I love Birmingham, in no small part because on my first visit, the cabbie in London who took me to the train station tried, desperately, to convince me not to go, so sure was he that we'd hate it. I think it's great.
I am really looking forward to reading your thoughts on BA, too. Fascinating place.
When it comes to housing in the USA I can share some details as a small scale developer (1 single family house at a time). Buying land is not a problem. It's the permits and the labor costs that make housing unaffordable. For example a 1,600 square foot home (149 square meters) cost $31,000 in permit fees alone! The county had an entire campus dedicated to the administration of permits. One fee alone was $6,000 for affordable housing. I asked where the affordable housing was in the county and they said they haven't built it yet. I said how long have you been collecting the tax. They said 20 years!
Reminds me of my job application cover letter for academic jobs in Australia a decade ago...
After growing up in continental Europe, Grad School in the US and post-doc in the UK, I motivated my application by arguing it is a great combination of both, the freedom and space of the US and the urban sophistication of Europe.... Seemingly the flattering worked and they gave me the job 😎
Europe: higher quality of life for normal folks. Generally less long-term sustainable due to demographics.
USA: riskier, uglier, more stressful for normal folks. But a migrant magnet because of good money-making potential. Greatest place in the world if you don't mind the negatives, which are manifold.
V interesting. Largely agree. My migration post from a few months back on similar theme:
'Much I read tells me the U.S. is a busted flush, its era of global dominance is coming to an end, it is on the brink of internal collapse. That's not how ordinary people see it - for now.
2023 saw 43,000 Russians, 42,000 Indians and 24,000 Chinese illegally cross into the U.S. across its southern border, and total of 40,000 Indians and Chinese do the same across its northern border, coming from Canada.
When we see Americans trying to circumvent the border controls of India, China and Russia, in search of more opportunities and a better life, that is when we will really know things have changed.'
Thank you. I'm going to spend most of my time in Kampala. I'm going to Nairobi because that is basically the only way to fly to Kampala and I thought I would check it out, do a comparison.
I've not been in over three decades!
I've generally got a pretty good 5th sense on safety, although I always appreciate any advice.
I've always wondered/suspected that had I been born outside of the US, I might have desperately wanted to immigrate to there. I say that because while I now absolutely love so much about living in Europe, I can see feeling stifled by how much closer family ties are here and the fact that it can be harder to be innovative and break free of social norms. All three are things I took advantage of when I was younger to create the life I wanted.
That might have been harder to do had I been born European...
Yeah. One of the paradoxes (or the hypocrisy) of many of us global travelers is we would never have had the freedom to do what we do without having been born, raised, and made our money from the US.
You can only turn your back so far on something that you have benefitted from!
Brent read your latest newsletter as well and this morning we were discussing how much our views have changed in seven years of living abroad. When we first left the U.S., we would've said the POV you shared was crazy -- no way could anyone sanely want to live in America.
Flash forward to today when were living in the Balat neighborhood of Istanbul -- not a rich neighborhood by any means -- and I guarantee a huge number of people here would happily move to America.
As a gay man who wanted to be a writer -- neither of which thrilled my parents -- I am thrilled I grew up in a culture that valued MY independence over my FAMILIAL obligations. Had I lived in Italy or Spain back in the 80s, I suspect that would've been a much harder thing to do.
While not everyone may want to live in the USA there are a lot of people who want their money to live here. But of course their money must live in a nice place. This reality alone has created a severe "affordable" housing crisis. Take Hawaii for example where over half of the native born Hawaiians no longer live in the Islands because they can't afford it. I'm guessing that the entire world is this way though, not just the US. Is it a) Capitalism b) Supply and Demand or c) Both of the Above.
I have heard from Jewish and Catholic Relief Service personnel who facilitate legal migration to the U.S. that most immigrants want 1.) Northern Europe 2.) Canada 3.) the U.S., in that order (I never hear Australia/NZ mentioned). Obviously the time people put into learning English has a bearing on their choice (Northern Europe being tolerably English-speaking), but also most immigrants have family, friends, cultural groups in each of those places, and they know how easy/difficult it is to find shelter and support. So much of the burden for helping these families in the U.S. falls on local networks of synagogues, temples, churches, etc., whereas Canada and Europe have better national systems for support. No place is perfect, but it’s interesting to me that people like political refugees who put a lot of work into thinking and networking to learn about migration destinations are not prioritizing the U.S.
Interesting. I've heard from a lot of those refugees here in the US (many settled by Catholic relief services) that they requested US, but that's a self selection thing
I think in general refugees will go wherever they can, but if they can chose, their preferences are first to a place they might have family, then the closest place.
I think that there are tons of people in the US who would prefer to live in a smaller apartment in a more dense city (in Europe). The evidence is in the US itself: there is high demand for places approaching this in the US. COVID aside, people are *still* moving to cities.
I agree. I'm not denying that, but I do think it's a preference more dominant with highly educated.
Also, our cities are pretty low density when compared to the rest of the world -- which is partly due to the demand for large single home suburbs that limit the space the city can expand in
We are likely be moving soon to Chicago from Oxford, UK, not to fulfil a dream, but merely for a good school for our child, and healthcare we can buy there, but could not buy here (to buy healthcare in UK, one must really be rich, not just well off).
Not that we are really looking forward to this - e.g. we don't know how to drive cars, and our workloads will get higher.
Chicago is a good city, but like most american cities, location matters immensely. There is a huge difference between neighborhoods only a few blocks apart.
Public transport is ok in Chicago, but not anything like it is in the UK. Good luck and I hope it works out
I think this is my biggest issue with the urbanist/YIMBY crowd. While my personal preferences (and lifestyle decisions) are far more in line with what they believe I observe the United States and see that a large majority of people are choosing something else--and some version of false consciousness doesn't explain it. People WANT the two-car garage with the beer fridge and the large, fenced backyard. They're not choosing that due to a shortage of 1,800 square foot townhouses next to an urban rail line. And I think that desire is pretty transcendent across cultures.
townhouses next to an urban train station are a waste of space. You need (relatively) high-rise blocks in such places to sustain passenger traffic.
We live in a 1100 sq ft townhouse (terrace house in UK English) within 25 minutes walk to a train station. It costs about 1M US$ at present prices and exchange rate. Its price didn't move in the 10 years we live here, but increased 2.5-fold in the preceding 20 years. No car, no beer fridge (well, a pub next block). Streets are typically jammed with cars, most of the town was planned before cars were even invented. Seldom used fenced backyard, a typical feature, contributing to a relatively low density of town population.
Both you and the person you're replying to are correct, I think. Quality urban/dense-suburban living is undersupplied relative to demand in the US, but the modal person probably wants the big house with the big yard and two-car garage.
Is this really true? Or do we just think it's true because the big yard and two-car garages take up so much physical space? I don't know. But it's possible that when we see suburban developments we think "lots of people" when the places where there are really lots of people is where property doesn't sprawl. It could be like assuming that Trump must have won because "look at all that red on the map".
Where we used to live (very rural Iowa), lots of the kids moved to Kansas City, Chicago or Denver on graduation, though I certainly don't know their housing preferences in those places.
I think it very well could be the case that more people live in sprawling suburban developments than ideally would want to because we disproportionately build them. But I think they are very likely still the modal preference.
Where young people go immediately after graduating isn't really good evidence for this either way, as this is usually not where a given person opts to settle down. It's a pretty common pattern in the US for people to live in The Big City for a while in their 20s and then decamp to the suburbs when it comes time to have kids. Of course there are different kinds of suburbs and this isn't true of everyone, but still.
(Also if by "graduating" you mean "graduating college," it's worth noting that most Americans do not have degrees. But perhaps you meant high school.)
More importantly, I do think revealed preference exists. It's not the only thing that exists, as some people like to claim, but it exists. And the power of it, IMO, is that it implicitly accounts for the trade-offs people make in decisions like these. I'll give you an example of what I mean.
I live in a streetcar-suburb type area near Boston. It's suburban but the houses are close together, lots of two-family units, it's walkable, there's some transit, etc. I have a couple of friends who recently moved from the town next to mine to an exurb much further away from the city because it is very very expensive to buy a single family house around here; they couldn't afford it despite high incomes.
I would not make this decision because I would hate living somewhere where you need to get in the car to go literally anywhere. I'd opt to stay here even if it meant having a smaller living space than maybe I'd ideally want. They could have made this decision, too - a unit in a two-family home around is more "affordable" (scare quotes because this is Boston, after all) - but they didn't.
Now, I think in an ideal world I think they'd have bought a big-ish house in this area. But they had to pick, and they picked the big house over the walkable area. That's revealed preference.
And while I am a big supporter of the YIMBY movement, the fact is there is not enough space to build a bunch of big SFHs with yards where I live. The new units are gonna have to be multifamily, or have smaller/no yards (and the yards around here are pretty small already), or some combination of both. That's OK with me, and I suspect there are enough people who would find it appealing that they could find buyers for them. But I still think that lots of people - probably at least a plurality of people - would pick the bigger house if forced to choose, even at the expense of walkability and such.
Your example is a good one. It's really not a choice for many people at all because the housing close to the city center (and actually quite far away in Boston these days) is crazy expensive. Boston and neighboring towns have done nothing to accommodate any would-be demand to live in the city. Things are still growing out, not up (Seaport excepted). When I drive into the city I'm always struck by how far *in* single-family housing extends. IMO those properties should have been replaced with higher-density housing long ago, but existing property owners have outsized power. Also, Boston's transport system, public or otherwise, has become a joke, which also doesn't encourage city living.
It's hard to know what people prefer if you don't give them viable options.
My SIL’s first cat was named Breezewood, after the halfway point b/t Montgomery County, MD, and her grandparents’ place in Acme, PA. Breezewood is still horrible.
I love Birmingham, in no small part because on my first visit, the cabbie in London who took me to the train station tried, desperately, to convince me not to go, so sure was he that we'd hate it. I think it's great.
I am really looking forward to reading your thoughts on BA, too. Fascinating place.
When it comes to housing in the USA I can share some details as a small scale developer (1 single family house at a time). Buying land is not a problem. It's the permits and the labor costs that make housing unaffordable. For example a 1,600 square foot home (149 square meters) cost $31,000 in permit fees alone! The county had an entire campus dedicated to the administration of permits. One fee alone was $6,000 for affordable housing. I asked where the affordable housing was in the county and they said they haven't built it yet. I said how long have you been collecting the tax. They said 20 years!
Reminds me of my job application cover letter for academic jobs in Australia a decade ago...
After growing up in continental Europe, Grad School in the US and post-doc in the UK, I motivated my application by arguing it is a great combination of both, the freedom and space of the US and the urban sophistication of Europe.... Seemingly the flattering worked and they gave me the job 😎
don't overthink things, please.
Europe: higher quality of life for normal folks. Generally less long-term sustainable due to demographics.
USA: riskier, uglier, more stressful for normal folks. But a migrant magnet because of good money-making potential. Greatest place in the world if you don't mind the negatives, which are manifold.
V interesting. Largely agree. My migration post from a few months back on similar theme:
'Much I read tells me the U.S. is a busted flush, its era of global dominance is coming to an end, it is on the brink of internal collapse. That's not how ordinary people see it - for now.
2023 saw 43,000 Russians, 42,000 Indians and 24,000 Chinese illegally cross into the U.S. across its southern border, and total of 40,000 Indians and Chinese do the same across its northern border, coming from Canada.
When we see Americans trying to circumvent the border controls of India, China and Russia, in search of more opportunities and a better life, that is when we will really know things have changed.'
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jonathan-thomas-a29374a9_americas-southern-border-has-become-a-global-activity-7154782129137074176-bFPq/
Parts of Nairobi are not safe, period, and many places not safe to walk after dark, And I lived in Kenya for 3 years, Used to be better but......
Once again I suggest paying somebody to walk with you.
You will probably be OK anyway but.....
Rural areas in Kenya much safer, I worry little there.
But Kenyans will look out for you and let you know where someplace is not safe, insisting kindly that you not go someplace.
Very likable people but I worry more about predatory cops, they call them mambas, crocs below the surface which come out to attack you.
I have been shaken down by various police but since I worked with big NGO I had some protection by tossing out a few local names.
Thank you. I'm going to spend most of my time in Kampala. I'm going to Nairobi because that is basically the only way to fly to Kampala and I thought I would check it out, do a comparison.
I've not been in over three decades!
I've generally got a pretty good 5th sense on safety, although I always appreciate any advice.
Machakos about 40 miles east of Nairobi is a good place to walk. I used to live there. Great rural landscape.
I've always wondered/suspected that had I been born outside of the US, I might have desperately wanted to immigrate to there. I say that because while I now absolutely love so much about living in Europe, I can see feeling stifled by how much closer family ties are here and the fact that it can be harder to be innovative and break free of social norms. All three are things I took advantage of when I was younger to create the life I wanted.
That might have been harder to do had I been born European...
Yeah. One of the paradoxes (or the hypocrisy) of many of us global travelers is we would never have had the freedom to do what we do without having been born, raised, and made our money from the US.
You can only turn your back so far on something that you have benefitted from!
What freedoms are we speaking of?
Brent read your latest newsletter as well and this morning we were discussing how much our views have changed in seven years of living abroad. When we first left the U.S., we would've said the POV you shared was crazy -- no way could anyone sanely want to live in America.
Flash forward to today when were living in the Balat neighborhood of Istanbul -- not a rich neighborhood by any means -- and I guarantee a huge number of people here would happily move to America.
And I wouldn't blame them.
I prefer the foreign model -- but I need to keep reminding myself that is me, who has benefited from the US model, and so have the option.
There is a lot wrong with the US, but that view needs to be tempered with realization it's very appealing to a lot of the world that I respect so much
As a gay man who wanted to be a writer -- neither of which thrilled my parents -- I am thrilled I grew up in a culture that valued MY independence over my FAMILIAL obligations. Had I lived in Italy or Spain back in the 80s, I suspect that would've been a much harder thing to do.
While not everyone may want to live in the USA there are a lot of people who want their money to live here. But of course their money must live in a nice place. This reality alone has created a severe "affordable" housing crisis. Take Hawaii for example where over half of the native born Hawaiians no longer live in the Islands because they can't afford it. I'm guessing that the entire world is this way though, not just the US. Is it a) Capitalism b) Supply and Demand or c) Both of the Above.
I have heard from Jewish and Catholic Relief Service personnel who facilitate legal migration to the U.S. that most immigrants want 1.) Northern Europe 2.) Canada 3.) the U.S., in that order (I never hear Australia/NZ mentioned). Obviously the time people put into learning English has a bearing on their choice (Northern Europe being tolerably English-speaking), but also most immigrants have family, friends, cultural groups in each of those places, and they know how easy/difficult it is to find shelter and support. So much of the burden for helping these families in the U.S. falls on local networks of synagogues, temples, churches, etc., whereas Canada and Europe have better national systems for support. No place is perfect, but it’s interesting to me that people like political refugees who put a lot of work into thinking and networking to learn about migration destinations are not prioritizing the U.S.
Interesting. I've heard from a lot of those refugees here in the US (many settled by Catholic relief services) that they requested US, but that's a self selection thing
I think in general refugees will go wherever they can, but if they can chose, their preferences are first to a place they might have family, then the closest place.
Thank you for the introspection, Chris.
I think that there are tons of people in the US who would prefer to live in a smaller apartment in a more dense city (in Europe). The evidence is in the US itself: there is high demand for places approaching this in the US. COVID aside, people are *still* moving to cities.
I agree. I'm not denying that, but I do think it's a preference more dominant with highly educated.
Also, our cities are pretty low density when compared to the rest of the world -- which is partly due to the demand for large single home suburbs that limit the space the city can expand in
We are likely be moving soon to Chicago from Oxford, UK, not to fulfil a dream, but merely for a good school for our child, and healthcare we can buy there, but could not buy here (to buy healthcare in UK, one must really be rich, not just well off).
Not that we are really looking forward to this - e.g. we don't know how to drive cars, and our workloads will get higher.
Chicago is a good city, but like most american cities, location matters immensely. There is a huge difference between neighborhoods only a few blocks apart.
Public transport is ok in Chicago, but not anything like it is in the UK. Good luck and I hope it works out
going to be Evanston or nearby - Northwestern wants to employ us.
I think this is my biggest issue with the urbanist/YIMBY crowd. While my personal preferences (and lifestyle decisions) are far more in line with what they believe I observe the United States and see that a large majority of people are choosing something else--and some version of false consciousness doesn't explain it. People WANT the two-car garage with the beer fridge and the large, fenced backyard. They're not choosing that due to a shortage of 1,800 square foot townhouses next to an urban rail line. And I think that desire is pretty transcendent across cultures.
townhouses next to an urban train station are a waste of space. You need (relatively) high-rise blocks in such places to sustain passenger traffic.
We live in a 1100 sq ft townhouse (terrace house in UK English) within 25 minutes walk to a train station. It costs about 1M US$ at present prices and exchange rate. Its price didn't move in the 10 years we live here, but increased 2.5-fold in the preceding 20 years. No car, no beer fridge (well, a pub next block). Streets are typically jammed with cars, most of the town was planned before cars were even invented. Seldom used fenced backyard, a typical feature, contributing to a relatively low density of town population.
People choose from what's available and what they know. There *is* a shortage of townhouses near rail lines, so there's really no way to know.
Both you and the person you're replying to are correct, I think. Quality urban/dense-suburban living is undersupplied relative to demand in the US, but the modal person probably wants the big house with the big yard and two-car garage.
Is this really true? Or do we just think it's true because the big yard and two-car garages take up so much physical space? I don't know. But it's possible that when we see suburban developments we think "lots of people" when the places where there are really lots of people is where property doesn't sprawl. It could be like assuming that Trump must have won because "look at all that red on the map".
Where we used to live (very rural Iowa), lots of the kids moved to Kansas City, Chicago or Denver on graduation, though I certainly don't know their housing preferences in those places.
I think it very well could be the case that more people live in sprawling suburban developments than ideally would want to because we disproportionately build them. But I think they are very likely still the modal preference.
Where young people go immediately after graduating isn't really good evidence for this either way, as this is usually not where a given person opts to settle down. It's a pretty common pattern in the US for people to live in The Big City for a while in their 20s and then decamp to the suburbs when it comes time to have kids. Of course there are different kinds of suburbs and this isn't true of everyone, but still.
(Also if by "graduating" you mean "graduating college," it's worth noting that most Americans do not have degrees. But perhaps you meant high school.)
More importantly, I do think revealed preference exists. It's not the only thing that exists, as some people like to claim, but it exists. And the power of it, IMO, is that it implicitly accounts for the trade-offs people make in decisions like these. I'll give you an example of what I mean.
I live in a streetcar-suburb type area near Boston. It's suburban but the houses are close together, lots of two-family units, it's walkable, there's some transit, etc. I have a couple of friends who recently moved from the town next to mine to an exurb much further away from the city because it is very very expensive to buy a single family house around here; they couldn't afford it despite high incomes.
I would not make this decision because I would hate living somewhere where you need to get in the car to go literally anywhere. I'd opt to stay here even if it meant having a smaller living space than maybe I'd ideally want. They could have made this decision, too - a unit in a two-family home around is more "affordable" (scare quotes because this is Boston, after all) - but they didn't.
Now, I think in an ideal world I think they'd have bought a big-ish house in this area. But they had to pick, and they picked the big house over the walkable area. That's revealed preference.
And while I am a big supporter of the YIMBY movement, the fact is there is not enough space to build a bunch of big SFHs with yards where I live. The new units are gonna have to be multifamily, or have smaller/no yards (and the yards around here are pretty small already), or some combination of both. That's OK with me, and I suspect there are enough people who would find it appealing that they could find buyers for them. But I still think that lots of people - probably at least a plurality of people - would pick the bigger house if forced to choose, even at the expense of walkability and such.
Your example is a good one. It's really not a choice for many people at all because the housing close to the city center (and actually quite far away in Boston these days) is crazy expensive. Boston and neighboring towns have done nothing to accommodate any would-be demand to live in the city. Things are still growing out, not up (Seaport excepted). When I drive into the city I'm always struck by how far *in* single-family housing extends. IMO those properties should have been replaced with higher-density housing long ago, but existing property owners have outsized power. Also, Boston's transport system, public or otherwise, has become a joke, which also doesn't encourage city living.
It's hard to know what people prefer if you don't give them viable options.
I agree with this!
My SIL’s first cat was named Breezewood, after the halfway point b/t Montgomery County, MD, and her grandparents’ place in Acme, PA. Breezewood is still horrible.
Ha! I now want to name a cat Breezewood!
A great name for a cat. Woody was much loved and lived his best life w/my SIL.