Thread: Elite cities are pushing out the working class

Elite cities are pushing out the working class

November 6, 2016 | 11:30pm



Donald Trump probably won’t poll well tomorrow in his hometown of New York City, or in San Francisco or Washington, DC. But these cities, too, are filled with America’s economically precarious working class and middle class.

So precarious, in fact, that they’re leaving.

Global-city residents are struggling not because factories closed and jobs vanished. Nor are they leaving because they’re fed up with crime and other “inner city” woes Trump talks about.

They’re leaving because the new economy where they live has been too good, pricing them out.

The stark numbers come from Trulia, the real estate information firm. In a study highlighted last week by the Wall Street Journal, Trulia analyzed who moves away from the country’s 10 most expensive cities, all on the East Coast or in California.

Answer: disproportionately, the poorest — those making $30,000 or less. But they weren’t exclusively poor: People earning $30,000 to $60,000 also left in numbers that exceed their share of the population.

People making more money left, too. But they left in smaller numbers, far less than their share of the population. (The cities continued to grow because of immigration, including high-earning immigrants.)

The result? The cities got richer, and fast. From 2010 to 2014, “the share of households in these cities making more than $100,000 . . . has risen 3.6 percentage points,” says the study’s author, Mark Uh.

One big culprit is, obviously, house prices. Rents in these cities went up by 13 percent on average, while home values rose by 12.5 percent.

And some mild good news for New York: Of the 10 cities studied, Gotham had “the smallest move-away rate” among people earning less than $30,000, although, as Uh notes, it was “still very high.”

Not everyone leaves because they have to. Some leave the Bronx for Atlanta because they think it’s nicer — and because, though they can afford to live here, they can get a lot more house for their money there.

Still, economics tells the harsh truth. Dense global cities are more expensive because the richest people in the world — the people with the most choices — think they’re better.

And certainly they score higher on measures from public health to crime to transportation. Indeed, in another study, economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues found that many of these same cities — New York, San Francisco and Washington among them — are the best places for poor people to become not-poor: that is, for economic mobility.

Cheaper cities — Cleveland, Atlanta, Milwaukee — were the worst on economic mobility. And many poor suburbs, which have little money to deal with gang crime and homelessness, are even more miserable places for kids to grow up.

Places like New York and San Francisco aren’t dealing with growth very well. “Build more houses” is a rather obvious solution. But people who already live in a neighborhood have a say. They moved to Greenwich Village or the Upper West Side because they liked those neighborhoods, and don’t want them changed by high-rise towers.

And when we build more houses for middle-class and wealthy people in less-expensive neighborhoods, their presence makes that neighborhood more expensive.

One solution is to build subsidized housing. But our best practical efforts yield us 20,000 apartments a year, and the subsidies they require push housing costs up for the people who aren’t lucky enough to win the literal affordable-housing lottery.

And more apartments mean we need more subway stops and more trains — something else that we’re not good at doing. In fact, for all the population growth New York has seen since 1980 — about 20 percent, or 1.4 million more people — we’re only 8 percent above our postwar peak.

We can fit 8.5 million people here today — barely — because the subway and other infrastructure building we did a century ago left room for growth. Now, we’ve used it up.

One crazy idea: Maybe cities and suburbs that aren’t on the East and West coasts should look to what we do that makes us so expensive, and copy the good parts. That would include neighborhood density, which often means small-scale apartment buildings not far from stores, plus transit, parks and libraries, and low crime.

That way, even if we can’t do enough to keep poorer residents here, they’ll have some of what creates opportunity wherever they end up.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

http://nypost.com/2016/11/06/elite-c...working-class/

We have one of those cities where prices are rising fast and some groups are being pushed out. But it is simplistic to say that it is necessarily 'classes' of people. I have a neighbor who owned a house, but was pretty low skilled; but they got an excellent offer from a developer. And in San Francisco there have been 'working class' neighborhoods where the homeowners have eventually got quite a windfall.

My parents managed to get a start here---as did many similarly situated Midwest refugees---because they managed to get a house built. Nowadays it hard for poor people to do that individually. But if groups would pool their resources and build a cluster of townhomes, they could do it. What is really happening is that any innovative social cohesion is vanishing, such as putting feelers out to people who are in similar situations. Instead people are expecting governments to step in and institute some big program. And when they do, such as getting affordable housing it still plays into the hands of the big scale developers---and no longer the individuals. When my parents built their home, I don't think they had a very big mortgage. Plus my dad had a younger brother to look after who was stricken with muscular dystrophy. We'll see if a new generation can figure out how to do these things for themselves, but somehow I doubt it.