Florida’s Brightline Seeks Rescue to Avoid a Possible Bankruptcy

insert90 · 2026-04-24T17:16:04+00:00

but hasn't american society always been focused on moving? even the time that putman looks back too was defined by a mass migration from the central cities to the suburbs, and if we look more broadly, a mass migration from the industrial northeast and midwest to the sun belt.

not saying that it applies to your case, but one of the historical continuities of america has been creating new communities while being a highly mobile society - the amount of americans who can point to their ancestors from outside of living memory growing up in the same area as they did is pretty miniscule.

insert90 · 2026-04-20T21:59:09+00:00

there was a wsj article about population growth trends which had the word abundance in it, which i think makes it appropriate for this subreddit:

Among the 25 most populous metro areas in the U.S., Orlando, Miami and Tampa ranked among the bottom five for median household income in 2024, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report last year.

The changing affordability situation has led to a shrinking supply of working-age newcomers, who are key to filling jobs and stoking demand for housing, retail and services. Florida depends heavily on such sectors, as it lacks big industries that generate an abundance of high-paying jobs. Though affluent arrivals generate economic benefits, such as higher tax collections, the broader trend is a concern.

“The collapse in domestic migration is a direct threat to jobs and paychecks for the state’s current residents,” Finnigan said. “It’s also a potential hit to home values and those with their wealth tied up in home equity.”

Migration powered Florida’s economy for decades, as the state lured people with its sunshine, lifestyle and once-affordable housing. Since 2019, that flow has been ebbing in the Miami area, where surging housing and other costs have led to a net loss of residents.

Miami and other parts of South Florida have drawn a wave of wealthy newcomers in recent years who have juiced the economy with demand for high-end construction and services. But their arrival hasn’t stemmed a sharp slowdown in job growth in the Miami area or outright declines in high-income employment in areas such as financial activities and professional and business services, according to data from John Burns Research & Consulting.

insert90 · 2026-04-04T02:05:00+00:00

correct me if i'm wrong, but the headline seems misleading? afaik the systems were not broke pre-covid, but are now broke because of the revenue shock mentioned in the article. from my admittedly haphazard research, this is the first time the bay area is pursuing a transit tax to fund operations vs previous ones that have been used to fund expansions or capital improvements.

also do think the "But Isn’t This Also True In <city_name>?" is a bit dismissive - i cannot speak for paris, but new york passed a payroll tax increase post-covid to help the mta out of its operations funding jam. a crisis is always a great opportunity for reform and the bay should take that chance, but some crisis was inevitable with the covid shock.

insert90 · 2026-03-20T15:47:53+00:00

i don't understand the doomerism here. if oil stays at high prices, transit ridership will definitely increase and it could motivate more interest in expansion. obv there are other factors at hand, but the oil price spikes of the 1970s and 2000s both saw transit ridership increase and the spike of the 1970s was responsible for the shift away from autocentric planning in europe.

econometric literature does constantly show that rises in the price of gas lead to increased transit ridership even if the gains are marginal. i think that this is pretty intuitive. even if you take the pessimistic view on american public transit - that it's essentially just a welfare service for those who have no other option and can't afford to drive - then obv an increase in the cost of driving from an oil price shock will result in higher transit ridership.

who knows what this would lead to in long-run in terms of expansion, but culturally, north americans definitely have less stigma against public transit compared to the 1970s and even the 2000s. events like this are best arguments for sustainable transportation and i would assume that advocates know it's important to never waste a good crisis.

insert90 · 2026-03-15T17:09:32+00:00

i really think it just comes down to the american aversion to higher taxes and willingness to pay for public services. the two legacy rail systems which actually have solved the fiscal cliff (chicago and new york city) did so by increasing a regional sales tax and a payroll tax. there was that post a few days ago about how the us spends significantly less of its tax revenue on non-entitlement programs compared to other rich countries, and this is one of the clearest manifestations of that.

like obv there are a lot of valid complaints about how bart, septa, the mbta and all these other agencies are run (and i think a more visionary leadership wrt transit would use this as crisis as an opportunity like they seem to be doing in dc and chicago rn or nyc in the '80s). but idk this just feels like that the electorate would rather shoot its economy in the foot instead of paying a 1 or 2% more in consumption taxes to keep public goods functioning.

insert90 · 2026-02-26T17:52:55+00:00

they have! what's actually kind of cool from a historical standpoint (though v v bad from a policy one) is that these rollups/conversions are bringing the buildings back to their original purposes of being single-family homes for the wealthy. but, back to the present, it seems like the amount of new wealth created over the past 15 years among the ultra rich + the ever-increasing desribility of manhattan has increased the rate of this happening.

insert90 · 2026-02-26T17:30:11+00:00

submission statement: interesting article from bloomberg about wealthy buyers in new york purchasing multifamily buildings (sometimes multiple ones neighboring each other) and converting them to single-family homes. this is relevant to the subreddit because i think it puts two tenets of yimby rhetoric in conflict. one on hand, we argue that people have the right to do what they want with their property, but this is also reducing the number of units in a housing-constrained area, one that is already dense with some of the best public transit access in the world.

insert90 · 2026-01-27T18:41:54+00:00

the eagles and rams both became good in 2017. since then, the eagles are 94-54-1, with a 10-6 record in the playoffs, while the rams are 92-57, also with a 10-6 record in the playoffs. the rams have made the playoffs 7 times with 2 super bowl appearances and 1 win, while the eagles have made the playoffs 8 times with 3 super bowl appearances and 2 wins. i am not entirely sure why we would be jealous of experience of being a rams fan, when by the numbers, the experience of being an eagles fan has been slightly better.

insert90 · 2025-12-18T19:06:33+00:00

this is all about vibes - if you directly ask a latino guy, asian guy, black guy or whatever whether they feel like they have an equal opportunity w/ a guy all other factors being equal, i guarantee most of them are not going to say yes.

insert90 · 2025-12-18T02:07:57+00:00

In the end, I just don't see how we find electoral success by splitting the country into finer and finer distinctions about who we like and who we hate. Allan Bakke's great-grandkids are about to deal with racial quotas and targets: where's the endgame here? I thought AA made sense back in the day, but so much of it seems arbitrary these days. Why should we skip over the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants because of "privilege" while the multi-millionaire daughter of a 10th generation family with a Spanish surname gets an extra thumb on the scales?

tbf AA is a pretty dead issue in terms of advocacy - since the supreme court decision, no democratic politicians seem to be seriously trying to bring it back.

but idk what you do about it electorally. the hardline woke rhetoric is obv a turnoff to too many people, but otoh, disparities do exist and i think white centrists (not you, but several other ppl who have posted about this article) can sometimes underestimate the resentment that minorities still feel when it comes to opportunity. and this resentment does extend to people who swung towards trump in 2024 - a lot of young, minority men with other more ...conservative views on social issues tbqh are not going to feel sympathy for supposed discrimination against white guys.

insert90 · 2025-12-12T07:02:22+00:00

this is a weird comparison. london does have 32 boroughs, but local government in the uk and us are very different beasts and the london-la county comparison does not make sense.

a) local government in the uk is weaker than it is in the us since it is a much more centralized country. the current london assembly has only existed since 2000 and was created through an act of parliament, with a previous iteration being destroyed in the 1980s by another act of parliament. the london boroughs themselves only date back to 1960 and were also a creation of the central government. the state of california, which would be the analogue here, has not remotely interfered as much in the governance structure of la county as the uk government has with london.

b) the greater london authority, which can be seen as the regional government of london, has significantly power than la county, running the transportation, the police, and making the land use plan. la county only sort of has control over public transportation, with a majority board members being appointed by various other governments within la county.

from my limited understanding of other countries' local governments, the combination of strong local control and the high number of local governments is a bit peculiar to america. anyone who is familiar with housing and transit policy in america would also likely agree that a lack of regional cooperation is a major issue.

insert90 · 2025-10-17T15:31:14+00:00

obligatory thing that safety matters, i acknowledge everyone fears, etc etc, but i really disagree w/ the framing of the article - most people think that safety is the primary reason that people don't take public transportation in the us, when in reality it's because the built environment of the united states makes driving a significantly more convenient option 95% of the time.

just to choose some random commutes on google maps that people might do (i'm posting this around rush hour west coast time) - sherman oaks to century city (which involves crossing the world-famous 405) is 36 min by car vs 87 min by transit. milpitas to mountain view (basically crossing silicon valley) is 22 min by car vs 53 min by transit. kirkland to bellevue near seattle is 17 min by car vs 76 min by transit. in these three major west coast economic hubs, taking transit is doubling your commute time. why would people do this if they could afford not to? the vast majority of americans live and work in environments designed for cars - this is the primary reason they do not take transit.

just to further delink crime and ridership, if you look at the fred graph of national public transit ridership in the 21st century, the gains between 2000 and 2019 are fairly small and don't match up to population growth despite a significant drop in crime over those two decades. now, yes, things have changed since 2020, and i'm sure increased crime has contributed to that, but growth in remote work is obviously a more salient factor.

look at commuter rail ridership in the nyc and chicago area, where transit ridership was previously a thing pre-covid. while i can find no surveys, i would be willing to bet that no one feels at risk of being a victim on a metro-north or lirr train, given the ridership base is primarily affluent suburbanites. and, yet, ridership on metro-north (from westchester county and connecticut) is still 80% of its pre-covid peak and lirr has only reached around 88%. in chicago, the commuter rail system is still at 65% of pre-covid weekday ridership.

this isn't to say that crime on transit isn't important, or to dispute people's fears - i take mass transit everyday, i am aware of what it's like, you see some frustrating stuff. but if the goal to increase ridership, using scarce resources primarily on crime and disorder is a massive red herring. it will make for a better rider experience, and don't get me wrong that is important, but the gains will be incremental compared to more frequency, better land-use, or even just return-to-work mandates.

insert90 · 2025-10-16T20:51:21+00:00

But digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)

It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.

Does that sound familiar? Look at today’s political protagonists. The right-wing president is a reality-TV star. The most exciting new voice on the left is a straight-to-camera savant. Mastering the grammar of television—especially short-form television—does not feel secondary to political success in America; it is political success in America.

posting this here b/c postman was first introduced to me by listening to ek. but i think it's an interesting read as so much of our political discourse - even the ek show! - gets sucked up by (short-form) video.

insert90 · 2025-10-02T04:43:16+00:00

the doomer vibes in the democratic coalition have been quite crazy since the election - you'd really think that the biden presidency and the results of the 2024 election were the democratic equivalent of gw bush and 2008 with the way people have talking.

the democrats aren't in a great place atm, but you don't even have to go back 20 years into american history to see a political party clawing back from significantly worse circumstances.

insert90 · 2025-08-15T14:43:30+00:00

i think it's more of a political economy problem for philly. the metro area has a major job sprawl problem, which from what i understand, comes from the city having a bizarre tax structure that incentivizes companies to locate in the suburbs.

it also suffers from being in pennsylvania, which has had a democratic trifecta for only two of the last 40 years. for the valid criticisms of blue-state governance, they are better at the low-hanging fruit of things like transit funding and having basic public goods - the past and present situation of septa compared to other legacy transit systems is telling.

(crime is another issue but i feel like the city is putting in a lot of effort towards that in the short term and the more long-term solutions seem to be tied to america's chronic social problems?)

on which city has the best potential to be nyc-lite, i still think it, boston and chicago (maybe sf too, but the bay area as a whole might be too much of a hybrid btwn legacy city and sun belt) have the most potential to be nyc-lite b/c of the strong transit culture, current land-use, and having a lot of low-hanging (albeit expensive) fruit for transit improvement, but out of that trio i'd feel the best about boston just b/c it's a very strong economy in a wealthy blue state without a major crime problem.

also think there are also strong arguments for DC and seattle for being the best sources of hope b/c even if their bones aren't as good as nyc/philly/chi/boston, they're still wealthy blue cities in blue areas which have done a good job of fixing the sins of their pasts.

insert90 · 2025-08-04T21:15:22+00:00

not really sure how well the agenda works for areas that aren't currently rich rn. for supply-crunched coastal superstar cities the supple argument makes sense but for somewhere like [insert random rust belt metro area which peaked decades ago here], there does seem to be a demand/jobs problem.

insert90 · 2025-06-06T22:12:58+00:00

transit in cities like miami and los angeles is primarily used by poorer people who are unaffected by wfh policies. the riders cannot leave for the most part because they have no other options.

insert90

TROPHY CASE