Bill Gates Does Not Live In Buffalo

Picking on Buffalo is like shooting fish in a barrel. Marginal Revolution summarizes Ed Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko to tell us why:

2. Urban decline is highly persistent (you can be stuck deep in the range where new building is unprofitable)....
4. Negative shocks decrease housing prices more than population (housing supply cannot contract readily).
5. The combination of cheap housing and low labor demand attracts individuals of low human capital to those locations.  Bill Gates does not live in Buffalo.

As a (suburban) Buffalo native who left for good when he was 24, this sounds about right.

An interesting point though is that places like Buffalo also seem to be full of people who don't have the will to leave. This seems to be positively but imperfectly correlated with low human capital. Any ideas what's going on here?

Comments

[J Hall]

I used to think it was lack of a will to leave (and perhaps it is for those with moderate-to-high levels of human capital). But I think that individuals with low levels of human capital stay in the home city because it represents the best opportunity available to them. In my personal experience it is the family ties that keep those with low levels of human capital at home. If the car breaks down, well Uncle Jimmy is a mechanic. Need a new roof, we'll all pitch in to put a new one on. You can't do that if you move to a new city. If you have high levels of human capital, however, you don't need to (or feel you need to) reply on family ties.

[Cate]

If you come from the burbs, I guess it is hard to imagine any type of imprint that an area could leave on you. A subdivision in Orchard Park and its surrounding flatliner strip malls can be found in Columbus Ohio or Atlanta Georgia. So why stay when these other places may provide more options for a bigger salary or more job security? But if you come from the city or the waterfront or further into the Apalachin plateau, the area has a character to it that many enjoy and is not so readily replicable in other places in the country. This attraction is often coupled with a strong sense of neighborhood and/or the family ties referenced above. It may not be the high end that anomalistic folks like billionaires desire, but that does not mean it is relegated to the level of a 1946 Dresden. Instead, we have a place that residents enjoy and wrap themselves around.

This "will" that you mention also assumes that all demographics enjoy the same ambition and expectation that you have been able to enjoy: a belief that if you pick yourself up and work really, really hard, life will be good. Get out from behind your safe desk, text books and adding machine, go into the impoverished or borderline neighborhoods and interview some folks on why they don't pack up and move to other places that do not want them either, where they can earn just as low as salary and carry just as heavy a burden of low self esteem. Then you may have the qualifications needed to raise the issue on free will and motiviation.

[Dave Tufte]

REPLY TO J HALL:

I think this is very well said. But, is a description of what is, rather than an explanation of how it got that way. Glaeser and Gyourko are providing an explanation of why (say) Seattle did not end up this way.

REPLY TO CATE:

I agree that BFLO is a great place to live. It isn't clear that it is a great place to make the most out of your human capital though. I get the point in your second paragraph, but it doesn't explain why those people - who may not want to move - appear to move from BLFO more heavily than from other places. You're really talking about the average mensch (who on average does stay), rather than the marginal one who makes the committment and goes. The latter are the ones we really need to understand.

P.S. You picked on the wrong BLFO native. I have a million reasons to be in BFLO and I'm still not. I grew up in one of the most unique and wonderful areas of the Niagara Frontier - not the Williamsville zip code, or the Williamsville school district, but the actual Village of Williamsville. There was a castle on an island a block from my house, Glen Falls within a 10 minute walk, huge amounts of park-like terrain (in what is now Amherst State Park, the old Farber estate, and the now urbanized fields around E.C.C. North), and I graduated from Williamsville South H.S. (a gem of a site that Hollywood is bound to put in a film someday). I have an enormous attachment to that area, but I'd be dumb to give up what I've found elsewhere for it.

[Colesh]

BILL GATES IS SO HOTT I WANT TO MAKE SWEET LOVE TO HIS BODY AND ROLE AROUND NAKED IN HIS MONEY!!

[Colesh]

OH AND BUFFALO SUCKS!!! THAT IS THE WORST PLACE TO LIVE!!

[David Tufte]

I'd protest ... but ... um ... I'm one of the people who think BFLO is a great place to be from, not of.