This has to be one of the sillier things I've ever seen. Highlighted in the article is Phoenix arizona in Maricopa County which is one of the most responsibly managed metropolitan areas in the country if not the world.
More than 50% of the power derived from nuclear at Palos Verdes just 45 miles from the city which evaporates wastewater to drive turbines and provide cooling. Another 14% from solar. Plumbed grey water throughout 80% of the metropolitan area. Per-capita water used declined by 20% over the past 40 years. Net groundwater contributor with 100 year plan for water usage anticipating drought conditions. This is actually the picture of a sustainable metropolitan area with low taxes and high quality of life.
Meanwhile the author lives in a city (somerville, ma) which routinely dumps its sewage and into the nearest rivers, in a part of the country that burns diesel to stay warm for months out of the year and where without a precision engineered weather suit between dec and may you will die from just being outside.
I'm not saying 118 is for everyone but if you have shade you won't die. Just comically out of touch.
On a more socio-economic note: I moved from DC to PHX 5 years ago thinking I'd gtfo after 3 months, because, you know, it's PHX.
Despite my best efforts I really love it; you find so much more value in places you believe to have none.
Great cost of living, a HUGE variety human experiences, and a massive airport where you can catch a cheap flight out! I live in downtown PHX (I can see the basketball arena as I type this) and it's wonderful. I truly believe that PHX is seeing a boom akin to Detroit's in the mid-20th century. Hopefully we don't get that bust.
If you move to Phoenix now and plan to live in your house for 30 years, then you are going to have a bad time because Phoenix will be unlivable if there aren’t drastic measures put in place. 118 is the ceiling now. Not the ceiling forever.
Yes but You'll've always had a bad time because it was always bad. Yet people somehow still live there. So having a "bad time" isn't a reason not to live there.
"Arizona already averages more than 50 dangerous heat days a year, the second highest in the nation. By 2050, Arizona is projected to see almost 80 such days a year."
From 50 days to 80 is the difference between good and bad place to live? No. This is just handwaving nonsense. Not every worsening is a showstopper.
It doesn’t matter how efficiently the city is run. At some point, it may become impossible to support current levels of population. For instance, if drought conditions continue to be more common, there will be less and less water available, which means less wastewater for use in thermoelectric plants. Also, this means less water to maintain urban vegetation, which will also demand more water as temperatures rise and vapor pressure deficit rises. Less urban vegetation means less evapotranspiration, less latent heat flux, and greater urban heat island effects, which will further increase air conditioning & power loads above and beyond what would be the case with warmer temperatures assuming current land use/vegetation cover. It’s very easy to envision ways that places like Phoenix collapse.
Phoenix has made strides, but largely because it started from such a low, low bar. Exemplified by the Navajo Generating Plant, one of the largest coal fired power plants ever built, just to power pumps for lifting Colorado River water 2900ft up to Phoenix.
Not to mention the damage to the Colorado, which no longer has enough flow to reach the ocean. That “Net groundwater contributor” comment? It’s because Phoenix drains the Colorado and pumps it into the city’s private aquifers
> I'm not saying 118 is for everyone but if you have shade you won't die.
Yeah, barely. I once spent a day in the shade at 113F waiting for a bus with a friend. We played chess and it was the dumbest game ever. We could barely function. Without aircon nobody is doing anything very much at that temperature.
You can survive, just, at 118F but you can't live.
Maricopa County is the place that had the sheriff that was found guilty of criminal contempt for ignoring federal orders. I’m not sure if those sorts of attitudes exist there that I’d be too interested.
But far worse, it’s a desert. Nothing grows there. That should be your first hint to not try and live there.
Fresh water is the new oil. As a business you may be in good shape there as you’ll always be taken care of, as an individual I’d suggest you’re going to get the short end of the stick as supply tightens.
It's not fair to say nothing grows there; Arizona is the world's winter lettuce provider. Irrigation is pretty standard. It makes sense to move water to fertile land.
Not naturally, which I thought would've been implied. You can even sustain a major city in the desert if you pipe in water from other places that are already suited for life on Earth.
Are there any statistics on homelessness per city? There seems to be a rise in homelessness in Atlanta as well, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was a country-wide thing for big cities.
Oakland is similar in SF Bay Area, used to be quite livable 15 years ago.
Californians (and people from west coast states) that move there also bring their unchecked progressive views and will lead to the situation that we have in SF Bay Area, Portland, Seattle, LA and now Austin, Denver. Rampant homelessness, housing crisis, exploding crime rates, etc. No one wants to live in a society that keeps peddling failed policies. I can't wait to move out of Bay Area. I will still be a democrat but it's getting harder.
The housing crisis that California is exporting is rich people buying up single family homes then demanding that no apartments get built near them anywhere.
This is not a "progressive view". This is rich, elitist, anti-renter landed gentry shit.
General election: Mostly international diplomacy, health policies, climate policies, funding for R&D, EPA, NASA, Infra (I think Republicans usually vote for defense spending), and the obvious derailment of the Republican party for past 20 years. It is unreconizeable today and there is no way I am voting for Trumpism. I have voted for local Republican leaders in the past.
Before criticizing those seeking a better life in questionable directions first ask why are they motivated to do so in the first place? This pattern predates COVID, what is the problem in the North East that is causing people to move south west? Answer that and you might have a clue as to why the migration is happening and what to do about it.
Shelter, rent out of control, let alone a house that might be within reach of purchase, is economic insanity. We don't usually think about shortage of food, water, and comfortable temperature; within the US anyway. Not if someone has even a basic job.
Housing also builds to the safety and security aspect.
Relationships, a sense of belonging, I've found it very difficult knowing that I'll move because I rent, there's seemingly no point to investing in anything resembling a sense of community, let alone personal relationships. Esteem is a related issue, as is self fulfillment.
Right...and isn't the reality that a country as rich as America can afford to have people live in places which aren't directly compatible with life?
Power and water seem to be the most important aspects regarding quality of life. I'm not worried about power because the southwest has tons of solar power available. And I'm not worried about water in the southwest because, yes, the Colorado river is oversubscribed, but only about 10-15% of it is used for residential use. The bulk of it goes to agricultural uses who are greatly underpaying for their water access and using it to grow ridiculous crops like cotton in Arizona. If there ever really was a crunch, those water rights would be obtained to let people drink and shower instead of to grow those crops (either through buying out, or just straight highway robbery).
Germany (typically used as an example of a wealthy country in EU) is ~49k mean (average), so US has higher median and mean income than Germany. One can get into services, etc, but still US is a rich country.
Once you get much past north west of EU, things get decidedly poor. While situation is not ideal in the US, most Americans have considerably more luxuries in their lives (in other words higher consumption of goods and services). Whether we are consuming and prioritizing the wrong things is a different question, and I suspect your criticism is more aimed at what do we actually get in return for this wealth/consumption.
You should know better, come on, income is pretty much bullshit when it comes to the rich. They don't make "income" since that is taxed. This has been true since Leona Helmsley and Cheers with the CEO making 1$ per year. The rich have wealth.
There was just a propublica about this. Anyone that knows anything about capital gains, stock options, etc (and I'm assuming you do since you are commenting on a forum run by a startup farm)
Stock options and RSUs are largely taxed as ordinary income. There is a way to forward exercise options and save, but that’s super rare for non-founders (and only super successful at that). While I agree that the truly wealthy have ways to structure their wealth to reduce tax burden, vast majority work for a living and don’t have such perks.
Do you think Phoenix is full of rich people? And yet, there they are, in the middle of the desert, somehow not all dying of thirst while the 1% waters their multi-acre front lawn.
People move to these cities because of PR and marketing? It seems like it is the author who is divorced from reality. Is there study on marketing dollar to population growth? Do mega cluster exists because of superior marketing?
A more convincing argument would be that policy attracts talent and business, and locations with bad weather is more likely to have better policy.
That and serendipity - Michael Dell and William Shockley come to mind
You can move west without moving to a desert. I’m in San Diego for a bit. It’s been in the low 70’s and climate control consists of opening or closing the windows.
Meanwhile back home in the midwest I’m trying to coordinate someone to be at my house while the HVAC folks replace the compressor in my heat pump. I was going to wait until we got back but the temps are getting so high we’re concerned our fish are going to die.
san diego long time resident here. the city has the climate you describe only by virtue of it being centered almost entirely within a coastal scrub biome about 20-30 miles wide. it's a sweet spot both created by and geographically impacted within the enclosure of a low coastal range immediately east, beyond which things get very hot and barren almost immediately.
this strip exists in some form for most of the so cal coastline up through roughly the central coast, where the mountain range edges up to the water line itself.
it's just not anywhere near enough land. Too narrow, and much of the land is impractical to live within outside of retirement or vacation circumstances (not even considering that vast swathes are on military property).
It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.
Understood, i spent the weekend roaming around Borrego Springs.
My broader point is that there is a lot of land in ’the west’ that doesn’t meet the criteria that the author is talking about. Oregon, Washington, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado all have attractive destinations that aren’t (literally or practically) the desert.
Also, anecdotally it seems many of the folks migrating to Austin are actually moving east.
The point the author is making is legit, I’m just engaging in the time honored tradition of roasting bad titles.
> It cannot absorb a mass westward migration. this is evident in the property values where settlement has already been long established.
Sure it can, if it were built at any remotely reasonable density. But there are plenty of people deeply invested in that not happening who already live there.
San Diego (the city) barely escapes the semi-arid/arid designation, placing it slightly within the CSa / Mediterranean climate[0] designation. But it is surrounded by BSh areas (the Sonoran desert and California chaparral) - by area, I'd guess most of San Diego county is BSh. So unless you want to live right next to the coast (and can afford to), Southern California is mostly desert.
San Diego itself really does have an amazing climate though.
The difference is that what people think of as LA includes a huge number of suburbs that push out quite far east into the desert. So if you are in Santa Monica or Malibu, the climate is very comparable to coastal San Diego. If you drive out on the 10 for a ways, its going to get brutally hot and arid quite fast.
Water-wise, San Diego also gets a lot of its water from the Colorado river, but it has a desalination plant as well. I'm not sure how much impact that has on the water situation there.
> For the climate-friendly but less glamorous northern cities like Albany, Worcester, and Pittsburg, a successful marketing campaign could make them the climate-proof cities of the future.
Putting aside any of the climate change arguments, suggesting that successful marketing could make Albany a “city of the future” is absurd. I don’t know what you would have to pay me to be willing to live in Albany, ever, let alone during the winter — but it would be a lot. Like, at least $1.5m a year. And even then, I’m going to be taking many bad for the environment flights to NYC or a more desirable western city as often as possible. I abhor the Midwest (although Chicago, Boulder, and Denver are some exceptions), but if I’m going to have to live in a shithole, I’d rather be in Michigan or Minnesota or even Indiana before I would live in Albany.
The article also seems to ignore non-coastal western and southern cities that aren’t as deeply impacted by climate change. Yeah, Phoenix and Las Vegas might be fucked, but Denver? Salt Lake City?
It says “don’t move west,” but also mentions Seattle, NYC, and Boston and places that need to still concentrate on affordable housing to be attractive — which as a person who has lived in NYC and Seattle, I can tell you housing/rent hasn’t been affordable in NYC compared to the rest of the world in decades and Seattle is getting less and less affordable (I pay more in rent than all but one of my NYC friends and her mortgage is a monthly figure that would make even most New Yorkers choke), housing isn’t affordable because it doesn’t have to be.
I grew up in the midwest, and it's not a shithole. You completely forgot Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, Madison, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Des Moines, Omaha, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toronto (not US, but still very much in the mix here), hell there are dozens of small, really cool college towns in there too.
I left for personal reasons, and because I prefer super large cities but man... you're writing off A LOT of people.
> housing isn’t affordable because it doesn’t have to be.
The high price of housing means there's a shortage. There would be arbitrage available but in many places housing is not being allowed to be built.
I live in a luxury apartment, alone, just outside DC on a junior SWE salary with most of my paycheck left over because the county I live in actually builds.
The author talks about climate change, but it seems he doesn't know that cold-weather cities use more energy in heating than hot-weather cities use in cooling. Also the energy sources used in heating (oil, propane and natural gas) contribute more to global warming than the electricity energy mix used for cooling.
The north-east is going to have an expensive reckoning as they build billions of dollars of off-shore windfarms to start catching up to the renewable energy production that is already in the Southern US, and also the tens of millions of households that will need to replace their furnaces and boilers with heat pumps to stop burning fossil fuels to heat their homes.
This is a fascinating article because at the surface level it appears to be high quality information. It looks nice. It's well written. It speaks in the kind of sweeping generalities and economic lingo that give it an air of authority.
But by the time I got about 3/4 of the way through, I realized that this was basically just some random blogger's opinion piece with little to no research or data to back it up. It falls apart if you squint at it.
First of all, the title implies that some general directional trend is at play, but then cherrypicks just a couple of cities. I'm not sure how Miami of all places is a good example of people moving west.
Also, attributing the success of the handful of cherrypicked cities to "marketing" is... bizarre. These are actual places with actual history that people can form real opinions of based on what the place is actually like to live in. People don't live in Austin because someone told them to live in Austin. They live there because they love it, a property they are able to accurately perceive for themselves independent of marketing telling them what to think.
I don't like to be negative online but this article is just not very good.
It's also content marketing for a content marketer who is talking her book. "Writer, growth hacker, and crypto enthusiast based on the East Coast", and her Substack is titled "Confessions of Reluctant Marketing Guru."
More power to her for going out and hustling, but understand that it - just like it's purported solution - is just marketing.
She doesn't actually make any logical arguments for her conclusions except contradicting herself. Triple the risk of drought in a place that's already a desert? Obviously drought isn't a can't-live-there problem. Even Miami is getting a sea wall to protect it. Increased this and more of that? How much more? Enough that people won't live there or not enough to matter or enough to be worth the lower real estate prices?
Also people move to places to live there today, not suffer a bad life just so their house will be worth more in 50 years.
Americans Have Options. So Why Do They Go West and South?
I spent about seventeen years in the north. I came pretty close to offing myself due to seasonal depression. There's a not-insignificant chance that New Orleans will end up drowning before the end of my expected GenX lifetime but I'm still gonna enjoy the rest of life several orders of magnitude than if I'd stayed in Boston or Seattle. Even if it ends in that flood.
I will say, New Orleans is really underrated. I understand the flood risk and it would make me nervous too, but what a great city. Perhaps there’s a way to keep the core city above water long-term?
Ha, it's about five feet below sea level already and the way we use the land and river just makes it keep on slowly sinking even without factoring in rising seas. Really the bigger worry is heavier/longer hurricane season meaning more chances for one to fill up the bowl of the city, especially with the pumps and their generators being increasingly in need of maintenance - right now there's barely enough of the power system online to keep them running if the cyclone coming up the gulf at us decides to dump an asston of rain, for instance.
Or maybe the Mississippi will finally triumph over the Army Corps of Engineers and start going down the Atchafalya, like it's been wanting to do for most of my life, and then a significant part of the city's revenue dries up.
Ain't nothin' permanent anyway. Any given hurricane could be The One, and everyone in town knows it, and that's part of why we have such big parties. Enjoy it while it lasts.
This is why some of the rustbelt cities like the one I grew up in (Buffalo, NY) will have a resurgence at some point. They have affordable housing, good infrastructure bones (including green hydro power from Niagara Falls), are on one of the world's largest sources of fresh water in the Great Lakes and have direct flights to most cities you'd need to get to for work when required. While the few months of winter rather suck, it is easier to deal with a few months of winter than these 115 degree summer days the article talks about (heating, an extra layer or two of clothing, etc.). Buffalo also has being on the Canadian border and being an hour and a half from Toronto going for it. I moved to Sydney, Australia to be with my Aussie wife (who wants to stay here) but I see several of my friends who had moved away moving back to Buffalo to be around family and buying a house for cash under these remote work conditions - and if I was States-side I'd be considering it too...
> Though real estate investment groups are often blamed for the lack of affordable housing, the real problem is restrictive building laws — especially in desirable, liberal, and highly regulated cities.
> The above-listed places are cheap because they have lots of land and few regulations...
Being clear here there's a difference between what "building more housing" means in SF, Seattle etc, that is, densifying existing detached homes and creating a compact city, and what is means in Vegas, Phoenix and other places, which is unsustainable, endless, automobile dependent sprawl. The former a much more politically challenging thing as it means pushing back against the "American Dream" of a detached home and white picket fence. Adding yet another house on the edge is of course quite easy.
This sprawl is part of what is driving the doom of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Woefully inefficient sprawl, absurdly large highways and countless CO2 emitting cars.
I'm sure electric cars will help, but it's gonna be a tough transition to there and the energy needs will be incredible. What really needs to happen is to stop sprawling and rebuild these cities, but who knows if the genie can be put back into the bottle there.
"Building more housing" in SF, Seattle, etc means building apartment complexes whose cost is restrictive enough such that only those that aren't experiencing a housing crisis can afford them.
Yes, and having the option to rent those nice brand new apartments means the wealthy are a lot less likely to compete with the less wealthy over the same shitty 40 year old apartments. More vacancy is a big win for someone who can only afford a 40 year old apartment.
I get a perverse sense of joy from showing up at work with a frozen beard after riding my bicycle over the packed snow in the bike lanes.
Wouldn’t dream of taking a walk in a shopping mall even in the dead of winter. I’d go for a hike in the Fells instead, with a couple of layers and some ice traction on my boots.
You’d have to pay me a fair bit to move to California. Maybe I’m just weird? Lots of people seem to like it here though.
The article repeatedly calls out Miami for being the hottest city in the country. I've never been to Miami, but it looks like averages in the 70s and 80s year-round. I'd take that any day over having to put up with the blizzards, shoveling snow off my driveway and car, etc. that I did in Omaha.
Right, like, suggesting people move to Albany or Pittsburg or Worcester, without mentioning that the winters are incredibly tough and that colder climates are another aspect of global warming, strikes me as incredibly naive.
Yeah. I miss a lot of things. The crisp air, making snowmen, sledding, fall colors, the intellectual culture, the sense of history... I am not at all saying that there’s nothing to miss.
I love how this “article” completely glosses over the fact that the northeast/Midwest gets devastating snowstorms that cripple entire states for days at a time. These “polar vortexes” are clearly becoming more severe and more common as the earth’s weather continues to spiral out of control.
So the options are move somewhere where it’s hell on earth for a portion of the year, move somewhere where it’s a frozen wasteland for a portion of the year, or move somewhere temperate along the coast which is also going to be impacted by climate change.
The Polar Vortex has definitely become a regular (annual?) occurrence in the central US. What should scare Texans is that this year it only came 5-10% further south than “normal”. But you have to remember - it is bringing air down from the arctic circle - this air is as cold as it gets. It’s not getting colder over the next few decades.
It’s ludicrous to expect that there will be a region in the world that will be unaffected by climate change over the next 5 decades. There are going to be negative effects everywhere. But some places are going to be worse than others, and the southern half of the US is going to be worse off than the northern half of the US.
I personally think that we are 10-20 years away from the point at which climate migration makes sense for the smart money, with ready buyers of the property you want to leave behind. Put a reminder in your calendar and go about your life.
It mentions Seattle as being potentially a good place, if it built more housing. That's sort of not true because it's at sea level, but sort of true because it's hilly.
More than 50% of the power derived from nuclear at Palos Verdes just 45 miles from the city which evaporates wastewater to drive turbines and provide cooling. Another 14% from solar. Plumbed grey water throughout 80% of the metropolitan area. Per-capita water used declined by 20% over the past 40 years. Net groundwater contributor with 100 year plan for water usage anticipating drought conditions. This is actually the picture of a sustainable metropolitan area with low taxes and high quality of life.
Meanwhile the author lives in a city (somerville, ma) which routinely dumps its sewage and into the nearest rivers, in a part of the country that burns diesel to stay warm for months out of the year and where without a precision engineered weather suit between dec and may you will die from just being outside.
I'm not saying 118 is for everyone but if you have shade you won't die. Just comically out of touch.