9 ms·

Is It Time for the US to Drag Jobs Out of Silicon Valley and into the Heartland?

84 points by teklaperry 7y ago

brenden2 7y ago
PG's essay from 2007 seems relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
cvaidya1986 7y ago
Yes.
thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
This is literally the best idea idea I've seen in print all year long: "They argue that the federal government should create eight to 10 regional “growth centers” in the U.S. heartland." New cities, we desperately need. The entire housing fiasco is caused by an imbalance between the number of jobs and the amount of housing. all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow. so the logical thing to do, is to move those jobs to new places that do want to grow. This could really ignite the economy in a way that's not zero sum (like most other solutions). There's so much free wealth out there for the taking (land that's not being used for any productive capacity ~ you could literally create wealth out of thin air).
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  I agree with you. My last job was on a deep learning team located in a university research park at UIUC in Central Illinois. The area was rich in local entrepreneurship and had a critical mass of skilled people. I retired and moved back to my home in Sedona Arizona, but I can strongly recommend UIUC for both the great tech community, great tech meetups, and also good quality of life with a low cost of living. I compare this to working as a contractor at Google, which was a really nice experience but my wife and I burned through $6500/month in living expenses in Mountain View and the traffic was so bad that I was dissuaded from driving to tech meetups.
  - cgy1 7y ago
    I grew up in C-U and still dearly miss the area. Would definitely move back to the right job.
- 1over137 7y ago
  New cities we desperately don't need. There are plenty of small cities than can be grown instead of destroying more wild nature, which we are fast running out of.
  - thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
    You know those hen farm houses where hens are squeezed together by the 1000s into a tiny area with poop all over the place. Some people think that's not nice to do to a chicken. I think it's not nice to do that to human beings. And yet that's exactly what we're doing to the people in SF, Poop included. If you don't create new cities, the people still need to end up somewhere. You can move jobs to smaller cities or create new ones, whatever. the point is, you need to move jobs to areas that want to grow. Have you seen the new neighborhoods that are being built in places like CA? Every single tree gets chopped down, ever last one. That's because developers are forced to build with density because the cost of land is so high. if you want to prevent the slaughtering of trees, you'll need specifically create minimum distance regs or reduce the # of trees that can be cut down legally. at the current rate, there's no nature for anyone to enjoy in the neighborhoods that are currently being built.
    - fluxic 7y ago
      Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment? The only reason that doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies.
      - maxsilver 7y ago
        > Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment? There's a lot of chickens unhappy about $1600/month 200sqft apartments. (a real example from SF - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/micro-apartments-making-160-square-feet-livable-san-francisco/1038601/ https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti... ) Because that's the dystopian nightmare in SF, and to move jobs out of silicon valley to elsewhere, would be to export that same dystopia to more places. We already see this in Michigan of all places. You can make a SF salary and pay $1600/month for a micro-apartment. Or you can take a 50% pay cut, to pay $800/month for ~200sqft micro-apartment. They are equally ridiculous and equally unaffordable, once you account for the currency/wage differences, despite the fact that we have no zoning restrictions in this town. We obviously need more housing, and need to build more housing, but housing is inherently pollution-heavy. You can not build your way into affordability alone, because the act of new construction inherently generates more unaffordability. It alone can never solve it. > The only reason (cheap apartments) doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies. No, that's only a tiny part. Zoning is a small reason, but not the primary one. The biggest reason CA apartments are expensive, is the financial pollution generated by the companies there. If you built a brand new city in an empty cornfield somewhere, with no laws or zoning of any kind, it would be somewhat cheaper than San Francisco, but every single apartment would still cost ~$1100-$1600/month. Because most of that price is due to the financial pollution from the companies, not the zoning.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  No one is forcing jobs to be where they are now. There’s a variety of reasons that the situation is the way it is, such as differing state laws, weather, natural features, etc. Without addressing those, there is no point in moving jobs. When my friends and I talk, we value things such as a family leave act or parental leave, assisted suicide, legal marijuana, and bans non competes. As well as weather (humidity isn’t popular), and natural features, such as oceans and mountains. No one considers going to a state that is still dealing with women’s rights.
  - jethro_tell 7y ago
    This is exactly it. My family is incredibly well rounded, we are both earners with success in multiple industries. We could get a job in any city in the US and many cities in the world, because of that we can choose where we live, and it's not one where I have to move back in time or fight to get fast internet in my house. The thing is, companies aren't moving to expensive places for the cheap land for office space, or the low salaries for cleaning and food service employees, They aren't moving to cities because of vast cheap and free parking. They are moving there, because the talent that can live anywhere it wants to is living in these cities. I'd love to work remote, but then I'd work in my basement with my legal weed and fast internet and still in the middle of the city I live in now. There's a fundamental misunderstanding here thinking that the people who can move anywhere they want haven't already. So if they want to make a difference, the best way would be to encourage the arts, federally support human rights, and move the whole country forward, break internet monopolies, pay for education. I'm not moving my daughter to a state that's still challenging abortion rights or teaching creationism in schools, or still has their head in the sand about confederate statues. I don't want my kids growing up in a place where the war on drugs isn't just a failed experiment.
    - drblast 7y ago
      I cannot agree with this more. Come to the Midwest! Make half as much and live in a house that you can sell for half as much profit when you retire! Come for the flat outdoors with nothing to do, stay for the lack of ethnic and cultural diversity! Half of the people in Seattle are Midwest refugees who came here despite not having a job lined up. It's laughable to think they'd move back for a salary cut despite cheaper housing. The financial incentive would have to be overwhelmingly positive so they could work in the Midwest for a few years then move somewhere better.
- csharptwdec19 7y ago
  This may not benefit employees as much as they think. i.e. this doesn't mean anyone will still make SV money in the midwest. Also there is the caveat that things like a vehicle become a lot more important for day to day life. Those caveats given, if someone were to find some land unsuitable for farming and build a tech center there.... It could go well.
  - thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
    100K in the midwest is at least as good as 200K in the penninsula/SF, at least for those who have a family of 4.
    - drblast 7y ago
      Except that you have to live in the Midwest, so no, it's not as good. I like doing outdoor things in the mountains and the queer culture on the "left coast" that is anathema to more conservative areas of the country. So no thank you, I'll keep my high salary, access to mountains, and ability to retire anywhere I like after I sell my ridiculously overpriced house to someone else. Living in most of the U.S. sucks if you're not a cookie-cutter copy of the socially acceptable suburban family with 2.5 kids and a dog. It's not all about money.
      - Apocryphon 7y ago
        You already own property, so you're probably not the prospective demographic who would be willing to move to one of these cities.
      - bryan_w 7y ago
        This is kind of a close minded view. There are nice places to live with queen culture and "outdoors" all over the country. It may not be everywhere but there are a handful of medium size cities across the Midwest that you should visit
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  There's nothing stopping this from happening now except lack of infrastructure in pluck-my-banjo heartland and nobody wants to go first (do you want to live for a few years in a city with no real friends?) It's also a terrible idea for the Feds to be in charge of doing this in any meaningful capacity aside from tax incentives and banner waving, and it'd be up to the state/city to want to be selected. edit: removed suggestion that the heartland was lacking bars and restaurants
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - shantly 7y ago
    > (do you want to live for a few years in a city with no real friends and no nice bars or restaurants?) As someone in a mid-sized heartland city, we've got nice bars and restaurants (no, seriously). Main pain points: 1) decent "ethnic" cuisine of certain types falls in the mid-range-and-up category, price-wise, for the most part, with few delicious but cheap options like larger coastal cities may have (Indian food, for example). I do not know why this is. Actually-good bread is also weirdly expensive. We do have surprisingly-good fine dining and good bars, and a ton more food variety than a coast-dweller might think, so there's that. 2) Really far from any decent "outdoorsy" stuff unless you like fishing on kinda-ugly lakes, or hunting in kinda-ugly woods. Hiking? Most of a day to reach mediocre mountains, a long day to reach real ones. Local "hiking" is largely indistinguishable from a neighborhood walking trail in terms of what you'll see (which is to say, not much). Beautiful desert vistas? 1.5 days or so. Any part of the ocean? Again, 1.5 days of driving, minimum. Great lakes? Not close enough to those either, 1.25 days to reach parts of those other than Chicago (1 long day for that). No such thing as a long-weekend getaway to anything outdoorsy that's much fun, let alone single-day trips of that sort.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  > New cities, we desperately need. The entire housing fiasco is caused by an imbalance between the number of jobs and the amount of housing. all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow. so the logical thing to do, is to move those jobs to new places that do want to grow. Even if this strategy did work (it doesn't), it's a terrible idea for the environment and quality of life. This is how Los Angeles got super-commutes from the never-ending sprawl of the Inland Empire.
  - mcguire 7y ago
    And how's your commute in SF?
    - doublement 7y ago
      Commutes to SF via BART train are fine from the denser, inner-ring suburbs. Commutes from the sprawl area in Contra Costa County are horrendous.
    - pcwalton 7y ago
      Pretty ideal, actually. Muni works fine.
    - baby 7y ago
      It’s hell. I spend 3 hours per day in a shuttle.
      - boring_twenties 7y ago
        No amount of money is worth this IMO. That's 30 hours a week, you could almost do a whole nother full time job with that.
        deathanatos 7y ago
        > 3 hours per day > That's 30 hours a week It's 15 hours per week, unless parent is a time traveller. (3 hours per day, not 3 hours one way.) I also used to be in the Bay, and that's about right; 3-4 hours per day. It's fucked.
- poulsbohemian 7y ago
  I don't disagree with your assessment of the issue, but I question the federal government as the solution. This has long felt to me like the free market not working, but I can't quite figure out why. For decades now, I've not understood why companies don't relocate to places like Des Moines or Kansas City. Labor was cheap, land was cheap, governments are willing to give you credits to move your business there, etc. The midwest is crawling with small colleges churning out educated people. After spending a decade in Seattle I moved inland for cheaper real estate (and this was back in 2010 because I thought Seattle housing had already gone insane back then). I've been a remote worker / road warrior type since 2005, and the opportunities for remote work or to work from where you want have only gotten easier. Why would I hire the $250K+ developer in the Bay Area, have to cover office costs, etc there, when I could encourage them to live in Boise or some other lower-cost area? So, to my thinking - employers need to get more creative and drop the industrial era mindset of control. Certainly there are jobs that require people and equipment being in one physical location. Certainly the most profitable large companies - the Googles, Microsofts, Apples, etc of the world might choose to establish centralized corporate campuses. For everybody else though, the economics make far more sense in other parts of the country.
  - fredophile 7y ago
    Have you ever tried to get someone to move to Boise? Did you succeed? I work for a tech company in North Carolina. Cost of living is very reasonable and there are plenty of tech companies here but in my experience getting someone to move here for work is hard. It's not just the employers you need to convince.
    - hiram112 7y ago
      That's probably because North Carolina companies (especially in Charlotte) pay horribly, especially now that homes are becoming more expensive there, like every other large city. Furthermore, Charlotte is heavily banking and finance, and thus lean heavily on H1B visas for most of their enterprise jobs. I've had recruiters contact me for jobs in the area and the salaries were a joke. Honestly, I don't know if they were for real or just using it as 'proof' that they couldn't hire any Americans so they could forward off a few hundred more H1B petitions to USCIS...
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  There might be some folks interested in living in manufactured cities in "The Heartland," where the only thing that matters is having a huge, cheap house and a job. For the rest of us though, who appreciate mountains, good weather, and culture, we're going to stick to the existing cities in geologically and culturally diverse areas regardless of the cost.
  - thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
    Not every place in the midwest is the same. There's plenty of places in the midwest that have diversity and culture in abundance: for example Houston and Chicago.
    - seattle_spring 7y ago
      Those are both perfect examples of places that lack geologic diversity. I can't think of a worse form of torture than living 12 hours from real mountains.
  - tzs 7y ago
    > For the rest of us though, who appreciate mountains, good weather, and culture, we're going to stick to the existing cities in geologically and culturally diverse areas regardless of the cost. Do you have time to actually take advantages of the cultural resources of a city or visit mountains during the work week? Or is that a weekend thing generally? I suspect that for most tech workers, it is a weekend thing. I'd like to see more companies optimize for that. For the Bay area that would mean putting tech offices away from San Francisco and SV in smaller cities, but close enough that driving in to SF for the weekend would not be too arduous a trip to do regularly. Modesto, for example, is a 2 hour drive from SF if you avoid rush hour on the SF end, has much cheaper housing than SF, and is a lot closer to the mountains.
    - pb7 7y ago
      I appreciate good weather and culture every day. Interesting topography, while not directly interacted with every day, is also very pleasing and calming to see on a daily basis. I say this having grown up with endless smooth moss-like rolling hills in every direction as far as the eye can see. Rain on an annoying unpredictable day-to-day schedule ruining plans got old very quickly. Clear skies and beautiful mountainous skyline haven't gotten old so far for me. In fact, weather is the very first thing I'm reminded of when I travel anywhere else.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Drag people from one place to another its not governments role here. Sorry to say this (as an outsider) but not all areas of the US are the same and are not as desirable to live in, also for those planning a family you may be limiting their career choices in 20 years. One of my friends has move back near London from one of the cheaper (more depressed regions of the UK) because her v bright daughter through the only job for her was working on the tills.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    One thing that would help a bit is have more liberal SF style labour laws and other laws - ban non competes for example like SF does. But that would require a complete rebalance of power from states to federal government.
  - mywittyname 7y ago
    > Drag people from one place to another its not governments role here. The US government is one of the largest employers in the USA. And they are responsible for the expansion of major metropolitan areas around the US. Washington DC is an obvious example, but for one from that list, Dayton Ohio owes most of its technology sector to the US Air Force due to its proximity to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the glut of technology contractors in the area. I'm sure Dayton is not a terribly desirable place for technology workers to emigrate to, but it does demonstrate the feasibility of special economic zones. The US is full of beautiful places that would be highly attractive to workers, if only jobs were available in sufficient numbers. The US government could even work with public-private partnerships to ensure that enough private investment occurs to bring culture to the area so that it doesn't sit around as some stagnant boomtown.
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      But those areas are not chosen on merit or for the benefit of the country are they its all about greasing the hands of the local politicians. The challenger disaster was caused by this as for "political reasons" the plant that made the boosters was a long way away and thus required the design with the O rings.
- cl0ckt0wer 7y ago
  There are many underused cites in the rust belt. They are prime candidates for job relocation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_cities
- xenocyon 7y ago
  > all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow That's a little misleading. True, SF and Seattle have zoning laws which are a significant part of the reason for housing unaffordability (e.g. 75% of Seattle is zoned for single family dwellings, prohibiting even short townhouses), but it's likely that many of the smaller cities in the article either do have such zoning laws already or would adopt them once increasing density motivates local homeowners to "protect" their neighborhoods. (Heck, in many smaller towns it is illegal to grow veggies in your front garden or let your lawn grass go brown.) An overbearing notion of house-property-values and everything associated with that mindset is not the province of big metros alone. Meanwhile, the recent efforts of cities like Seattle to enable smart urban planning, public transit, and bicycling, even though laughably puny by European standards, are still significantly ahead of the rest of the USA. Most importantly, sprawl is devastating from an environmental point of view - it massively blows up per capita carbon footprint. Well-planned, dense cities can include parks, green space, and even urban wilderness while still accommodating density and drastically reducing car travel. It is a matter of political will, not technical feasibility.
- jdkee 7y ago
  Or we could change local zoning laws that prohibit denser housing where the jobs already are.
rolltiide 7y ago
The crux of this argument is that federal funding should be involved, which is what got Silicon Valley started so it can have some merit. Silicon Valley's culture is hard to replicate, and by culture its just the consolidation of venture capital firms and the aspirations of liquid wealthy people who want to play angel investor themselves. Would newly wealthy tech aficionados in the midwest really stay in opioid land with its extremes of temperatures, or would they just get the condo in south beach Miami and disappear? Having one local Warren Buffett means only insurance and real estate plays get funded, as an example. Having only a couple Warren Buffetts means you get some people that "only invest in what they know" and aren't willing to learn anything. You really need a market of venture capital, run by people that got rich there. So pumping an area with federal funding is a much better step than just slapping a "Silicon" label on the nearest geographic formation.
- jrs95 7y ago
  I live in Ohio, and I would stay here. I’d rather contribute to my community than abandon it.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    The only reason this article is trying to get the federal government is involved is because more economic outliers say that then actually do
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fortran77 7y ago
Amazon wanted to open an office in New York--not exactly the heartland, but it does spread out the jobs a bit. But there was resistance and they cancelled the plan. How can you "drag jobs" out? Government ordered migrations of people? Massive subsidies?
- bdcravens 7y ago
  Subsidies and incentives is the most practical answer, though that's always a political minefield.
- jorts 7y ago
  Amazon is opening a new office in NY by 2021, just without the huge tax breaks that they were originally pushing for. The tax breaks were the main reason that folks like AOC were pushing back against them opening a new headquarters in NY.
  - corporateslave5 7y ago
    1500 people versus 25k. A huge loss for nyc. Also lost tax revenue for nyc and the state.
    - poulsbohemian 7y ago
      If Amazon believes it is in their best interest to be in NYC, then they will eventually grow to that 25K number regardless. There's a long track record across the country of companies demanding concessions in promise of jobs, only to have the jobs never materialize. In many cases, companies are going to do what they want, so there isn't any real incentive for governments to play along.
    - cooljacob204 7y ago
      We will be more then fine without Amazon.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      The market will bring in other firms and other jobs to NYC, without the government intervention that a deal with Amazon would entail.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cgy1 7y ago
I feel like these places outside of Silicon Valley would run into many of the same problems if a bunch of high paying tech jobs were dropped into these places, such as steep increases in housing prices (although still cheaper than the SF Bay Area) and resistance of current residents to change/new housing. You take a look at places receiving an influx of new well-paid residents, like Boise, and you can see that these problems are also cropping up there.
excalibur 7y ago
No. We don't need government intervention to bring tech jobs to the large cities listed, they already have them. I could have my pick of jobs if I were willing to relocate or commute to one. It's a singular failure of Silicon Valley that so many tech jobs still need to be done in person. All physical infrastructure is going to need a contingent of warm bodies onsite (or at least on-call locally), but there's no reason in 2020 that the vast majority of tech positions can't be remote.
- lettergram 7y ago
  My team regularly designs systems on white boards, we discuss, refer to the board as we write docs, and implement. I’ve attempted the same thing remote. Unfortunately, there is nothing more creative / better than having those in person sessions. I hope one day VR can replace this, but today there just isn’t anything there. I should note, we are an internal research and consulting group inside a large corporation. So it is specialized, arguably most full-stack jobs can be done remote. My personal suggestion is to build teams in cities (5 people per team). These teams can be setup in a small office and maybe you get 3-4 teams per office. That’s how my group is currently setup and it works fairly well. The only issue is ensuring facilities are decent and backfilling team members because it can be a challenge to backfill and often attrition snowballs
  - aantix 7y ago
    For remote collaboration, have you tried something like the Meeting Owl to bridge that gap? https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl
    - lettergram 7y ago
      I haven’t but we have done a camera on a whiteboard. It just doesn’t work super well. I think a lot of it has to do with just being stuck in a room together without distractions from personal stuff.
- SQueeeeeL 7y ago
  It's helpful to physically speak to management. Remote can create a fragmented environment of mistrust between your engineers and executives making decisions because they are essentially isolated from each other. It also doesn't allow quick informal meetings which facilitate a lot of information exchange
mumblemumble 7y ago
I'd directly benefit from this, but still, I'm inclined to say no. For starters, when it comes to this sort of thing, the government is inevitably running toward where the ball just was instead of where it's going to be. That's just the nature of the game - legislation is (or at least should be) a slow process. Second, these kinds of interventions inevitably result in rent-seeking behavior. I don't want the kinds of games that agricorps played with the dairy subsidy being related to how far you are from Eau Claire, WI getting imported into the tech industry. And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution. (Perhaps only after the eventual dissipation of the reality distortion field being fueled by a certain generation of techies' determination to heat their own backyards by burning the money that fell into their laps during previous tech bubble. But still.)
- vharuck 7y ago
  I'd also benefit from this, but I'm for the idea so may be biased. >And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution. Capitalism trends toward more efficient usage of resources. But it doesn't care about humans and their quality of life. It works with that (people spend resources on their healthcare for themselves and their families), but it's perfectly "efficient" for some people to stay impoverished. The government is a great entity to cover this gap. And Brookings' proposal isn't so bad: fixed 10-year duration, cities chosen by RFP instead of by politicians, and funds focusing on R&D instead of "make money now" projects. Most R&D moves as slowly as the government, so it's not a bad target.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mc32 7y ago
I think companies will be incentivized to do this for two reasons. Cost and echo chamber. If they geodiversify they lower costs and the workforce is less of an echo chamber.
jrs95 7y ago
The “eligibility index” here is kind of a bullshit number. R&D per capita doesn’t make sense as a measurement to begin with, and even if it did it doesn’t account of population density and the artificial nature of the borders of some of these places. Some cities have more or less of their suburbs within their borders, which is going to drastically affect those R&D per capita numbers. Overall though I think the concept is very good.
satya71 7y ago
We do have a "boomlet"-ing tech scene in St Louis, MO and metro areas in the surrounding states. The thing that crimps the growth is access to risk capital. Companies here had to list with a bay area address, just to get a look from the VCs. What the govt can do is fill the role of VCs and make good returns in pure financial terms as well. Missouri has a small fund that's been very successful, but the new GOP governor cut funding as soon as he got in.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Silicon Valley is risk adverse and unwilling to invest in firms outside of its own geographical and cultural bubble. So perhaps that's what the article should have mentioned, one angle that could involve government funding.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
There is a pay problem. In the heartland there are lots of employers that think $75K is too much for a senior engineer. My junior engineer starting salary was $55K in 2000 which would be more after inflation adjustment than what many will offer. Lower cost of living doesn't make up for being short changed.
- yesimahuman 7y ago
  Salaries in “the heartland” have gone up quite a bit in recent years. Have seen this first hand as a startup hiring locally in a smaller college town in this region. I think remote work has had a big impact on forcing local companies to be competitive. It’s a net positive
duxup 7y ago
I think it would be a good policy to incentivize it. I often tell my anecdotal story about working for a valley company who was 'forced' to hire some midwesterners and there was a serious bias towards valley hires for jobs that really could be done elsewhere. TL;DR Valley company thought tech support HAD to be in the valley / required some high spec resumes ... it very much did not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219 I do wonder if those POVs towards the existing tech centers would make any government incentives irrelevant.
ldoughty 7y ago
The government shouldn't invest billions in proping up existing or new cities.. it should spend time reversing ISP regional monopolies and giving citizens choice on internet access. The barrier to entry of a high tech job sector is primarily internet connectivity. You can't run a web server out of your house if your ISP doesn't allow it.. or if the top speed is 3Mbps. Sure, you could push stuff to a third party, but that increases development costs (in dollars and knowledge). And if you're doing a lot of data pushes, a 256Kb upload speed will be painful if you're pushing a 90MB container up to the cloud. IT people flock to areas that have internet. It was a requirement both times I moved that there's >25Mbps high-cap wired internet. I would NEVER move to a place with less. I would be eager to move to a place that offers gigabit fiber that I could run a server behind (I mostly do cloud work, but I do enjoy having some at-home services).
- ryanmarsh 7y ago
  I disagree with your assertion that not being able to run a publicly addressable web server out of your house is a barrier to entry in tech jobs. However, I have friends in the heartland interested in tech jobs. I tried to help one learn HTML and CSS over Zoom calls and quickly discovered internet quality (speed, latency, etc) is a barrier to entry. When your internet isn’t even good enough to pair program that’s a problem. We even went to the trouble of finding the nearest buried fiber (half a mile away on a major road) and calling the owner (Sprint) to see how much it would cost to splice him in as a customer (a ridiculous sum). I still can’t comprehend how we had an extended period (nearly a decade) of high unemployment across the heartland and the most portable job which pays a living wage was importing talent from the other side of the globe.
  - ldoughty 7y ago
    I agree with you -- it's not the ONLY barrier to entry, but it can be A barrier to enter that also works as a good standard to support many features IT workers need... Though I suppose video calls w/screen sharing is now a better measuring stick for the current shape of IT.
  - Lammy 7y ago
corporateslave5 7y ago
Downvote me into oblivion, but I would say there is no Silicon Valley culture. Walk into half of those companies and you would barely see any Americans working there at all. Places like Cisco and intel are practically all Indian and Chinese. There is rampant discrimination against Americans in one of the only good jobs sectors this country has. “Talent” shortages used as a false reason to bring over cheap workers who have the same ethnicity as their bosses. Heartland Americans have no idea how much of the money of tech growth has gone into the pockets of foreigners.
- archagon 7y ago
  Define "Americans".
  - corporateslave5 7y ago
    People born in the United States. Over 77% of people working in technical jobs in Silicon Valley are foreign
kindatrue 7y ago
Some long time Silicon Valley residents would be thrilled with this - like the Cupertino planning commissioner who opposes building more housing for Apple employees because those engineers will turn high schoolers into prostitutes. https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816 https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816 You can't make this stuff up.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  Wow just Wow where some of these apple engineers be "coloured gentlemen"
vonnik 7y ago
A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies are actively trying to hire remote engineers all over the US and the world. Market forces are doing the job better than a government initiative could.
rb808 7y ago
Its relevant that the US DoD contracts helped build Silicon Valley in the first place. It makes sense for the government to encourage firms to other regions. https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
vmchale 7y ago
I'm curious how discrimination economics affects the relative lack of investment in some of these areas. Particularly for transgender people and immigrants (a larger group). If immigrants/engineers are getting murdered in hate crimes in your city, why should the whole country pay to subsidize the fact that your city is an unpleasant place to work and live?
alex_young 7y ago
Silicon Valley is a place where you have lots of smart people because the smart people all go there because that's where the other smart people are. You can get them in a room and they can figure out amazing things. It's kind of like Los Alamos for nuclear physics. Sure, you can put a team together elsewhere, but it's never going to be quite the same because those happenstance conversations won't have the right people in them. Let's say for a minute that you could break this thing up into dispirate groups. What's the advantage? You'll be splitting up the best team ever created and hoping they somehow reconstitute. Sounds dangerous to me.
- ecf 7y ago
  I don’t really enjoy this response because Los Alamos was purpose built by the government to develop the bomb and realistically, could have been constructed in any remote area of the US. The government even used eminent domain to force ranchers out of the area. I feel SV has developed much more organically.
- madengr 7y ago
  Yeah, but the point if the article is Los Alamos (formerly a desolate plateau built up by Uncle Sam).
- munificent 7y ago
  > What's the advantage? More affordability for the people in those groups, and thus less separation of tech people from members of other sectors and socio-economic levels. It's good to have enough people concentrated in one region to form great teams and give people options and mobility. But, beyond that, it starts becoming a negative to tech people and non-tech people. SF and Seattle are insanely expensive. Most of my friends here in Seattle are in tech, and over the past few years, I've watched most of my non-tech friends get priced out and be forced to leave the area. I don't think it's good for individuals or humanity as a whole for people to spend all of their time in a bubble surrounded only by people like themselves.
- auiya 7y ago
  > Silicon Valley is a place where you have lots of smart people because the smart people all go there because that's where the other smart people are. The bell curve in the valley is no different than any other city of comparable size. The only exceptionalism is ego.
blackflame 7y ago
The Government has no business in picking and choosing which cities to promote. The free market will take care of that. The government should instead focus on why everyone is leaving the heartland because it's not just because of the beach.
hamhand 7y ago
Keep piling big budget infrastructure like subways into existing cities seems like a dead end, you push the living cost ever higher, concentrating workers ever more into city centers, congestion, then more big budget infrastructure, this is just a vicious cycle. If electric vehicles are the future, young people shouldn't be afraid to creat their own new cities with scattered companies and minimum infrastructure investment, you only need roads and charging stations. Cheap land make for cheap houses and low living cost, in fact, isn't this what their fathers did to achieve the American dream life young people nowadays so pine for? This seem to be the only way the American dream can still be realized.
- blt 7y ago
  Cars require too much land area per person. Two dedicated parking spaces is only scratching the surface. There's gas stations, repair shops, dealers, and of course the actual roads. By the time you carve out enough space for these, sprawl is necessary, and horrible traffic is unavoidable. Personal cars are a failed experiment and a total aberration from historically successful modes of human development.
auiya 7y ago
Smart company leaders are already doing this by hiring remote worker teams. They don't need to "drag" anyone. FAANG are woefully behind the curve in this regard and would rather waste money building office empires in big cities. Nobody wants to relocate their entire life across the country away from family/friends just for some BS tech job that could just as easily be done from home.
- kamarg 7y ago
  The "office empires" make perfect sense at the size of FAANGs. When you need to hire that many people every year, many of them who have never worked in "the real world" before, how do you do the best to ensure they all have access to knowledge, resources, support, and oversight? Not everyone is good at self directed work from home. That doesn't mean they can't be an outstanding employee. Hiring is expensive and if you can avoid having major churn in employees you'll save quite a bit of money. On top of that, being a major employer in a city gives your company sizable clout when it comes to lobbying the local government. Don't like the new tax plan? It will probably work out in your favor to let the city know that it would really hurt hiring and salaries at the biggest employer in the city. Heck if it hurts enough, you might even have to move to that nearby competitor city who is offering all those sweet tax breaks. You don't want to but it's the only responsible thing to do for all of your employees. It would be a shame to see a bunch of those employees leave the city and cause housing prices to drop for all the rest of the citizens. What's that? You're reconsidering that tax bill? I knew you'd make the right choice for your constituents.
Apocryphon 7y ago
It doesn't seem like anyone has actually RTFA. The Brookings contenders for the next Silicon Valley aren't random farming towns in the Great Plains. If you look at the chart at the bottom they include Madison, Minneapolis, Albany, Portland, Nashville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Charlotte. A lot of these cities are already up and coming to the point of rapidly escalating rents.
- alexhutcheson 7y ago
  Their criteria unintentionally selected for metros with a restricted housing supply, by including "only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole". That can indicate a slow-growing economy, but can also indicate that you're not building enough new housing for population to grow at or above the national rate. Portland and Nashville are obvious examples here - nobody who has been there recently believes that they are struggling, but they've been adding population slowly because they're not building enough housing to meet demand.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    You're not wrong, but my overall point is that it seems like a lot of people in this thread are arguing against the prospect of moving to intolerant backwater villages, whereas most of the ones that Brookings listed are already hot secondary destinations. And many of them aren't even located in the Midwest! Guess IEEE was referring to basically everywhere not on the coast when they say "the Heartland".
nullbull 7y ago
Is it time for the government to drag financial sector jobs out of New York? Is it time for the US to drag credit card companies out of Delaware, or agribusiness out of the heartland and toward the coasts? No. It isn't. Funny the regionally exclusive monopolies that we seem to have tolerated for literally decades and the ones we suddenly, for some reason, don't. Or maybe it isn't funny at all. Maybe it's a totally predictable outcome of a system that is highly tolerant of calcified, politically-connected regional monopolies. A system that is intolerant of disruptive, politically-indifferent or unestablished regional monopolies. In other words, this isn't about economic efficiency or anti-trust law. It's about political sour grapes first. Everything else second.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  A ton of finance jobs moved out of NYC to Charlotte after 9/11.
- anm89 7y ago
  This gets at the heart of this. This isn't t part of some consistent political philosophy or legal framework. This is policy based on angry people wanting to get revenge on a specific topic. Unfortunately I think the tide is moving in the direction of this being an acceptable way to govern and while people may get individual things they want out of it I think the end result is a net loss for everyone.
martianfeeder 7y ago
Many great comments on this thread but I, a sikh immigrant who wears a turban, would rather leave the US than live anywhere except for the valley or NYC. Comments on this thread address everything from internet speed to "gov intervention is bad" but fail to miss a very important point - US tech workforce has a lot of immigrants and cities outside the list mentioned in the article are actively hostile to immigrants. It would be very difficult to build tech hubs without making them friendlier towards an immigrant workforce. I spent 6 days in Houston visiting a friend, here's what I remember from the trip: - Random airport check in a private room (check) - Called random names more times in 6 days than in my entire life (check) - Stared down actively in every bar I went to (check) Imagine being on an evening out, people staring at you trying to figure out "what" you are and knowing that they may be carrying a gun on them. Silicon valley (and NYC) is a place where its okay to be whoever you are, and that is something government intervention can't inject no matter how hard they try. I hope my comment doesn't come off as offensive, just trying to provide an important perspective which I believe the article misses.
- rayiner 7y ago
  This is an important issue, though I’d like to present the opposite experience. Only a small fraction of the country lives in New York or SF, but the US is among the top countries in the world for inclusive attitudes: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-06/the-inclusiveness-of-nationalities-ipsos-global-advisor.pdf https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/.... For inclusiveness of naturalized citizens, it’s #1 by a large margin. (This is based on surveys asking people like whether they would consider a naturalized citizen a "real American" or "real German" or whatever. For that question, 76% of Americans answered "yes" versus 13% answering "no." In Italy, it was 41% "yes" to 36% "no." Incidentally, also do pretty well on LGBT inclusiveness, having a higher net “yes” score than Spain, Italy, Germany, or the U.K.—which together comprise more than half the EU.) That’s consistent with my experience as a Bangladeshi immigrant. I grew up in a DC suburb in the early 1990s, before that area became diverse. A few remarks aside, I’ve always felt welcome, including in rural parts of Virginia, Illinois, Georgia, etc. I was on a plane to Dallas a few months ago. My seat mate was delicately trying to figure out my ethnicity. I explained I was Bangladeshi, and he didn’t know what that was. Then we had a very good conversation about how had really gotten into Indian food, and had put together a tandoor. Speaking for myself, I’d rather live in Houston or Kansas City or Pittsburgh than anywhere in the coasts. Also, where would I go, besides back to Bangladesh? You think the Berlin tech scene is more welcoming than the Salt Lake City tech scene? Maybe people will not say anything uncomfortable or offensive. But a Bangladeshi immigrant can become American, and people will recognize that as substantive and not merely a euphemism. But he’ll never become German, or Japanese, or French. The United States elected a son of an immigrant President. Not just New York and California, but Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa. That’s never happened in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, or Italy, or any EU country that I’m aware of. I don’t say this to diminish anyone’s experience. But I think to the extent that people on the coasts are wondering what the rest of America is like, they get a balanced picture.
alexhutcheson 7y ago
The criteria the Brookings paper used to determine eligibility doesn't make sense. Specifically this bit: "Looking next at the remaining top 20 metro areas with the most innovation sector jobs, only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole since 2010 are considered eligible to become designated growth centers. By dint of that, cities such as Raleigh, N.C., Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin are set aside because they are already self-sustaining superstars. They are safe bets for any new tech graduate looking for a job or any tech firm looking at add a few hundred jobs somewhere. Allowing these places to be eligible would simply reinforce existing spatial imbalances." This decision disqualifies growing Sun Belt metros including Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta from inclusion, specifically because they are already growing. The result is a list that is biased towards metros in the northeast and midwest, which are shrinking for a variety of reasons, not strictly due to job opportunities. This has two problems: 1. It sets the program up for failure: Targeting shrinking metros means that the policy intervention needs to offset existing decline before it can demonstrate any positive growth. This is not easy! There are lots of public programs already targeting these metro areas (particularly state-level programs), and they are still shrinking. 2. It makes it very unlikely that the program would develop a new "superstar" tech city comparable to NYC, because you've already excluded the most probable candidates. Adding some regional balance for fairness and (valid) political concerns is a good idea, but a program that proposes to subsidize growth in Chicago and Minneapolis while excluding Atlanta, Dallas, and Raleigh-Durham seems neither fair nor sensible.
purplezooey 7y ago
We seem to be incapable of challenging entrenched city councils and fixing our housing problem, so we may deserve it.

84 points by teklaperry 7y ago

PG's essay from 2007 seems relevant: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

cvaidya1986 7y ago

Yes.

thorwasdfasdf 7y ago

This is literally the best idea idea I've seen in print all year long: "They argue that the federal government should create eight to 10 regional “growth centers” in the U.S. heartland." New cities, we desperately need. The entire housing fiasco is caused by an imbalance between the number of jobs and the amount of housing. all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow. so the logical thing to do, is to move those jobs to new places that do want to grow. This could really ignite the economy in a way that's not zero sum (like most other solutions). There's so much free wealth out there for the taking (land that's not being used for any productive capacity ~ you could literally create wealth out of thin air).

mark_l_watson 7y ago
I agree with you. My last job was on a deep learning team located in a university research park at UIUC in Central Illinois. The area was rich in local entrepreneurship and had a critical mass of skilled people. I retired and moved back to my home in Sedona Arizona, but I can strongly recommend UIUC for both the great tech community, great tech meetups, and also good quality of life with a low cost of living. I compare this to working as a contractor at Google, which was a really nice experience but my wife and I burned through $6500/month in living expenses in Mountain View and the traffic was so bad that I was dissuaded from driving to tech meetups.
- cgy1 7y ago
  I grew up in C-U and still dearly miss the area. Would definitely move back to the right job.
1over137 7y ago
New cities we desperately don't need. There are plenty of small cities than can be grown instead of destroying more wild nature, which we are fast running out of.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  You know those hen farm houses where hens are squeezed together by the 1000s into a tiny area with poop all over the place. Some people think that's not nice to do to a chicken. I think it's not nice to do that to human beings. And yet that's exactly what we're doing to the people in SF, Poop included. If you don't create new cities, the people still need to end up somewhere. You can move jobs to smaller cities or create new ones, whatever. the point is, you need to move jobs to areas that want to grow. Have you seen the new neighborhoods that are being built in places like CA? Every single tree gets chopped down, ever last one. That's because developers are forced to build with density because the cost of land is so high. if you want to prevent the slaughtering of trees, you'll need specifically create minimum distance regs or reduce the # of trees that can be cut down legally. at the current rate, there's no nature for anyone to enjoy in the neighborhoods that are currently being built.
  - fluxic 7y ago
    Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment? The only reason that doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies.
    - maxsilver 7y ago
      > Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment? There's a lot of chickens unhappy about $1600/month 200sqft apartments. (a real example from SF - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/micro-apartments-making-160-square-feet-livable-san-francisco/1038601/ https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti... ) Because that's the dystopian nightmare in SF, and to move jobs out of silicon valley to elsewhere, would be to export that same dystopia to more places. We already see this in Michigan of all places. You can make a SF salary and pay $1600/month for a micro-apartment. Or you can take a 50% pay cut, to pay $800/month for ~200sqft micro-apartment. They are equally ridiculous and equally unaffordable, once you account for the currency/wage differences, despite the fact that we have no zoning restrictions in this town. We obviously need more housing, and need to build more housing, but housing is inherently pollution-heavy. You can not build your way into affordability alone, because the act of new construction inherently generates more unaffordability. It alone can never solve it. > The only reason (cheap apartments) doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies. No, that's only a tiny part. Zoning is a small reason, but not the primary one. The biggest reason CA apartments are expensive, is the financial pollution generated by the companies there. If you built a brand new city in an empty cornfield somewhere, with no laws or zoning of any kind, it would be somewhat cheaper than San Francisco, but every single apartment would still cost ~$1100-$1600/month. Because most of that price is due to the financial pollution from the companies, not the zoning.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
No one is forcing jobs to be where they are now. There’s a variety of reasons that the situation is the way it is, such as differing state laws, weather, natural features, etc. Without addressing those, there is no point in moving jobs. When my friends and I talk, we value things such as a family leave act or parental leave, assisted suicide, legal marijuana, and bans non competes. As well as weather (humidity isn’t popular), and natural features, such as oceans and mountains. No one considers going to a state that is still dealing with women’s rights.
- jethro_tell 7y ago
  This is exactly it. My family is incredibly well rounded, we are both earners with success in multiple industries. We could get a job in any city in the US and many cities in the world, because of that we can choose where we live, and it's not one where I have to move back in time or fight to get fast internet in my house. The thing is, companies aren't moving to expensive places for the cheap land for office space, or the low salaries for cleaning and food service employees, They aren't moving to cities because of vast cheap and free parking. They are moving there, because the talent that can live anywhere it wants to is living in these cities. I'd love to work remote, but then I'd work in my basement with my legal weed and fast internet and still in the middle of the city I live in now. There's a fundamental misunderstanding here thinking that the people who can move anywhere they want haven't already. So if they want to make a difference, the best way would be to encourage the arts, federally support human rights, and move the whole country forward, break internet monopolies, pay for education. I'm not moving my daughter to a state that's still challenging abortion rights or teaching creationism in schools, or still has their head in the sand about confederate statues. I don't want my kids growing up in a place where the war on drugs isn't just a failed experiment.
  - drblast 7y ago
    I cannot agree with this more. Come to the Midwest! Make half as much and live in a house that you can sell for half as much profit when you retire! Come for the flat outdoors with nothing to do, stay for the lack of ethnic and cultural diversity! Half of the people in Seattle are Midwest refugees who came here despite not having a job lined up. It's laughable to think they'd move back for a salary cut despite cheaper housing. The financial incentive would have to be overwhelmingly positive so they could work in the Midwest for a few years then move somewhere better.
csharptwdec19 7y ago
This may not benefit employees as much as they think. i.e. this doesn't mean anyone will still make SV money in the midwest. Also there is the caveat that things like a vehicle become a lot more important for day to day life. Those caveats given, if someone were to find some land unsuitable for farming and build a tech center there.... It could go well.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  100K in the midwest is at least as good as 200K in the penninsula/SF, at least for those who have a family of 4.
  - drblast 7y ago
    Except that you have to live in the Midwest, so no, it's not as good. I like doing outdoor things in the mountains and the queer culture on the "left coast" that is anathema to more conservative areas of the country. So no thank you, I'll keep my high salary, access to mountains, and ability to retire anywhere I like after I sell my ridiculously overpriced house to someone else. Living in most of the U.S. sucks if you're not a cookie-cutter copy of the socially acceptable suburban family with 2.5 kids and a dog. It's not all about money.
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      You already own property, so you're probably not the prospective demographic who would be willing to move to one of these cities.
    - bryan_w 7y ago
      This is kind of a close minded view. There are nice places to live with queen culture and "outdoors" all over the country. It may not be everywhere but there are a handful of medium size cities across the Midwest that you should visit
vorpalhex 7y ago
There's nothing stopping this from happening now except lack of infrastructure in pluck-my-banjo heartland and nobody wants to go first (do you want to live for a few years in a city with no real friends?) It's also a terrible idea for the Feds to be in charge of doing this in any meaningful capacity aside from tax incentives and banner waving, and it'd be up to the state/city to want to be selected. edit: removed suggestion that the heartland was lacking bars and restaurants
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shantly 7y ago
  > (do you want to live for a few years in a city with no real friends and no nice bars or restaurants?) As someone in a mid-sized heartland city, we've got nice bars and restaurants (no, seriously). Main pain points: 1) decent "ethnic" cuisine of certain types falls in the mid-range-and-up category, price-wise, for the most part, with few delicious but cheap options like larger coastal cities may have (Indian food, for example). I do not know why this is. Actually-good bread is also weirdly expensive. We do have surprisingly-good fine dining and good bars, and a ton more food variety than a coast-dweller might think, so there's that. 2) Really far from any decent "outdoorsy" stuff unless you like fishing on kinda-ugly lakes, or hunting in kinda-ugly woods. Hiking? Most of a day to reach mediocre mountains, a long day to reach real ones. Local "hiking" is largely indistinguishable from a neighborhood walking trail in terms of what you'll see (which is to say, not much). Beautiful desert vistas? 1.5 days or so. Any part of the ocean? Again, 1.5 days of driving, minimum. Great lakes? Not close enough to those either, 1.25 days to reach parts of those other than Chicago (1 long day for that). No such thing as a long-weekend getaway to anything outdoorsy that's much fun, let alone single-day trips of that sort.
pcwalton 7y ago
> New cities, we desperately need. The entire housing fiasco is caused by an imbalance between the number of jobs and the amount of housing. all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow. so the logical thing to do, is to move those jobs to new places that do want to grow. Even if this strategy did work (it doesn't), it's a terrible idea for the environment and quality of life. This is how Los Angeles got super-commutes from the never-ending sprawl of the Inland Empire.
- mcguire 7y ago
  And how's your commute in SF?
  - doublement 7y ago
    Commutes to SF via BART train are fine from the denser, inner-ring suburbs. Commutes from the sprawl area in Contra Costa County are horrendous.
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    Pretty ideal, actually. Muni works fine.
  - baby 7y ago
    It’s hell. I spend 3 hours per day in a shuttle.
    - boring_twenties 7y ago
      No amount of money is worth this IMO. That's 30 hours a week, you could almost do a whole nother full time job with that.
      - deathanatos 7y ago
        > 3 hours per day > That's 30 hours a week It's 15 hours per week, unless parent is a time traveller. (3 hours per day, not 3 hours one way.) I also used to be in the Bay, and that's about right; 3-4 hours per day. It's fucked.
poulsbohemian 7y ago
I don't disagree with your assessment of the issue, but I question the federal government as the solution. This has long felt to me like the free market not working, but I can't quite figure out why. For decades now, I've not understood why companies don't relocate to places like Des Moines or Kansas City. Labor was cheap, land was cheap, governments are willing to give you credits to move your business there, etc. The midwest is crawling with small colleges churning out educated people. After spending a decade in Seattle I moved inland for cheaper real estate (and this was back in 2010 because I thought Seattle housing had already gone insane back then). I've been a remote worker / road warrior type since 2005, and the opportunities for remote work or to work from where you want have only gotten easier. Why would I hire the $250K+ developer in the Bay Area, have to cover office costs, etc there, when I could encourage them to live in Boise or some other lower-cost area? So, to my thinking - employers need to get more creative and drop the industrial era mindset of control. Certainly there are jobs that require people and equipment being in one physical location. Certainly the most profitable large companies - the Googles, Microsofts, Apples, etc of the world might choose to establish centralized corporate campuses. For everybody else though, the economics make far more sense in other parts of the country.
- fredophile 7y ago
  Have you ever tried to get someone to move to Boise? Did you succeed? I work for a tech company in North Carolina. Cost of living is very reasonable and there are plenty of tech companies here but in my experience getting someone to move here for work is hard. It's not just the employers you need to convince.
  - hiram112 7y ago
    That's probably because North Carolina companies (especially in Charlotte) pay horribly, especially now that homes are becoming more expensive there, like every other large city. Furthermore, Charlotte is heavily banking and finance, and thus lean heavily on H1B visas for most of their enterprise jobs. I've had recruiters contact me for jobs in the area and the salaries were a joke. Honestly, I don't know if they were for real or just using it as 'proof' that they couldn't hire any Americans so they could forward off a few hundred more H1B petitions to USCIS...
seattle_spring 7y ago
There might be some folks interested in living in manufactured cities in "The Heartland," where the only thing that matters is having a huge, cheap house and a job. For the rest of us though, who appreciate mountains, good weather, and culture, we're going to stick to the existing cities in geologically and culturally diverse areas regardless of the cost.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y ago
  Not every place in the midwest is the same. There's plenty of places in the midwest that have diversity and culture in abundance: for example Houston and Chicago.
  - seattle_spring 7y ago
    Those are both perfect examples of places that lack geologic diversity. I can't think of a worse form of torture than living 12 hours from real mountains.
- tzs 7y ago
  > For the rest of us though, who appreciate mountains, good weather, and culture, we're going to stick to the existing cities in geologically and culturally diverse areas regardless of the cost. Do you have time to actually take advantages of the cultural resources of a city or visit mountains during the work week? Or is that a weekend thing generally? I suspect that for most tech workers, it is a weekend thing. I'd like to see more companies optimize for that. For the Bay area that would mean putting tech offices away from San Francisco and SV in smaller cities, but close enough that driving in to SF for the weekend would not be too arduous a trip to do regularly. Modesto, for example, is a 2 hour drive from SF if you avoid rush hour on the SF end, has much cheaper housing than SF, and is a lot closer to the mountains.
  - pb7 7y ago
    I appreciate good weather and culture every day. Interesting topography, while not directly interacted with every day, is also very pleasing and calming to see on a daily basis. I say this having grown up with endless smooth moss-like rolling hills in every direction as far as the eye can see. Rain on an annoying unpredictable day-to-day schedule ruining plans got old very quickly. Clear skies and beautiful mountainous skyline haven't gotten old so far for me. In fact, weather is the very first thing I'm reminded of when I travel anywhere else.
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Drag people from one place to another its not governments role here. Sorry to say this (as an outsider) but not all areas of the US are the same and are not as desirable to live in, also for those planning a family you may be limiting their career choices in 20 years. One of my friends has move back near London from one of the cheaper (more depressed regions of the UK) because her v bright daughter through the only job for her was working on the tills.
- C1sc0cat 7y ago
  One thing that would help a bit is have more liberal SF style labour laws and other laws - ban non competes for example like SF does. But that would require a complete rebalance of power from states to federal government.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  > Drag people from one place to another its not governments role here. The US government is one of the largest employers in the USA. And they are responsible for the expansion of major metropolitan areas around the US. Washington DC is an obvious example, but for one from that list, Dayton Ohio owes most of its technology sector to the US Air Force due to its proximity to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the glut of technology contractors in the area. I'm sure Dayton is not a terribly desirable place for technology workers to emigrate to, but it does demonstrate the feasibility of special economic zones. The US is full of beautiful places that would be highly attractive to workers, if only jobs were available in sufficient numbers. The US government could even work with public-private partnerships to ensure that enough private investment occurs to bring culture to the area so that it doesn't sit around as some stagnant boomtown.
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    But those areas are not chosen on merit or for the benefit of the country are they its all about greasing the hands of the local politicians. The challenger disaster was caused by this as for "political reasons" the plant that made the boosters was a long way away and thus required the design with the O rings.
cl0ckt0wer 7y ago
There are many underused cites in the rust belt. They are prime candidates for job relocation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_cities
xenocyon 7y ago
> all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow That's a little misleading. True, SF and Seattle have zoning laws which are a significant part of the reason for housing unaffordability (e.g. 75% of Seattle is zoned for single family dwellings, prohibiting even short townhouses), but it's likely that many of the smaller cities in the article either do have such zoning laws already or would adopt them once increasing density motivates local homeowners to "protect" their neighborhoods. (Heck, in many smaller towns it is illegal to grow veggies in your front garden or let your lawn grass go brown.) An overbearing notion of house-property-values and everything associated with that mindset is not the province of big metros alone. Meanwhile, the recent efforts of cities like Seattle to enable smart urban planning, public transit, and bicycling, even though laughably puny by European standards, are still significantly ahead of the rest of the USA. Most importantly, sprawl is devastating from an environmental point of view - it massively blows up per capita carbon footprint. Well-planned, dense cities can include parks, green space, and even urban wilderness while still accommodating density and drastically reducing car travel. It is a matter of political will, not technical feasibility.
jdkee 7y ago
Or we could change local zoning laws that prohibit denser housing where the jobs already are.

rolltiide 7y ago

The crux of this argument is that federal funding should be involved, which is what got Silicon Valley started so it can have some merit. Silicon Valley's culture is hard to replicate, and by culture its just the consolidation of venture capital firms and the aspirations of liquid wealthy people who want to play angel investor themselves. Would newly wealthy tech aficionados in the midwest really stay in opioid land with its extremes of temperatures, or would they just get the condo in south beach Miami and disappear? Having one local Warren Buffett means only insurance and real estate plays get funded, as an example. Having only a couple Warren Buffetts means you get some people that "only invest in what they know" and aren't willing to learn anything. You really need a market of venture capital, run by people that got rich there. So pumping an area with federal funding is a much better step than just slapping a "Silicon" label on the nearest geographic formation.

jrs95 7y ago
I live in Ohio, and I would stay here. I’d rather contribute to my community than abandon it.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  The only reason this article is trying to get the federal government is involved is because more economic outliers say that then actually do

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fortran77 7y ago

Amazon wanted to open an office in New York--not exactly the heartland, but it does spread out the jobs a bit. But there was resistance and they cancelled the plan. How can you "drag jobs" out? Government ordered migrations of people? Massive subsidies?

bdcravens 7y ago
Subsidies and incentives is the most practical answer, though that's always a political minefield.
jorts 7y ago
Amazon is opening a new office in NY by 2021, just without the huge tax breaks that they were originally pushing for. The tax breaks were the main reason that folks like AOC were pushing back against them opening a new headquarters in NY.
- corporateslave5 7y ago
  1500 people versus 25k. A huge loss for nyc. Also lost tax revenue for nyc and the state.
  - poulsbohemian 7y ago
    If Amazon believes it is in their best interest to be in NYC, then they will eventually grow to that 25K number regardless. There's a long track record across the country of companies demanding concessions in promise of jobs, only to have the jobs never materialize. In many cases, companies are going to do what they want, so there isn't any real incentive for governments to play along.
  - cooljacob204 7y ago
    We will be more then fine without Amazon.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    The market will bring in other firms and other jobs to NYC, without the government intervention that a deal with Amazon would entail.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cgy1 7y ago

I feel like these places outside of Silicon Valley would run into many of the same problems if a bunch of high paying tech jobs were dropped into these places, such as steep increases in housing prices (although still cheaper than the SF Bay Area) and resistance of current residents to change/new housing. You take a look at places receiving an influx of new well-paid residents, like Boise, and you can see that these problems are also cropping up there.

excalibur 7y ago

No. We don't need government intervention to bring tech jobs to the large cities listed, they already have them. I could have my pick of jobs if I were willing to relocate or commute to one. It's a singular failure of Silicon Valley that so many tech jobs still need to be done in person. All physical infrastructure is going to need a contingent of warm bodies onsite (or at least on-call locally), but there's no reason in 2020 that the vast majority of tech positions can't be remote.

lettergram 7y ago
My team regularly designs systems on white boards, we discuss, refer to the board as we write docs, and implement. I’ve attempted the same thing remote. Unfortunately, there is nothing more creative / better than having those in person sessions. I hope one day VR can replace this, but today there just isn’t anything there. I should note, we are an internal research and consulting group inside a large corporation. So it is specialized, arguably most full-stack jobs can be done remote. My personal suggestion is to build teams in cities (5 people per team). These teams can be setup in a small office and maybe you get 3-4 teams per office. That’s how my group is currently setup and it works fairly well. The only issue is ensuring facilities are decent and backfilling team members because it can be a challenge to backfill and often attrition snowballs
- aantix 7y ago
  For remote collaboration, have you tried something like the Meeting Owl to bridge that gap? https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl https://www.owllabs.com/meeting-owl
  - lettergram 7y ago
    I haven’t but we have done a camera on a whiteboard. It just doesn’t work super well. I think a lot of it has to do with just being stuck in a room together without distractions from personal stuff.
SQueeeeeL 7y ago
It's helpful to physically speak to management. Remote can create a fragmented environment of mistrust between your engineers and executives making decisions because they are essentially isolated from each other. It also doesn't allow quick informal meetings which facilitate a lot of information exchange

mumblemumble 7y ago

I'd directly benefit from this, but still, I'm inclined to say no. For starters, when it comes to this sort of thing, the government is inevitably running toward where the ball just was instead of where it's going to be. That's just the nature of the game - legislation is (or at least should be) a slow process. Second, these kinds of interventions inevitably result in rent-seeking behavior. I don't want the kinds of games that agricorps played with the dairy subsidy being related to how far you are from Eau Claire, WI getting imported into the tech industry. And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution. (Perhaps only after the eventual dissipation of the reality distortion field being fueled by a certain generation of techies' determination to heat their own backyards by burning the money that fell into their laps during previous tech bubble. But still.)

vharuck 7y ago
I'd also benefit from this, but I'm for the idea so may be biased. >And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution. Capitalism trends toward more efficient usage of resources. But it doesn't care about humans and their quality of life. It works with that (people spend resources on their healthcare for themselves and their families), but it's perfectly "efficient" for some people to stay impoverished. The government is a great entity to cover this gap. And Brookings' proposal isn't so bad: fixed 10-year duration, cities chosen by RFP instead of by politicians, and funds focusing on R&D instead of "make money now" projects. Most R&D moves as slowly as the government, so it's not a bad target.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mc32 7y ago

I think companies will be incentivized to do this for two reasons. Cost and echo chamber. If they geodiversify they lower costs and the workforce is less of an echo chamber.

jrs95 7y ago

The “eligibility index” here is kind of a bullshit number. R&D per capita doesn’t make sense as a measurement to begin with, and even if it did it doesn’t account of population density and the artificial nature of the borders of some of these places. Some cities have more or less of their suburbs within their borders, which is going to drastically affect those R&D per capita numbers. Overall though I think the concept is very good.

satya71 7y ago

We do have a "boomlet"-ing tech scene in St Louis, MO and metro areas in the surrounding states. The thing that crimps the growth is access to risk capital. Companies here had to list with a bay area address, just to get a look from the VCs. What the govt can do is fill the role of VCs and make good returns in pure financial terms as well. Missouri has a small fund that's been very successful, but the new GOP governor cut funding as soon as he got in.

Apocryphon 7y ago
Silicon Valley is risk adverse and unwilling to invest in firms outside of its own geographical and cultural bubble. So perhaps that's what the article should have mentioned, one angle that could involve government funding.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

There is a pay problem. In the heartland there are lots of employers that think $75K is too much for a senior engineer. My junior engineer starting salary was $55K in 2000 which would be more after inflation adjustment than what many will offer. Lower cost of living doesn't make up for being short changed.

yesimahuman 7y ago
Salaries in “the heartland” have gone up quite a bit in recent years. Have seen this first hand as a startup hiring locally in a smaller college town in this region. I think remote work has had a big impact on forcing local companies to be competitive. It’s a net positive

duxup 7y ago

I think it would be a good policy to incentivize it. I often tell my anecdotal story about working for a valley company who was 'forced' to hire some midwesterners and there was a serious bias towards valley hires for jobs that really could be done elsewhere. TL;DR Valley company thought tech support HAD to be in the valley / required some high spec resumes ... it very much did not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219 I do wonder if those POVs towards the existing tech centers would make any government incentives irrelevant.

ldoughty 7y ago

The government shouldn't invest billions in proping up existing or new cities.. it should spend time reversing ISP regional monopolies and giving citizens choice on internet access. The barrier to entry of a high tech job sector is primarily internet connectivity. You can't run a web server out of your house if your ISP doesn't allow it.. or if the top speed is 3Mbps. Sure, you could push stuff to a third party, but that increases development costs (in dollars and knowledge). And if you're doing a lot of data pushes, a 256Kb upload speed will be painful if you're pushing a 90MB container up to the cloud. IT people flock to areas that have internet. It was a requirement both times I moved that there's >25Mbps high-cap wired internet. I would NEVER move to a place with less. I would be eager to move to a place that offers gigabit fiber that I could run a server behind (I mostly do cloud work, but I do enjoy having some at-home services).

ryanmarsh 7y ago
I disagree with your assertion that not being able to run a publicly addressable web server out of your house is a barrier to entry in tech jobs. However, I have friends in the heartland interested in tech jobs. I tried to help one learn HTML and CSS over Zoom calls and quickly discovered internet quality (speed, latency, etc) is a barrier to entry. When your internet isn’t even good enough to pair program that’s a problem. We even went to the trouble of finding the nearest buried fiber (half a mile away on a major road) and calling the owner (Sprint) to see how much it would cost to splice him in as a customer (a ridiculous sum). I still can’t comprehend how we had an extended period (nearly a decade) of high unemployment across the heartland and the most portable job which pays a living wage was importing talent from the other side of the globe.
- ldoughty 7y ago
  I agree with you -- it's not the ONLY barrier to entry, but it can be A barrier to enter that also works as a good standard to support many features IT workers need... Though I suppose video calls w/screen sharing is now a better measuring stick for the current shape of IT.
- Lammy 7y ago

corporateslave5 7y ago

Downvote me into oblivion, but I would say there is no Silicon Valley culture. Walk into half of those companies and you would barely see any Americans working there at all. Places like Cisco and intel are practically all Indian and Chinese. There is rampant discrimination against Americans in one of the only good jobs sectors this country has. “Talent” shortages used as a false reason to bring over cheap workers who have the same ethnicity as their bosses. Heartland Americans have no idea how much of the money of tech growth has gone into the pockets of foreigners.

archagon 7y ago
Define "Americans".
- corporateslave5 7y ago
  People born in the United States. Over 77% of people working in technical jobs in Silicon Valley are foreign

kindatrue 7y ago

Some long time Silicon Valley residents would be thrilled with this - like the Cupertino planning commissioner who opposes building more housing for Apple employees because those engineers will turn high schoolers into prostitutes. https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816 https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816 You can't make this stuff up.

C1sc0cat 7y ago
Wow just Wow where some of these apple engineers be "coloured gentlemen"

vonnik 7y ago

A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies are actively trying to hire remote engineers all over the US and the world. Market forces are doing the job better than a government initiative could.

rb808 7y ago

Its relevant that the US DoD contracts helped build Silicon Valley in the first place. It makes sense for the government to encourage firms to other regions. https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

vmchale 7y ago

I'm curious how discrimination economics affects the relative lack of investment in some of these areas. Particularly for transgender people and immigrants (a larger group). If immigrants/engineers are getting murdered in hate crimes in your city, why should the whole country pay to subsidize the fact that your city is an unpleasant place to work and live?

alex_young 7y ago

Silicon Valley is a place where you have lots of smart people because the smart people all go there because that's where the other smart people are. You can get them in a room and they can figure out amazing things. It's kind of like Los Alamos for nuclear physics. Sure, you can put a team together elsewhere, but it's never going to be quite the same because those happenstance conversations won't have the right people in them. Let's say for a minute that you could break this thing up into dispirate groups. What's the advantage? You'll be splitting up the best team ever created and hoping they somehow reconstitute. Sounds dangerous to me.

ecf 7y ago
I don’t really enjoy this response because Los Alamos was purpose built by the government to develop the bomb and realistically, could have been constructed in any remote area of the US. The government even used eminent domain to force ranchers out of the area. I feel SV has developed much more organically.
madengr 7y ago
Yeah, but the point if the article is Los Alamos (formerly a desolate plateau built up by Uncle Sam).
munificent 7y ago
> What's the advantage? More affordability for the people in those groups, and thus less separation of tech people from members of other sectors and socio-economic levels. It's good to have enough people concentrated in one region to form great teams and give people options and mobility. But, beyond that, it starts becoming a negative to tech people and non-tech people. SF and Seattle are insanely expensive. Most of my friends here in Seattle are in tech, and over the past few years, I've watched most of my non-tech friends get priced out and be forced to leave the area. I don't think it's good for individuals or humanity as a whole for people to spend all of their time in a bubble surrounded only by people like themselves.
auiya 7y ago
> Silicon Valley is a place where you have lots of smart people because the smart people all go there because that's where the other smart people are. The bell curve in the valley is no different than any other city of comparable size. The only exceptionalism is ego.

blackflame 7y ago

The Government has no business in picking and choosing which cities to promote. The free market will take care of that. The government should instead focus on why everyone is leaving the heartland because it's not just because of the beach.

hamhand 7y ago

Keep piling big budget infrastructure like subways into existing cities seems like a dead end, you push the living cost ever higher, concentrating workers ever more into city centers, congestion, then more big budget infrastructure, this is just a vicious cycle. If electric vehicles are the future, young people shouldn't be afraid to creat their own new cities with scattered companies and minimum infrastructure investment, you only need roads and charging stations. Cheap land make for cheap houses and low living cost, in fact, isn't this what their fathers did to achieve the American dream life young people nowadays so pine for? This seem to be the only way the American dream can still be realized.

blt 7y ago
Cars require too much land area per person. Two dedicated parking spaces is only scratching the surface. There's gas stations, repair shops, dealers, and of course the actual roads. By the time you carve out enough space for these, sprawl is necessary, and horrible traffic is unavoidable. Personal cars are a failed experiment and a total aberration from historically successful modes of human development.

auiya 7y ago

Smart company leaders are already doing this by hiring remote worker teams. They don't need to "drag" anyone. FAANG are woefully behind the curve in this regard and would rather waste money building office empires in big cities. Nobody wants to relocate their entire life across the country away from family/friends just for some BS tech job that could just as easily be done from home.

kamarg 7y ago
The "office empires" make perfect sense at the size of FAANGs. When you need to hire that many people every year, many of them who have never worked in "the real world" before, how do you do the best to ensure they all have access to knowledge, resources, support, and oversight? Not everyone is good at self directed work from home. That doesn't mean they can't be an outstanding employee. Hiring is expensive and if you can avoid having major churn in employees you'll save quite a bit of money. On top of that, being a major employer in a city gives your company sizable clout when it comes to lobbying the local government. Don't like the new tax plan? It will probably work out in your favor to let the city know that it would really hurt hiring and salaries at the biggest employer in the city. Heck if it hurts enough, you might even have to move to that nearby competitor city who is offering all those sweet tax breaks. You don't want to but it's the only responsible thing to do for all of your employees. It would be a shame to see a bunch of those employees leave the city and cause housing prices to drop for all the rest of the citizens. What's that? You're reconsidering that tax bill? I knew you'd make the right choice for your constituents.

Apocryphon 7y ago

It doesn't seem like anyone has actually RTFA. The Brookings contenders for the next Silicon Valley aren't random farming towns in the Great Plains. If you look at the chart at the bottom they include Madison, Minneapolis, Albany, Portland, Nashville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Charlotte. A lot of these cities are already up and coming to the point of rapidly escalating rents.

alexhutcheson 7y ago
Their criteria unintentionally selected for metros with a restricted housing supply, by including "only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole". That can indicate a slow-growing economy, but can also indicate that you're not building enough new housing for population to grow at or above the national rate. Portland and Nashville are obvious examples here - nobody who has been there recently believes that they are struggling, but they've been adding population slowly because they're not building enough housing to meet demand.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  You're not wrong, but my overall point is that it seems like a lot of people in this thread are arguing against the prospect of moving to intolerant backwater villages, whereas most of the ones that Brookings listed are already hot secondary destinations. And many of them aren't even located in the Midwest! Guess IEEE was referring to basically everywhere not on the coast when they say "the Heartland".

nullbull 7y ago

Is it time for the government to drag financial sector jobs out of New York? Is it time for the US to drag credit card companies out of Delaware, or agribusiness out of the heartland and toward the coasts? No. It isn't. Funny the regionally exclusive monopolies that we seem to have tolerated for literally decades and the ones we suddenly, for some reason, don't. Or maybe it isn't funny at all. Maybe it's a totally predictable outcome of a system that is highly tolerant of calcified, politically-connected regional monopolies. A system that is intolerant of disruptive, politically-indifferent or unestablished regional monopolies. In other words, this isn't about economic efficiency or anti-trust law. It's about political sour grapes first. Everything else second.

Apocryphon 7y ago
A ton of finance jobs moved out of NYC to Charlotte after 9/11.
anm89 7y ago
This gets at the heart of this. This isn't t part of some consistent political philosophy or legal framework. This is policy based on angry people wanting to get revenge on a specific topic. Unfortunately I think the tide is moving in the direction of this being an acceptable way to govern and while people may get individual things they want out of it I think the end result is a net loss for everyone.

martianfeeder 7y ago

Many great comments on this thread but I, a sikh immigrant who wears a turban, would rather leave the US than live anywhere except for the valley or NYC. Comments on this thread address everything from internet speed to "gov intervention is bad" but fail to miss a very important point - US tech workforce has a lot of immigrants and cities outside the list mentioned in the article are actively hostile to immigrants. It would be very difficult to build tech hubs without making them friendlier towards an immigrant workforce. I spent 6 days in Houston visiting a friend, here's what I remember from the trip: - Random airport check in a private room (check) - Called random names more times in 6 days than in my entire life (check) - Stared down actively in every bar I went to (check) Imagine being on an evening out, people staring at you trying to figure out "what" you are and knowing that they may be carrying a gun on them. Silicon valley (and NYC) is a place where its okay to be whoever you are, and that is something government intervention can't inject no matter how hard they try. I hope my comment doesn't come off as offensive, just trying to provide an important perspective which I believe the article misses.

rayiner 7y ago
This is an important issue, though I’d like to present the opposite experience. Only a small fraction of the country lives in New York or SF, but the US is among the top countries in the world for inclusive attitudes: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2018-06/the-inclusiveness-of-nationalities-ipsos-global-advisor.pdf https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/.... For inclusiveness of naturalized citizens, it’s #1 by a large margin. (This is based on surveys asking people like whether they would consider a naturalized citizen a "real American" or "real German" or whatever. For that question, 76% of Americans answered "yes" versus 13% answering "no." In Italy, it was 41% "yes" to 36% "no." Incidentally, also do pretty well on LGBT inclusiveness, having a higher net “yes” score than Spain, Italy, Germany, or the U.K.—which together comprise more than half the EU.) That’s consistent with my experience as a Bangladeshi immigrant. I grew up in a DC suburb in the early 1990s, before that area became diverse. A few remarks aside, I’ve always felt welcome, including in rural parts of Virginia, Illinois, Georgia, etc. I was on a plane to Dallas a few months ago. My seat mate was delicately trying to figure out my ethnicity. I explained I was Bangladeshi, and he didn’t know what that was. Then we had a very good conversation about how had really gotten into Indian food, and had put together a tandoor. Speaking for myself, I’d rather live in Houston or Kansas City or Pittsburgh than anywhere in the coasts. Also, where would I go, besides back to Bangladesh? You think the Berlin tech scene is more welcoming than the Salt Lake City tech scene? Maybe people will not say anything uncomfortable or offensive. But a Bangladeshi immigrant can become American, and people will recognize that as substantive and not merely a euphemism. But he’ll never become German, or Japanese, or French. The United States elected a son of an immigrant President. Not just New York and California, but Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa. That’s never happened in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, or Italy, or any EU country that I’m aware of. I don’t say this to diminish anyone’s experience. But I think to the extent that people on the coasts are wondering what the rest of America is like, they get a balanced picture.

alexhutcheson 7y ago

The criteria the Brookings paper used to determine eligibility doesn't make sense. Specifically this bit: "Looking next at the remaining top 20 metro areas with the most innovation sector jobs, only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole since 2010 are considered eligible to become designated growth centers. By dint of that, cities such as Raleigh, N.C., Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin are set aside because they are already self-sustaining superstars. They are safe bets for any new tech graduate looking for a job or any tech firm looking at add a few hundred jobs somewhere. Allowing these places to be eligible would simply reinforce existing spatial imbalances." This decision disqualifies growing Sun Belt metros including Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta from inclusion, specifically because they are already growing. The result is a list that is biased towards metros in the northeast and midwest, which are shrinking for a variety of reasons, not strictly due to job opportunities. This has two problems: 1. It sets the program up for failure: Targeting shrinking metros means that the policy intervention needs to offset existing decline before it can demonstrate any positive growth. This is not easy! There are lots of public programs already targeting these metro areas (particularly state-level programs), and they are still shrinking. 2. It makes it very unlikely that the program would develop a new "superstar" tech city comparable to NYC, because you've already excluded the most probable candidates. Adding some regional balance for fairness and (valid) political concerns is a good idea, but a program that proposes to subsidize growth in Chicago and Minneapolis while excluding Atlanta, Dallas, and Raleigh-Durham seems neither fair nor sensible.

purplezooey 7y ago

We seem to be incapable of challenging entrenched city councils and fixing our housing problem, so we may deserve it.