[ghaff]

A lot of people forget that many now "elite" cities weren't that popular until relatively recently. Boston was losing population until well into the 90s and there was basically no tech left there by then.

When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.

[astrange]

Yeah, living in cities was unpopular until about 2000 for a good reason - they were full of crime. Surprisingly it turns out giving the entire country lead poisoning was a bad idea.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

[majormajor]

> Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)

You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban ones. A large demographic group got married and started having kids much later than previous ones (this part traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so was looking for very different things in housing. As those factors started to change, they started following similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated that dramatically.

"Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording of this, showing the draw of living in the city for single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage. Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there because NYC was the cheap option.

[ghaff]

Manhattan was something of an outlier. Even in not so great in a lot of ways 1980s Manhattan, a lot of people moved to "the city." This was especially true in finance. (Contra my comment about classmates not living in Boston proper, many lived in Manhattan proper. Of course, one difference is that the jobs were actually in Manhattan. )

But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan specifically.

[majormajor]

If we drop NYC we lose the easy TV show example, but I would still maintain that nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs. Places were already "pay for the privilege of living somewhere denser and walkable" by that point.

[ghaff]

>nobody young was moving to places like Midtown Atlanta or downtown Austin in the early 2000s just because they were priced out of the suburbs.

Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.

[majormajor]

> Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.

I actually agree with `astrange that by the early 2000s, if not a tad earlier[0], millennials were moving in-town (though not because their parents lived there! the opposite, if anything!), but I completely disagree on the "why" - their claim was that it was because it was cheaper because suburbs had zoning that caused them to get too expensive. My claim is that it was a lifestyle thing, not a "forced out" thing.

[0] I can't speak firsthand to earlier, but there were a lot of new or newly-redone apartment buildings by the early 2000s, suggesting that the trend had been going for several years already.

[skeeter2020]

Is this lead poisoning theory really any more proven than say, the access to birth control idea?

Young people tend to be economic migrants and the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities. They're also single and relatively poor so they live in multi-tennant housing near the downtowns where they work. As they get older, richer and more numerous (i.e. married w/ kids) they move out of the core. Cycle repeats with rising prices if growth is still there, or you hollow out the city and only the poorest remain. SF could stay like it is, or become a west-coast steel town, but it's unlikely to return to what it once was.

[ghaff]

>the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities

It's varies over time. With SV-style tech that hasn't been the case until quite recently. And, in the Bay Area, arguably the nexus of jobs is still in the South Bay. And this sort of situation is true for many other areas as well.

[tick_tock_tick]

Lets be real it was abortion

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/

https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-s...

[astrange]

It was not (or that was only some of it.) The same crime rise and fall happened worldwide - this is addressed in the article.

Continues to happen too. The parts of the world with the most terrorism like Iraq/Yemen also most recently had leaded gas.

[peder]

Cities are full of crime again today. Is it a problem with lead? Or is it a larger condition of cities in the Americas?

[ska]

> Cities are full of crime again today.

That doesn't seem to actually be the case, but crime statistics is a notoriously tricky area.

[astrange]

It is actually up a lot in 2020-2021 including murders and other “real” crimes.

There of course is also an effect where people think all of Portland is on fire because they saw a protest on TV once. But also Portland has had twice as much gun violence this year than all of 2020, which seems like a problem someone should do something about.

[ska]

Sure, there is a notable bump (with all the usual reporting caveats) in 2020-21; but that doesn't change the general trend. Or at least so far that doesn't seem the case.

[jeffbee]

Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.

[rufus_foreman]

You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure to lead can cause that.

The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years.

You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.

[crooked-v]

Or, you know, the whole "massive upheaval of lifestyles caused by a pandemic and the responses to it" thing.

[rufus_foreman]

Well that is in a completely different category than "lead", now isn't it?

Although I don't remember the "massive upheaval of lifestyles" suddenly happening at the beginning of June last year, is that your recollection of events?

[astrange]

It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to unemployment and especially not having anything else to do.

But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.

[cbm-vic-20]

At the time there were a lot more tech companies out along Routes 128 and 495. This is still true today, but now the balance has shifted to Boston and Camberville.

[ghaff]

Yeah, all the minicomputer companies (which is where most of us went to work after school). I'd have actually considered living in Cambridge at the time but it would have been something like a 45 minute (reverse) commute whereas I had about a 5 minute commute until I bought a house.

Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.