I think you're right about all this. Fundamentally, world cities have just become too expensive. If you want to live in them you have to be wealthy or earn a hi

I think you're right about all this. Fundamentally, world cities have just become too expensive. If you want to live in them you have to be wealthy or earn a high income, neither of which are historically associated with culture generation. When I moved to NYC my cohort was initially a lot of former SF residents, and their main reason by far for leaving was that there's more than just tech people in NYC and that's so refreshing. Some of that has to be a bubble effect, because NYC isn't tons better: you're looking at lots of people in tech and finance. None of this is conducive to creating the kinds of environments where art thrives: low cost of housing, sufficient part-time day jobs, and weird, diverse, inspiring milieus. I think the fix is really simple: build more housing and build more public transit to get there (more or less the Tokyo model, structurally). Unfortunately the US seems to be uniquely trash at both, so my guess is the big cities' loss is the middle cities' gain. And this is maybe healthy: big Emerald Cities domiciling a huge percentage of the professional/managerial class along with a similarly huge percentage of artists has created all kinds of cultural and political problems.