Well I hope there are still enough who are desperate to be Number One. Otherwise, New York will grow older and greyer until it looks like Venice, Florida, only without Florida Man. Likewise Los Angeles, can you imagine Hollywood without a steady stream of talented young people to victimize?
So how is that news? My contemporaries and I made the same decisions forty years ago.
What the hell is this graph showing? I even clicked through to the article…do I really need to read the entire article to get some vague idea of what that is suppose to represent… How about paying someone enough to label some axises Bloomberg.
The thing about the “big” cities is that they have already hit a critical mass of jobs. New York is pretty much the only city I’ve been in where you could hop on the subway and ask people about their jobs and hear someone is a hedge fund manager, another is a journal editor, another is a ballerina, another is a math teacher, another is a physicist and cellist, and so on. Pretty much any job you can think of exists in New York.
I’ve only vacationed in San Francisco, but all of these megacities have similar demographics from what I’ve read. These types of articles say “people move to these mid-tier cities for the jobs” but I’ve never read one that actually does a cross-analysis of the TYPE of jobs.
Not to mention that there’s still tons of people being born in these big cities that never move, for whatever reason. When you have a “metro area” of 20,000,000 people, I don’t think New York is going to be starving for youth anytime soon.
Yeah, I was kind of kidding. Still, I’m willing to bet the crazed young lampreys who power Wall Street come from all over - likewise the actors off-off-Broadway. Some jobs are only for the ambitious. But half my engineering school was from Queens and the other half from Garden City. Techie kids don’t dream of one day making it big in the Big Apple.
Baltimore’s pretty cool these days. Fairly inexpensive, very close to DC, Philly and NYC, lot of neat art and music stuff going on, ever-increasing number of great restaurants. Don’t let little stuff like the riots, looting, and unprecedented violence keep you away, I swear it’s really pretty nice. I’ve been here for half my life and still like it, honestly.
They want Philly!
Long Island, where I live, is one of the most expensive places to live relative to what you earn. It’s bizarre, actually, to see the expensive properties that line the coast but rarely meet anyone who lives in them. From what I can tell, they are owned by financial types who have second apartments in The City (Manhattan) and live on Long Island on the weekends.
Because it is so expensive to own or rent here, young people move away, after attending some of the best public high schools and colleges, which are paid for by our taxes.
They call this phenomenon “The Brain Drain” and it is particularly affecting the tech industry.
Why the tech companies do not pay salaries that are high enough to make it possible for their workers to live here is a question I have. But the pay is quite low for the industry, especially at the starting level, and seems to cap out at what I consider a modest amount compared to other places I have lived, like DC and Atlanta.
Thank goodness for H1Bs, eh?
Yes, exactly. One of the companies I worked here for had about 80% of their programmers from India. They paid for their Visas, and the developers had a huge amount of loyalty to the company because of that. It was a real win-win situation for both the company and their employees - they had one of the most stable group of employees of any software firm I’ve worked for, and their coders all got their Visas taken care of by a company that had the system down pat. I loved working with that group of developers- unfortunately they had one of these open concept offices with NO privacy. I hate that.
Yep, and New York will always have Equadorians roasting guinea pigs in a public BBQ. Does Pittsburgh have that? 
Yeah I see this with my current actual employer with a big push to get us all in Pittsburgh and a few other places that are cheap in the U.SofA. Not that I have anything against Pittsburgh as it looks nice and all just I would have to move away from Seattle and since I grew up in St. Louis I remember what the weather would be like as well. But if I moved I could depending on neighborhood buy 2 or 3 houses for what I live in is now ‘worth’. Also all the new hires can actually live on the starting salary there. Seattle not so much.
I’ve actually been thinking a lot over the past several weeks about the fact that “Tier 2” cities have a great opportunity to attract residents these days, now that NYC, San Fran, and the other “Tier 1s” have gotten to be priced SO ludicrously. Frankly, the quality of life in smaller cities can be significantly better than that in the big ones, especially for folks who are lower in the earnings spectrum.
“Pretty much any job you can think of exists in New York.”
This line strikes me, because while it’s true of New York, and explains the robustness of the economy and culture there, San Francisco, for being most commonly compared to New York, has the opposite economy. Seems like in SF, you’re either in tech, or in a service industry catering to tech. Ultimately, I think this kind of “mono economy” (if you can call it that), is very bad for a city. Time will tell!
"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
– Snow Crash
I resemble that remark.
On the other hand, most of my high school friends moved back in with their parents after college, and are still there. We just had our 10 year reunion.
It is. It was a great place to be a grad student: people bought houses on their stipends, and because it used to be several times its current size and still has the museums and cultural institutions to match. But make no mistake, those tech companies want to be there to hire up all the Carnegie Mellon engineers and U. Pitt. doctors right after graduation.
Who are much cheaper than say a nigh on 20 year veteran in his late 40s as well. 
As a mom to a 17 year old - you are not encouraging!!! lol. Though I’d love to have her back home but even more I’d like her launched.
