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As strongly as I advocate measures to combat real estate hyperinflation, I've come to think that building more real estate is only a small part of the solution.
by api 8y ago
As strongly as I advocate measures to combat real estate hyperinflation, I've come to think that building more real estate is only a small part of the solution.
Why does everyone have to be in New York? San Francisco? LA? Boston? Seattle? Why does everything upwardly mobile, creative, interesting, or otherwise productive need to super-concentrate in a small list of super-dense cities?
The US has dozens of medium sized cities with affordable rents, affordable housing, and interesting history, and hundreds to thousands of smaller cities and towns depending on where you stop looking. Why can't interesting stuff happen in these places?
Indeed it did once. The Altair, widely regarded as the first quasi-PC, came from Albaquerque, New Mexico. The IBM PC was designed in Boca Raton, Florida. Commodore, one of the best selling PC lines in the 80s, came from Philadelphia by way of Toronto. Texas Instruments in Dallas was once a leader in the semiconductor industry (they still lead in some ares like DSPs but have fallen quite a bit.) Apple came from the Bay Area, so that's one out of quite a few. The rest of the early PC industry came from elsewhere.
Today that list of cities would be San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, San Francisco, and maybe Seattle.
What happened? It's very paradoxical. The Internet was supposed to make it easier to compete from geographically diverse locales by making access to information easier and breaking gatekeepers, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Either that or the decentralizing effect of the net has been swamped by some other much more powerful centralizing effect that has simultaneously been in operation.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>Why does everyone have to be in New York? San Francisco? LA? Boston? Seattle? Why does everything upwardly mobile, creative, interesting, or otherwise productive need to super-concentrate in a small list of super-dense cities? >The US has dozens of medium sized cities with affordable rents, affordable housing, and interesting history, and hundreds to thousands of smaller cities and towns depending on where you stop looking. Why can't interesting stuff happen in these places? The people who are in a position to shape the long term direction of a no-name city are still of sufficient means that they are capable of packing up and moving to some city that grew out of a suburb of SF, NYC, Seattle, Boston, etc. They don't do that because that's not the kind of place they want to live. Why won't those people point to the fate of Denver, Austin, etc and say "we're not going to compromise our culture and character in the long term to attract a bunch of rich people in the short term" and implement policies that boil down to "screw off, we're full"?
- babesh 8y agoIts the self reinforcing ecosystem/market. For companies, you can find people if all the people are concentrated in a single place. For people, you can choose between companies if the companies are concentrated in one place. You get faster exchange of informal information from people jumping between companies. You have people striking out on their own. There are the same sorts of hubs in other parts of the world for other sectors: finance, manufacturing, auto, aerospace, entertainment. London, Shenzen, Detroit, Munich, LA.
- babesh 8y agoAs to why the Internet didn't "solve" this. Not all things are virtual. Your physical self isn't virtual. Nor are other people. Physical goods are not virtual. You need to invent and continue to nurture equivalent virtual places for formal and informal, accidental and deliberate interactions. Its hard to take a heart to heart walk with someone who isn't there with you.
- babesh 8y agoIs there any industry that wasn't and isn't like this?
- raldi 8y ago> Why does everyone have to be in New York? I would turn that around and ask, why does everyone have to be kept out of New York? If you live in New York, you should understand exactly why people want to live there -- how is it fair to deprive them of what you have? If you don't live in New York, what business is it of yours if other people want to live there?