The liberal cities with the most recognizable brands were once the dream destinations for college graduates and aspiring professionals in various industries. Now, they are all recognized as overrated dumps that have been carried by their reputation for years.
New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., are all seeing a net exodus of college graduates (as is San Jose). Those four cities were typically the finish line for those seeking jobs in media, politics, entertainment, finance, or tech. As New Yorkers used to boast, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” For many college graduates, the goal was to make it in one of those four big brand cities.
HOTELS FLEE CRIME-INFESTED SAN FRANCISCO MARKET
No longer. All four are plagued by a crime crisis that has bled out from those icky poor areas of the cities that college graduates avoided and into the rest of the city. New York City’s public transportation isn’t safe. San Francisco is plagued by homelessness. Los Angeles actively refuses to keep violent criminals and gang members off the streets. Washington can’t even guarantee the safety of members of Congress in their own apartments.
Combine that with the stupidly expensive cost of housing in those cities, and you have the least desirable professional destinations imaginable. You can hardly blame the college graduates who are making their way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, among the many cities seeing an increase in working-age college graduates. Arizona, Florida, and Texas are also winners, with cities that still appeal to that demographic that also happen to be affordable and not nearly as dangerous.
As America’s Big Four cities continue to decay, no one, from the average residents who were already moving out to the college graduates who no longer want to move in, is impressed with the old reputations of those cities. If you can’t make it here, don’t worry about it. No one else really wants to anymore, anyway.