Santa Barbara Named One of “Ten Pricey Cities That Pay Off”

Still waitng for it to pay off.

Pretty superficial analysis by a University of Michigan econmist, probably a tenured professor making 150K a year for his studious insight of the obvious.

Basically he says that SB has great weather on the coast and you make a lot of money if you own property that you rent out. Duh...

While interesting, I might have taken a different approach to writing Lopez's article.

First, I would note that David Albouy is an assistant professor at UM whose research challenges traditional quality of life metrics that focus primarily on local cost-of-living vs. local wages. That is why he's interested in putting numbers to the abstract notion of "amenities". When amenities are added to cost-of-living, Albouy finds that people prefer to live in larger cities with good weather that are close to the ocean. This contradicts traditional models which predict people prefer to live in less urban areas. See Albouy's bio here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Albou...

Second, I would point out that the US News & Report article (written by junior reporter Matthew Bandyk) is only a summary of the recent paper written by Dr. Albouy. Bandyk's article is confusing because it doesn't define the meaning of terms used to describe geographical regions used in the study. Bandyk alternately uses the terms "city" and "metreopolitan area". If you read Dr. Albouy's paper:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~albouy/ci...

you quickly find out that the geographic regions his study uses are pretty big and are *not* cities in the everyday sense. As Albouy says in his paper:

"Cities are defined at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level using 1999 OMB definitions. Consolidated MSAs are treated as a single city (e.g. San Francisco includes Oakland and San Jose), as well as all non-metropolitan areas within each state."

For more info on MSA's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stat...

So this is why the numbers cited for Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo approach county, not city, populations. But based on Bandyk's writing, you'd think he was talking about cities! This leads to more confusion because, as we know, its harder to make generalizations about the county of Santa Barbara than the city of Santa Barbara.

In summary, I don't think the US News & Report did a very good job reporting the story. But that doesn't mean Albouy's paper is to blame. He's doing what many economists do, which is to build better and more predictive economic models. I would not necessarily dismiss Albouy's work as "superficial" based on Bandyk's article.

I might add that if Albouy had more granularity in his geographic data inputs (which he gets from the US Census) the results of the computer model might have been more interesting and/or actionable.

Models like Albouy's are really meant to be 5,000-ft views. I hope nobody uses the results to make a real-life decision.

Like the old adage goes, those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

As a committed educator, I hate that adage.

Well done EastBeach. That's the kind of analysis I'd love to see more of.

"Like the old adage goes, those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." -- El Informador

I can, and I teach. Go figure.

Wow, I guess everybody here thinks Santa Barbara sucks

:confused:

Thats because santa barbara used to not suck, and all of the locals can see that.