D&D and the rising pandemic

[J.Quondam]

Location! Location! Location!

 

[Cadence]

So, when you first use a term, maybe don't use just the acronym - I presume you mean "Metropolitan Statistical Area".

Doh! I should have, and you are correct on what I meant.

I think housing prices are dependent on many things, and in complicated ways. I expect simple heuristics that hold up to scrutiny would be hard to come by.

Certainly. It just felt like there is probably some populations where an area starts to accrue a lot of things (big mass transit, suburbs of over 100k themselves, multiple corporate headquarters, etc...) where they start to act differently from the things smaller than them. So I'd guess Boston is more similar in many Dynamics to cities 2 or 3 times its size than those 1/5th its size.

I'm sure it does, but not in a simple way. It also pay to be very careful when considering MSAs, as they are not created equal.

For example - for Boston, you name "Boston-Cambridge" and "Boston-Cambridge-Newton". Those are three adjacent towns, but we must be clear that the actual MSA they are talking about is in no way limited to those towns. That MSA includes almost the entire eastern half of the state of Massachusetts and two counties in New Hampshire! This is NOT a region with all the same housing prices.

I'm guessing the entire MSA should have been generically named Boston-Cambridge-Newton (not sure if I or the web-site left the name off).

It feels like a city of x population with open country around it would have very different real estate dynamics than a city of x population with another 2x or more people surrounding it.

Cities themselves vary greatly in terms of housing prices as well... but folks still talk about the housing prices of cities in general. It is sometimes interesting to see how different cities have grown based on annexing or not annexing everything around them (some MSAs are mostly the city, here in Columbia the city proper is only about 1/6th of the total).

 

[Cadence]

@Umbran @Dannyalcatraz One of the things I'm always curious about is how much of the famour/touristy/"good" stuff in the big cities the people living there take advantage of (museums, pro-sports teams, theaters, etc...). It fells like some folks do hit all those things, but a lot of others would find everything they use (well, except often the same job or same high prices) in a city 1/10th the size. Do y'all take advantage of a lot of those things in Boston and DFW? (I sometimes wondered if kids in my hometown 70 miles west of Chicago saw some of the museums in Chicago on field trips a lot more than the people who lived right their).

 

[Umbran]

(some MSAs are mostly the city, here in Columbia the city proper is only about 1/6th of the total).

I think we need to reiterate - the MSAs (at least, those created by the Census Bureau) are not created using some criteria that's in some way predictable or even-handed, such that you can expect comparisons to mean something. They are created in a fairly arbitrary manner for convenience for the Census Bureau.

(I did some work for the Census Bureau back in 2010, which is how I know).

 

[Cadence]

I think we need to reiterate - the MSAs (at least, those created by the Census Bureau) are not created using some criteria that's in some way predictable even-handed, such that you can expect comparisons to mean something. They are created in a fairly arbitrary manner for convenience for the Census Bureau.

The rules seem necessarily (?) arbitrary like those for many types of clusterings (starting page 37249), but it looks like they're all determined using those rules. And they do admit up front it's done for ease of doing statistical things.

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2010-06-28/pdf/2010-15605.pdf

I was surprised that New England got its own special things things (using towns instead of counties, with CT and RI having no county governments apparently).

Anyway, this has zoomed off topic from the thread now now, but for anyone who hadn't run into them before, a brief overview of Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US is at

Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA): Definition and Uses

Metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) are delineated by the U.S. OMB as having at least one urbanized area with a minimum population of 50,000.

www.investopedia.com

with a list of the 392 current MSAs at

Metropolitan statistical area - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

@Umbran @Dannyalcatraz One of the things I'm always curious about is how much of the famour/touristy/"good" stuff in the big cities the people living there take advantage of (museums, pro-sports teams, theaters, etc...). It fells like some folks do hit all those things, but a lot of others would find everything they use (well, except often the same job or same high prices) in a city 1/10th the size. Do y'all take advantage of a lot of those things in Boston and DFW? (I sometimes wondered if kids in my hometown 70 miles west of Chicago saw some of the museums in Chicago on field trips a lot more than the people who lived right their).

Speaking only for myself & those closest to me, I’ve been to several of the museums & galleries (multiple times). I’ve attended dance, theatrical and classical, jazz, opera (and other genres) concerts in several of the cities‘ main halls. Add to that 2 Lollapalooza festivals (back when it traveled) and countless other festival, venue, club and open air rock concerts. I’ve attended games for the Cowboys, the Burn (now F.C. Dallas), the Stars, Texas-OU weekend, The Cotton Bowl and even some HS championship football.

And that’s just in D/FW. I did likewise when living in Austin and San Antonio, including SXSW. Hell, I did road trips up & down I-35 to do things like see bands I liked (Dread Zeppelin) or work on certain projects (The Lennox Lecture series).

 

[Ryujin]

If you want to put a house in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from any job, sure, you can do that cheap. But the urban areas are already built up to (and somewhat beyond) the carrying capacity for the infrastructure around them.

That has become quite an issue in the Greater Toronto (an Hamilton) area of Ontario, Canada. Areas that were previously industrial or century old housing tracts have been converted to apartment buildings. Now it can take a half an hour to get from your home to a main street, before you're even getting on your way to work. Not to mention how the water/waste systems are over taxed.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

@Umbran @Dannyalcatraz One of the things I'm always curious about is how much of the famour/touristy/"good" stuff in the big cities the people living there take advantage of (museums, pro-sports teams, theaters, etc...). It fells like some folks do hit all those things, but a lot of others would find everything they use (well, except often the same job or same high prices) in a city 1/10th the size. Do y'all take advantage of a lot of those things in Boston and DFW? (I sometimes wondered if kids in my hometown 70 miles west of Chicago saw some of the museums in Chicago on field trips a lot more than the people who lived right their).

I say that I can "head up a mountain for skiing in the winter" but I haven't done so since I was a kid (when it was free, as opposed to now, when it's expensive). I used to go sailing, too. My wife used to ride horses. All of these things are now priced out of our privilege level (which I would still count as pretty privileged). Heck, I even stopped going camping because it costs too much and you have to book it many months in advance. (I just can't decide if I will want to go camping on a certain weekend in July when it's still March!)

I also haven't been to any of the local museums since I was a kid, nor do I frequent the beaches. I do occasionally see live productions, but only once a year or so. Generally I'm too busy and/or can't justify the expense. On the other hand, I do all that tourist stuff when I travel. (Bringing us back to the pandemic of the thread - I don't know when I will ever travel again, sadly. I mean, I will as soon as it seems reasonable to do so, but I'm not getting on a plane any time soon, y'know?)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

One of the best experiences I ever had in a museum was when I took two teenage cousins who had NEVER been to one. They grew up “in the hood” in New Orleans.

So there they were, running from exhibit to exhibit- not together, of course- in the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, calling to each other to see this or that. Chasing them around was exhausting as a football practice.

But to this day, they visit the museums with their wives and kids almost every time they come to town.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Appendix: a college buddy of mine was from NYC; went to the diplomat’s school. When we asked him about things like the Statue of Liberty, etc., he said he’d never done any of the touristy things.