When I moved to DC with a newly minted college degree in 1992, I took my first job as a typist in an association; a job not normally associated with college-degrees. And it wasn't just me. College graduates flocked to DC and took the jobs there were in the hopes of better jobs later (it was a recession, after all). We, of course, were over skilled for those jobs and displaced those without college degrees in offices across the city. I suspect this dynamic has only become more pronounced. In the big, dynamic urban areas, jobs once reserved for high school graduates are being consumed by college graduates making comparisons with the situation in 1960 laughable when so few Americans had college degrees. This is a highly flawed study that fails to account for the changing education level in the work force and the jobs those education levels implicate. It only proves that not having a college degree is not a good situation in one of the magnet urban areas that draw the more educated population.

All of this could be summed up in two sentences: It's expensive to live in cities on top of the fact that low tech services may be of little value there. For more bang for your buck, move out of the city, and to the town or country.

Even with a four year degree it is very difficult to find housing in smaller cities. Housing needs to be significantly cheaper. People that think otherwise either derive their success on other peoples' misfortune or simply don't want to see their home's value shrink.

I don’t know if this phenomenon can or will change unless and until the plutocrats find living in the favored cities becomes too unpleasant. That won’t happen as long as there are enough mostly illegal immigrants willing to do blue collar jobs for slave wages and no benefits, living ten to a rundown one-room apartment and sleeping on the floor between shifts. Or until the homeless become so annoying, and the traffic so intolerable, that the plutocrats just relocate, to begin destroying some other city. Technology and AI “workers” will deal with some of this, but also exacerbate the problem of finding work at a livable wage for the unskilled. My wife and I were never plutocrats, but were by no means poor, either. When my career was cut short by a severe health issue, we managed to hang on in Santa Monica/Los Angeles until a few years ago, when the traffic, the congestion, the medical care costs, the anger of people stuck in traffic four hours a day led us to leave for a city in Northern California now feeling living cost pressure from those fleeing the Bay Area. As California welcomes ever more illegal immigrants, things will only get worse. My wife and I will be fine, as our three children will. But our grandson? Not sure. We really have to start by doing two things: having less children everywhere, especially in our resource-sucking first world countries, and helping nations inundating us with illegals to create conditions keeping their people home. I’m not optimistic.

I work for a retirement system in southern California. We are retiring hundreds of workers each month, mostly in the health,school, or public work fields. I am talking nurses, x-ray techs, janitors, public road workers, etc. Most are retiring before 65, and almost all are moving to Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, or Montana. In the case of many of the nurses, they will work in their new states, and have been offered up to $100k to work in another state. Add the more reasonable housing, and you have a big answer to why people are leaving some big city areas. CA will continue to lack affordable housing, as long as obscene appraisals, greedy nimbys, and all-cash, no questions asked real estate practices remain legal.

I suspect that a substantial number of those moving out of big cities right now are doing so to realize capital gains on their homes before the market collapses. When I lived in Irvine, California in 2005 we were holding weekly going-away parties for friends moving back to the Midwest with truckloads of cash from the sales of their homes.

Housing subsidized in anyway is taxing the middle class people who pay the taxes, don't get the housing, and get paid lower wages since many people are in affordable housing. They have to stop letting in low-wage earners willing to work for slave wages so the laws of supply and demand can increase wages. Then people will get paid more or move.

As a native Californian driven out by housing costs - not to mention air pollution, interminable traffic, and crowded everything - I think that overweight state could stand to lose more than a few pounds. Unfortunately, that would mean losing people it needs - younger, immigrants, people fired with ambition just starting out in life - and eventually becoming the Assisted Living State, with the inevitable, concomitant economic decline. The cracks in the shell of the Golden Egg are widening, and there is no putting it back together again.

Something is very, very off with this analysis: "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." Are they comparing Alabama McMansions to a 1br apartment in Gilroy? A lawyer hoping to ever buy a house in a decent neighborhood with a reasonable commute would have to be insane to move to the Bay.

These days I am on the lookout for "legitimate" sources of "Fake News", as in well-intentioned news articles that put forward questionable information with some appearance of authority. I find this article does not pass the test. 1. The folks leaving the Metropolitan areas, are they fleeing the "big cities", or just selling and moving out to suburban/exurban developments? Cities are megacities now, including Seattle and San Jose. 2. Clark County, Nev., is Las Vegas, a big city for all intents and purposes. 3. "Relaxing zoning regulations ..." how did you jump to that from this data? Or are you using this data to push for a pre-existing agenda? Is that fair? 4. Writing up just the data analysis part of the article and leaving out the prescriptions would have made for a more honest and credible piece, wouldn't it? It would also have been more helpful and less "polarizing" by sticking to facts and not opinions. 5. "Cities have lost their luster" - please avoid flowery language when talking about data-related information. Scientific journals have strict rules about how data is presented and described, not because they are dumb, but because they are smart and know it is very easy to miscommunicate with words. Keep it simple, keep it unambiguous. Please. 6. Articles like this should be peer-reviewed to make sure it does not end up meaning 6 different things to 5 different people. Get rid of half of your columnists and use the money for this process. Please. End Fake News.

It's not just workers without degrees that move to small cities I recently recommended to a high tech worker fed up with the high housing pricing in S.V. to check out Lehi (Utah) Population of Lehi, Utah 2000 19,028 2010 47,407 2016 61,130 Lehi has been transitioning from an agricultural economy to a technological economy. Currently, 1 out of every 14 flash memory chips in the world is produced in Lehi in Micron's factory. Other high tech companies with operations in Lehi: Adobe, that moved that Adobe Marketing Cloud to Lehi, Anchestry.com that moved it's headquarters to Lehi, Microsoft that moved its MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack) to Lehi Data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah

I recommend to Mr. Porter to read up on Lehi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi,_Utah A much studied example by labour economists :-)

One month’s flow of illegals across our southern border is 100,000, i.e. enough to fully populate one of our middle-sized cities. The bulk of them have no skills, limited education and marginal literacy. It is an utter fantasy to believe that the continual flow of illegals does not push down the standard of living of our poorest citizens, Employers delight at avoiding the costs associated with hiring a citizen. No need to pay for healthcare, workman’s comp. social security, sick leave & vacations. Tax payers subsidize illegals by paying these costs plus subsidized housing, food banks, schools and hospitalization. It is a myth that illegals “pay taxes”.

Gee, could a factor also be the contempt which we see brazenly displayed about those "ignorant" people with advanced degrees? We have elevated a college degree to something more than it really is, especially by assuming that it also confers more moral worth, wisdom, insight, decency, judgement, etc. on its holders. Don't have a degree? You can't possibly have anything of merit to contribute to society, the snobbish attitude goes. Society reaps what it sows.

It is crazy these days. I manage a lab at a medical center in San Francisco. It takes 6 months to a year to find a replacement for a person who leaves (and they leave because they finally figure they either cannot save enough money living here, or can't afford a house -ever). And we always end up hiring someone local because those outside the state simply say "no thanks" when they figure out the housing costs or commute time it takes to get to work. We can't even get temp lab workers to come from out of state because it costs too much for short term rent. We end up doing a lot of on the job training of in-house staff to fill positions.

Funny, your chart shows everyone leaving Blue state "worker's paradises" for "racist" Red states. How could that be?

I've worked in Silicon Valley for 30+ years. In large part because I graduated from UC Berkeley and already lived in the area. Tech hiring tends to be "just in time". If you can't start a few days after your offer, your almost employer may look elsewhere. As an engineering manager, I've tried to recruit software developers from other parts of the country. They come for the interview, and love the job offered, but once they see housing costs here, it's "no deal". Trading a 4 bedroom 3,000 sq ft house outside of Boston for 1,000 sq ft that costs twice as much is the problem.

I don't recall that people ever moved across the country to take a janitor's job. But how about more skilled non-college jobs? My daughter lives in a wealthy NYC suburb where home remodelers seem to be in high demand and able to command good pay. Might such people consider moving? And the unwillingness to move for a janitor's job plays into the immigration debate. It is those immigrants, legal or not, who do the work that makes life bearable for the well to do in expensive places. Cut off immigration and make it impossible to staff a restaurant or find a nanny in places like Silicon Valley, might the grass seem greener for tech firms and people in smaller, less expensive places?

Got to have the work that lower paid people do. It seems logical that wages for less-skilled labor will rise. At the same time, increasing numbers of young people have a B.A. Look for waiters who can quote Shakespeare or spend their spare time painting pictures.

In New York there is a huge, insatiable, luxury market to serve, from food to furniture, to art. There was a swath of manufacturing that extended up the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront, which Michael Bloomberg rezoned and doled out like party favors to his developer cronies. Now there extends an unbroken wall of glass condos from the Brooklyn Bridge to Astoria. Someone with more imagination than class loyalty would have set this whole area up for boutique manufacturing. Admitted, nobody is going to build an auto plant in NYC, but small, high-tech manufacturing is a sector ripe for growth. It requires little space, little energy, a talented workforce, takes advantage of local demand and transportation, and provides a decent middle class wage for By contrast, anyone laboring in an office knows that 95% of what they do is absolutely meaningless garbage. Mayor Bloomberg and President de Blasio have corralled manufacturing into a few "theme parks", like the Navy Yard, and Industry City. They are large tracts but have already become hyper-competitive among eager artisans. We need more space. If you want to keep middle class workers in the city, give them vocational training so they can work in niche manufacturing.

"The problem is that workers without a four-year college degree don’t earn anywhere near that much" It's probably more accurate to say that *unskilled* workers don't make that much. Electricians, plumbers, welders, helicopter pilots, and truckers, to name a few, can and do often make six figures annually.

I live in King County and have since 1961. I think that blue color wages here have not risen as fast as home prices because we have imported a large number of immigrants to do this work at the price we like to pay. So not only has the supply of janitors (the example used in the article,) grown faster than the demand but also the janitors have live somewhere, too. While contributing to the lower blue collar wages they are also contributing to scarcity of housing. Even if they live at the low end of the housing market there is a trickle up effects all housing. My upper middle class neighbors had their houses build by people who don't speak English, their gardens are tended by people who don't speak English, and their homes are cleaned by people who don't speak English. These neighbors have a wonderful standard of living but unfortunately it is at the expense of blue collar Americans. If we are really serious about helping people in the world then we have to start helping them in their own countries instead having them come here to work for low wages and ruining the lives of our fellow Americans.

Again people are calling for more housing for more people in California, completely ignoring the inescapable fact that there are insufficient water resources to accommodate any more people. And global warming is making this much worse over time.

Workers with a 4 year degree, who don't work in tech, also either have to leave or move into tech. Our civil servants are struggling, education is struggling, police departments are struggling. But when we try to raise salaries, people complain about how fancy our (professional-degree holding, experienced, highly skilled) city workers make. We are cannibalizing our own cities for growth. We have to create a sustainable model that allows us to fund a fully functional city for these companies to grow.

Janitors, coffee sellers, and cab drivers can survive outside the expensive cities but the expensive cities can’t survive without them. You can make $1,000,000/year in your midtown office but somebody has to clean it, and when the guy down the hall in his office has a stroke somebody’s got to show up with a clot blocker and stretcher. Those people have to have places to sleep. Affordable housing in the expensive cities is part of the infrastructure.

Forced commutes are yet another way that the 1%ers are pushing for inequality. If all those with a forced commute have no time for a second job, let alone community participation, so much the better for the 1%. Middle-wage earners will thereby never threaten their 1%, which people enter not by merit but by belonging to a privilege system (right family, right school, right demographic).

Excellent article, well-documented with graphs. How often do reporters expose the low earnings of janitors over time vis a vis the inflation in housing in this country? Maybe the reporters should also study older low-income single with only Social Security as income ((After Regan ravaged it by turning it into a 35 year average instead of top three years) and what is happening to them. For myself, I am seriously considering moving to a more rural state to buy a house as on Colorado's Front Range I have been priced in the last five years out of anything but an Affordable Home. And the competition for those is intense because so few cities offer many of them. Boulder, Colorado, actually has 750 units but only one or two come on the market in any one month and the demand is high e.g. 20 for one unit.

It was interesting to read this article a day after reading yesterday's guest column on the South. The latter elicited a number of comments from readers in places like New York City and San Francisco condemning the backwardness and racism of the South. While I live in a blue bubble in the South (67% of the voters in North Carolina's Research Triangle area voted for Clinton), I grew up in the rural South and would never deny that there is more explicit racism in the South that in the North. Nevertheless, progressives in the North should pause before patting themselves on the back to contemplate how the cost of living in progressive urban areas is a form of systemic injustice that adds to to the burdens of the poor and disproportionately to the burdens of African-Americans.

The economics of housing cost and location of high-paid, high-skill work opportunities has created prosperity islands surrounded by less affluent feeder communities housing on average lower wage workers who commute. King County has some of the nation's worst traffic. The traffic/housing stratification paradigm applies to SF and LA as well.

TO Jonathan Oronoque 6 minutes ago, who wrote Economic theory predicts that if there is a shortage of blue-collar workers in these cities, then wages for these jobs will rise. That's Keynesian theory, formulated for a closed National Economy. With a fixe labour supply. But that no longer applies in a global economy There are millions of people in the world , willing to work for less and wanting to move to the United States. Just as chamber maids , it will become another minimum wage entrance job for desperate immigrants US wages are increasing set by supply (global) and demand (domestic)

Economic theory predicts that if there is a shortage of blue-collar workers in these cities, then wages for these jobs will rise. Either that, or the computer programmers and engineers who live there will have to develop robots to do this work!

This article misses two points that can be illustrated by San Francisco. First, in 1940, San Francisco had piers that handled shipping. It had manufacturing. The shipping moved to a container port in Oakland. The manufacturing is gone, the real estate filled by offices and housing for tech and finance. The longshoremen and manufacturing workers were replaced by college educated workers, not janitors. Second, San Francisco provides low cost health care to all residents, including undocumented residents. Health care dampens the income disparity shown in the article. I expect much the same can be found in other cities. For example, the tenements of the lower east side in New York have gone from Jews to Latinos and back to the college-educated grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the garment workers. The garment district is gone.

No way the graphic depicts 1960 janitor wages in 1960 dollar values! $29,000 annual income for a janitor then? Not possible. My mother had income of $10k in 1970 from her job as a government bookkeeper which allowed us to live in an apartment building in a middle class suburb. Minimum wage was less than $2 per hour at that time, $1 in 1960. So Janitor income might have been something like $3000 per year then.

I am not sure this is a bad thing. If a janitor can save more money in Clark County Nevada, he or she will accumulate the wealth necessary to reach the next rung of the economic ladder and, at the same time, bring prosperity to the younger or more struggling cities. If a janitor in NYC saves nothing at the end of their toils they will be in the same economic position as when they started. The obvious follow up to this article would explore the change in actual wages after the Janitor moves from NYC to Clark County Nevada.

'Affordable housing' is subsidized housing. Land in New York City is valuable and should be used to house those who can afford to live here and to pay for the benefits of an NYC life. Why should tax-payers provide housing in NYC, the world’s greatest city, for those who pay less (if any) in taxes than it costs to support them? Think of it in terms of dining: We provide basic meals for the indigent, no more; we don't provide vouchers to upscale restaurants. We don’t provide a fine dining experience to someone just because the best they can afford is fast food. Affordable housing should be built in less expensive areas where land is cheap. Public transportation should be available so that those who have jobs can commute to work and earn enough to move somewhere better. The long commute is the price they pay for failing to get an adequate education and learn marketable skills. If they want a better lifestyle, let them earn it; otherwise, they should get used to having a less-than-middle-class life.

We could be heading back to the days when the wealthy had separate servants' quarters on the grounds of their mansions.

Here in California we need more housing. SB50 would have allowed duplexes, triplexes and four-plexes in single family zones—something anathema to most California homeowners. Here is a better idea: rather than messing with the sacrosanct single-family zone, why don’t we require all commercial zones to be at least medium-density mixed-use commercial/residential? All those commercial areas surrounded by giant asphalt parking lots on every major intersection should have stores and parking on the ground floor with two to three story town homes above them. Statewide, hundreds of thousands of housing units could be built in this way without touching single family neighborhoods.