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> definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area Supply and demand gonna supply and demand. It's weird to "blame tech" for existing and
by helen___keller 7y ago
> definitely blame tech for loading an entire industry into a metro area
Supply and demand gonna supply and demand. It's weird to "blame tech" for existing and injecting a massive amount of jobs into our economy; there's no metro region that could have handled that growth without the same effect on price, and there is no singular entity responsible for concentrating tech into a single city instead of distributed more evenly.
Maybe Houston could have come close to handling it without massive price increases, but I'm guessing Houston is too spread out to enjoy strong network effects, and probably would have become gridlocked with traffic to boot.
New York could have "handled" it, from a raw housing & transit perspective, but the region is already pricy and all of Manhattan (which has the best access to jobs and transit across the metropolitan region) has long since gentrified, so I don't know if that really counts.
(Of course, part of the reason no region could have handled it is precisely because of how Americans approach zoning and growth. Like our politics, our cities and neighborhoods seem to be static until there's an absolutely overwhelming force against the status quo, and even then sometimes that's not enough to change anything)
- ummonk 7y agoNew York is significantly more affordable than the Bay Area though. Transit into manhattan from affordable places in NYC and New Jersey is quite quick, in contrast to the Bay Area where any place within reasonable commute time of SF or SV is just as expensive.
- mrep 7y agoI'm biased since I grew up in Chicago, but I think Chicago could have handled it fine with the endless farmland to develop with housing especially if the companies put their offices in high rises downtown as Chicago has double decker trains that go from the suburbs to downtown [0]. We also love high rise architecture so there are plenty of high rises to live in downtown if you want to. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra-System.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra-System...
- helen___keller 7y agoGrowth only happens upwards or outwards. Your post seems to suggest that Chicago still has both available, which is (pleasantly) surprising to me as I was under the impression that every major american city had hit the limit on outward growth (usually because the roads are clogged by traffic and there's no political will to build more trains, so nobody wants more farmland developed).