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This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the e

This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. We’re truly heading for Elysium.

jdavis703 8y ago
There's another option: just build new housing in the cities that have a proven track-record of economic dynamism. There are several factors that I believe these "winner take all" cities have that many smaller cities either can't or refuse to implement. This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system.
- umeshunni 8y ago
  > This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system. Well 2/3 of these don't apply to the Bay Area / SF
umeshunni 8y ago
It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people) People don't want to relocate to cities where there aren't multiple job possibilities - you lose your job/hate it and don't want to have to relocate to find a new job or you want to move but your spouse can't find a job there because their industry isn't well represented there. This leads to a reinforcement cycle where new jobs are created in a city, people flock there, found the next generation of companies, new jobs, more people fleeing less attractive cities and so on... Things that can happen that could break this cycle include - new industries emerging (like tech in the 90s), poor governance, infrastructure in an area forcing companies to find alternatives (like bay area right now), new skills coming into demand and companies establishing offices to take advantage of that (e.g. Pittsburg emerging as an AI hub, Seattle for 'cloud' skills etc)
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  > Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I don't know man? You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.) Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      And also for those with kids you have to think about them i.e. what opportunities will they have living in this area when they leave school.
      - closeparen 8y ago
        Why would a kid stay in the same area after leaving school? That was categorically out of the question for my graduating classes.
        ionised 8y ago
        Why?
claydavisss 8y ago
95% of Googlers in NYC will be lifetime renters just like they are in the Bay Area. Hardly the gilded class
- zjaffee 8y ago
  This isn't true in the slightest, the only people who will be this way are those who are unwilling to make sacrifices in terms of quality or amount of space within a certain location, in return for the desire to own. The regional home prices in the bay area are more than twice what they are in the greater NYC region.
- taurath 8y ago
  "Googlers, hardly the gilded class" is a silly argument. SWEs can afford to buy in the Bay, and can in NYC too. $250-300k is enough to afford a $1.5m place. Yes, many Google employees aren't engineers, and not everyone working there gets paid like one.
  - almost_usual 8y ago
    As long as you assume all things remain constant for the next 30 years which is an exciting assumption.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  Way more than 5% of my coworkers at Google NYC own their own place. You're also off on the stats for the Bay Area as well.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  95% of Googlers in NYC who insist on living in Manhattan. Hell, not even then.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    Curious why I got downvoted here. I was disagreeing with the post I was replying to. Did I come across in the opposite direction? I was attempting to make the point that this statement would only possibly be true for those who insisted on living in Manhattan, and that it isn't even true for that segment.
icebraining 8y ago
NYC is not reserved for the rich, though; there's plenty of working class people living there, and house prices are actually falling. How would Elysium play out if many people could simply move there?
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  If you get the ideas of living in Manhattan out of your head, NYC is definitely more affordable than SF. So NYC does have the option of people just being able to move there. The larger problem is how do the other cities compete at all in the future? Smart cities are building out train based metro systems that connect their major universities and their airports to their downtown areas. (Houston for example). But that's REALLY expensive. It's not a coincidence that Houston, a city flooded with energy wealth, is one of the few cities pursuing such a strategy. They're one of the only cities that can afford it. What about everyone else? I think the other cities will need to get aggressive and creative about making themselves appeal to the bottom lines of tech companies. If not, yeah, most will likely be left behind. Sad, but that's how the market works. Just ask Gary Indiana.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    Boulder seems to be doing alright. It's just one aspect of city attractiveness, but embracing urbanism, especially in terms of multimodal transportation options, does seem to help.
Xcelerate 8y ago
I worry about this as well. I wouldn't be surprised if SF, NYC, and DC encompass the majority of the country's wealth in a few decades. It genuinely amazes me that remote tech jobs haven't taken off. I just can't fathom why—unless companies have honestly found that it doesn't work for some reason unknown to me. What other incentive could there be? You get good workers at a fraction of the cost. And with companies like Google and Amazon spreading out across the U.S., remote teleconferencing systems are already set up. Is it really that much different to have someone dialing in to Mountain View from Idaho rather than NYC?
- iainmerrick 8y ago
  Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of remote working, yes, videoconferencing is awful. I’ve worked at several different companies of different sizes and it’s always awful. The video quality is bad, audio is terrible, getting a meeting started takes forever. These aren’t insurmountable problems, you just have to get used to a different way of working. It’s not remotely the same as working in the same office. Better in some ways, worse in others. Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame. Edit to add: the above doesn’t necessarily preclude remote offices, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a good productive remote team started without a nucleus of strong local staff. It’s hard for a company like Google to open a big office in a new city without an established tech base, and videoconferencing tech doesn’t help much.
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    > Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame. I'm a googler, and this is completely wrong. Google absolutely wants to fix the remote work issue. Nearly every meeting room in the company is equipped with videoconferencing equipment, and "dialing in" is an accepted practice, with people occasionally dialing in from home being quite common. Hell, they sell their videoconferencing stuff to other companies even, so the monetary incentive is certainly there. But fully remote work also introduces organizational problems that current tech, at least, does not overcome.
my_first_acct 8y ago
There is an NYT article to that effect: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/upshot/in-superstar-cities-the-rich-get-richer-and-they-get-amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/upshot/in-superstar-citie...
TulliusCicero 8y ago
> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them No they don't. Tax breaks aren't enough. One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city. NYC is urbanist in a way that relatively few American cities are (and most of the other cities in this category are also big economic winners, like SF and Boston). How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue? Virtually none of them that I've seen, they put in token efforts at best; an unprotected bike lane here, a "technically counts as transit" bus stop there, but very little that really moves the needle or challenges the status quo. Name one of these cities, and I'll show you how they're failing miserably on at least this front just by a quick look at Google Maps.
- bun_at_work 8y ago
  Seattle?
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    Is this a serious reply? Seattle has no shortage of high-paying tech jobs, and it's certainly not a cheap place to live, nor is it in any way conservative.
  - Majestic121 8y ago
    I think we can consider Seattle part of the "Big Economic Winners"
- christophilus 8y ago
  Portland?
  - TulliusCicero 8y ago
    I wouldn't consider Portland to be a cheaper or more conservative US city, and it's still one of the better US cities at urbanism, sad as that is, but okay. * The MAX has decent reach, but it's severely handicapped in capacity and speed by running at-grade. The Portland metro cheaped out there, and the result is a train system that's only good by American standards. * Many of the MAX stops, you can go a block or three and hit single-family homes (mandatory single-family homes, I think). To spend billions on a transit system, and then intentionally handicap its usage by strictly limiting how many people can live nearby around its stations...that's just completely insane. What are they thinking? "Better make sure as few people as possible can actually use this enormous investment"? * No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic. * Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars. * Despite ostensibly being a major city, most of the residential areas are zoned very low density. * Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things. Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.
esotericn 8y ago
This has been the case in the UK since, well, forever. In every field I can think of, London has the top tier jobs. It surprises me that the US was ever different. I'm wondering whether it's a young country effect. I don't think it's "Elysium" as claimed. It's more like - if you're competitive and want to be the best in a field, you're probably (not always) going to move to London. If you want to live a life, raise a family, buy a house, etc, the status game isn't that relevant, and you don't need to bother with it. It's the same on a global scale too - if you're playing that game, there's a hierarchy of 'best paying, most status-giving' _countries_. The most keen will move across the world.
- wil421 8y ago
  You’re comparing the UK to the whole US when you should compare it to California or the Northeast. A better comparison would be Europe but I think London and SF would still be the best paying.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Not a fair comparison. The UK doesn't have labour mobility with the rest of Europe. Even within the EU it's not as simple as 'move from Poland to France and get a job'. Most of the countries have different languages. "Europe" isn't a country.
    - wil421 8y ago
      I have a lot of friends and old co workers I Europe. My Serbian coworker had no problem moving to Spain and learning Spanish. My Greek friend had no problem living in the Netherlands. Another Slovakian friend has no problem living in Scotland, same goes for a couple Germans I know in Scotland. The Poles have no problem moving everywhere in Europe working construction jobs. Hell the Russians have no problem spending summers working in the part of Florida I vacation at.
      - esotericn 8y ago
        Moving from Serbia to Spain is obviously not equivalent to moving between US states. Come on. It's more like Scotland to England with a bit more distance involved.
malandrew 8y ago
Look at the bright side, just 10-20 years ago it was basically just the SF Bay Area with tiny outposts in Seattle, Boston and Austin. Now all three of those are a lot bigger. NYC now has a solid tech scene. Boulder has one. Toronto is starting to develop one. Many secondary cities are starting to develop their own like in Durham, NC. Pittsburg is now on the map when previously all CM alums would leave the area after graduation. Even Detroit is developing a small scene. Tech opportunities are still going to cities, especially those with the biggest companies, but it's spreading to more and more cities and tech companies now know they need to expand to other markets to reach new talent.
madengr 8y ago
Google and Amazon are not “real industry”. I don’t even consider them to be “tech”, though that is my opinion being a traditional EE hardware designer.
havetocharge 8y ago
I've relocated to NYC area for work, from a different country. One can get depressed about jobs not being where they are, or go to where the opportunity is better. People have freedom of movement and there is incredible infrastructure supporting that. Why not take advantage instead of complaining?
- emddudley 8y ago
  To me the idea of living in NYC is depressing. I think overall the US would have a better quality of life if industry was not so concentrated in major cities. Fewer people would need to make trade-offs between their jobs and lifestyle.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    I live in NYC and I’m not going to try to change your mind, but out of curiosity what don’t you like about it? Winter? The smell? Too many people?
    - dionidium 8y ago
      I live in Manhattan and work in Midtown. I love it here, but I'll give you my complaints (for whatever they're worth): 1. The traffic and noise in Midtown is downright oppressive. People just laying on their horns for basically no reason, giant trucks speeding by the mass of pedestrians. 2. Yes, too many people. This is also Midtown specific. I don't mind crowds and I like a busy streetscape, but Midtown reaches a level that's dystopian. I dread walking on the avenues during rush hour. People spill out into the street, because there's not enough sidewalk to contain them all and it's basically impossible not to bump into people the entire way. I'm a fast walker. I hate walking slow. Midtown is very frustrating in a very minute-to-minute kind of way. (See #1 for some ideas about how we could give people more space. Hint: less space for cars.) 3. I would like to own my own home. I don't see how that's going to be practical here. 4. I like building stuff. In my hometown I had lots of tools and the space to work on projects. I don't have the space for any of that here. 5. I'm a cyclist. I prefer to own a couple bikes. I can't do that here. I barely have room for one bike in my 350 sq/ft apartment. It's kind of a pain even having that one bike. Any one of these could be reason enough to prefer a less crowded and expensive city.
throwawaymath 8y ago
The moral of Elysium wasn’t that our species is headed for that world. The director intended it to be a dramatic portrayal of the world we already live in. Take away the scifi backdrop of a generational satellite with artificial gravity and immortality and you’re left with substantially the same vision of the world as what we currently have. Those of us who are affluent and live in coastal cities (and similar cities across the world) are, comparatively speaking, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Most of us can’t afford everything around us. But we enjoy - and frequently take for granted - luxuries and technology which billions of other humans can scarcely even conceive of having in everyday life.
bradleyjg 8y ago
> This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. Why would godless, latte-sipping, well educated, coastal executives--some of whom weren't even born in this country--want to open up offices in places that have made it abundantly clear they hate people exactly like that?
- taurath 8y ago
  They want an educacted workforce, and the brain drain of people out of rural areas only accelerates that. Towns with good colleges are doing better than those without. The elitism comes mainly from economic rather than social considerations Ive been seeing. See: Texas.
amyjess 8y ago
As somebody who lives in Dallas, I'm actually glad that Amazon is passing us up in favor of NoVa, and I've heard similar sentiments from talking to a few of my fellow Dallasites. The consensus is that if Amazon moved here, all they'd accomplish is sending housing prices into the stratosphere and turning traffic into a nightmare. We have plenty of jobs here, and housing prices and traffic are already starting to get problematic. We don't need Amazon throwing gasoline on the fire. I've also heard discussion about how we don't want Amazon because they could wreck the city's culture like they did to Seattle... and from what I've seen, both the right and the left are pretty unified on this. We like Dallas the way it is, thank you very much.
yesimahuman 8y ago
Many midwestern cities are seeing strong growth right now, especially in tech. Madison is one of them. I think we’ll be fine.
scarejunba 8y ago
> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. Got to tell you: few smart people want to live in some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious. To top it off those states are full of rampant anti-labour provisions: no anti-poaching, no anti-non-compete. Sorry, the Rust Belt made itself suck. This isn't disturbing. This is righteous.
- benglish11 8y ago
  There are plenty of progressive cities that aren't SF/SEA/NY/DC. Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis to name a few
- ihatesarcasm 8y ago
  > some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious. The fact that you write things like this indicates that you are not truly the type of "smart person" that you obviously consider yourself. The real world is not the caricature that you see from your echo chamber.

jdavis703 8y ago

There's another option: just build new housing in the cities that have a proven track-record of economic dynamism. There are several factors that I believe these "winner take all" cities have that many smaller cities either can't or refuse to implement. This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system.

umeshunni 8y ago
> This includes not just a tolerating, but welcoming immigrants; robust public transit investment; and a great education system. Well 2/3 of these don't apply to the Bay Area / SF

umeshunni 8y ago

It's a classic chicken and egg problem. Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent. This limits large new offices to large metro areas (5M+ people) People don't want to relocate to cities where there aren't multiple job possibilities - you lose your job/hate it and don't want to have to relocate to find a new job or you want to move but your spouse can't find a job there because their industry isn't well represented there. This leads to a reinforcement cycle where new jobs are created in a city, people flock there, found the next generation of companies, new jobs, more people fleeing less attractive cities and so on... Things that can happen that could break this cycle include - new industries emerging (like tech in the 90s), poor governance, infrastructure in an area forcing companies to find alternatives (like bay area right now), new skills coming into demand and companies establishing offices to take advantage of that (e.g. Pittsburg emerging as an AI hub, Seattle for 'cloud' skills etc)

NeedMoreTea 8y ago
> Companies don't want to establish new offices in cities where they cannot attract new talent or there isn't a large existing base of talent This seems especially silly. There are almost limitless people who would like to get one of the FAANG co's on their CV. They'd gladly relocate and benefit from reasonable property prices for a year or three. Google or Netlix are hardly going to struggle to attract talent if they decide to open an office in some rural backwater.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I don't know man? You'd be surprised how attached people are to their spouses or partners. Doesn't matter how badly you want to work at Google, if your spouse is an IP attorney or VP at an academic hospital, as a family you just can't go moving to the middle of nowhere. It's not ALL about being able to work at Google. There's a lot more going on in making these decisions. (At least there is for the type of people that Google would be interested in.) Much better to be in that NYC-Boston-DC corridor where high powered opportunities abound in multiple sectors. Or SF. Or Chicago. Etc. But trying to move a lot of these types of couples to, say, Lincoln Nebraska, is just asking for trouble. The spouses or partners are definitely not going to go for that.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    And also for those with kids you have to think about them i.e. what opportunities will they have living in this area when they leave school.
    - closeparen 8y ago
      Why would a kid stay in the same area after leaving school? That was categorically out of the question for my graduating classes.
      - ionised 8y ago
        Why?

claydavisss 8y ago

95% of Googlers in NYC will be lifetime renters just like they are in the Bay Area. Hardly the gilded class

zjaffee 8y ago
This isn't true in the slightest, the only people who will be this way are those who are unwilling to make sacrifices in terms of quality or amount of space within a certain location, in return for the desire to own. The regional home prices in the bay area are more than twice what they are in the greater NYC region.
taurath 8y ago
"Googlers, hardly the gilded class" is a silly argument. SWEs can afford to buy in the Bay, and can in NYC too. $250-300k is enough to afford a $1.5m place. Yes, many Google employees aren't engineers, and not everyone working there gets paid like one.
- almost_usual 8y ago
  As long as you assume all things remain constant for the next 30 years which is an exciting assumption.
CydeWeys 8y ago
Way more than 5% of my coworkers at Google NYC own their own place. You're also off on the stats for the Bay Area as well.
vonmoltke 8y ago
95% of Googlers in NYC who insist on living in Manhattan. Hell, not even then.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  Curious why I got downvoted here. I was disagreeing with the post I was replying to. Did I come across in the opposite direction? I was attempting to make the point that this statement would only possibly be true for those who insisted on living in Manhattan, and that it isn't even true for that segment.

icebraining 8y ago

NYC is not reserved for the rich, though; there's plenty of working class people living there, and house prices are actually falling. How would Elysium play out if many people could simply move there?

bilbo0s 8y ago
If you get the ideas of living in Manhattan out of your head, NYC is definitely more affordable than SF. So NYC does have the option of people just being able to move there. The larger problem is how do the other cities compete at all in the future? Smart cities are building out train based metro systems that connect their major universities and their airports to their downtown areas. (Houston for example). But that's REALLY expensive. It's not a coincidence that Houston, a city flooded with energy wealth, is one of the few cities pursuing such a strategy. They're one of the only cities that can afford it. What about everyone else? I think the other cities will need to get aggressive and creative about making themselves appeal to the bottom lines of tech companies. If not, yeah, most will likely be left behind. Sad, but that's how the market works. Just ask Gary Indiana.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Boulder seems to be doing alright. It's just one aspect of city attractiveness, but embracing urbanism, especially in terms of multimodal transportation options, does seem to help.

Xcelerate 8y ago

I worry about this as well. I wouldn't be surprised if SF, NYC, and DC encompass the majority of the country's wealth in a few decades. It genuinely amazes me that remote tech jobs haven't taken off. I just can't fathom why—unless companies have honestly found that it doesn't work for some reason unknown to me. What other incentive could there be? You get good workers at a fraction of the cost. And with companies like Google and Amazon spreading out across the U.S., remote teleconferencing systems are already set up. Is it really that much different to have someone dialing in to Mountain View from Idaho rather than NYC?

iainmerrick 8y ago
Speaking as someone who does a fair amount of remote working, yes, videoconferencing is awful. I’ve worked at several different companies of different sizes and it’s always awful. The video quality is bad, audio is terrible, getting a meeting started takes forever. These aren’t insurmountable problems, you just have to get used to a different way of working. It’s not remotely the same as working in the same office. Better in some ways, worse in others. Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame. Edit to add: the above doesn’t necessarily preclude remote offices, but one of the problems is that it’s hard to get a good productive remote team started without a nucleus of strong local staff. It’s hard for a company like Google to open a big office in a new city without an established tech base, and videoconferencing tech doesn’t help much.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > Google is one of the few companies with the resources to try to drastically improve the technology and fix this problem, but they instead decided just to double down on consolidating their staff in big offices. Obviously works for them but it’s a shame. I'm a googler, and this is completely wrong. Google absolutely wants to fix the remote work issue. Nearly every meeting room in the company is equipped with videoconferencing equipment, and "dialing in" is an accepted practice, with people occasionally dialing in from home being quite common. Hell, they sell their videoconferencing stuff to other companies even, so the monetary incentive is certainly there. But fully remote work also introduces organizational problems that current tech, at least, does not overcome.

my_first_acct 8y ago

There is an NYT article to that effect: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/upshot/in-superstar-cities-the-rich-get-richer-and-they-get-amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/upshot/in-superstar-citie...

TulliusCicero 8y ago

> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them No they don't. Tax breaks aren't enough. One of the big reasons a lot of people really like NYC is that it's one of the few cities in the US that actually feels like a city. NYC is urbanist in a way that relatively few American cities are (and most of the other cities in this category are also big economic winners, like SF and Boston). How many of those more conservative/cheaper US cities actually take walking/biking/transit over driving as a serious issue? Virtually none of them that I've seen, they put in token efforts at best; an unprotected bike lane here, a "technically counts as transit" bus stop there, but very little that really moves the needle or challenges the status quo. Name one of these cities, and I'll show you how they're failing miserably on at least this front just by a quick look at Google Maps.

bun_at_work 8y ago
Seattle?
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Is this a serious reply? Seattle has no shortage of high-paying tech jobs, and it's certainly not a cheap place to live, nor is it in any way conservative.
- Majestic121 8y ago
  I think we can consider Seattle part of the "Big Economic Winners"
christophilus 8y ago
Portland?
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  I wouldn't consider Portland to be a cheaper or more conservative US city, and it's still one of the better US cities at urbanism, sad as that is, but okay. * The MAX has decent reach, but it's severely handicapped in capacity and speed by running at-grade. The Portland metro cheaped out there, and the result is a train system that's only good by American standards. * Many of the MAX stops, you can go a block or three and hit single-family homes (mandatory single-family homes, I think). To spend billions on a transit system, and then intentionally handicap its usage by strictly limiting how many people can live nearby around its stations...that's just completely insane. What are they thinking? "Better make sure as few people as possible can actually use this enormous investment"? * No bus lanes that I'm aware of, or at least few enough that a multiple-time visitor didn't see them, so buses are stuck in general traffic. * Very few physically protected bike lanes, in spite of its reputation as a bike-friendly city. The sum total value of bike improvements prior to the Orange Line was I believe estimated at around 60m, which is probably like a hundredth of one percent of the value of the roads and other stuff built for cars. * Despite ostensibly being a major city, most of the residential areas are zoned very low density. * Those very low density areas also generally have no commercial/retail activity allowed, which particularly hurts walkability: part of walkability is being able to, y'know, walk to things. Most of what I wrote here, you could apply in some form to nearly every US city.

esotericn 8y ago

This has been the case in the UK since, well, forever. In every field I can think of, London has the top tier jobs. It surprises me that the US was ever different. I'm wondering whether it's a young country effect. I don't think it's "Elysium" as claimed. It's more like - if you're competitive and want to be the best in a field, you're probably (not always) going to move to London. If you want to live a life, raise a family, buy a house, etc, the status game isn't that relevant, and you don't need to bother with it. It's the same on a global scale too - if you're playing that game, there's a hierarchy of 'best paying, most status-giving' _countries_. The most keen will move across the world.

wil421 8y ago
You’re comparing the UK to the whole US when you should compare it to California or the Northeast. A better comparison would be Europe but I think London and SF would still be the best paying.
- esotericn 8y ago
  Not a fair comparison. The UK doesn't have labour mobility with the rest of Europe. Even within the EU it's not as simple as 'move from Poland to France and get a job'. Most of the countries have different languages. "Europe" isn't a country.
  - wil421 8y ago
    I have a lot of friends and old co workers I Europe. My Serbian coworker had no problem moving to Spain and learning Spanish. My Greek friend had no problem living in the Netherlands. Another Slovakian friend has no problem living in Scotland, same goes for a couple Germans I know in Scotland. The Poles have no problem moving everywhere in Europe working construction jobs. Hell the Russians have no problem spending summers working in the part of Florida I vacation at.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Moving from Serbia to Spain is obviously not equivalent to moving between US states. Come on. It's more like Scotland to England with a bit more distance involved.

malandrew 8y ago

Look at the bright side, just 10-20 years ago it was basically just the SF Bay Area with tiny outposts in Seattle, Boston and Austin. Now all three of those are a lot bigger. NYC now has a solid tech scene. Boulder has one. Toronto is starting to develop one. Many secondary cities are starting to develop their own like in Durham, NC. Pittsburg is now on the map when previously all CM alums would leave the area after graduation. Even Detroit is developing a small scene. Tech opportunities are still going to cities, especially those with the biggest companies, but it's spreading to more and more cities and tech companies now know they need to expand to other markets to reach new talent.

madengr 8y ago

Google and Amazon are not “real industry”. I don’t even consider them to be “tech”, though that is my opinion being a traditional EE hardware designer.

havetocharge 8y ago

I've relocated to NYC area for work, from a different country. One can get depressed about jobs not being where they are, or go to where the opportunity is better. People have freedom of movement and there is incredible infrastructure supporting that. Why not take advantage instead of complaining?

emddudley 8y ago
To me the idea of living in NYC is depressing. I think overall the US would have a better quality of life if industry was not so concentrated in major cities. Fewer people would need to make trade-offs between their jobs and lifestyle.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  I live in NYC and I’m not going to try to change your mind, but out of curiosity what don’t you like about it? Winter? The smell? Too many people?
  - dionidium 8y ago
    I live in Manhattan and work in Midtown. I love it here, but I'll give you my complaints (for whatever they're worth): 1. The traffic and noise in Midtown is downright oppressive. People just laying on their horns for basically no reason, giant trucks speeding by the mass of pedestrians. 2. Yes, too many people. This is also Midtown specific. I don't mind crowds and I like a busy streetscape, but Midtown reaches a level that's dystopian. I dread walking on the avenues during rush hour. People spill out into the street, because there's not enough sidewalk to contain them all and it's basically impossible not to bump into people the entire way. I'm a fast walker. I hate walking slow. Midtown is very frustrating in a very minute-to-minute kind of way. (See #1 for some ideas about how we could give people more space. Hint: less space for cars.) 3. I would like to own my own home. I don't see how that's going to be practical here. 4. I like building stuff. In my hometown I had lots of tools and the space to work on projects. I don't have the space for any of that here. 5. I'm a cyclist. I prefer to own a couple bikes. I can't do that here. I barely have room for one bike in my 350 sq/ft apartment. It's kind of a pain even having that one bike. Any one of these could be reason enough to prefer a less crowded and expensive city.

throwawaymath 8y ago

The moral of Elysium wasn’t that our species is headed for that world. The director intended it to be a dramatic portrayal of the world we already live in. Take away the scifi backdrop of a generational satellite with artificial gravity and immortality and you’re left with substantially the same vision of the world as what we currently have. Those of us who are affluent and live in coastal cities (and similar cities across the world) are, comparatively speaking, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Most of us can’t afford everything around us. But we enjoy - and frequently take for granted - luxuries and technology which billions of other humans can scarcely even conceive of having in everyday life.

bradleyjg 8y ago

> This coupled with the Amazon news is starting to get distressing. With the amount of companies that copycat them it’s like the rich are getting richer and the economic benefits are still going to be concentrated only in the most affluent cities. The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. Why would godless, latte-sipping, well educated, coastal executives--some of whom weren't even born in this country--want to open up offices in places that have made it abundantly clear they hate people exactly like that?

taurath 8y ago
They want an educacted workforce, and the brain drain of people out of rural areas only accelerates that. Towns with good colleges are doing better than those without. The elitism comes mainly from economic rather than social considerations Ive been seeing. See: Texas.

amyjess 8y ago

As somebody who lives in Dallas, I'm actually glad that Amazon is passing us up in favor of NoVa, and I've heard similar sentiments from talking to a few of my fellow Dallasites. The consensus is that if Amazon moved here, all they'd accomplish is sending housing prices into the stratosphere and turning traffic into a nightmare. We have plenty of jobs here, and housing prices and traffic are already starting to get problematic. We don't need Amazon throwing gasoline on the fire. I've also heard discussion about how we don't want Amazon because they could wreck the city's culture like they did to Seattle... and from what I've seen, both the right and the left are pretty unified on this. We like Dallas the way it is, thank you very much.

yesimahuman 8y ago

Many midwestern cities are seeing strong growth right now, especially in tech. Madison is one of them. I think we’ll be fine.

scarejunba 8y ago

> The rest of the country desperately needs real industry and good paying jobs - and will go to huge lengths to try to get them but it appears nobody can come up with a business plan. Got to tell you: few smart people want to live in some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious. To top it off those states are full of rampant anti-labour provisions: no anti-poaching, no anti-non-compete. Sorry, the Rust Belt made itself suck. This isn't disturbing. This is righteous.

benglish11 8y ago
There are plenty of progressive cities that aren't SF/SEA/NY/DC. Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis to name a few
ihatesarcasm 8y ago
> some anti-civil-rights nightmare where everyone is anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and hopelessly religious. The fact that you write things like this indicates that you are not truly the type of "smart person" that you obviously consider yourself. The real world is not the caricature that you see from your echo chamber.