Will people leave the large cities?

[A True Kaniggit]

17 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

What amazes me is that anyone finds that huge sum amazing. I’m so resigned to the enormous costs these days 

Big city prices/wages vs. little town prices/wages.

[brook]

3 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

That is both train and tube. But yes, and it's only that low in $ because the exchange rate is so shit currently. If she bought a day ticket it would be £70. 

Thank you for making sure I never complain about PT costs again. 

[A True Kaniggit]

12 minutes ago, brook said:

Thank you for making sure I never complain about PT costs again. 

Pardon. PT?

Physical Training?

[BigFatCoward]

36 minutes ago, brook said:

Thank you for making sure I never complain about PT costs again. 

There is free wifi.

[A wilding]

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Pardon. PT?

Physical Training?

Public Transport.

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

Puplic transport is incredible expensive in London(and maybe the whole of the UK). The joys of privatization I guess. 

[A wilding]

Privatisation indeed. Trains especially are so expensive that it feels that people in the UK only use them when there is no alternative. I am always shocked at how much they cost now on the rare occasions I use them.

[Alarich II]

I pay the monthly ticket for two of my employees, it costs around 110 EUR / month. For a distance of about 30 kilometres.

 

I did leave the big city (Hamburg) to live in a small village outside a rural town. There were many factors that went into my decision

a. My wife and I realized that we don't use many of the cultural "features" that a city offers and that because most of our friends from uni and family are spread out all over Germany, the city didn't really improve our social life.

b. living is and was very expensive, especially since we would have to get a bigger place (kids were coming); especially wrt housing, there was a definitive economic argument, because we could afford a bigger house (the cost for the same in Hamburg would have been about 3 times more and therefore unattainable) and we have 2.5 acres of land which would have been unthinkable in Hamburg or even the suburbs.

c. very important: I had a the opportunity to buy my own professional practise at a good price which got me out of the corporate machine of Big4 accounting.

We can now do a lot of stuff we always wanted: I'm growing apples and started to make cider last year, my wife has the garden she always wanted and a horse stable nearby, we can do great stuff with the kids like building tree houses and we still have enough space for new projects whenever the fancy strikes us.

However there are also negatives: while I had a good income opportunity, the job change was harder for my wife who worked in public administration and while my commute has shortened extremely, hers -while the time has stayed the same - is now by car, which is more stressful than public transportation. Also, the kids can't walk or bike to school, because the elementary school it is a bit too far (8 kilometres) and there are fewer kids in our village.

We are very lucky to have great neighbours which made it easy to integrate into the community and that could have easily turned out to be very hard, rural Saxony is not exactly know for its easy integration of foreigners. This was very important to my wife and we would have moved back if this didn't work out. Turns out, she integrated much better than she expected and she got elected into the municipal council so we are very lucky that everything turned out for the best.

I believe though, that our experience is not a general trend and especially in our case the argument of better housing prices wasn't countered with a lower income (rather the opposite) which (combined with an improvement of our daily social life) made the decision easy.

[brook]

9 hours ago, A wilding said:

Public Transport.

 

I would absolutely complain endlessly about physical training.

As far as public transport goes ours is a horrendous mix of public and privately but the prices are standard across the network and have a daily and weekly cap (I think it’s around $15 a day or $50 a week but I have a student card & never go near it so not sure).

The only exception is the airport line with is horrendously expensive. If you have more than one person you’re way better off getting an uber for that reason. 

[williamjm]

11 hours ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Puplic transport is incredible expensive in London(and maybe the whole of the UK). The joys of privatization I guess. 

It varies a lot. I remember being surprised how much more expensive buses were in Cambridge after moving here from Edinburgh. London and long-distance rail journeys are particularly expensive.

[karaddin]

I think the density number alone misses something vital when comparing US "the burbs" to inner city suburbs in Sydney. In the US all the houses have their own driveway, their own garage and their own packaged up tiny slice of land in a back yard. Shops are largely situated together in strip malls with enormous parking areas for every single shop. 

Where we live in Sydney many places don't have a yard at all, or at least it's too tiny to even consider bothering trying for a lawn or anything like that. The houses are smaller, many don't have a garage or even a driveway. Most importantly is that the shops are integrated into the suburb, mostly situated around the "main" couple of streets (never literally called Main St) that you typically can just walk up for most shopping and eating out needs and owning a car is not a requirement at all.

We live in a relatively quiet side street that's as short a walk to the shops as it would be to walk from the edge of the car park into a Walmart, Albertsons or any of the US equivalents. The closest mall that we do have is right next to a park and the only parking area it has is on the roof - not an enormous most of car parks.

[Buckwheat]

On 6/11/2020 at 2:40 PM, Luzifer's right hand said:

Puplic transport is incredible expensive in London(and maybe the whole of the UK). The joys of privatization I guess. 

Speaking of public transport, I am very envious of your country's. I loved being in Vienna in a great part because of that reason.

I have lived on the outskirts/in the village near the biggest city in my country (mind you, that is about 300 000 people with suburbs included) almost my whole life, but I do want to move to the actual city at some point - but I don't know if that is going to be financially possible at any time in my life at all. I used to hate driving, I got over that in the past few years, but it is still not something I would want to do every day to get to work and home. I like using public transport, provided there is an accessible and frequent one in place. I am not interested in maintaining a house or gardening, and I don't think I need a large flat. If I am ever so lucky as to have a partner to have a child with, I want them to have the opportunity to walk to school, take the bus to extracurriculars and to be able to visit schoolmates in the neighbouring streets, which are some options I didn't have as a teenager.

But I really don't know how job opportunities, financial state and everything else will work out for me in the future.

[Iskaral Pust]

On 6/11/2020 at 2:46 AM, BigFatCoward said:

My wife pays nearly 7 grand a year for travel into london, WFH is saving us a fortune. We are lucky that I get subsidised trains (less than £1,000) and free tube. 

That’s 20-30% higher than NYC commuting, and even worse when you factor in the differential in currency and typical wages.  And here your employer can create a tax exempt plan for your commuting costs, so that you spend pre-tax dollars. 

But buying a day-pass here, rather than monthly commuter passes, is about as expensive as I recall for London.  And the tube is at least a much higher quality service than the subway in terms of coverage, frequency, reliability and safety. 

[Prue]

Not having a functioning public transport system will become simply not sustainable any more once the climate crisis effects fully hit. People can't keep wasting energy and producing CO2 in the west by living somewhere where you need a car for getting to work or even buying something to eat. We're lucky in Europe that cities evolved in times where you had to be able to walk everywhere. Plus, we didn't have that much land to waste for suburbs that are ridiculously spread out. Well, of course the car lobby was really strong here, too, especially in the 1960s, so the politicians heavily favoured cars over public transport. But there seems to be at least some insight now that this needs to change. Keeping a car in cities where you don't really need it is made increasingly expensive and difficult for example. It gets harder and harder to find a parking spot free of charge, for example, and that's intentional. And Corona led to far more peope using a bike. I know several people who got rid of their car and now commute to work by e-bike instead. 

The destruction of public transport in the US seems to have been intentional, and started by the car and oil industry, too, btw.:

eta:

So, to answer the thread's question: no, I don't think people will leave the cities. They will rather move to cities or at least add city centres to suburbs that can be reached on foot/by bike / by public transport.

In the big cities, they will have to create opportunities for urban gardening, though. Living in a brick desert wouldn't be healthy. 

eta2:

Frankly, I'm surprised that houses in remote suburbs still find buyers in the US. In Germany, I know of several people who weren't able to sell their houses in tiny dying villages with no shops and no public transportation. Nobody wants to move somewhere where you will be stuck when you are old and can't drive a car on your own any more. And the children all move away once they finished school. Old people in such villages depend on helpful neighbours or on travelling mini-supermarkets.

[Zorral]

In terms of the subject of this thread: the moment any loosening of the lock down here in NYC began, people flocked in from outside, at least judging by own neighborhood.  The place is cheek and jowl, shoulder-to-shoulder, with people socializing, drinking and eating, all through lower Manhattan -- which by the city and state regs isn't even supposed to be taking place yet -- these restaurants aren't supposed to be open for serving food to tabled customers. But they are, and the sidewalks and streets are packed.  No mask, needless to say.

So maybe people aren't going to leave large cities no matter what?

[Zorral]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/pandemic-cities-moving-remote-work/613069/

Quote

 People decided that moving during a pandemic would be a big hassle and renewed their leases at greater rates than in a normal year. In the past few months, anecdotal evidence emerged that some landlords were taking advantage of tenants’ strong desire to stay put by jacking up their rent, a trend hardly in line with the narrative of a mass exodus.

 

[Isis]

On 6/9/2020 at 3:40 PM, BigFatCoward said:

The thing with london is (and I assume other major cities) its possible to live 45 mins outside, and still be a quicker commute than if you live in the city and your job is in the wrong place for your commute. I live 55 miles outside of london, and getting to work takes the same time as it did when I lived in zone 3. 

Yeah, this is a weird but true thing. It really depends what your train line is like. You're in a funny place aren't you? Do you come into Marlebone?

At the moment, I'm 'trying out' what my commute would be once we move further out (zone 5 rather than zone 3). It's more peaceful, calmer, and I honestly don't miss the tube. And I say that as someone who genuinely doesn't mind the tube - I have colleagues who are practially allergic to it. Two of them who haven't used it since 7/7, which I personally find to be an INCREDIBLY poor piece of judgment. One of those two still uses buses, which is ironic. But then irrational fears are irrational. 

Anyway, we both have highly specialised jobs which cannot be done from home (entirely) and can only be done in London or one or two other cities in the UK. So that's us stuck unless we both change careers! In an ideal world I'd rather live in a smaller city. We both love Bristol but we can't work there.

[BigFatCoward]

35 minutes ago, Isis said:

Yeah, this is a weird but true thing. It really depends what your train line is like. You're in a funny place aren't you? Do you come into Marlebone?

 

Oxfordshire. but fast train stops before Marylebone right next to where I work, i dont even need to go all the way in. 

[Iskaral Pust]

I cannot fathom how you would travel around central London during business hours without the Tube.  I wouldn’t even try to take a taxi to a meeting because you just couldn’t be sure of arriving on time.  The Tube is very, very good as urban mass transit systems go.

[BigFatCoward]

8 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I cannot fathom how you would travel around central London during business hours without the Tube.  I wouldn’t even try to take a taxi to a meeting because you just couldn’t be sure of arriving on time.  The Tube is very, very good as urban mass transit systems go.

to your last point I totally agree, its not pleasant, but very effective. 

It depends what you mean by central London.  Its actually surprisingly easy to walk, if you know the way, its not actually that big.  Or you can cycle anywhere in 15 mins.  What I consider central London is probable 3/4 miles wide and 2 miles deep (basically south London can fuck right off).