Is middle America vastly underrated? (real estate, condos, buyers)
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400k would buy you a nice house in one of the best neighborhoods in other cities. Heck half that would get you into a really nice area. You want slum you could find a crap shack in a bad hood for 90k. Why would someone pay four or five times the national average to live in a less safe, less affluent, area? How does this escape you?
So youre assuming the poor families who would leave compton would automically make enough to buy a 400,000
House elsewhere, or they would choose to do that?
Most likely, theyd move to another poor neighborhood in dallas/houston efc where its more dangerous.
ha okay you keep saying that, we get it. So is NYC and London, this doesn't mean they have dangerous areas...and many of LA's dangerous areas are in it's suburbs too(if you include the suburbs LA's gang population basically triples). No one is arguing against statistics. You said gangs are not a problem anymore and all I was pointing out is that gangs are clearly still prevalent in LA...seeing as it was ranked the second most gang infested city in the USA. Not to mention CNN named LA and epicenter for Mexican drug cartels.
So youre assuming the poor families who would leave compton would automically make enough to buy a 400,000
House elsewhere, or they would choose to do that?
Most likely, theyd move to another poor neighborhood in dallas/houston efc where its more dangerous.
If they manage to sell their house in Compton and use merely half that to purchase a new home in a better area in abother city sure. Now if they don't own a house they can start off in an apt in a nicer safer area and work their way up to a nicer home in a subdivision.
Dude little Tokyo isn't half as big as Koreatown. I don't look at little Tokyo as something to brag about even though it's cool. It's not even as big as Houston's Chinatown which covers 12 miles. Then there is little Saigon and and the Mahatma Gandhi district too. You're belittling a city when you don't know anything about it even though I'm giving LA it's props for being a great diverse and huge city.
All you sound is bitter because you want me to admit that one city is inferior to the other as if that says anything at all.
Dude, seriously.....you dont want to compare asian
enclaves.
san gabrirel valley is basically the largest chinatown in the u..s, for starters.
I brought up little tokyo, because it has 2-3 hotels for japanese travelers, the japanese museum, art galleries, gisnt japanse markets, and is in dense, urban environment that draws alot of locals and tourists.
Theres other japanese neighborhooods elsewhere.
Irvine, gardena, rowland hts, swatelle etc
If they manage to sell their house in Compton and use merely half that to purchase a new home in a better area in abother city sure. Now if they don't own a house they can start off in an apt in a nicer safer area and work their way up to a nicer home in a subdivision.
These things happen all the time.
They also move to other poor neighborhoods all the time.
I wouldn't characterize cities like Chicago or Atlanta as "Middle American" because they are progressive and chock full of minorities. Atlanta is one of the top Creative Class cities in the country so it's automatically disqualified in my mind.
Now Nashville, Columbus, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Memphis, etc. are a different story.
Ok, even if we take out Chicago, some cities in the Midwest still meet most, if not all of, your non-Middle American criteria. Let's use Columbus. It's 59% non-Hispanic white, 6% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and 28% African American. It's 11.3% foreign born.
Portland, meanwhile, is 72% white alone, not Hispanic, 9% Hispanic, 7% Asian, and 6% African American. It is 14% foreign born.
Now I definitely wouldn't call Columbus more liberal than Portland, but it's worth pointing out that Columbus isn't a conservative, homogenous backwater. Columbus' metro area is about 2 million people, and 500,000 thousand of them showed up for Columbus' pride this year. In comparison Portland averages 50,000-60,000. Pride turnouts obviously aren't the end all factor in liberalness, and they're merely anecdotal evidence, but that is a massive amount of people and it's worth noting. LA averages 400,000, in comparison.
To sum up what I'm saying, we should be using a tiered approach when talking about Middle American and or the Midwest. Columbus may still be somewhat under the radar nationally, but it's meeting many of your non-middle America criteria already. It's also not the only one by a long shot.
I fully concede that some states here go to colossal **** once you get away from their cities though, and they are most definitely stereotypical Middle America. I have zero arguments there.
Hell yeah Middle America is underrated. In the Midwest and South you get nearly all the same amenities for a fraction of the price. People move to NYC, SF, and LA etc. anyway though because they want to feel good about themselves for going to one of the media's darling cities.
"I wouldn't characterize cities like Chicago or Atlanta as "Middle American" because they are progressive and chock full of minorities. Atlanta is one of the top Creative Class cities in the country so it's automatically disqualified in my mind."
This thread is like talking to a wall. If you're going to close your mind to a giant swath of the country and reject any information that counters your preconceived notions then I really don't know what to tell you.
You're ever so slightly missing my point. Let me rephrase.
I didn't. I understood your point to be precisely this (I actually addressed this counterpoint proactively in my first response).
Quote:
Originally Posted by PerseusVeil
What I was trying to get out though is that there is a similar dynamic between NYC's offerings and the rest of the Northeast's offerings as there is between Chicago's offerings and the rest of the Midwest's.
I understood that. You then go on to say this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PerseusVeil
Again, this isn't to say that the aforementioned places are necessarily all on par with institutions in the Northeast, but I highly recommend visiting many of them, as they are no slouches.
I think my point is very simple. What cities in the Midwest, outside of Chicago, are considered cultural and economic heavyweights? The point wasn't that other cities in the Midwest *don't* have great institutions. The point was that Chicago is the only global, truly cosmopolitan powerhouse in the Midwest. Other regions of the country have more than just one. And it seems you readily acknowledge that the other Midwestern cities aren't on that level.
The obvious counter we've already addressed is "Well, New York pounds the other cities on the East Coast." But that doesn't matter, in my view, because the other cities on the East Coast (except Baltimore) are considered among the Top 10 cities in the U.S. These are cities that match up well with other powerhouses like the Bay Area and Los Angeles. I suppose that's why we see more Boston vs Bay Area threads on CvC than we do St. Louis vs Bay Area threads. Economically and culturally, there is no city in the Midwest beyond Chicago that can put up a decent fight against San Francisco.
This shouldn't be taken as an insult. I think most would agree that there's a general pecking order here in terms of economic and cultural clout.
"I wouldn't characterize cities like Chicago or Atlanta as "Middle American" because they are progressive and chock full of minorities. Atlanta is one of the top Creative Class cities in the country so it's automatically disqualified in my mind."
This thread is like talking to a wall. If you're going to close your mind to a giant swath of the country and reject any information that counters your preconceived notions then I really don't know what to tell you.
Not only are they placing restrictions on what they will consider middle America, they're restricting "costal" to cities that are actually on the ocean. I've had California and Massachusetts towns disqualified to make their point.
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