Study: As cities grow in size, the poor get nothing at all
santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-study-prospe...
santafe.eduPosted Aug 18, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC
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santafe.eduBut it’s not just wealth that tends to increase as cities grow; the cost of living also increases. So, the authors factored in an adjustment for housing prices. With that adjustment, their analysis showed that, as cities get bigger, the housing costs increase at a faster rate than lower-decile income
The assumption in the study is that cities intrinsicly get more expensive as they grow, and not treating the growth in the expense of cities as a choice we have actively made and continue to make.
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That’s an excellent point, but my experience having lived in very large cities on every continent except Australia and Antarctica, is that they require low-income workers to make significant sacrifices in quality of life as they grow. Agglomeration effects accrue to the benefit of highly-educated professionals and even more-so to property owners. Unskilled labor is a commodity that has no pricing power.
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Unions
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Unions are most successful for skilled labor, where there is a smaller pool of workers with a stronger sense of community. For unskilled labor, its difficult to keep non-union labor from replacing you.
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Historically, that's not accurate. Most unions were created to protect "low-skill" industrial jobs that had highly "replaceable" workers.
Today, we are left with a legacy of union membership as most of the remaining industrial jobs that have not been off-shored are highly skilled (insert bullet ridden airplane meme.jpg).
Some unions have attempted to make inroads into the service sector, but those efforts are limited and significantly overshadowed by the national pushes for government-mandated minimum wage, SS, Healthcare, and other worker benefits. National advances instead of sectoral.
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Unions can't do a damn thing if the working poor are living multiples to a bedroom. Raise the wage floor and the landlords will see unrealized gain and make up the difference with the next tenant. This is why public housing and rent stabilization pegged to wages is important. It's a race to the bottom otherwise since landlords have every incentive to continue wringing out as much as they can and no incentive to not do that, since people need housing and some of the working poor pay as much as 90% of their wages on that.
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Can maybe, as a solution, we install a city or better metro region income transfer program tax from the richest to the poorest ? No government involved, just directly from and to people’s bank accounts, so that the benefits can be universally felt ?
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Localized minimum wages, perhaps.
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How would you keep prices down in a growing city without just sprawling?
Surely the demand for property near the center would increase as more people live in the city?
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A multicentered model of development would work. For instance, Paris is a city with more than one center. Sure, the original center will always be preeminent, but it would balance different parts. Encouraging businesses to set up in a new center with tax incentives, regulations and infrastructure could work to make this happen. I think Jane Jacobs talks about this in terms of "districts" in Death and Life. I forgot her solutions though.
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That sounds like it will certainly help to reduce growing prices, but it still seems to imply that increasing prices are inevitable for a growing population (i.e. the original center being preeminent and therefore in demand and expensive).
It doesn't sound like the underlying assumption is unreasonable.
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I don't think I have seen a city where that is not the case, at least to some extent. For me, it's about reducing the disparity, not making sure it doesn't happen. If you can show examples of cities where the center has changed completely in modern times, that would be interesting.
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I think the more technical term for it is Polycentric Development. It has it's perks in that there is more attractive places then merely downtown, so that land value rise may be a bit slower then it otherwise would have been.
A notable downside to it though, is that the transportation need may go up massively due to there being multiple places in commutable places that are attractive now. So roadways and regular transit would need to be much more extensive then in the case of a traditional downtown.
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That's better than people from the outskirts being stuck in traffic, all trying to get to the middle. I guess bus transportation would fill the void, since it's cheap and flexible. You don't need a subway for fewer people going to a greater number of places.
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what defines sprawl out here? Especially in the US Canada pulling people towards a city that grows outword at a dense level vs growing suburban areas would be a net benefit to the footprint of humanity.
Also, A city doesn't need to grow around a single dense cluster. We kind of see this naturally as cities grow into each other, but then, especially in the west we decide "This is downtown, now everything radiating away needs to be smaller"
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Forgetting existential questions like what's better for humanity, or exactly when does expansion become 'sprawl', I just mean to say, if more people come into a city and it doesn't grow, then there will be more people demanding the same area, which seems to me, necessarily means that the prices of the property in that area (and by extension all sorts of other things) will go up.
And even if the city expands somewhat, surely that still will increase the demand in the center?
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We mostly value the center of hte city because A) We cluster all the jobs there and B) because in the west its one of the few areas of a city that are walkable/transitable. Both of those are choices to some degree, though i agree certain job types will want to cluster together naturally, but it doesn't have to be just dumping it all in one tight urban core and everyone fights to get as close as possible.
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Elevators
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For one, elevators are really expensive. Given two properties of equal size, the one with the elevator will be significantly more expensive.
But for two, the implication that it's possible to build new properties (upwards) at a rate that matches the growth of the city as just a simple choice we make, seems a bit disingenuous to me.
I'm all for higher density zoning and living, but ultimately cities do have a limited amount of space and as they grow in population, the value of land in the middle of the city is going to go up significantly. Certainly, you can build apartments so that the number of homes on that land goes up too, but I don't think it's reasonable to imply that it's trivial (or maybe even possible?) to simply outpace the growth.
e.g. If you have a city, that already has apartment buildings in its core, and the price of land goes up by 50% due to increased demand, you can't just easily add 50% more properties. Eventually, you start butting up against various limits.
This necessarily means that property values will go up in a growing city, which ultimately makes the cost of basically everything goes up - e.g. restaurant or market in downtown manhattan is gonna charge more for items than an equivalent in rural Ohio, mostly due to the property costs.
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For one, elevators are really expensive. Given two properties of equal size, the one with the elevator will be significantly more expensive.
But that is not possible, you can't have two buildings of equal size if one doesn't have an elevator. Yes, there is a middle ground where a 3 story walk-up building with 6 units will be cheaper to construct, which may result in cheaper units than a 6-story elevator building with 12 units. But that per-unit cost benefit dissipates quickly once you get into the 10-14 story range, due in-part to block and plank construction. Switching over to steel for >14-16story buildings creates another cost hurdle, but again it starts to dissipate in the 20-40 story range.
the price of land goes up by 50% due to increased demand, you can't just easily add 50% more properties.
I know this is just an illustrative example, but this isn't how housing demand and development works. If you zoom out and squint a bit, land values will broadly increase based on proximity to desirable infrastructure or jobs, generally because more people want to be near those things.
But land value is also made up of a combination of the land itself, existing site improvements, and the price per buildable square foot (BSF), net taxes, site cleanup, maintenance, and tenant relocation costs, etc. Then there is debt, both existing and future, which is different for each site and owner/developer. So determining soft sites and the development opportunity of existing lots is extremely fuzzy (and can often be irrational), land value is not necessarily just tied to demand, and while some sites will have zero redevelopment opportunity, others could become 1,000' towers.
There is no US city that I can think (maybe parts of Manhattan) where our urban centers are completely full of 20-40 story towers, and it would be financially infeasible to replace them with 60-80 story towers. If we ever got to that point in the US, that's a completely different set of issues we would be addressing. But in reality, the US is made up of hollowed urban cores of parking garage with some spiky CBD's of tower clusters, surrounded mostly by 1-2 family streetcar suburbs and some 3-6 story walk-up apartment buildings. Going to mid-rise elevator buildings is totally feasible.
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Have zoning be for infrastructure* and health and safety** instead of "neighborhood character", allowing people to build residential units in line with demand.
*like building footprint to green space ratio to allow for passive storm water control in an area that doesn't have a good storm water system
**such as height limits based on firefighters having access to top floor via ladders
Having a robust public transit system with grade separated light rail to make what sprawl occurs less onerous for the inhabitants.
Demand in certain neighborhoods will always be higher or lower than other neighborhoods, but by encouraging multiple economic centers of activity, and having robust transit through out the city, it matters less.
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It matters less, but it still will mean that as the population increases that the prices will increase.
I live in a city with very good public transportation, decent density, and lots of green space - but it's also expensive as fuck, because, if you have a really nice space with lots of public access, then lots of people want to live there.
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The key isn't to keep the prices from rising, its to make the productivity rise faster than the cost of housing.
Tell me the city, and I'll tell you what its not doing that I said it should.
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Name a single city where lower income people do better in as the city grows...
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The vast majority of cities today?
The story of urbanization around the world is literally the rural poor becoming the urban poor becoming the working class becoming the middle class.
Much like Japan and Korea, before it, China would have no middle class if people stayed in the rice fields. Vietnam is creating its middle class today by getting people out of the rice fields.
And don't tell me I'm distracting people by bringing up the billions of people who live outside the US. It's literally mentioned in the article.
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Almost every major city in developed and especially developing nations. There is no better place for social mobility that a large city. Ofc bad urban policies can curb this but that doesn't change the point.
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Tokyo is an obvious one where pieces have dropped as the city has grown. The points others make about urbanization are also true.
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Using data from municipal areas across the U.S.
As American cities grow in size, the poor get nothing, on average.
American metro areas inevitably contain districts that bear the brunt of the concrete expanse (little/no green space), traffic noise and air pollution (I'm sure you can think of more items in this list). The most prominent example is that swath of LA bounded roughly by 5, 10 and 405. The negative health impacts of these areas could cancel out any benefits from economic opportunity.
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All the numbers in your comment added up to 420.0. Congrats!
5 +
10 +
405 +
= 420.0
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Neat
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The swath of LA bounded by the 5, 10, and 405 contain some of the largest urban parks in the entire country (elysian park, griffith park)
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A lot of people in this thread are desperate for having city amenities to mean being poor sucks less. Cities having transit doesn’t make struggling to pay rent less stressful in real ways. Cities having parks doesn’t make facing eviction less stressful in real ways. More stores you can’t afford to shop in doesn’t make food insecurity less traumatic. Especially when you are priced out of living near either. The article is very straight forward and y’all are like “oh but surely getting to maybe walk to lunch is worth your rent being twice as high and not being paid twice as much they didn’t account for that.” Urban amenities mean literally nothing to people who are time and money poor and can’t use them. Cities are propped up on the labor of people who can’t live there. Stop looking for excuses for that not to suck. It’s dismissive and delusional.
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The article is very straight forward and y’all are like “oh but surely getting to maybe walk to lunch is worth your rent being twice as high and not being paid twice as much they didn’t account for that.”
Cities are propped up on the labor of people who can’t live there. Stop looking for excuses for that not to suck. It’s dismissive and delusional.
This. 100% this.
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The article is very straight forward
It's not though. The study finds that the poorest people are the same amount of poor in both big and small cities, even when adjusting for housing. But the richest people are more rich in big cities. The poorest are not worse off. I don't think people are arguing that we shouldn't improve lives for the poorest, or that the status quo is okay or good. People are saying that scaling population up is not what's making things bad for the poorest.
Urban amenities mean literally nothing to people who are time and money poor and can’t use them.
Most people are not talking about tickets to the theater here (which NYC does provide free and low cost access to!), it's that the large scale and tax base allows for services in ways lower population cities cannot. NYC has heaps of targeted benefits for its lowest income residents, some are universal and most are even available to undocumented residents. Things like universal pre-k, enhanced SNAP, public housing, etc.
Cities are propped up on the labor of people who can’t live there.
So do you want more people to be able to live in cities, or do you want them capped in size and the population dispersed?
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I still feel like you have a lot more opportunity in a small city due to the lower cost of living overall, if you are poor. A fast food manager in NYC can probably afford their own 1br apartment I would expect, but certainly not homeownership in that city. A fast food manager in some smaller city can afford a lot more house and cover a lot more with that job. Class mobility in these major cities are limited to people who luck out with a good back and a decent path to the lucrative trades, or people who are able to afford college degrees and land internships where the nepotism effect snowballs into NYC job offers. For others stuck in service jobs they just tread water until their children are of age to take on part or full time work then it only gets marginally easier.
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You dont. Ive lived in several small cities. The opportunities for better jobs dont exist. NYC has every kind of industry. Anna TX doesnt have that. San Antonio TX doesnt have the level and amount of industries simply because these places arent large enough to support it.
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Maybe there aren't many opportunities for better titled jobs or a wider range of industries, but these other jobs that are available can offer you more in terms of cost of living. It's reflected in homeownership rate data. It's always a fun experiment to find some bay area or other high cost of living home on zillow and find the exact floorplan in the midwest and compare the asks. Usually its like an order of magnitude difference at least if not more, for instance a million dollar 3br in San Fransisco, and a similarly specced and condition 3br home in Toledo for $35k. and fast food managers in the midwest certainly aren't being paid an order of magnitude less.
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TIL there opportunities "don't exist" in cities with a population of over 1 million, but apparently below 10 million.
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NYC has heaps of targeted benefits for its lowest income residents, some are universal and most are even available to undocumented residents. Things like universal pre-k, enhanced SNAP, public housing, etc.
Have you ever been in the position where you've actually had to apply for these programs? They don't just give you benefits carte blanche. These programs are often means-tested, lacking funding, and beyond capacity (public housing in particular has ridiculous wait lists). So even if you do qualify (and you have to be POOR to qualify), you're not living in the lap of luxury, and you basically aren't allowed to improve your financial situation too much, otherwise you'll be kicked off or run the risk of "fraud". Undocumented residents are also ineligible for federal aid programs and most welfare programs in NYS, so I don't know which programs you're referring to when you say "most are even available to undocumented residents."
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Please re-read my comment above within the context of the thread, and in the context of the article posted.
In response to your questions: No, I will not tell you if I've participated in any of the City's targeted programs. Yes, your tax dollars are hard at work providing universal services like NYCID, School Meals, Pre-K and 3-K, Right To Counsel, Adult Daycare, Paid Sick Leave, NYC Well, Citywide Health Insurance, Fair Fares... there are a lot, lot more, including city-funded non profit programs.
You can see additional targeted city/state programs, including ones accessible to people without documentation here: https://access.nyc.gov/ .... They have everything from Broadband Benefits to Air Conditioning Benefits.
You're (rightfully) upset about waitlists and quality. So I'll reiterate what I said in my comment above: It's better to live in a large city that can actually provide redistributive services than a small one, and that the status quo is not good and we have a lot of work to do.
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Pfft, way to sidestep almost everything I said.
No, I will not tell you if I've participated in any of the City's targeted programs.
So the answer is no, gotcha.
You can see additional targeted city/state programs, including ones accessible to people without documentation here: https://access.nyc.gov/
This is just a link to the NYC gov't website. Did you fill out the 10 step eligibility screening?
It's better to live in a large city that can actually provide redistributive services than a small one
See, this is the problem I'm trying to point out; people AREN'T receiving "redistributive services". These services, if they exist at all, are unable to provide for everyone who needs them. Homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression. The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping each night in municipal shelters is now 32 percent higher than it was ten years ago. The number of homeless single adults is 108 percent higher than it was ten years ago. Life for vulnerable people in big cities isn't magically less difficult or precarious just because you can do a google search.
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I mean, its pervasive in every thread in this sub. Its a loose narrative held by the faith that agglomeration and amenities simply make everything better for everyone despite their situation and circumstances.
I think the fact that you see the wealth gap increase in larger cities (and resort communities) only buoys your point that cities are propped up by the labor of people who not only can't live there, but also who do live there but struggle to afford doing so.
In my city (Boise), our median home price went from ~ $250k to ~$550k in less than 3 years, and median rents went from about ~$700 per month for a 2/1 to over $1,600 per month in that same time period. Wages didn't climb at all that fast, especially for people in the lowest tier of wage earners. In the past year, as starting wages in most service sector jobs climbed first above $10 per hour to $15 and now some places even advertising $20 per hour (seriously, in less than 18 months), these employers are STILL having issues filling their staff because even $20 per hour isn't enough to pay the rent.
Meanwhile, we have had a record number of homes over $1m sold, but something like 800% increase over 2 years. More money is flooding into Boise, and people with means are buying up more and more housing stock for investment purposes. The wealthy are getting wealthier, the poor are getting left further behind, more people are experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity, and the middle class is either treading water, or for the opportunistic, they are doing pretty well if they leverage their resources.
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Nothing but rising rents/taxes.
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Is it any different for middle class? I just pay more property tax for the same house and my income after taxes is lower than ever. I guess I could profit from the sale of my house and retire elsewhere one day, but the near term is that every time my city gets bigger my life gets worse.
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Middle class often benefit from rising wages.
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Citation needed. I haven’t seen data that wages for middle class have kept pace with inflation more than lower income workers. Not to mention healthcare and education are rising faster than inflation. My city gives free healthcare and free preK to low income people but my healthcare costs go up every year through my employer premiums.
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Same. As my city grows, the quality of life absolutely decreases.
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As my city grows things get better for me.
Growth and change is a natural part if life. With the growth change has to come with it. We arent going to use wvery square ounce of nature to build on due to the climate impact. So its better to get used to density growth and change.
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You're getting downvoted, but you're absolutely right on this. So many mid-sized cities growing through unbelievable growing pains, and I'm not sure any of them have actually improved their quality of life through it.
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I suspect much of this sub hasn't lived anywhere besides their parents' house in the suburbs or their college town.
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When I moved from dallas to nyc my salary went up 1.5x and my bills were cut in half and within 3 years it went up 3x while my bills were still half of what they were in dallas. The opportunities matter. Some people are willing to forgo some opportunities or make a little less to “live better”. It depends on ones own definition of what that means.
Im sorry but my own experience tells me that this study isnt including all the costs of living in a small town in America of which transportation cost is the one almost always under counted.
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haven't read the study looks like it's not addressing causal effect of size; it's not like doubling the size of a city mechanically pushes up cost of living unless you hold the housing stock fixed. moreover, there could be compensating differentials, people accept lower wages because larger cities offer more amenities that can only work at scale, eg, public transit systems.
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The cheapest housing gets built first. If you increase the size of the city, its natural that developers are going to have to start building more expensive housing.
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Or they could just build enough multifamily long term rental housing to meet demand.
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When economic activities move to large cities, due notably to the increase in government spending and the spread of large corporations replacing small businesses (bringing profits and administration to central HQs), people will want to move to follow the money. The mechanism used by default in an economy in such a situation is price increase, until some people just cannot afford the move, which also eats into the income of those who do make the move.
I have a feeling if we abolished all national borders, this would be the de facto restriction on movement that would appear. World population would even more agglomerate in a few large metro areas, which cost of living would be prohibitively high, creating an extreme disparity of wealth between these "world cities" and the rest.
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So the social theory on this is that global firms (think apple, google, but also say the 10 firms who own most food manufacturing in the world, appliances conglomerates, the big global banks, etc) have to put offices in every region to control finance, retail, manufacturing, deal with various laws and regulation for all their products and services. So they'll go to Auckland, New Zealand. And To Sydney and Melbourne Australia. Tokyo and Osaka. London.
So they set up in these regional centres. But it's actually all the firms which they contract with which make the global city global. Consultants. Lawyers. Research scientists. etc which produce the elite class which then attracts all the elite consumption like museums and art galleries, gastro pubs etc.
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Buddy, you nailed it. The only piece you're missing is that it's not just corporate jobs and HQs moving to the cities, it's capital gains and dividends. As inequality grows, the rich get an ever-larger piece of the pie. And the rich invariably live in a handful of major metros.
Trickle down won, and big cities are the faucet.
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Ehhhh this is r/badeconomics. There’s no such thing as trickle down, and you seem to be falling for the fixed pie fallacy.
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There’s no such thing as trickle down, and you seem to be falling for the fixed pie fallacy.
That's funny, because trickle down assumes a growing pie.
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YIMBYs and neolibs alike also assume trickle down when they talk about "filtering" of housing...
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Trickle down doesn't work, I agree.
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This is basically what Henry George said 150 years ago.
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[deleted]
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Biggest sin in America is poverty.
It’s a place with good, Christian values.
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It seems to me that urban "YIMBYism" only benefits developers and rich buyers, and almost never actually benefits the poor. CMV.
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The entire set of cities studied are all NIMBY as fuck.
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YIMBYism made sense initially, I like the idea of upzoning and creating new housing stock, but the complete blindspot of public housing in that role and the co-opting of the movement by real estate interests has kind of led to the phenomenon you're describing.
The slavish obsession with free markets and more libertarian ideology doesn't really help either.
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No it hasn’t, because no city has embraced it.
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You sound like people who say "communism was never really tried so it still might work".
I'm all for deregulating building as much as possible without causing safety issues, but I think there is a danger of just giving it over to giant developers. What we need are for poor people to actually own the city and not pay rent to corpos for low quality homes. That means building something like favelas in America. Public housing can compliment it, but it shouldn't replace this solution. Otherwise people will still get exploited even if housing prices go down or stagnate. That's my problem with the "drive down housing prices by any means" brand of YIMBYism. We'll just end up with Chinese superbloc cities, maybe with a nicer glass facade. Changes can be drastic and graceful, not one or the other.
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I'm definitely not a communist.
Your previous comment seemed to imply that removing zoning and allowing the market to determine the level of density a city wants would create less-than-optimal outcomes. All YIMBYs want is for supply to be able to keep up with demand. Nobody wants everyone to live in pencil towers.
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Are you really calling Favelas graceful?
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That means building something like favelas in America.
Favelas are the result of complete deregulation. The government has no means to enforce regulation on them if they wanted to.
The reason why favelas don't exist in the US is because the US loves to kick homeless people off the land they are squatting on.
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Of course there is a paywall on the study, but the big takeaway:
"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 [income] effect over the null expectation of a linear increase. We repeat our analysis after adjusting income by housing cost, and find similar results."
Translation 1: the bigger the city, the more money top earners have. In contrast, poor people are the same amount of poor whether they live in small cities or big cities.
Translation 2: The richest person in NYC has a lot more money than the richest person in Topeka. The poorest person in NYC has about the same amount of money as the poorest person in Topeka (adjusted income by housing costs).
The news article link describes a secondary assumption that this must mean the poorest residents end up being worse off in big cities than in small cities, because they suggest cost of living also increases with population size. Authors of the paper are quoted in the article saying "However, since costs do go up, the experience of the poorest individuals gets worse" and ”There’s even evidence that you’re losing quality of life".
I think those are two big comments to unpack, the first one because that's intrinsically tied to housing shortages endemic to many growing US cities, and the second one because that seems awfully qualitative and may miss out on some of the larger benefits of agglomeration and big-city service provision.
Did they account for the better quantity and quality of public services and opportunities?
I concur and was going to ask this. Big cities can offer big public policies - from public housing to public health to social services et al.
I'd rather be poor in NYC than Topeka.
From a services standpoint, I get it. From an opportunity standpoint, NYC would have greater opportunities.
But for someone trying to get back on their feet, and presumably any employment they are able to get and maintain would be at or near minimum wage, how would it be easier to actually maintain, and then ultimately build up and out of that poverty, in NYC rather than somewhere vastly less expensive like Topeka?
Yes. More jobs, better paying jobs - Topeka's minimum wage is half that of NYC and two thirds that of NYS - and more means to transition out of poverty.
Or to put it another way, it's cheap in Topeka for a reason.
I would still prefer to get back on my feet in a bigger city than a smaller one. In fact thats what I did. I moved back to NYC from a smaller town in CA in 2020. It was the right thing to do.
Topeka's public services would be more expensive to run per capita than NYC's. I suspect that's biggest issue, and it's not directly related to the population size of a metro area.
I'd argue that smaller cities also have fewer economic opportunities in general, which means less money to pay for services.
I looked it up - the percentage of people living in poverty in Topeka is 17%. In NYC it's 13%. NYC not only has more money to spend on the poor, it has fewer poor per capita.
This isn't necessarily the case -- the opposite is usually true. Density usually increases costs, both upfront, and per person. Sometimes dramatically so.
Topkea's public services that match NYC's (like say, public water or public sewer) have similar or lower per-capita cost. Public Water in Topeka is $5.25/1kgal, Public Water in NYC is $5.50/1kgal. Similarly, electricity cost in NYC (~$0.21/kWh) is almost double the cost of electricity in Topkea ($0.11/kWh).
Utility + Service prices in NYC are all above national average, in every category across the board, according to US-BLS - https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/news-release/averageenergyprices_newyorkarea.htm
That's just utility prices though. Let's get into an example with personnel. If we look at education, for example, NYC spends about $28k per student per year in NYC public schools (according to the Independent Budget Office of NYC), but Topeka spends only about $13k per student per year (according to the Kansas Department of Education).
NYC definitely has more public services, but it's not clear that those extra services help poor/middle-class people. And everything regular people do for-sure use, is quickly more expensive the higher density a city gets.
[deleted]
Thank you ✨
The transportation costs go up the further you go out of the city. Also things like access to hospitals, access to grocery stores, access to the necessities of life becomes an issue. I remember driving 30 mins to the nearest grocery store, the nearest cleaners, the gym. When I was sick driving to the hospital was really difficult. It was almost impossible for anyone to reach me.
Moving to NYC improved my life exponentially.
It feels like the authors went in trying to justify a bias or make news. They gave away their bias after the first couple of paragraphs ”Well we know…”. mmmkay! Im like ohhh here we go.
Then it makes the assumption that costs go up in a city almost by default. It depends on what adjustments you make to your lifestyle as a result of being in a city.
Yeah if I decide to keep my car in a big city and drive rather than take the subway, my costs would go up. But if living in a big city means I can downsize my house to an apartment, get rid of my car…. then my life is much simpler and I have a few extra bucks to go out to eat with once in awhile.
Rural and middle America is proof that you could be low income in the smallest of towns and be living a very low quality of life in comparison to low income folks living in a big city.
Its all about tradeoffs.
This right here is the very example of the class, culture, and political divide we find in the US, and the reason nimrods like Trump got elected.
The more y'all urban elitists shout this, the more the "rural poor" flock to megalomaniac populists like Trump, De Santos, et al, and the more our state and national politics become increasingly f---cked.
There's the small issue of the better labour market which a big city has.
Which is also often more competitive. Sometimes being a bigger fish in a smaller pond is more advantageous. I make less as a partner / owner in my own law firm in Boise than I would an associate in a mega firm in NYC, but my quality of life is a million times better.
Source: I have many close friends who are in the latter situation, and who legitimately hate their lives. That carrot is always just out of reach, and they'll never quite be able to grasp it. Sure, they make a lot more money than me, but housing is more expensive, everything is more expensive, and they work at least 2x the hours I do, and they have zero autonomy.