When I was 18 years old, I moved from the suburbs of Toronto to Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour west of the city.
I largely did this for two reasons.
Firstly, I had started visiting friends at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo while I was in high school, and I thought that I wanted that kind of University town experience.
Secondly, I started University as a Computer Science student and I figured that Waterloo was a pretty good place to study that. Research In Motion (later renamed to Blackberry) was an important company at the time and interesting things were happening.
Though to be clear, I was a student at Laurier and not at the University of Waterloo – the better of the two schools for Computer Science – because I didn’t have the grades for the latter.
But a funny thing ended up happening. I hated living in Waterloo. I felt so out of place. So much so that I spent every weekend back in Toronto visiting my friends who had instead decided to go to the University of Toronto.
And I remember vividly how I felt during those weekends. I would stand in my friend’s apartments – most of which had dens and solariums that were hacked into bedrooms so that they could afford to live there – and I would look across the skyline and think to myself: why the hell do I not live here?
So I transferred to the University of Toronto. And that solved that.
The reason I bring up this story today is that I was reminded of it while reading a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida called,
When I was 18 years old, I moved from the suburbs of Toronto to Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour west of the city.
I largely did this for two reasons.
Firstly, I had started visiting friends at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo while I was in high school, and I thought that I wanted that kind of University town experience.
Secondly, I started University as a Computer Science student and I figured that Waterloo was a pretty good place to study that. Research In Motion (later renamed to Blackberry) was an important company at the time and interesting things were happening.
Though to be clear, I was a student at Laurier and not at the University of Waterloo – the better of the two schools for Computer Science – because I didn’t have the grades for the latter.
But a funny thing ended up happening. I hated living in Waterloo. I felt so out of place. So much so that I spent every weekend back in Toronto visiting my friends who had instead decided to go to the University of Toronto.
And I remember vividly how I felt during those weekends. I would stand in my friend’s apartments – most of which had dens and solariums that were hacked into bedrooms so that they could afford to live there – and I would look across the skyline and think to myself: why the hell do I not live here?
So I transferred to the University of Toronto. And that solved that.
The reason I bring up this story today is that I was reminded of it while reading a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida called,
(1) Where we choose to live has a massive impact on our life outcomes.
(2) Self-confident people – according to a recent study – seem to be drawn to big cities.
(3) Self-confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy for people in big cities.
Now, I don’t know if it was really self-confidence and youthful hubris that told me I needed to live in a bigger city than Waterloo. (It was probably part of it.) All I know is that I wanted to live in a super dynamic place that felt bigger than me. I wanted to feel like I was a small fish in a big pond trying to make some sort of meaningful dent.
That was true for me when I was 18. And it remains true for me today at 32.
When I was in Revelstoke, BC last year I met a number of people who had made the move out there from Toronto. When I asked if they missed living in a big city, pretty much everyone gave me the same answer: “No, I love it here.”
This past week when I was in Park City, Utah, I similarly met a number of people who had made the move from New York and other large cities. And when I asked them the same question, I heard statements like: “I used to live in New York, but then I got a life and moved out here."
In these two examples, the obvious draw is the mountains. But it’s not like everyone just moved and became a ski bum. In fact, Inc Magazine recently published an article talking about Park City’s robust startup scene. People are figuring out how to combine hard work with the lifestyle they want.
What I find interesting about this is that it runs counter to the trend of young people preferring big cities. Here’s a quote from NPR:
“But affordable real estate and waterfront views don’t have millennials biting. They continue "a multigenerational pattern of young adults preferring more expensive urban areas over lower-cost rural ones because the lifestyles and opportunities in such places make the extra burden of cost worth it,” says Robert Lang, professor of urban growth and population dynamics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.”
However, some small towns clearly have a unique lifestyle advantage: mountains. And that seems to be a strong enough draw that some people are simply figuring out how to create the economic opportunities for themselves.
For me, this is yet another reminder that if you’re trying to attract the best human capital to your city or town, you need to think about lifestyle. And since young adults aged 18-34 are far more likely to move around than any other generation, you should also be thinking specifically about what this generation wants.
(1) Where we choose to live has a massive impact on our life outcomes.
(2) Self-confident people – according to a recent study – seem to be drawn to big cities.
(3) Self-confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy for people in big cities.
Now, I don’t know if it was really self-confidence and youthful hubris that told me I needed to live in a bigger city than Waterloo. (It was probably part of it.) All I know is that I wanted to live in a super dynamic place that felt bigger than me. I wanted to feel like I was a small fish in a big pond trying to make some sort of meaningful dent.
That was true for me when I was 18. And it remains true for me today at 32.
When I was in Revelstoke, BC last year I met a number of people who had made the move out there from Toronto. When I asked if they missed living in a big city, pretty much everyone gave me the same answer: “No, I love it here.”
This past week when I was in Park City, Utah, I similarly met a number of people who had made the move from New York and other large cities. And when I asked them the same question, I heard statements like: “I used to live in New York, but then I got a life and moved out here."
In these two examples, the obvious draw is the mountains. But it’s not like everyone just moved and became a ski bum. In fact, Inc Magazine recently published an article talking about Park City’s robust startup scene. People are figuring out how to combine hard work with the lifestyle they want.
What I find interesting about this is that it runs counter to the trend of young people preferring big cities. Here’s a quote from NPR:
“But affordable real estate and waterfront views don’t have millennials biting. They continue "a multigenerational pattern of young adults preferring more expensive urban areas over lower-cost rural ones because the lifestyles and opportunities in such places make the extra burden of cost worth it,” says Robert Lang, professor of urban growth and population dynamics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.”
However, some small towns clearly have a unique lifestyle advantage: mountains. And that seems to be a strong enough draw that some people are simply figuring out how to create the economic opportunities for themselves.
For me, this is yet another reminder that if you’re trying to attract the best human capital to your city or town, you need to think about lifestyle. And since young adults aged 18-34 are far more likely to move around than any other generation, you should also be thinking specifically about what this generation wants.
In 1933, the United States Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). With foreclosures rising as a result of The Great Depression, the task of the agency was to provide new low-interest mortgages to both homeowners and private mortgage lenders. Between 1993 and 1936, the agency served about one million households.
By 1935, the parent company of the agency (the Federal Home Loan Bank Board) decided to initiate something called the “City Survey Program.” The idea was to look at local real estate trends – including the racial and ethnic composition of the country’s largest cities – in order to get a better understanding of how to manage all of these outstanding loans.
One outcome of this program was the creation of the HOLC’s infamous “residential security maps.” (Philadelphia’s is shown at the top of this post.)
These were maps that categorized city neighborhoods according to 4 grades. Grade A neighborhoods (green) were the best ones. They were ethnically homogenous and had room to be further developed. Grade B neighborhoods (blue) were the second-best ones. They were already completely developed, but were still considered desirable. Grade C neighborhoods (yellow) were starting to decline and showed an “infiltration of a lower grade population.” And finally, grade D neighborhoods were considered “hazardous” and colored in red. These neighborhoods had low homeownership rates, old crappy housing, and an “undesirable population”, which, at the time, largely referred to Jews and African Americans.
Some have argued that the HOLC and their “residential security maps” are what kicked off systematic mortgage discrimination in America’s inner city neighborhoods – later referred to as “redlining.” This was the practice of denying credit to people who lived in these undesirable neighborhoods (and even to real estate developers who wanted to build in these undesirable neighborhoods).
But University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Hillier has argued that these maps simply reflected the ethos of the time period. Using a sampling of HOLC mortgages, she found that 62% of them were issued to grade D (red) neighborhoods. The agency, itself, was not actually redlining in practice.
Furthermore, she also looked at private mortgages issued in Philadelphia between 1937 and 1950 and found that security grade rating actually had no impact on the total number of loans issued. She did, however, discover slightly higher interest rates for properties located near and in the bottom security grades.
All of this is to say that “redlining” is likely not the only culprit for inner city decay. There are other factors at play.
“Our preferred estimates suggest that white flight was responsible for 34 percent of the increase in segregation over the 1910s and 50 percent over the 1920s. Our analysis suggests that segregation would likely have arisen in American cities even without the presence of discriminatory institutions as a direct consequence of the widespread and decentralized relocation decisions of white urban residents.”
In other words, it wasn’t just mortgage discrimination; it was also just general discrimination. That actually makes a lot of sense, because, if you think about it, the former couldn’t have occurred without the latter being present.
Here’s how the research paper puts it (via CityLab):
“Policies that reduce barriers faced by blacks in the housing market may thus not prevent or reverse segregation as long as white households have the ability and desire to avoid black neighbors.”
Here’s a chart from CityLab that shows how precipitously migration falls off (in the U.S.) once people finish school and get settled in a job:
Obviously, not every town or small city is blessed with mountains. But there are many lifestyle advantages that can be created. It’s for this reason that I keep talking about nightlife and Toronto’s laughable 2AM last call. Those are lifestyle things and we can do better.
In 1933, the United States Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). With foreclosures rising as a result of The Great Depression, the task of the agency was to provide new low-interest mortgages to both homeowners and private mortgage lenders. Between 1993 and 1936, the agency served about one million households.
By 1935, the parent company of the agency (the Federal Home Loan Bank Board) decided to initiate something called the “City Survey Program.” The idea was to look at local real estate trends – including the racial and ethnic composition of the country’s largest cities – in order to get a better understanding of how to manage all of these outstanding loans.
One outcome of this program was the creation of the HOLC’s infamous “residential security maps.” (Philadelphia’s is shown at the top of this post.)
These were maps that categorized city neighborhoods according to 4 grades. Grade A neighborhoods (green) were the best ones. They were ethnically homogenous and had room to be further developed. Grade B neighborhoods (blue) were the second-best ones. They were already completely developed, but were still considered desirable. Grade C neighborhoods (yellow) were starting to decline and showed an “infiltration of a lower grade population.” And finally, grade D neighborhoods were considered “hazardous” and colored in red. These neighborhoods had low homeownership rates, old crappy housing, and an “undesirable population”, which, at the time, largely referred to Jews and African Americans.
Some have argued that the HOLC and their “residential security maps” are what kicked off systematic mortgage discrimination in America’s inner city neighborhoods – later referred to as “redlining.” This was the practice of denying credit to people who lived in these undesirable neighborhoods (and even to real estate developers who wanted to build in these undesirable neighborhoods).
But University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Hillier has argued that these maps simply reflected the ethos of the time period. Using a sampling of HOLC mortgages, she found that 62% of them were issued to grade D (red) neighborhoods. The agency, itself, was not actually redlining in practice.
Furthermore, she also looked at private mortgages issued in Philadelphia between 1937 and 1950 and found that security grade rating actually had no impact on the total number of loans issued. She did, however, discover slightly higher interest rates for properties located near and in the bottom security grades.
All of this is to say that “redlining” is likely not the only culprit for inner city decay. There are other factors at play.
“Our preferred estimates suggest that white flight was responsible for 34 percent of the increase in segregation over the 1910s and 50 percent over the 1920s. Our analysis suggests that segregation would likely have arisen in American cities even without the presence of discriminatory institutions as a direct consequence of the widespread and decentralized relocation decisions of white urban residents.”
In other words, it wasn’t just mortgage discrimination; it was also just general discrimination. That actually makes a lot of sense, because, if you think about it, the former couldn’t have occurred without the latter being present.
Here’s how the research paper puts it (via CityLab):
“Policies that reduce barriers faced by blacks in the housing market may thus not prevent or reverse segregation as long as white households have the ability and desire to avoid black neighbors.”
Here’s a chart from CityLab that shows how precipitously migration falls off (in the U.S.) once people finish school and get settled in a job:
Obviously, not every town or small city is blessed with mountains. But there are many lifestyle advantages that can be created. It’s for this reason that I keep talking about nightlife and Toronto’s laughable 2AM last call. Those are lifestyle things and we can do better.
