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Having lived in Chicago, I think it's probably because the city government is corrupt, the Cook county government is corrupt, the suburban county governments ar

Having lived in Chicago, I think it's probably because the city government is corrupt, the Cook county government is corrupt, the suburban county governments are corrupt, all their municipalities are corrupt, and the whole region is going bankrupt from it. People look at Detroit, and think Chicago may be next. They don't want to put their eggs in the same basket as a time bomb, or an egg-sucking weasel. The only thing that has saved it so far is that it is a nice, affordable place to live. There are billboards on the state border encouraging people to live in Indiana (live in Gary?!) because Indiana isn't going bankrupt. And it isn't just the obvious form of corruption that everyone can see and hate on, like Blagojevich trying to outright sell a vacant senate seat. It's also the subtle form that pays public employees slightly too much to do not quite enough, and then a pension that gives them even more for doing even less, while their replacement adds even more to the burden. You can't just fire all those people and take away their pensions, because then you can't provide municipal services to your residents, and that is more acutely painful than being slowly bled to death. Edit: In slight support of those billboards and some cousin posts, Indianapolis is one of the most affordable cities in the US for buying housing. And the pool for tech talent is largely untapped. Public transit sucks, though. The city has a huge area and is almost completely flat, so it has taken extreme advantage of its ability to sprawl. Any sudden spike in growth will immediately lead to commuting nightmare traffic, all around the entire city.

tptacek 9y ago
Public finance problems in Chicago are a product of unrealistic pension guarantees. You can call that "corruption", but by that definition many other major metros in the USA are equally "corrupt". The Chicago and Illinois Democratic party machines are almost certainly corrupt (or just rife with corruption), like most single-party states. But it's not clear to me how this impacts ordinary life for citizens. Indianapolis is fine. I generally think, if you're going to move to a Midwestern city with no critical mass of tech companies, you might just consider throwing a dart. There are more tech workers in Chicago than Indianapolis, but in no Midwestern city are you going to exhaust the supply. We generally need to get away from the notion that the locale in which you start your company is make-or-break. What we don't need to do is suggest that there's a Midwestern Ur-city where everyone needs to go.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  By that measure, yes, I do think most of the major metros in the US are corrupt. It is a by-product of the loss of genuinely productive jobs in the country, and the rise of the "jobs" that had to replace them, because as a nation, the U.S. is violently allergic to any form of "unearned" welfare system. So the largest portion of the welfare system takes the form of pointless, overpaid, make-work government jobs. The military-industrial complex is similar, providing jobs for people leaving the military with no experience applicable towards ordinary businesses. It's welfare for veterans, but they have to work for it, so that's okay. It impacts ordinary citizens by raising their taxes and making the siting of production facilities in that locale even less attractive to companies, which tends to compound the problem. Real jobs leave. Fake jobs spring up. Companies that offer real jobs get squeezed harder to pay for the fake jobs. When they finally reach a breaking point, they leave and take the jobs with them. Spiral further down and repeat. This gets thrown around on HN a lot, but the root cause of the problem is the implicit and seemingly unassailable assumption that everyone has to work in order to eat. People actually get angry at the idea that someone might get the minimum portion of life's necessities without sweating on them first. Until that is addressed, no city in the US is totally safe for a business founded to do productive work, and the safest cities are those where enough new businesses are founded to employ all the people who would otherwise be forced to do make-work jobs to survive. And I think that's why people want to found companies in places that are already considered to be friendly to startups. The tightness of the labor market is not a bug; it's a feature. It means that more of your taxes go to infrastructure and vital services, and less to stealth welfare. The best place to start a business is one that doesn't need for you to start it there.

tptacek 9y ago

Public finance problems in Chicago are a product of unrealistic pension guarantees. You can call that "corruption", but by that definition many other major metros in the USA are equally "corrupt". The Chicago and Illinois Democratic party machines are almost certainly corrupt (or just rife with corruption), like most single-party states. But it's not clear to me how this impacts ordinary life for citizens. Indianapolis is fine. I generally think, if you're going to move to a Midwestern city with no critical mass of tech companies, you might just consider throwing a dart. There are more tech workers in Chicago than Indianapolis, but in no Midwestern city are you going to exhaust the supply. We generally need to get away from the notion that the locale in which you start your company is make-or-break. What we don't need to do is suggest that there's a Midwestern Ur-city where everyone needs to go.

logfromblammo 9y ago
By that measure, yes, I do think most of the major metros in the US are corrupt. It is a by-product of the loss of genuinely productive jobs in the country, and the rise of the "jobs" that had to replace them, because as a nation, the U.S. is violently allergic to any form of "unearned" welfare system. So the largest portion of the welfare system takes the form of pointless, overpaid, make-work government jobs. The military-industrial complex is similar, providing jobs for people leaving the military with no experience applicable towards ordinary businesses. It's welfare for veterans, but they have to work for it, so that's okay. It impacts ordinary citizens by raising their taxes and making the siting of production facilities in that locale even less attractive to companies, which tends to compound the problem. Real jobs leave. Fake jobs spring up. Companies that offer real jobs get squeezed harder to pay for the fake jobs. When they finally reach a breaking point, they leave and take the jobs with them. Spiral further down and repeat. This gets thrown around on HN a lot, but the root cause of the problem is the implicit and seemingly unassailable assumption that everyone has to work in order to eat. People actually get angry at the idea that someone might get the minimum portion of life's necessities without sweating on them first. Until that is addressed, no city in the US is totally safe for a business founded to do productive work, and the safest cities are those where enough new businesses are founded to employ all the people who would otherwise be forced to do make-work jobs to survive. And I think that's why people want to found companies in places that are already considered to be friendly to startups. The tightness of the labor market is not a bug; it's a feature. It means that more of your taxes go to infrastructure and vital services, and less to stealth welfare. The best place to start a business is one that doesn't need for you to start it there.