Super-Gentrification → Geoarbitrage → Quitting Time

Hey Neighbor. This unexpected sentence hits about 23 pages into the income, life satisfaction, and stress study just published by Nature: “Affluent respondents who work for longer hours and use their strength at work are more likely to experience prior-day stress.” 

It’s not just you. Getting paid to overthink things is exhausting.

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→ The top 10% of households – people raking in $250K and up – now account for 49.7% of all spending, up about 13% over the last decade. Those numbers just dropped as the People’s Union works to orchestrate a national boycott on February 28. Historically those kinds of boycotts fail because a silent majority doesn’t participate. Now, that majority isn’t even necessary. A silent, wealthy minority is enough. (READ MORE)

→ Yesterday, the homies at NPR ran a segment on the “courage to quit” featuring the story of one Emily Noyes, who quit her nonprofit job after she caught her bosses misappropriating grant money. Specifically, she reported the incident and quit the same day. That is… weird? The professional class – upon which NPR dotes so sweetly – seems increasingly conflict averse and scared of pink slips. The courageous move isn’t to quit, it’s to stick around and make everyone uncomfortable. No one should be embarrassed to be right. (READ MORE)

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field.

Good vibes are a side hustle if you’re in the right spot.

Wealthy boomers are bailing out the kids they pushed into once-prestigious, now-precarious careers by helping them monetizing their sophistication. It’s a nifty trick made possible by gentrification – or something very like it but more extreme.

The percentage of first-time home buyers with a co-borrower age 55 or up doubled between 1994 and 2022 (and has likely spiked since due to interest rates). The number sounds small, but suggests a big ol’ chunk of the top 20% has taken a “family money” approach to real estate. Good news for anyone with generous parents, but it’s particularly good news for creative class professionals attracted to peripheral areas with “potential” – cakes that could use a bit of frosting.

In 2008, The Onion ran an article with the headline “Nation's Gentrified Neighborhoods Threatened By Aristocratization.” The joke was rooted in the American understanding of gentrification as a process of racial displacement. But gentrification – not just a city thing – is fundamentally a financial and geographical process.^[1] Wealthy people move into central areas forcing others to the periphery. Then it happens again. And again. Simple logic dictates that at some point – say, when four-bedroom go for eight figures – those “others” will be Upper Middle. Aristocratization happens.

In 2003, urbanist Loretta Lees documented this process in Brooklyn Heights, where “financifiers” were buying townhomes from creative professional who’d bought them from Black locals, who’d bought them (in rough shape) from commuters moving to New Jersey. What she found was that Brooklyn Heights financifiers (perfectly depicted in Margin Call, btw) weren’t just another group of people. Whereas creative class professionals took an interest in the neighborhood as a whole, financifiers took interest solely in the creative professionals. They didn’t want to borrow sugar. They wanted to borrow taste.

Or, better put, invest in it. Brooklyn Heights got its first Starbucks a few years later. 

As it turns out, big money moves en masse. Developers and financifiers are a package deal.^[2] They wait for artists, writers, and marketers with garage bands to imbue neighborhoods with their trademark hipness then make it rain. Lees called this “super-gentrification.” Not only does it mean creatively dressed liberal arts majors are stuck in an endless game of duck duck goose with the quarter-zip crowd, it means they can cash out their “sweat equity” and vibes.

Which is actually pretty sweet. 

But only if you own.

The creative professionals who rented in Brooklyn Heights got pushed out by financifiers (moving to other neighborhoods with potential) and didn’t see a dime. The owners made bank. 

Buying a home is always an investment, but that may be doubly true for the sorts of overeducated, underemployed Substack readers now being subsidized by their wealthy boomer parents. Though many neo-Marxist pearl clutchers (some of them the same people cashing checks) might bemoan the dynamics at play, it makes a lot of sense to buy cake when you’re in the unique position to both eat then sell it. Gluttonous, sure, but filling.

→ Minnesota Senator Amy Klobucher went on the view and admitted that she spent “three weekends in a row” at The Container Store because she felt like her life was out of control.^[3] It’s not a legislative strategy per se, but it is relatable. (READ MORE)

→ The latest New York subway assault was perpetrated by a man with what looked (on security camera) like a 3 Wood. Honestly, impressive. Those clubs are hard to hit.

→ People really, really like Dirty Lab soap. A lot.

→ The new trailer for Holland, the surrealist suburban noir starring Nicole Kidman and Tom from Succession, just dropped. The premise – very similar to Wandavision, FWIW – seems to be that Kidman is trapped in a suburban Matrix controlled by Tom from Succession. Will Tom from Succession let her escape? Only Tom from Succession knows. (WATCH IT)

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Earlier this week, the Health Minister of British Columbia announced a plan to attract American doctors (worried about the downstream effects of Medicaid cuts). Savvy move. Vancouver needs specialists.^[4] But, unfortunately for OB/GYNs who want to ski Whistler, Canadian doctors don’t make that much.

Many white-collar workers facing career, market, and political uncertainty flirt with the idea of moving abroad. But the math can be rough. America is probably the best place on Earth that isn’t Singapore to make money. To justify a move abroad, Americans want a higher quality of life. It’s called geoarbitrage. And it works when it works.

The first step? Fiddling with a Purchasing Power Parity Calculator. PPPCs translate U.S. incomes into equivalent foreign incomes by incorporating cost of living. It’s a start. A way to begin noodling with the idea of ex-patriotism – a logic puzzle for people open to doing an illogical thing.

→ College-educated professionals are still more likely to move to New York than anywhere else in the country. That’s true even as high-income flight from New Yorks trends up. The new thinking seems to be: “If I can make it here, I can move it anywhere.”

→ Americans’ credit card debt has edged  up to $6580 on average. That sounds alarming, but it isn’t. People are making payments. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of debt. No need to get squeamish. (READ MORE)

[2] Part of the reason financifiers and developers seem to arrive together is that they are literally the same people.

[3] It seems like now would be as good a time as any for politicians – specifically career politicians – to cut the shit with relatable. Amy Klobuchar has a reputation for being good at her job and personally difficult. Cool. Me too. It’s fine.

[4] Vancouver gets all the press, but Victoria, B.C. is an incredibly beautiful town that feels, for some reason, exactly like the campus of the Washington University in St. Louis.