4 ms·
With regards to the US, there is affordable and attractive urban housing, just not in cities that people particularly want to live in. I mean, look at the Midw
by Bjorkbat 10y ago
With regards to the US, there is affordable and attractive urban housing, just not in cities that people particularly want to live in.
I mean, look at the Midwest. Houses there cost nothing compared to houses in metro areas along the coast. It's not like cities there are terribly middling either. You look at the Cleveland Metro, and it has 3.2 million people, it has a lot of historical architecture, it has good infrastructure, it's alright overall.
But everyone wants to live in LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Denver, New York, Miami, or pretty much any other major city along our nation's western or eastern coasts (not so much the southern coast, unless you like living in a greenhouse in the summer).
I mean, I get it, all the cool stuff is happening elsewhere, but Midwesterners are still having a good time, sans beach.
In case you're wondering, I myself live in New Mexico in a place called Albuquerque. Affordable, but not as affordable as some Midwestern cities. Because the city wasn't in the Rust Belt there's also fewer older structures. The boom took place once all the nuclear scientists moved in and gas was cheap, so it's pretty badly sprawled out.
- shostack 10y agoYou're omitting a major factor in this. Jobs. I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and while I'm not a developer, the opportunities are still night and day in terms of the job options, the pay, benefits, etc. A cheap mortgage on a nice house in a good neighborhood means squat if there are not a lot of job options, or only ones a long commute away. Personally I think the best thing to help this is make remote work more viable for non developer professions that don't have as much demand or leverage. This would enable more people to live in affordable areas if getting another remote job were comparable to living in a market flush with jobs.
- Bjorkbat 10y agoThat is true, I am conveniently omitting the jobs part. So maybe the right answer to ask is not how to create more affordable and attractive housing, but rather how to spread the jobs out to cities overlooked by employers. Why isn't there a satellite Google office in Cincinnati, in other words?
- zaccus 10y agoWhy does Google need physical offices in the first place?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]