Define "geographically uninspiring". I find that Silicon Valley's proximity to mountains and bodies of water to be overly confining, and I place 90% of the bla

Define "geographically uninspiring". I find that Silicon Valley's proximity to mountains and bodies of water to be overly confining, and I place 90% of the blame for its housing prices on the Bay Area's geographical restraints. Great Plains cities don't have to worry about that because they can just sprawl outwards; geographically-restrained cities have to get expensive and/or get dense when there's a huge influx of population. Let's pop onto Google Maps and check out some of these cities at the same zoom level (caveat: I'm using a maximized Chrome window at 1080p, so if you're on anything else it might not display the area I intend): The Bay Area: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6179156,-122.1933201,11z https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6179156,-122.1933201,11z -- notice how almost everything is developed in this narrow little strip around the bay. Only in San Jose do you see any real development inland, and it's honestly not that much compared to cities in other parts of the country. Really, even if you could sprawl more inland without hitting mountains, you'd still have massive bottlenecks commuting to anything in SF because it's on a peninsula. Kansas City: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1155568,-94.7391727,11z https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1155568,-94.7391727,11z -- it's spread out, and it's got more than enough room to grow outwards for quite a while. If it becomes a hub or something, it can just keep growing out to relieve the pressure. Columbus was the picture in the article: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9312081,-82.8231266,11z https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9312081,-82.8231266,11z -- not as big as KC yet, but check out that room to grow! The Twin Cities, mentioned as a former tech hub in another comment here: https://www.google.com/maps/@45.0593467,-93.2436588,11z https://www.google.com/maps/@45.0593467,-93.2436588,11z -- big and sprawly, the exurbs are just waiting to be filled in, and there's still plenty of room to grow beyond that Dallas, my own hometown: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.8116737,-96.9491413,11z https://www.google.com/maps/@32.8116737,-96.9491413,11z -- I can elaborate more since I've lived here for over 30 years. I chose this zoom level because it's the widest one that would fit the whole Dallas area. Built smack in the middle of a prairie, I have seen the suburbs continuously sprawl north and east, plus I've seen the formerly-empty suburbs in between Dallas and Fort Worth fill up like crazy. You can tell the age of certain parts of town because our freeways are built in rings, like a tree. When I was a kid, the two northernmost freeways (President George Bush Turnpike and Sam Rayburn Tollway) didn't exist. Half of Plano was farmland, and the suburbs to the north, east, and west of it weren't considered part of the contiguous metroplex. Now, we've filled in the gaps between Plano and Lewisville, built up Frisco and Allen, brought the contiguous metroplex all the way up to Propser and Wylie, and now we're working on bringing Celina in. Mark my words: in the next five years, they'll start upgrading US 380 to freeway status. And within a decade, the contigious metroplex will reach to Gunter and Van Alstyne. And development to the east will bring Royse City and Forney in as well. House prices are spiking now due to a bunch of companies moving their headquarters to the Dallas area, and creating massive demand out of nowhere, but once construction companies start reacting to that demand, we're going to see a massive explosion in house-building in the exurbs, and house prices will fall back to their old levels once new development is complete. Oh, and the concentric circles model we're using for our roads makes commuting much easier than something like SF where the bay gets in the way of going from one place to another. You can easily reach downtown from the exurbs (and it doesn't matter anyway because most of our tech industry is in the inner-ring suburbs, not downtown). So if I'm going to take geography into account when moving somewhere, I'm going to prioritize someplace built on a prairie, because that will give me low housing prices and low density.