Income map, Philadelphia vs Paris. Green means rich, Red means poor.
Here’s a video that explains why European inner cities have the most expensive homes, while American inner cities are full of slums.
Europe’s cities were built in the Middle Ages, before cars or railroads. Rich people paid for expensive homes in city centers so they could have the shortest walk to work. An urban home will naturally be limited in size, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, it didn’t make sense to have a massive house: It’s hard to keep a home warm and lit with candles and wood charcoal alone.
inner-city Paris
American cities were built in the 19th century, after the invention of railroads and coal energy. Rich people paid for big expensive estates along railroad lines because they could, and train tickets were so expensive that poor people could not afford to commute.
Suburban home along Philadelphia Main LineTypical commute to work
This configuration remained for centuries, reinforced by the fact that American inner cities have much higher crime rates than European ones.
Oh but hey America’s most expensive cities are turning inside out!
These days, the ability to commute to work is no longer reserved for the elite. In fact, long commutes are for suckers. Plus, it seems that having a gigantic house is overrated. Rich people are having fewer kids, and it doesn’t make sense to maintain a huge estate for two employed adults and a stay-at-home dog.
According to Bloomberg, Americans now want to live downtown. The zoning regulations of dense urban areas have made buildable lots incredibly expensive relative to the construction cost of a new home, thus urban developers focus on building high-end units to maximize their profits. If only rich people can afford to live in city centers, crime rates decrease, and this creates a virtuous cycle that makes Seattle look more and more like Paris.
There’s just one thing though. The opposite seems to be true in metros like Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Atlanta, and pretty much everywhere that isn’t Seattle-San Francisco-New York. But other than those non-entities, wealthy Americans are unilaterally flocking downtown, I guess.
Three years ago, FT had an article praising Tokyo’s laissez-faire zoning laws. Landowners can build and demolish as they see fit; the rules are set at the national level, so local governments have no say in the matter.
The article suggests that San Francisco could learn a thing or two from relaxed development rules. Ha. Hahahahaha. Why on earth would San Francisco residents want to liberate housing development??
In Japan, a housing development is the developer’s business. In San Francisco, it’s everyone’s business. Neighbors appeal building permits based on traffic considerations, shadow effects, environmental impact, historic preservation, and all manner of other stuff.
Here’s what they really want to preserve:
The upper blue area is North Beach and Little Italy. The red cluster to the right of that is Chinatown, port of entry for Chinese immigrants during the railroad and Gold Rush years. The red blocks on the west are the second, third, and fourth Chinatowns, formed after 1965. The orange area is the Latino Mission District; the dense blue spot down south is the Jewish retirement community. Source: Dotmap
San Francisco is culturally diverse, but the diversity* is strictly segregated. We call this historical character, and character can only be maintained by keeping outsiders out. Neighborhoods can’t exactly come out and impose cultural segregation, but they can enforce zoning laws. By blocking new buildings and preventing the renovation of old ones, residents ensure that the demographic makeup stays the same year after year.
When policy initiatives aren’t enough, diversity can be preserved in other ways. In Chinatown, landlords often advertise vacancies only in Chinese newspapers and sites, ensuring that incoming residents are also Chinese. The Mission District promotes gentrification resistance movements such as the Yuppie Eradication Project and Causa Justa, which tracks the number of Latino households displaced by white residents.
In any other city, we might start slinging the r-word around. Here in San Francisco, it’s a reasonable fear of displacement. I suspect that most of what we call racism today is this same type of fear.
City residents are right to be scared: The Fillmore District used to be known as the center of West Coast jazz, the Harlem of the West, until it was targeted for redevelopment in the 1960s. Urban renewal destroyed the Fillmore’s low rent housing, forcing tens of thousands of diverse residents out of the neighborhood. The development was widely criticized as a “N…. Removal” project. Today, the Fillmore District is just another place where rich tech workers live.
The area formerly known as the Harlem of the West
San Francisco is frequently charged with NIMBYism, in which wealthy landlords are accused of blocking development to uphold property prices. While it’s easy to rip on the landed gentry, low income residents are actually some of the most vocal opponents of new development.
75 percent of San Francisco’s rental stock is under rent control, and many units are priced so far below market rates that no amount of free market development could keep these tenants in their homes. The locals don’t want to compete with newcomers for business and housing because they know they can’t.
It’s these charming pockets of xenophobia that have preserved San Francisco’s historical character and made it such a desirable place to live. If SF were to liberate its zoning regulations, it might turn into San Jose.
Don’t get me wrong; San Jose is a lovely metropolitan area — I practically live there myself. San Jose is an older city with a history that goes back to the 18th century Spanish pueblos, but its historical character has long been displaced by the urban developments that rich hipsters are now trying to shoehorn into San Francisco.
Site of California’s first pueblo-town in downtown San Jose. We have the Fairmont Hotel, a Sheraton, and the Silicon Valley Capital Club, a private club for rich people.
So we can either have a bunch of segregated areas with rich cultural history and strict zoning plans, or a culturally dispossessed Frappuccino. It’s worth noting that, despite offering lower rent and easier access to the likes of Facebook and Google, Silicon Valley tech workers would rather not live in San Jose.
*I realize that the word “diversity” is constantly evolving. Here, I use it in the liberal sense of having representation from racial minorities.
Hello! I’ve been offline for the last two weeks. What’d I miss?
Judging by the headlines in my inbox, the last ten days have seen enough drama to fill a whole year. Bad stuff abounds, but this is what every week looks like to those who get sucked in.
A lot has happened; nothing’s changed. The real world is actually incredibly dull. Dullness doesn’t sell ads, so the media has to manufacture a continuous stream of outrage to fill the void. The coastal elite don’t live in a bubble, they live in a screaming echo chamber. No wonder we’ve all gone insane.
Wite Trash Partee hosted by a Chinese restaurant in Wyoming.
NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT—The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and a moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.
Spoiler alert: There was no adoption going on. The childless couple and kindly widow are actually thinly veiled offers to dispose of one’s infant for a fee.
Unwed mothers had a tough time during the uppity Victorian age. In response to widespread complaints about welfare abuse, Parliament passed the Poor Law of 1834 with a specific Bastardy clause barring the mothers of illegitimate children from child support. As Thomas Carlyle argued, giving them relief would effectively become “a bounty on unthrift, idleness, bastardy and beer-drinking.” It’s not so different from Bill Clinton railing against the welfare queens.
So what’s a single mother to do? Orphanages refused to accept bastard kids because immorality was thought to be a disease, and children conceived in sin might contaminate the minds of legitimate orphans. Similarly, unmarried mothers couldn’t find work because no one wanted to employ a moral imbecile. That’s not my terminology – The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act specifically classified unwed mothers as moral defectives to make sure they were institutionalized.
To avoid this trouble altogether, the mother of an illegitimate newborn might simply pay a baby farmer to poison the child and throw the body in the Thames. Extremely late-term abortion, if you will.
Baby farming was a lucrative profession: Amelia Dyer reportedly got paid to dispose of four hundred infants before getting caught. Several decades’ worth of cases came before hers, but baby farmers were rarely convicted if investigated at all. Given the high infant mortality rate and poor medical science of the day, it was difficult to attribute a death to murder vs neglect – and there was nothing illegal about neglect. There simply wasn’t much sympathy for unwanted babies. The Irish Potato Famine was going down, and people were actively starving to death.
There’s a Chinese idiom, 易子而食. It literally translates to “Swap kids to get food.” The phrase first appears in a 4th century BC text describing events of the Zhou Dynasty Spring and Autumn period [1]. Ancient Chinese parents were understandably reluctant to slaughter and consume their own offspring; thus in times of famine, parents would exchange children with their neighbors and eat each other’s kids instead.
To this day, I’m not entirely sure if 易子而食 was a real thing or if it was just a story that my parents told to scare me into submission. Come home with good grades or we’ll eat you, was the Battle Hymn of my Tiger Mother.
Sometimes I wonder if Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal was really all that modest.
Before the 1849 Gold Rush, Native Californians spent tens of thousands of years practically sitting on piles of gold. It’s not like the metal was buried in deep underground veins; much of it could be retrieved from sediment in the streams. Despite gold being treasured the whole world round, the Native Americans fixated on silly things like beads and feathers. If money is a collective hallucination, maybe the North American Indians simply huffed the wrong peace pipe.
In simple social organizations, individuals have more or less homogenous roles. They hunt, they gather, they mate. Some are more powerful than others, but it’s a fairly one-dimensional measure of environmental fitness. The items they collect are similarly homogenous.
Precious metals emerge when a population undergoes socioeconomic transformation and gains a higher degree of specialization, creating a need for status differentiation. It often coincides with hunter-gatherer tribes transitioning to sedentary life. When a group increases in size and complexity, you care less about where you rank amongst your peers and more about how your peer group ranks relative to greater society. A warrior might not care about being the wealthiest warrior, but it is crucial that the warrior class be considered superior to the farmers.
In the early goldbearing civilizations of South America and Europe, only rulers and religious leaders were allowed to wear gold. The Ancient Egyptians believed that gold came from the sun god Ra, and only kings could possess it.
Gold mask worn by a mummified falcon. The falcon was a god.
We see the same status differentiation emerge in modern times. Early cars all looked the same and every color was black. If you had one, you were well off, and that was enough. Then Packard came along and invented the luxury automobile, a way to distinguish the truly wealthy from the merely rich. Now Tesla takes it to a whole ‘nother level: It’s no longer enough to signal wealth; we must also signal virtue.
Eventually, society evolves to the point where a well-marked social ladder becomes less important than distinguishing the settlement within a larger group of city-states. This is when people start building big compensatory monuments like temples and pyramids and walls.
Prior to the arrival of European settlers, Native Americans lived in relatively egalitarian tribes. Their social structures didn’t warrant the effort required to incorporate a distinctive collectible like gold.
It’s not that the Native Californians couldn’t wrap their heads around precious metals – By 1849, over half the gold prospectors were the same Indians who had ignored it just a few years earlier. Just like in 4000 BC, the elite class didn’t like the idea of commoners possessing gold. California passed the Government and Protection of Indians Act of 1850, which made it legal to capture and enslave Native Americans. It’s called a “Protection” Act because before that, white people were shooting the Indians who tried to pan for gold. We were such assholes.
