8 ms·

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 center

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.

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.