Right. Young people graduating college tend to be incredibly polarized in either getting the **** out of dodge or settling into the Old Way of Life.

Here is a discussion of some research on declining geographic mobility compared to what it was historically:

http://equitablegrowth.org/equitablo...tic-migration/

The places with economic opportunity have brown people. It's not especially mysterious why the children of the white flight era aren't moving back.

I would also say it's definitely tougher to move than it used to be. Look at wages compared to the cost of living in general. Especially if you don't have a college degree or some kind of good career set up, it's quite a gamble to move hundreds of miles away to a place with an even higher cost of living.

There has definitely been some migration from So. Cal. to Phoenix, Vegas, Texas, Riverside/San Berdindino exurbs, particularly of middle class and lower middle-class whites. Thing is, moving to LA/SF/NY is for the young and those willing to suffer a bit with roommates, odd jobs, etc, and even then you probably need access to a few thousand dollars and not have too many belongings. It's not easy to move a household after 35 y/o unless you are doing a paid relocation for a job. Reminds me of the singer Jewel (and many other entertainers, writers, eventual-strippers, etc) who packed up a car and headed from Alaska to San Diego and sang in coffee houses and such for a year or more.

I have no idea where a 35+ white guy, much less one supporting a family, could find a way to make a living in LA--it's a city for professionals and hustlers where most of the manual labor is done by immigrants. Sure, you could get a good city job or some such, but even most of those require credentials.

I've had plenty of interactions with older white guys just scraping by from thing to thing (like movers, repair people, etc.). You basically need some kind of education or credential and a foundation to get things rolling, and don't even think of buying a house unless you make $75k+/yr and save 20% of your income. The immigrant communities that have established themselves in so. cal., including from many asian countries, have done so through insanely hard work, close cooperation, and self-sacrifice. Those donuts don't make themselves. Hell, my step dad was a community college chemistry prof who liked Rush Limbaugh, but he helped put one of his students (FOB asian, obv) through Cal Tech and med school and was paid back. I mean, there is a route from JC to high level technical/professional work, but it's littered with obstacles and takes ability and single-mindedness--not exactly Kushner to Harvard sort of thing.

Also, the problem with many rural areas is that people are moving, the skilled/energetic young people.

It's hard to be "master of your domain" in a city like SF/LA/NY. That's fine with most people, but would be hard for many to take.

That's because we don't live in caves any more.

The thing to remember is that the high cost of living is largely something that's imposed by a political choice, not a fact of nature. Building a mansion in LA will always be expensive because land is scarce, but an apartment in a tall residential tower doesn't have to be that costly. We make it expensive and/or illegal to build that kind of stuff.

Glibly, anecdotally, and referenced in the research you posted: you get the picture it's not clear to people who live in dying industrial towns what's for them in burgeoning urban areas. It's obviously hard to suss out, it is a vexing question, and an important one. The best I can gather talking to a lot of these people -- many are family and friends -- is that they've sort of guessed (probably rightly) that cities are a lot of service sector, knowledge economy, perhaps tech jobs, many of which they won't be candidates for or don't want. Perhaps it's trite and false, or perhaps it's the false promises of populists clouding their brains, or only partly true: but lots of these guys I know seem to be literally waiting for manufacturing careers, carpentry/construction jobs, manual labor to spring forth from the ground or rain from the sky and they'll drive Uber and do gigs or be a waiter at Friday's or fix cars off the books or deal drugs or whatever until that happens but they aren't in any rush to seek anything beyond that. It's probably overly poetic but I think the description of hopelessness about these places is entirely valid. These people largely don't have any aspirations. That's the thing that's most striking about many of them.

The best I can say of these people isn't that they don't want to move necessarily, it's that they don't want to adapt. It's unsatisfying and circular though.

An lot of the migration from LA to Riverside/San Bernardino/Lancaster has been African American. I would say that's largely cost of living (as it largely was with white migrants as well) and leaving violent neighborhoods. Many/most AA neighborhoods in LA have become Hispanic or mixed and there are a lot of Central American immigrants.

I don't think this is true at all. Desirable cities are outrageously expensive everywhere in the world, no matter how many or few regulations and zoning restrictions there are. The idea that $750/month apartments would start popping up in Manhattan if it weren't for political choices is ludicrous. The middle and lower classes get pushed to the fringes, always, under every system. The worst you can say about land use regulations is that they usually fail to solve an intrinsic problem that they are not typically trying to address in the first place.

I don't know where exactly this ZONING=BAD line of thinking comes from among a certain segment of the population, but I can make a few educated guesses, and I'd wager if you scratch the surface a bit you'll find a great big pile of disingenuous bull**** being pushed by moneyed interests that only benefits themselves.

The latest Taibbi column is interesting. He's like a self-hating media elite bernie bro with a sprinkling of WAAF nihilism.

bobman,

The only way SF could build it's way out of high prices is by becoming so crowded that people wouldn't like living there anymore.

A lot of average white people from my OC HS moved east to SB/Riverside so they could buy a house and raise a family. Temecula is likely mostly while and probably voted over 60% republican. My bro started with a ****ty condo in Anaheim when you could still get that for $300k, 15 years ago. He now lives in a $600k+ house in a pretty good part of OC, but he probably made 100k on the condo, makes $150k/yr+ as a higher-level computer scientist, and gets by ok (not too many frills) with 4 kids and a wife who doesn't work.

I think i dont want to live in a big city because i like to see the stars at night.

people still like living in paris and that's like 3 times more densely populated than SF.

I made this point earlier ITT I think, maybe a week or two ago. But there are parts of the upper midwest, the northeast (MA / VT / ME corridor) where rural and exurban populations are rather liberal. Pop history, not a deep study, but I suggested these are places that were basically settled as long as centuries ago now, were NOT populated largely by white flight migrants fleeing cities during the early to mid 20th century. That's actually quite different from the industrial midwest where a lot of these rural areas and small towns boomed with the influx of white migrants leaving cities ~100-50 years ago.

San Bernardino is majority minority. Temecula is a bit of a fancy city and is pretty white, but mostly the area out there is quite diverse with Hispanic population high pretty much everywhere and some concentrations of African Americans in areas - like Moreno Valley in Riverside, though AAs mostly moved to San Bernardino, Lancaster and Palmdale.

I'm not denying white flight, but the migration has been pretty universal. The more pure white flight was in the 40's through early 60s when cities like Lynwood, Compton - much of South LA went from almost all white to almost all black.

I agree. We should be clear where this tangent started, which is basically the Southern Baptist ecosystem of churches are at a cross-roads between (basically) Trumpism versus modernity; and (some) leadership fighting for modernity and trying very hard to not alienate racial minorities.

I think it is obviously true that Trump voters were on the whole wealthier than Clinton voters; in this case though we're talking almost exclusively about Trump voters. Obviously almost literally everyone at a Southern Baptist convention is a Trump voter, but some remain committed to trying to thread the needle and re-invoke compassionate conservative branding and beat back the influence of the alt-right. I was simply pointing out that this internecine battle was suggestive of the gentrification of even the Southern Baptists, and wondered aloud what that meant for the people that are are right now on twitter bemoaning the Southern Baptists as too liberal (!!!) because of events like this, and were largely falling out of organized religion. A trend that's been manifest for some time now; this convention is symbolic of the divide, not causative.

It was an allegory about social isolation and segregation and how there's a whole class of people (largely white, largely angry, largely racist, some with decent incomes, some not, consolidated in specific geographic places) increasingly feeling alienated by one of the remaining institutions that was largely considered a bulwark for that worldview/mentality. Again, this isn't Hillbilly Elegy, I do not demand sympathy but simply note that populations of people largely set adrift without structures of social order or any real social purpose besides "fuming in anger" is usually a hallmark of bad things. I do not shed a tear for Southern Bapists either but church in the South is a bonafide cultural institution and its degradation in standing, its decline in the social order is imo a worrisome sign. It's another point in the "America at a dark place right now" data set. Even if we hold their institutions in low esteem, they likely have social utility.

I had a Berkeley law school class mate who grew up upper middle class in SF (parents owned some rental units), private schools, etc. She went to work for a large firm out of law school for 130k and a few years later was selling real estate and making 2-5x+ in SF. However, she was smart, cute, sophisticated, and had a great network, something of a ringer as a real estate agent.

My dad grew up in Compton in the 40s. Pretty sure was all white then. Haven't been around there in a while (used to live in a downtown highrise), but I wouldn't be surprised if it's becoming (has become) more mixed. I worked on a small case a few years ago related to semi-scamming a house from an old black lady's heirs. Think it sold for $500k and it wasn't exactly in Brentwood. The only issue I have with your analysis is I think there are more white people available to flee OC than blacks to flee LA.

What's your point? Paris is still expensive.

https://transferwise.com/us/blog/the...y-in-the-world

Paris is on here, but I don't see SF. If you're suggesting SF can build it's way out of high prices, it better keep building well past it gets the Paris' density.

Housing prices are quite high in Compton and everywhere in LA.

Compton and most of South LA are quite mixed now. I worked a lot in those areas in the early 90s and they were quite solidly black and I work there now as well and they are almost all mixed black and Hispanic.

I'm not trying to say there haven't been a lot of white people moving to the desert as well. I just wouldn't call this white flight, though maybe you could say it is in Santa Ana/Westminster/Costa Mesa (well, Orange County). There are also big areas in LA where Asian, primarily Chinese, immigrants are moving in and mostly Hispanic people moving out - like San Gabriel and thereabouts.

I was in Berkeley 85-92, but not likely we ran across each other you being in law school and all, unless maybe you lived in the coops.

It's funny, while I fall on the Islam worse than replacement religion because of it's bad founding text and recent (200+ years) developments end of the spectrum, "religious" practice is often more bound up with economic/cultural issues than text, which is often smuggled in after the fact.

The impetus with evangelicals these days seems to be more liberal/spirit of jesus than law and order. Like you can have more or less the exact same religion, and the associated politics, justified with appeals to that religion, can go 180 degrees in three generations. There is a lot to infer from that relationship, but one of the thigns is that people really hate close, careful study of texts (except jews).

Like Madoff was guilty plain as day, but it took someone with some knowledge and attention to detail AND some motivation (to understand the truth) to dig into things and expose him. There are so many things that are BS out there that can be seen by someone with care and motivation, and that's how some investment funds make money (either short or long), but they just aren't scrutinized by anyone who cares. We are not that bright as a species.