This story can no longer affect the outcome of the election is my cynical guess.
justin66 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps they perceived that the English-speaking world might also be interested in the story.
23 hours ago [-]
contemporary343 23 hours ago [-]
Of note is that recently, top US undergrads (in physical sciences) are actually going abroad for PhDs. I think at a statistically significant rate but we’ll have to do surveys.
William_BB 23 hours ago [-]
I find this impossible to believe. Do you have any sources?
contemporary343 21 hours ago [-]
It's my anecdote from my top-10-ranked U.S. program with a small sample size, but I've heard similar from colleagues at two other programs. A lot of US PhD admission cohorts have been dramatically smaller the last 2 years, so some of it is just spreading the risk in terms of applications and only getting offers abroad.
But in our case, one student actively turned down an offer from a top-3 private university in the US (ranking in our discipline) for a UK university. He specifically cited the funding landscape, since that university had had many of its grants canceled at the time, but of course did not rule out returning post PhD. He was a top student!
donutdonot 23 hours ago [-]
We’ve had a significant increase in applications here in Europe. All the funding cuts leave less positions to apply for in the US
bilbo0s 22 hours ago [-]
I think this is more what’s happening. People have to apply abroad.
There are simply not as many positions available in the US.
porridgeraisin 23 hours ago [-]
Same. I haven't heard of this at all from collaborators. In fact I hear about more and more graduate students.
misiti3780 23 hours ago [-]
studying where?
contemporary343 21 hours ago [-]
UK and Europe primarily for US undergrads. A few went to Canada.
altcognito 23 hours ago [-]
I imagine the answers will vary in the same way that different universities within the US had different advantage.
cinntaile 23 hours ago [-]
I would guess Canada, EU, UK, Oceania and South East Asia.
misiti3780 21 hours ago [-]
lol - why am i getting downvoted for asking where students are going ? HN is really full of a bunch of snowflakes.
cinntaile 19 hours ago [-]
Don't worry about it, I got downvoted for answering your questions. Some people just... Downvote.
justin66 3 hours ago [-]
I'm guessing you were downvoted (not by me) because of the meaningless of your answer, which might as well have read "everywhere else."
I’d love to hear why someone shouldn’t migrate when the environment gets hostile to their way of life?
Seems like an obvious move to me.
goodmythical 23 hours ago [-]
It is not necessarily obvious to all. Some choose to stay out of a belief that there is a chance that order can be restored or perhaps created for the first time and that it is worth staying to participate in the work toward the prefered order.
This happens in all sorts of queer communities. Some do leave for the greener pastures, but some choose to stay and fight to build a supporting community where they already live. Some believe that they should not have to flee to the gayborhood in order to live their lives.
If every pro-choice individual left a pro-life community, the pro-life community will suddenly have zero votes against pro-life candidates/policies.
If all of the immigrants (or at least the ones with skin colors that trigger people, because no one seems to mind a white Swiss immigrant), knowing that many in the US are openly hostile toward them, simply left or chose to never enter in the first place, the US would never have a chance to develop a tolerance for these peoples.
Many Jewish people, given the chance to flee, chose to stay in Hitler's Germany in order to help others flee/hide, or support others in the area doing things like getting groceries to families that were at greater risk of harm.
Taken to an extreme, everyone at risk in a community leaving would only distill the hostility in to a pure un-hindered hatred that will take far more effort to address in the long run.
It is a personal decision that any who find themselves in hostile territory must make. Fight, flight, or freeze?
AndrewKemendo 23 hours ago [-]
> Taken to an extreme, everyone at risk in a community leaving would only distill the hostility in to a pure un-hindered hatred that will take far more effort to address in the long run
I think I understand the instinct behind this, but I’m not sure if it’s actually mechanically true.
What I’ve seen in practice is that when there’s an exodus of any major part of any group, then the group effectively dissolves
You’re right there may be some kind of final consolidation period of dogmatic people, which often splinters, but it mostly seems like exodus leads to long term dissolution, which seems like the goal of leaving it
Hence “vote with your feet” is the best protest
goodmythical 22 hours ago [-]
I think that depends on the scale.
If it is possible to get enough to leave such that the underlying community collapses, then it can work.
But if the effected population is 10%? 1%? If those individuals aren't in positions integral to the existence of the community?
If the 1% that left say the US were the "top 1%", then that would certainly cause waves, though I'm not sure it would completely dissolve the US. If on the otherhand the 1% that left were...hold on what's a 1% demographic..."everyone with rheumatoid arthritis", "those suffering from celiac disease", "people with natural red hair", "american indians", "chinese americans", etc then the US that remains is probably not a whole lot different from the US that was.
Brief research points to networks surviving random departure at rates as high as 50% (a random half of town folk leaving for different reasons) and loss of core individuals (healtchare/teachers/admin) at between 10-25%.
It seems there is indeed a threshold where collapse can be triggered by sufficient flight, and of course we've seen this in digital communities like digg.
I guess I'm just looking at like, if you're say a thousand racial minorities in an on average racist city of 100,000, and you all leave, the ratio of racists to non-racists will increase assuming the minorities aren't racist themselves. There is now less reason for the non-racists to campaign on behalf of the minorities because now there are fewer instances of injustice, and less reason for the racists to change their minds because they are less likely to engage in any racially driven encounters that give them the opportunity to change their mind.
I can see the appeal of leaving. You do the math, figure it's never going to change or won't change soon enough, the impact on your life is too great, leaving doesn't cost as much as staying does, and so you leave.
But suppose you've got lots of friends/family in the area. Elders you take care of. A neighbor whose pie is almost literally "to die for". The racism sucks, but your boss isn't racist and there's really only the one guy at work, so it's really just the subway that's a problem. Now staying is less expensive than leaving so you stay and make the most of it - vote to get someone like you on the city council, organize or participate in a support group, see something say something.
There is no one answer to fight or flight. It will always depend on the exact relation between the oppressed and their oppressor(s).
ericmay 22 hours ago [-]
Exactly. I tell people complaining about housing prices in New York City and California this all the time! There are other great places to live. It’s an obvious move if your financial expectations aren’t being met.
lisplist 22 hours ago [-]
I think it's definitely reasonable to consider moving if where you live just isn't worth it for you financially. Still, if you don't like it then leave is generally not great advice instead of asking our politicians to actually support policies that make our lives better.
ericmay 22 hours ago [-]
I agree with you, I’m just pointing out the same logic applies to this astrophysicist as it does to anyone else with a complaint.
Folks seem to want to celebrate this case just because they think it matters and makes the US look bad.
etchalon 22 hours ago [-]
I think you're confusing "financial expectations" with "financial resources".
AndrewKemendo 22 hours ago [-]
It’s desire that you’re getting stuck on.
The amount of Cubans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans Panamanians, etc… who had literally nothing and no resources to their name, who walked or hitched to the United States or Canada to back breaking labor to put their kids into high school is staggering.
Similarly for pretty much every cab driver and worker in Dubai, who is from Bangladesh or India or Kuala Lumpur or whatever…
In fact, I knew a very successful Honduran restaurant owner in Houston, who was deported twice from the U.S. between 1980-2000 finally got his citizenship on the third trip.
ericmay 22 hours ago [-]
That’s how it worked for everyone coming to the United States. You might get a fever and die on a ship sailing from England. Irish and Italian settlers were treated harshly and worked in factories as children. People came from China to California to help build the railroads. This is just a recency bias.
bilbo0s 22 hours ago [-]
That just turns into a revolving door. People who can’t make it in California moved to Arizona and Texas. Then complained about Arizona and Texas and moved to Florida. Then complained about Florida and are now moving to the next region.
Without ever considering the possibility that things are just less affordable all across the US. There’s multimillion dollar condos even in tier 3 places that aren’t even all that. Like Madison or Pittsburgh. Let alone talking about getting a house in these areas.
We gotta get the government refocused on affordability. That’s really the only way forward. Young people really have to be given a fair shot here.
ericmay 14 hours ago [-]
> There’s multimillion dollar condos even in tier 3 places that aren’t even all that. Like Madison or Pittsburgh. Let alone talking about getting a house in these areas.
You can buy a house in Pittsburgh lol. Have you been? Madison less so. But it’s telling that the first two places that come to mind are those two places. Forget Madison or anywhere anyone else going to Yale is talking about on TikTok.
How about Buffalo, Cleveland, and Memphis? Of course things aren’t as affordable as they might otherwise seem but there are plenty of homes outside of the “cool” places.
Safe enough area, you could be a single nurse and walk to work at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and buy a place. Not everyone’s desire or whatever but there are definitely affordable places to live.
Personally I propose that city governments just start building housing on land they already own, or buy land and develop it especially in the city where there is a lot of opportunity and then give it away by lottery or sell it at cost. Instead they give out lots of money to non-profits who “tackle” affordability and other such nonsense.
Didn’t California spend a bunch of money “housing” the homeless? The solution is right there in front of us - build housing. Why aren’t these majority Democrat city councils in these cities doing something about it?
bilbo0s 13 hours ago [-]
>build housing. Why aren’t these majority Democrat city councils in these cities doing something about it?build housing. Why aren’t these majority Democrat city councils in these cities doing something about it?
Because building shelter housing for the homeless one can pass off as "charity" for those less fortunate. And no one would willingly move to those shelters in any case.
Building desirable housing in a desirable place for nurses making 6 figures is an entirely different thing. It's gonna piss a lot of people off. So it becomes a political issue. No one wants to do it because they will be voted out of office by all the teachers, nurses and IT guys who didn't get a new place with free built in equity.
That's why we need, first, for the voters to agree on refocused policies and then afterwards build the necessary housing stock. No one's gonna build and give away free equity without a referendum providing political cover first.
ericmay 13 hours ago [-]
All I hear are excuses and wasteful spending.
> Building desirable housing in a desirable place for nurses making 6 figures is an entirely different thing.
Nobody needs or should build housing for people fitting this profile. Not everyone will be able to live in the desirable areas because if they did then there would just be other desirable areas.
Simply build housing. That’s all there is to it. Every time someone makes an excuse or tries to say some “charity” will get money or someone will get voted out of office you are just making the problem worse or maybe just not helping.
If building housing isn’t popular with voters though, and we are voting people who are building housing out of office, perhaps we shouldn’t be building housing regardless of outcome then. If someone is worried about their politician job then they should be voted out for that reason alone. Many elected officials have multi-year terms. They could at least make some progress even if they are sacrificing their job for it.
bilbo0s 8 hours ago [-]
That's naive.
You take a place like, say, Madison WI. The place is on an isthmus. Where other than a desirable place are the people who run Madison supposed to build new housing? It has to be in the city limits. That's where they have authority.
Now as soon as people who have to live out in the suburbs find out that some people get access to housing on the isthmus, yes, they're going to be justifiably pissed.
Now, if what you want is for housing to be built in other areas that maybe are not as desirable, (outside the isthmus/city limits), well, ok, that's fine. But in that case it's not the people who run the city who can do that. You asked why the people who run the cities don't build housing. It's generally because building affordable housing in desirable cities creates perverse incentives of the sort I mentioned above.
You need an enormous city like Houston, LA etc where there is always more land somewhere that is less desirable, perhaps even unused, yet still in the city limits. You're just not gonna find that in a lot of the desirable cities that everyone wants to move to.
We have to either incentivize people to want to move to these less desirable places. (Maybe with jobs or creative amenities or something.) Or we need to get referendums in place that allow us to change policies in the desirable places so that rebuilding a neighborhood for higher density, greater affordability, and probably fewer single family homes becomes less politically perilous.
Because in a lot of these cities, there's just only so much space. This is especially true in cities with challenging geography, Seattle, San Fran, Manhattan, even low tier cities that are not that great like Madison. It's also generally true the further east you travel in the US. Phoenix/Scottsdale is enormous in terms of physical space. LA area is even bigger. But you travel east things get smaller and smaller until you're dealing with Boston, and Manhattan.
I admire your passion. But we need solutions that can actually work. Referendums work. "Just build more housing" doesn't. Because people who build housing deserve to be paid for it, and they get paid for it by charging market value. Market value in desirable places is contrary to collective affordability. We need referendums that resolve to build housing without expecting to make market level money on the new housing stock.
ericmay 3 hours ago [-]
Referendums are the wrong answer. Referendums on bike lanes that never get built, feel-good statements about “affordability”, these are the exact kinds of big-talk no action politics that have resulted in housing being unaffordable for so many and not enough getting built. What you are advocating for here is the current state. It's not working.
City councils can simply take land they own (or buy land), and then build housing. If voters vote them out, well it takes time until the next election cycle and at least some housing gets built. If politicians are worried about losing their jobs, they shouldn’t be in that line of work. We shouldn’t be voting for people who just want a job and to play house.
We should stop talking about places that don’t matter (Madison) or the “cool” cities like Boston or Seattle. If you want “affordable” housing in these places good luck, send some more political fliers and organize on Facebook.
Meanwhile we have plenty of space here in Columbus, great jobs, and we are growing. We sit on over 1,000 acres of undeveloped land, many of it is surface parking lots. We just need to stop talking, and build housing. Period.
FWIW I have a nice house and whether new housing gets built is of little economic concern to me. My passion comes not for building housing as much as it does getting this country to build stuff and actually try to solve problems instead of us across the board electing the same whiny dotards who promise to do things and then issue statements and hand out money to ineffective groups and consultants and market studies or other such nonsense. There is only one thing that brings housing prices down (or I should say slows their relative price increase over time) and that is to just build more housing. That is it!
> We have to either incentivize people to want to move to these less desirable places. (Maybe with jobs or creative amenities or something.) Or we need to get referendums in place that allow us to change policies in the desirable places so that rebuilding a neighborhood for higher density, greater affordability, and probably fewer single family homes becomes less politically perilous
I agree with you that many of these cities including my own need to build more attractive and interesting amenities to attract more residents (interesting how it just keeps coming back to building stuff). One area where I disagree is the emphasis on building fewer single-family homes. We need single-family homes. We don’t need the suburbs. Those are two totally different things. Neighborhoods, like a healthy forest, need a variety of housing types to meet folks at different stages of their lives and different income levels. You need mansions for the wealthier, and you need apartments for the artist or student. You need smaller homes for the empty nesters, and you also need larger homes for folks with kids. Today in suburbia we do build a lot of SFH, too much. Car-only infrastructure and out of control state and federal highway administrations are doing their best to bankrupt us and keep driving up tax increases. But cities (like mine) also don’t have jurisdiction in the suburbs and can’t control what gets built there.
madaxe_again 22 hours ago [-]
I find peoples’ recalcitrance to relocate hard to comprehend. They’re always like “ah, but kids, family, work”, while talking about little much other than how they hate where they live, hate their job, can’t stand Sunday lunches with their parents.
I have a kid. I have family. I work. I move continents when I get bored of the one I live on currently.
On which note, hi from Brazil. 9th country in which I have lived.
kyleee 11 hours ago [-]
Not hard to comprehend. You are an outlier
jarjoura 22 hours ago [-]
What is the takeaway from this article? This is just an essay of a family who is deeply privileged enough to have the freedom to relocate to a part of the world that is even more gatekeeping. That is definitely an achievement, but it’s not like this doesn't happen all the time. It would have been nice if this were a more detailed article that talked about wider trends or highlighted the sacrifices she's making and the students she's bringing with her.
ocd 23 hours ago [-]
I realize this has been happening for a while since the current administration came into power, but for people from other G7 nations, it's kind of nice seeing this happen to the US for once.
chasil 22 hours ago [-]
CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was greatly impacted by the cancelation of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) project in Texas.
The U.S. has purposely ceded fundamental science before, and will again.
Edit: The notes for the first article above indicate that estimates of the mass of the Higgs boson were greatly reduced after the SSC cancelation, allowing the LHC to accomplish its goals with less than half the total power (design maximum of 14 TeV for the LHC, versus 40 TeV for the SSC).
Notice also that the SSC was cut in 1993, under a Democratic congress with Bill Clinton in the executive.
jjtheblunt 23 hours ago [-]
agreeing, though to widen the perspective, it's been happening since long before the current administration, or that before it, were in power.
As a concrete example, my amazing professor left U Illinois for Austria, for an example, several years before the Trump/Biden/Trump again era.
it seems that the unending political battle drama gets tiresome for scientists. I believe some people realize that immersed in that context isn't how they want to spend their lives.
contextweaver 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bentt 23 hours ago [-]
I don't think links to paywalled sites should be considered without a mirror. What's the point of discussing something if not everyone can access it?
dcrazy 23 hours ago [-]
SFPL gives out free access to the NY Times, 3 days at a time. Maybe your local library does too.
metabagel 22 hours ago [-]
(San Francisco Public Library)
sashank_1509 23 hours ago [-]
> Super intelligence is coming in 1-5 years.
> We need the best and brightest if very country to stay in US.
These are not coherent positions at all.
Frankly I think we need the best looking people, not the most talented/ hard working/ intelligent people anymore, because that might be the only thing AI won’t replace for a while (decades).
lasky 22 hours ago [-]
tldr;
Over decades, like all government institutions, NASA devolves into an ineffective bureaucracy with massive cost overruns and operational ineffectiveness.
The economic pressure of national debt allows Trump and DOGE to kick much of the academic intelligentsia out of NASA;
astrophysicist loses all her influence in NASA, dies her hair pink and moves to Europe.
NYT continues to publish idealogical comfort food for its reader base about it (mostly liberal elite professional class) and claims it is “journalism”. People feel good reading it.
Instead of the hard work of intellectual honesty and self reflection of views, people continue to devolve into polarized reptilian thinking.
* https://nu.nl/klimaat/6403448/amerikaanse-topwetenschapper-z...
* https://trouw.nl/wetenschap/sterrenkundige-uit-de-vs-zet-wer...
But in our case, one student actively turned down an offer from a top-3 private university in the US (ranking in our discipline) for a UK university. He specifically cited the funding landscape, since that university had had many of its grants canceled at the time, but of course did not rule out returning post PhD. He was a top student!
There are simply not as many positions available in the US.
https://kellyholleybockelmann.squarespace.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Holley-Bockelmann
https://x02.me/i/mIORIX.jpeg
https://wallhop.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/scienc...
Seems like an obvious move to me.
This happens in all sorts of queer communities. Some do leave for the greener pastures, but some choose to stay and fight to build a supporting community where they already live. Some believe that they should not have to flee to the gayborhood in order to live their lives.
If every pro-choice individual left a pro-life community, the pro-life community will suddenly have zero votes against pro-life candidates/policies.
If all of the immigrants (or at least the ones with skin colors that trigger people, because no one seems to mind a white Swiss immigrant), knowing that many in the US are openly hostile toward them, simply left or chose to never enter in the first place, the US would never have a chance to develop a tolerance for these peoples.
Many Jewish people, given the chance to flee, chose to stay in Hitler's Germany in order to help others flee/hide, or support others in the area doing things like getting groceries to families that were at greater risk of harm.
Taken to an extreme, everyone at risk in a community leaving would only distill the hostility in to a pure un-hindered hatred that will take far more effort to address in the long run.
It is a personal decision that any who find themselves in hostile territory must make. Fight, flight, or freeze?
I think I understand the instinct behind this, but I’m not sure if it’s actually mechanically true.
What I’ve seen in practice is that when there’s an exodus of any major part of any group, then the group effectively dissolves
You’re right there may be some kind of final consolidation period of dogmatic people, which often splinters, but it mostly seems like exodus leads to long term dissolution, which seems like the goal of leaving it
Hence “vote with your feet” is the best protest
If it is possible to get enough to leave such that the underlying community collapses, then it can work.
But if the effected population is 10%? 1%? If those individuals aren't in positions integral to the existence of the community?
If the 1% that left say the US were the "top 1%", then that would certainly cause waves, though I'm not sure it would completely dissolve the US. If on the otherhand the 1% that left were...hold on what's a 1% demographic..."everyone with rheumatoid arthritis", "those suffering from celiac disease", "people with natural red hair", "american indians", "chinese americans", etc then the US that remains is probably not a whole lot different from the US that was.
Brief research points to networks surviving random departure at rates as high as 50% (a random half of town folk leaving for different reasons) and loss of core individuals (healtchare/teachers/admin) at between 10-25%.
It seems there is indeed a threshold where collapse can be triggered by sufficient flight, and of course we've seen this in digital communities like digg.
I guess I'm just looking at like, if you're say a thousand racial minorities in an on average racist city of 100,000, and you all leave, the ratio of racists to non-racists will increase assuming the minorities aren't racist themselves. There is now less reason for the non-racists to campaign on behalf of the minorities because now there are fewer instances of injustice, and less reason for the racists to change their minds because they are less likely to engage in any racially driven encounters that give them the opportunity to change their mind.
I can see the appeal of leaving. You do the math, figure it's never going to change or won't change soon enough, the impact on your life is too great, leaving doesn't cost as much as staying does, and so you leave.
But suppose you've got lots of friends/family in the area. Elders you take care of. A neighbor whose pie is almost literally "to die for". The racism sucks, but your boss isn't racist and there's really only the one guy at work, so it's really just the subway that's a problem. Now staying is less expensive than leaving so you stay and make the most of it - vote to get someone like you on the city council, organize or participate in a support group, see something say something.
There is no one answer to fight or flight. It will always depend on the exact relation between the oppressed and their oppressor(s).
Folks seem to want to celebrate this case just because they think it matters and makes the US look bad.
The amount of Cubans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans Panamanians, etc… who had literally nothing and no resources to their name, who walked or hitched to the United States or Canada to back breaking labor to put their kids into high school is staggering.
Similarly for pretty much every cab driver and worker in Dubai, who is from Bangladesh or India or Kuala Lumpur or whatever…
In fact, I knew a very successful Honduran restaurant owner in Houston, who was deported twice from the U.S. between 1980-2000 finally got his citizenship on the third trip.
Without ever considering the possibility that things are just less affordable all across the US. There’s multimillion dollar condos even in tier 3 places that aren’t even all that. Like Madison or Pittsburgh. Let alone talking about getting a house in these areas.
We gotta get the government refocused on affordability. That’s really the only way forward. Young people really have to be given a fair shot here.
You can buy a house in Pittsburgh lol. Have you been? Madison less so. But it’s telling that the first two places that come to mind are those two places. Forget Madison or anywhere anyone else going to Yale is talking about on TikTok.
How about Buffalo, Cleveland, and Memphis? Of course things aren’t as affordable as they might otherwise seem but there are plenty of homes outside of the “cool” places.
Here is an example right here in Columbus: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/644-E-Whittier-St-Columbu...
Safe enough area, you could be a single nurse and walk to work at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and buy a place. Not everyone’s desire or whatever but there are definitely affordable places to live.
Personally I propose that city governments just start building housing on land they already own, or buy land and develop it especially in the city where there is a lot of opportunity and then give it away by lottery or sell it at cost. Instead they give out lots of money to non-profits who “tackle” affordability and other such nonsense.
Didn’t California spend a bunch of money “housing” the homeless? The solution is right there in front of us - build housing. Why aren’t these majority Democrat city councils in these cities doing something about it?
Because building shelter housing for the homeless one can pass off as "charity" for those less fortunate. And no one would willingly move to those shelters in any case.
Building desirable housing in a desirable place for nurses making 6 figures is an entirely different thing. It's gonna piss a lot of people off. So it becomes a political issue. No one wants to do it because they will be voted out of office by all the teachers, nurses and IT guys who didn't get a new place with free built in equity.
That's why we need, first, for the voters to agree on refocused policies and then afterwards build the necessary housing stock. No one's gonna build and give away free equity without a referendum providing political cover first.
> Building desirable housing in a desirable place for nurses making 6 figures is an entirely different thing.
Nobody needs or should build housing for people fitting this profile. Not everyone will be able to live in the desirable areas because if they did then there would just be other desirable areas.
Simply build housing. That’s all there is to it. Every time someone makes an excuse or tries to say some “charity” will get money or someone will get voted out of office you are just making the problem worse or maybe just not helping.
If building housing isn’t popular with voters though, and we are voting people who are building housing out of office, perhaps we shouldn’t be building housing regardless of outcome then. If someone is worried about their politician job then they should be voted out for that reason alone. Many elected officials have multi-year terms. They could at least make some progress even if they are sacrificing their job for it.
You take a place like, say, Madison WI. The place is on an isthmus. Where other than a desirable place are the people who run Madison supposed to build new housing? It has to be in the city limits. That's where they have authority.
Now as soon as people who have to live out in the suburbs find out that some people get access to housing on the isthmus, yes, they're going to be justifiably pissed.
Now, if what you want is for housing to be built in other areas that maybe are not as desirable, (outside the isthmus/city limits), well, ok, that's fine. But in that case it's not the people who run the city who can do that. You asked why the people who run the cities don't build housing. It's generally because building affordable housing in desirable cities creates perverse incentives of the sort I mentioned above.
You need an enormous city like Houston, LA etc where there is always more land somewhere that is less desirable, perhaps even unused, yet still in the city limits. You're just not gonna find that in a lot of the desirable cities that everyone wants to move to.
We have to either incentivize people to want to move to these less desirable places. (Maybe with jobs or creative amenities or something.) Or we need to get referendums in place that allow us to change policies in the desirable places so that rebuilding a neighborhood for higher density, greater affordability, and probably fewer single family homes becomes less politically perilous.
Because in a lot of these cities, there's just only so much space. This is especially true in cities with challenging geography, Seattle, San Fran, Manhattan, even low tier cities that are not that great like Madison. It's also generally true the further east you travel in the US. Phoenix/Scottsdale is enormous in terms of physical space. LA area is even bigger. But you travel east things get smaller and smaller until you're dealing with Boston, and Manhattan.
I admire your passion. But we need solutions that can actually work. Referendums work. "Just build more housing" doesn't. Because people who build housing deserve to be paid for it, and they get paid for it by charging market value. Market value in desirable places is contrary to collective affordability. We need referendums that resolve to build housing without expecting to make market level money on the new housing stock.
City councils can simply take land they own (or buy land), and then build housing. If voters vote them out, well it takes time until the next election cycle and at least some housing gets built. If politicians are worried about losing their jobs, they shouldn’t be in that line of work. We shouldn’t be voting for people who just want a job and to play house.
We should stop talking about places that don’t matter (Madison) or the “cool” cities like Boston or Seattle. If you want “affordable” housing in these places good luck, send some more political fliers and organize on Facebook.
Meanwhile we have plenty of space here in Columbus, great jobs, and we are growing. We sit on over 1,000 acres of undeveloped land, many of it is surface parking lots. We just need to stop talking, and build housing. Period.
FWIW I have a nice house and whether new housing gets built is of little economic concern to me. My passion comes not for building housing as much as it does getting this country to build stuff and actually try to solve problems instead of us across the board electing the same whiny dotards who promise to do things and then issue statements and hand out money to ineffective groups and consultants and market studies or other such nonsense. There is only one thing that brings housing prices down (or I should say slows their relative price increase over time) and that is to just build more housing. That is it!
> We have to either incentivize people to want to move to these less desirable places. (Maybe with jobs or creative amenities or something.) Or we need to get referendums in place that allow us to change policies in the desirable places so that rebuilding a neighborhood for higher density, greater affordability, and probably fewer single family homes becomes less politically perilous
I agree with you that many of these cities including my own need to build more attractive and interesting amenities to attract more residents (interesting how it just keeps coming back to building stuff). One area where I disagree is the emphasis on building fewer single-family homes. We need single-family homes. We don’t need the suburbs. Those are two totally different things. Neighborhoods, like a healthy forest, need a variety of housing types to meet folks at different stages of their lives and different income levels. You need mansions for the wealthier, and you need apartments for the artist or student. You need smaller homes for the empty nesters, and you also need larger homes for folks with kids. Today in suburbia we do build a lot of SFH, too much. Car-only infrastructure and out of control state and federal highway administrations are doing their best to bankrupt us and keep driving up tax increases. But cities (like mine) also don’t have jurisdiction in the suburbs and can’t control what gets built there.
I have a kid. I have family. I work. I move continents when I get bored of the one I live on currently.
On which note, hi from Brazil. 9th country in which I have lived.
The U.S. has purposely ceded fundamental science before, and will again.
https://students.aip.org/observer/the-life-of-the-lhc-and-th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider
Edit: The notes for the first article above indicate that estimates of the mass of the Higgs boson were greatly reduced after the SSC cancelation, allowing the LHC to accomplish its goals with less than half the total power (design maximum of 14 TeV for the LHC, versus 40 TeV for the SSC).
Notice also that the SSC was cut in 1993, under a Democratic congress with Bill Clinton in the executive.
As a concrete example, my amazing professor left U Illinois for Austria, for an example, several years before the Trump/Biden/Trump again era.
it seems that the unending political battle drama gets tiresome for scientists. I believe some people realize that immersed in that context isn't how they want to spend their lives.
> We need the best and brightest if very country to stay in US.
These are not coherent positions at all.
Frankly I think we need the best looking people, not the most talented/ hard working/ intelligent people anymore, because that might be the only thing AI won’t replace for a while (decades).
Over decades, like all government institutions, NASA devolves into an ineffective bureaucracy with massive cost overruns and operational ineffectiveness.
The economic pressure of national debt allows Trump and DOGE to kick much of the academic intelligentsia out of NASA;
astrophysicist loses all her influence in NASA, dies her hair pink and moves to Europe.
NYT continues to publish idealogical comfort food for its reader base about it (mostly liberal elite professional class) and claims it is “journalism”. People feel good reading it.
Instead of the hard work of intellectual honesty and self reflection of views, people continue to devolve into polarized reptilian thinking.