Recent Wall Street Journal article, “Florida’s Population Boom Fizzles as High Costs Drive Away Middle Class”:
Florida’s migration patterns are changing dramatically. Residents in their prime working years are heading to other states, often citing affordability concerns. At the same time, the stream of people arriving from other states is shrinking.
Meanwhile, an influx of wealthy people from other states—turbocharged during the pandemic—has helped drive up home prices. Inflation in parts of Florida outpaced the national average over the past decade and home-insurance rates soared.
These side-by-side trends could spell trouble for a state whose economy relies on continued population growth and real-estate development.
“The affordability picture has changed in Florida almost more than anywhere else in the country,” said Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research & Consulting.
First, note the assumption that underlies almost all American politics: infinite growth should be the goal. (Never mind that growth without limit in an organism, and without regard to available resources, is known as “cancer”.)
Second, the WSJ implicitly assumes that a place that is affordable is better than a place that is unaffordable for median-income residents.
Third, the WSJ lumps all of “Florida” together. Florida is about the same size as all of New England. The WSJ wouldn’t lump together Boston and western Maskachusetts, much less Bridgeport, Connecticut and Houlton, Maine. (It’s still possible to get a brand-new single-family house in central Florida for less than $300,000, though the same can’t be said for coastal Florida; the house will be about 1500 square feet, which is the size of the house I grew up in (family of five) and with the added advantage that Floridians don’t need as much indoor space.) The most convenient housing for a SpaceX or Blue Origin engineer is in Titusville, where a decent (not new) house can be purchased for $300,000 (relocation guide).
Fourth, the WSJ assumes that the market is full of stupid people who bid up the prices of houses in places that aren’t desirable. Single-family home prices are $10.15 million in Palm Beach and $212,000 in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, where Ayman Ghazali mostly peacefully lived. From this we can infer that living among Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants in Dearborn Heights is better than living among Manhattan immigrants in Palm Beach (perhaps not an unreasonable inference!).
Maybe in a country with a shared language and culture it would make sense to try to find an inexpensive place to live. However, in a country that is jammed with low-skill migrants from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (our asylum-based immigration system ensures that someone from Switzerland or Japan goes to the back of the line), isn’t it actually an advantage from a typical native-born perspective that a place is out of reach for the median present-day American? Google AI: “Newport Beach has lower racial diversity and worse racial disparity across various indicators compared to the average for California cities.” Given the stratospheric real estate prices, it seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for low racial diversity and “worse racial disparity”. As of 2021, the town was supposedly 85 percent white (source):
The Dallas metro area is more affordable than most parts of the US with jobs, which has enabled a mostly-immigrant community of 130,000 Muslims to set up more than 60 mosques and lay out EPIC City, “a master-planned Islamic community-centered residential development project”. Non-Muslim Americans who don’t want to hear the muezzin calling five times per day might prefer to spend more on a house that is in an area that is “unaffordable” to immigrants from Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
We could take this to an extreme. Aspen, Colorado is absurdly unaffordable for the median worker. My friend doesn’t like Aspen (see An actual skier goes to Aspen to ski), but apparently a lot of people do like it. Would we say that Dearborn Heights, Michigan is a better place to live than Aspen? That Aspen is bad because the population isn’t growing 3% per year like Gaza’s or Somalia’s? (Maybe Gaza and the West Bank are the ultimate examples of affordability. US and EU taxpayers pay for all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc. Nobody needs to work. Hamas-ruled Gaza is a model society by Ivy League standards, but wouldn’t the typical American rather be in St. Barts, Aspen, or Nantucket (all of which rank near the bottom for affordability on a median income)?) We could also consider a massive public housing project in Chicago or New York City. They’re “affordable” by definition since no tenant is charged more than 30% of his/her/zir/their income (often 30% of $0 since the tenants aren’t stupid!). Would a typical American prefer to live in the 6000-person Queensbridge Houses (“well known for its contributions to hip hop and rap music”; “a problem with drug dealers and drug users”) or in Atherton, California (population 7,000; home to Larry Ellison before he spent $450 million to escape to Florida)?
In short, given the continued flood of low-skill migrants (70 million since 1976) maybe “affordability” shouldn’t be the goal for any city or state that seeks to maintain a pleasant environment.
Notes from the Relocation Tar-Pit State:
Niche, a resource I use (with a large grain of salt) in our seemingly endless search for a new place to live, thinks diversity is desirable, and rates Dearborn Heights a “B”:
https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/dearborn-heights-wayne-mi/
One of the first things I check is crime:
https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-dearborn-heights-mi/
Looks red to me. One has to take this data with a grain of salt too — in my own experience crime is underreported. So I filter for areas that are completely green. There has been a consistent correlation between less crime and increased housing cost. (What are governments doing with the windfall of property taxes? Wasting it I guess.) We are moderately well-off, work from home, and it has been a slog trying to find an escape. This has been the most difficult relocation I have ever contemplated. Our current method is finding a new place within a four hour drive, without having to bet $40K on a temporary rental.
As for Atherton vs. Queensbridge, I think we are looking at a false dichotomy, Phil.
https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-atherton-ca/
Red. Check out this nearby gem with convenient lawn and street-wide parking for the low low price of $2M, more in my range:
https://www.homes.com/property/1243-woodside-rd-redwood-city-ca/47cp6bbwgs6j7
It drops deep as it does in my breath
I never sleep, huh, because sleep is the cousin of death
Beyond the walls of intelligence, life is defined
I think of crime when I’m in a New York State of Mind
— Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones (AKA “Nas”, former Queensbridge resident), New York State of Mind
OAG: Godspeed in finding the “American Dream” to anyone who isn’t wealthy, and even then. — as I listen to an out of control brat screaming in his yard. What existence is that alien life form going to lead, going forward? We’ve stretched the abstraction of “America” so far, we’ve gone way past the linear elastic region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress%E2%80%93strain_curve
That’s what you are seeing, most likely. Thanks, by the way for your comments — kinda funny that the car parked in the grass looks like a Prius.
☮
[Word Press just told me I’m posting comments too fast. Pulling Internet ejection handle.]
Only a bigot would notice the massive overlap between “The safest places in America”, and “The whitest places in America”.
Articles trying to find the best places to live constantly struggle with this. Since “safest” is good, and “least diverse” is awful, the algorithm always ends up somewhere in the mushy middle.
Rational humans, on the other hand, don’t have this problem. The left avoids it by not being rational.
Sometimes it seems to me that the problem is how English is used in a non-law context. Imagine a person saying for a group G and a characteristic C, that most people who belong to group G have C. When said with variables it incites no emotions.
But when G is people of some color and C is some characteristic like pleasant/rich/corrupt etc. it suddenly has emotions that are incited. It starts to matter who’s saying it, etc. How is one supposed to say something about a G without inciting any emotions?
You are not allowed to even notice characteristics of specific groups. Unless the group is “white men”, and the characteristic is negative. Then it’s fine. Anything else is verboten!
What about subconsciously, similar to what Bill Burr suggested in a stand-up.
We think of a group, G, and then close our eyes and see what comes to our minds when we think of G. Unless one has renounced the world or haven’t ever come across a member of G, there will be some picture in the head, because we are always noticing stuff subconsciously. How does one get rid of that, is it scientifically possible? That would always be affecting the decisions we make, right?
Of course it isn’t possible. This is what leads to the self-loathing in the left. When they watch the local news every morning, they also notice the commonality among the perpetrators. They don’t want to live next to those people either. The cognitive dissonance drives them insane. They either check themselves into re-education camps, or just become deranged, TDS suffering, pussy-hat wearing protestors in an attempt to cope.
BTW, here’s the list of amenities in QB, as seen on the Wikipedia page. Sounds like a paradise! Anyone with kids should love living there!
Queensbridge Park
The original plans included some basic amenities, like a central shopping center, a nursery and six inner courtyards for play. In the 1950s, there were also three playschool rooms, a library, a community center with an auditorium where shows were put on, a gymnasium with a wooden floor that doubled as a wooden-wheels roller skating rink, activity rooms downstairs, and a cafeteria upstairs where the playschool children ate their lunches. Some of the downstairs activities included tap dancing, ballet, art, playing the recorder and singing, pool, knock hockey and table tennis, as well as Girl Scout and Boy Scout meetings. Residents enjoyed concerts during the hot summer months in the square central shopping area, and the Fresh Air Fund sent children on trips out to the Peekskill mountains.
The buildings in the complex are divided by a series of paths and small lawns. Also in the complex are several basketball courts and play areas lined with benches. Across Vernon Boulevard lies Queensbridge Park, the primary place of recreation for tenants of the project. There was also a smaller park placed conveniently right under the Queensboro Bridge called “Baby Park”. Baby Park was closed due to debris falling from the bridge during maintenance work in the late 2000s. Baby Park was replaced by a new playground for the same age range, between 40th-41st Avenues, within Queensbridge Park itself.
$300k for that economy is still insane. When lions left in 2000, it was $50k in Tampa, at 8% interest.
lion: While of course there has been tons of inflation in housing costs in the U.S. (not in any way related to our epic immigration-fueled population growth, we’re informed), maybe some of the issue in Florida is that post-2002 houses are built stronger and, thus, at a higher cost in materials. A lot of pre-2002 houses were built with the expectation that they’d be wiped out by a big hurricane and… they were! (not in Tampa, though, untouched by big hurricanes since 1921)
> In short, given the continued flood of low-skill migrants (70 million since 1976) maybe “affordability” shouldn’t be the goal
What if the goal was zero immigration for the next 50 years, and removal of 30M uninvited visitors? Dare we dream the dream?
> Dare we dream the dream?
Yes! Never give up dreaming about being able to have affordable dreams someday, anon.
Jeannie was an immigrant in I Dream of Jeannie — a super-hot, highly-skilled one — although somewhat mischievous. Being Persian, she’d be a good cultural fit in modern times. I wonder if an astronaut like Major Nelson could live in Cocoa Beach these days, in the style to which he was accustomed.
Titusville has some nice 290 sq. ft. “capsules” in an RV park for under $200K. My wife and I could pretend we were billionaires in space. The options for relocation are opening wide. Thanks for the ideas Phil! I could cash in my 401(k) to buy an RV and go on excursions nearly anywhere in the continental U.S. (are Canada and Mexico states yet? Would be cool to have a custom reclining painting of Jeannie on the side of the R.V.) Park the rig in an abandoned lot in Queens…and finally visit Queensbridge, boyhood home of my hero Nas.
https://www.viewbrevardhomes.com/property-search/detail/127/1073204/35-sunset-dr-titusville-fl-32780/
But am I dreaming too big, anon? It seems like it’s turning into a psychotic nightmare. Have a nice day. 🙂
All kidding aside, something like that Titusville RV listing would be an interesting option for people living the RV life, I know a lot of people do. A little home base for when you are tired of being on the road.
Not long ago, I did a deep dive search on Bestplaces.net for my ideal city. Turns out El Paso, TX is the place for me! Don’t meet me there, beat me there!
Money magazine used to put out an annual list of best cities to live/retire/start a career, etc. Problem was, the notes showed that once a city was selected, it could not be repeated. A bigger problem was the heavy positive-factor weight given to diversity.
For a while bestplaces.net was unmaintained, it’s kind of back, but not many people comment anymore. Niche.com is a similar site. Those best cities for “X” lists always seemed like they were written by people that had never visited the listed cities, and when people flood in they aren’t best anymore. Diversity, especially of thought (but I know what they mean), is desirable as long as it isn’t convolved with crime. (Bigotry isn’t stating facts, it is attributing unfounded reasons for those facts based on someone else’s identity and one’s own.)
I drove through El Paso once on the way to Arizona. It seemed like houses had very sensible landscaping for the type of environment they were in.
“Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican gal.” — Marty Robbins
@OAG: “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, I fell in love with a Mexican gal.”
“All my exes live in Texas!”
– George Strait, 1987
I think the reasoning is that without zoning, Atherton would have 100,000 more apartments, thereby making it affordable to all. Whatever “it” is at that point.