Comments on Ketan.org: The Best Places to Live (and study)

The places you mention are dirt cheap. If I was l...

2010-08-23T21:31:47.536-05:00

The places you mention are dirt cheap. If I was living in New York, selling my place would make up for a lot of inertia. Detroit is like the bottom of a gravity well; everywhere else is uphill. New York is the opposite, so why do people run so hard just to stay in the same place?

I'd be willing to wager you don't even see...

2010-08-23T21:03:31.695-05:00

I'd be willing to wager you don't even see those sorts of lists in, say, Germany. They are an artifact of the higher mobility in the US.

I agree with your points about inertia, but you aren't taking that to the logical conclusion. Since inertia slows migration places that are historically large tend to stay large well past they should. Metro Detroit still has ~5 million people but it's dropping (relatively) fast. It will take decades for Detroit to decrease in size to its "proper" size. Places that aren't as terrible as Detroit (Cleveland, for example) can stay large just through natural growth so saying that Detroit is a better place to live than Seattle, Austin, Portland Oregon, or Orlando is dumb. I think a better proxy than size is growth rate relative to the US average as well as growth rate relative to metropolitan category (1m+, 500k+, 250k+, etc) to factor in job availability.

I've never seen Bel Air or Sausalito or Greenw...

2010-08-22T19:46:39.677-05:00

I've never seen Bel Air or Sausalito or Greenwich on these lists. I think they exclude places middle class people can't live. So the distinction is moot.

Inertia in the United States is low compared to most countries. Millions of people move every year; one of the big trends over the last few decades has been the exodus of northerners to the Sun Belt.

Besides, inertia is a dodge. Inertia should apply pretty evenly across the country. The net effect should be to slow rather than eliminate migration. There are people who stay in Brooklyn because of the ties you mention, but that's true of Fort Collins, Eden Prairie, and pretty much everywhere else.

There is an important distinction between "be...

2010-08-22T14:09:12.036-05:00

There is an important distinction between "best place to live where you are likely to be able to find a job" and "best place to live if you are independently wealthy/not career minded". Burlington is a much nicer place to live than, say, Worcester, provided you don't have to worry about finding a new job though it's 1/10th the size.

Additionally, you aren't factoring in inertia. A great many people live where they grew up. Someone from Brooklyn may prefer to live in Fort Collins provided that they were aware of the differences, had the finances and transferable skills to move, and if their entire family was able to move with them. The targets for those articles are people who aren't tied down by family ties, job or financial constraints. By those metrics, they are a lot closer to accurate.