expect more unequal (or more expensive) cities to be more sprawling - as people are "pushed out" further by higher prices; but that is not the case. Why? Probably because people actually want to live far away, or don't care either way if they can trade off for e.g. more space, so they do (disclaimer: not me until 2020).

Similarly, you would expect more unequal cities around the world to be sprawling, with more driving. Yet, many cities where the central area is unaffordable to locals do quite well with transit. Related to the above, many do have a ton of people who drive, and they may make up in low speed/inefficiency what harm they fail to produce because they don't drive as far. Again, because people, apparently, want to drive as soon as they can afford it (disclaimer: not me).

raxxorrax• 5 years ago

You won't get rid of individual transportation. This just won't happen, even if you triple or quadruple investments in infrastructure. Getting into a city core is actually readily available in most places.

The solution has to be to make individual traffic CO2 neutral.

lkbm• 5 years ago

True, but can we cut it 50%? Can we convert 20% to bicycles, or 10% to walking, or 5% to scooters, or all of the above?

I don't think we'll get rid of all personal transportation, or even all car usage, but it's highly variable from city to city, and I suspect we could convert some of the "worst" cities to be more like the "best".

We should also decarbonize private cars, but we should be pursuing battery of solutions.

RickJWagner• 5 years ago

Did the Covid era of lockdowns and Zoom day-to-day make a dent?

Phrodo_00• 5 years ago

People need to get to work, so they drive.

This is not an immediate conclusion. There exist multiple alternatives to driving, but it's also up to cities to provide them.

aaron6952• 5 years ago

As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study

This is wrong

As cities get bigger everyone benefits as expected confirmed by the study -

"We show that income in the least wealthy decile (10%) scales close to linearly with city population, while income in the most wealthy decile scale with a significantly superlinear exponent."

"We repeat our analysis after adjusting income by housing cost, and find similar results"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349682590_Scaling_o...

Clewza3133• 5 years ago

It's not "wrong", you're just parsing it differently. The title means that the poor don't enjoy any additional benefits from that growth, since their expenses scale accordingly; thus theie net growth in disposable income is "nothing at all".

arc-in-space2• 5 years ago

That is certainly the original meaning, but do you think that after seeing the headlined "nothing at all" before reading further, most people will arrive at this exact understanding?

There is a very good reason the title used quotation marks, and it's not because it's a quote.

aaron6952• 5 years ago

Expenses don't change with city size with a few exceptions. Housing being the only one they look at, which I think is fair. With housing costs removed they say -

"The poorest two deciles in bigger cities make about the same income as their counterparts in smaller cities"

Which does match the title.

I think there are a few obvious problems with this. But as a paper it's a good start. I object to the strongly worded title, but it's not wrong from the paper.

ineedasername4• 5 years ago

It doesn't seem to address per capita income relative to cost of living.

I don't think astronomical income differences are a great thing, but if the COL-adjusted income is higher among, say, the bottom 25% in a city than in a suburban or rural area, that would be an important factor to take into account. Even more so if COL-adjusted income is lower since that would mean the poor are getting less than nothing.

Just looking at the income gap doesn't really tell the story though.

41209• 5 years ago

Even 10 or 11 years ago you could find a studio apartment in LA for 600 to 700$.

It wasn't perfect( mine didn't have a kitchen, I learned how to cook pasta via a rice cooker), but considering it gave me a much needed escape from the insanity of my family, might as well of been a mansion.

I was making 10$ an hour back then, at 40 hours a week I'd take home maybe 1300 a month.

Rent was very doable. Now the same apartment is 1100$, minimum wage is 15$ but it's harder to get a 40 hour work week. I strongly believe you should be able to at least move out at 18, 19, etc. The best way to deal with a toxic family is dealing with them less.

But that's largely impossible now.

CryptoPunk6• 5 years ago

This is because regulatory restrictions inhibiting housing construction leads to housing shortages which prices out lower income workers:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

S_A_P• 5 years ago

I will preface this by saying that I hate sprawl and think we should figure out how to disincentivize it. But why would the size of a city growing magically make people more wealthy? It isn’t magic, a person would need to somehow get a piece of the city via real estate or a business to benefit from population growth.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

The people who own see their property values rise. The people who rent see their monthly payments rise.

coder-3• 5 years ago

inequality is primarily an urban phenomenon, arising from underlying social dynamics

I'd love for West to provide some corroborating evidence for that claim...

taurath3• 5 years ago

One thing I've noticed about NA cities vs those in Asia is that NA cities sort of just stop growing upwards at a certain point - they never make the leap to having an actual urban core, with transit, density, and many apartment buildings.

Condo buildings in asia often can have a 10x-100x difference in price between units. The maid for the person in the penthouse might live downstairs, or a few buildings away. They planned for their cities a lot better to actually have a lot of people in them. New condo projects go up constantly, all the time. Seattle for a while in the past few years had the most cranes in use in the US, at something like 18. That number seems pitifully low.

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

Neither do the middle class. My property taxes as a home owner just keep going up and I don't really see anything in return for that from being in a growing city. I suppose I can sell my house for a tidy profit, but that's not why I moved here. I moved here for friends and the city as a platform to enjoy life.

brozaman• 5 years ago

I discussed this with a mate precisely yesterday, we ended up agreeing that people who have no/low qualification jobs shouldn't move to big cities, at least here in Spain (maybe in other countries it's different).

Most of this jobs will pay close to the minimum wage anyway but the living expenses are significantly lower in the smaller towns. I don't know how much of this can be exported to other countries such as the US though.

I live in Spain in a small town (<100k citizens) and a single person with a modal wage can easily afford to own both a house and a car. And a family with two parents with minimum wages and two kids can live without luxuries but without missing any of the essential stuff. However, in Madrid you would need over half of a modal salary and well over 70% of a minimum wage just to rent a single bedroom apartment in a location that isn't in the middle of nowhere.

One of my friends here is a delivery man and his wife is a cashier, they have two daughters, own two good cars which weren't pre-owned, have a detached house less than 10km away from the city center (10 minute drive) and they live well, go on vacation every now and then, etc.

observer23• 5 years ago

I feel bad for you young guys. You get so much less than I did to do a job that is just getting harder.

As cities grow in size, the poor 'get nothing at all': study

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