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Poll: Americans want to live in CA, Hawaii, FL, and NC


DCMetroRaleigh

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Please name the standards of living in which NC is ahead of states with higher levels of regulation. Please show examples. I expect you will have trouble because other than housing affordability, NC remains way behind most of the northeast and the west in standard of living indicators.

Is the regulation the cause of their higher standards of living?

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My statement on regulation as it applies to housing:

Regulation is what caused the sprawl mess (that I happily live in) in the first place. Developers want to build developments as dense as possible, that's the ticket to the most profit. Don't say that people don't want these houses close together, there are lots of new subdivisions that are pretty dense in South Charlotte and Huntersville that have very few homes on the market - they sell out quickly, people buy them and hold them.

Setbacks, seperation between houses, wide roads with no parking on the sides, no housing above retail are all prescribed by regulations.

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No real surprise here, as newcomers are coming in droves. I am a bit disappointed and surprised that Virginia didn't make the list. The northerners and westerners who are moving here tend to come from the socialist loony liberal areas where density/smart growth/welfare state social engineering is the goal. The fastest growing states are free wheeling areas where growth and prosperity and improved standard of living are the goal, such as Georgia, N.C., and Va. Virginia recently ranked #1 in best in business place in Forbes. It also ranks low in tax burden compared to the welfare states up north. Really a shock to me they didn't make the top 10.

As long as N.C. and GA. continue to facilitate the American dream, and don't veer off onto smart growth's utopian agenda, they will continue to do well. The vast majority of people are moving to N.C.'s suburban/exurban areas, they want that quality of life, and they will stop coming if they can't get it.

California, Hawaii, Washington, New York, and Oregon are consistently at the top of the list though. 9 of the top 15 cities are even in blue states. This isn't about politics.

But if you really want to get into an ideological fight, I contend that there isn't a single state in the country that isn't "socialist," by the strictest definition of the word. We've long forgotten the intricacies of our own economy though; it's getting too common that someone asks for government 'help' to stimulate the free market, when it's really just some company writing the rules to give them a leg up against competitors.

Regulation is what caused the sprawl mess (that I happily live in) in the first place. Developers want to build developments as dense as possible, that's the ticket to the most profit. Don't say that people don't want these houses close together, there are lots of new subdivisions that are pretty dense in South Charlotte and Huntersville that have very few homes on the market - they sell out quickly, people buy them and hold them.

Setbacks, seperation between houses, wide roads with no parking on the sides, no housing above retail are all prescribed by regulations.

As I stated previously, regulations that companies write and lobby for are not proper 'regulations' in the strictest sense of the term. Setbacks, wide roads, and unit limits are just as much a product of private interests as public ones. Regulations can be both progressive and regressive. Simply because there is a concerted effort to keep them in the latter doesn't mean they can't or shouldn't be the former.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Not much of a surprise to me anymore. I often visit the forums on city-data.com --which are forums for people moving to get info from the locals. The North Carolina forum is by far the busiest on the site!

It's really funny to read some of the posts from northerners, especially. There's a lot about NC they don't understand! :wacko:

LOL - I'm kind of a weather geek; a few years ago I worked in a small company in the Triangle started by some folks who had moved down from Massachusetts, and the wife of the owner once told me that - among several other misconceptions, she was afraid of "the tornadoes down here." Informing her that the most expensively destructive tornado ever on the E Coast, and the most intense in strength (1979 Hartford and 1953 Worcester, respectively) were both in New England was an unexpected shock to her, and funny to me - not only are there people who lack a rich knowledge of other regions in the country, there are plenty of people without a good knowledge of their own region.

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I love the term "social engineering." It can mean anything. Traffic lights, stop signs, and the ability of law enforcement to hand out tickets control behavior, thus they are a form of social engineering. But I digress...meaningless, euphemistic jargon that is supposed to sound like something that actually means something, as a caluclated way of pushing people's buttons is not really the topic at hand here.

Having lived in Charlotte, Boone, Foscoe, Chapel Hill and Carrboro (and having spent enough time in Asheville, the Triad and Wilmington to get a feel for those places), I've run into a lot of people from high-living-expense areas - SF, NYC, Washington DC who have moved here due to affordability; but they've tended to bring their values - right or left - with them. One would note - in looking as objectively as possible - that NC is more diverse (ethnically, politically, artistically - Black Mtn College was one of THE centers of 20th century modernism) that we're often given credit for being, so if non-natives can contribute in beneficial ways, good. I like living in a state where I can find bbq, bluegrass and southern rock; and can also go see a Bollywood flick or attend the biggest Documentary Film Festival in the Western Hemisphere.

And California is no poster child for anything - it's contributions to Americana include lifestyles, smog, real estate bubbles, and severe right/left political schisms; but any number of things it is credited for, or blamed for (liberalism, freeways, gay rights, the film industry) occurred elsewhere before they occurred in Cali. California did however give us 2 rather interesting presidents, one of whom was forced to resign in disgrace. No slight against California either - I love it, and have family and friends there; but its' importance in the grand scheme of "values" or "influence" or "socialistic tendencies" is highly overstated.

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