The New Demographics
A coworker sent a link to an interesting Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Worth a read.
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
1 comment:
The point of Barone's piece is that demographics are beginning to favor Republicans.
I seriously disagree with this. Assuming his numbers are correct (and that's a large assumption), immigrant "inflows" are more typically liberal, strengthening the coastal urban political dynamics and increasing dominance, not decreasing it.
Another large issue is petroleum. The "outflows" of the middle class have largely occurred because of the ability to make long communtes. Example, in the SF bay area it's common for folks to travel from the Central Valley (an outflow recipient according to Barone) to the SF Bay area to work, thus taking advantage of lower cost of housing in the Central Valley while retaining high paying jobs. That's getting increasingly difficult as high gasoline prices remove the cost advantage. And as these outflow area develop jobs, prices increase and they then become a outflow victim. Put another way, there's a reason these places are less expensive to live in. When that changes ....
Because of energy, the dynamic Barone discusses is going to change, and soon. Centralization will become a necessity again as the cost of long commutes increase.
As far as the economic divide of classes, that's taking place everywhere, not just in cities. The suburban outflows may not have the divide as strongly simply because these areas are so lily-white and ultra middle class.
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