Why Workers Without
College Degrees Are
Fleeing Big Cities
By EDUARDO PORTER and GUILBERT GATES MAY 21, 2019
Last month the Census Bureau confirmed a confounding dynamic taking hold across the American landscape: Superstar cities, the nation’s economic powerhouses, hotbeds of opportunity at the cutting edge of technological progress, are losing people to other parts of the country.
For the first time in at least a decade, 4,868 more people left King County, Wash. — Amazon’s home — than arrived from elsewhere in the country.
Santa Clara County, Calif., home to most of Silicon Valley, lost 24,645 people to domestic migration, its ninth consecutive annual loss.
The trend is becoming widespread. Eight of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country, including those around New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, lost people to other places in 2018. That was up from seven in 2016, five in 2013 and four in 2010. Migration out of the New York area has gotten so intense that its total population shrank in 2018 for the second year in a row.
As the chart above shows, 30 of the 44 largest counties, with populations above one million, recorded more domestic outflows than inflows of people in 2018.
This growing flow of people out of the hotbeds of innovation and economic activity underscores how lopsided the distribution of opportunity has become.
Places like Cupertino and Mountain View in Santa Clara County may still offer the best, most highly paid opportunities for the highly educated — lawyers and programmers seeking jobs at Apple or Google. The median family in that county makes $122,700 a year. In King County it is $105,512, way above the national median of $76,000.
The problem is that workers without a four-year college degree don’t earn anywhere near that much.
Consider janitors. In 1960, a janitor in the Deep South could more than double his income by moving to Santa Clara County, even after accounting for higher housing costs. Since then, janitors’ earnings have grown much more slowly in Silicon Valley and King County than in the Deep South. And this is upending the distribution of prosperity across the country.
Today it makes a lot of sense for a lawyer to move to Silicon Valley from the South. The additional pay will more than compensate for the higher cost of housing. But a janitor moving from, say, somewhere in Alabama to Cupertino could see her household income, after paying rent, fall by more than half.
The divergence of economic opportunity for workers on either side of college is not a new phenomenon. But we are only beginning to understand how it has reconfigured the rationale for migration: Moving to opportunity is not what it once was.
Continued
College Degrees Are
Fleeing Big Cities
By EDUARDO PORTER and GUILBERT GATES MAY 21, 2019
Last month the Census Bureau confirmed a confounding dynamic taking hold across the American landscape: Superstar cities, the nation’s economic powerhouses, hotbeds of opportunity at the cutting edge of technological progress, are losing people to other parts of the country.
For the first time in at least a decade, 4,868 more people left King County, Wash. — Amazon’s home — than arrived from elsewhere in the country.
Santa Clara County, Calif., home to most of Silicon Valley, lost 24,645 people to domestic migration, its ninth consecutive annual loss.
The trend is becoming widespread. Eight of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the country, including those around New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, lost people to other places in 2018. That was up from seven in 2016, five in 2013 and four in 2010. Migration out of the New York area has gotten so intense that its total population shrank in 2018 for the second year in a row.
As the chart above shows, 30 of the 44 largest counties, with populations above one million, recorded more domestic outflows than inflows of people in 2018.
This growing flow of people out of the hotbeds of innovation and economic activity underscores how lopsided the distribution of opportunity has become.
Places like Cupertino and Mountain View in Santa Clara County may still offer the best, most highly paid opportunities for the highly educated — lawyers and programmers seeking jobs at Apple or Google. The median family in that county makes $122,700 a year. In King County it is $105,512, way above the national median of $76,000.
The problem is that workers without a four-year college degree don’t earn anywhere near that much.
Consider janitors. In 1960, a janitor in the Deep South could more than double his income by moving to Santa Clara County, even after accounting for higher housing costs. Since then, janitors’ earnings have grown much more slowly in Silicon Valley and King County than in the Deep South. And this is upending the distribution of prosperity across the country.
Today it makes a lot of sense for a lawyer to move to Silicon Valley from the South. The additional pay will more than compensate for the higher cost of housing. But a janitor moving from, say, somewhere in Alabama to Cupertino could see her household income, after paying rent, fall by more than half.
The divergence of economic opportunity for workers on either side of college is not a new phenomenon. But we are only beginning to understand how it has reconfigured the rationale for migration: Moving to opportunity is not what it once was.
Continued
that bubble has to burst at some point. I don’t even wanna live in SF (heard that shyt was dirty af and it’s some triflin ppl) and I still can’t wait.