4 ms·
Right. Necessary, but not sufficient. San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out
by quesera 1y ago
Right. Necessary, but not sufficient.
San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out in the 1990s (first slowly, then much more quickly -- it's all long gone now. Apologies to anyone who would like to believe otherwise :).
This is also true of New York, on approximately the same timeline.
In the early 2000s, Austin and Portland tried to take up the creative mantle, with some success. Both are struggling to maintain it now, for the same reasons but on a slower timeline.
Cheap rents are a prerequisite, but there are other sparks required for a place to catch fire.
I don't know of any US cities that are doing anything interesting today. Not at the scale of SF and NYC certainly, but also not even at the scale of 20ya Portland and Austin.
I think part of the issue is that rent is not adequately cheap in any US cities now that have critical mass plus tolerable living conditions (climate, economy, politics). This worries me.
- awongh 1y agoIt seems relevant that now it's extremely accessible for US people to move abroad to another country. It feels like Mexico City, Costa Rica, Bali, Thailand, etc. have taken up some of the slack from Austin and Portland. Edit: More specifically in terms of cost of living anyways.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoPittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chattanooga, the (far) suburbs of Nashville...
- IAmBroom 1y agoPittsburgh was on that list. Then we got Uber and Google, and our nationally-cheap housing prices have jumped up closer to the norm - which is too high for the bottom half of earnings population.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoI was close to moving to Pitt a while back and was stunned when the house I was looking at doubled in price in less than 6 months... Indianapolis has been going through the same thing (we are getting some of the overflow from the housing crunch in Nashville, etc.) I snagged a house at a decent price last year after looking for over a decade.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoI wonder if the “out of steam” phenomenon is due to just aging out without sufficient replacement rates of equally creative people. E.g. 70s SF had a lot of 20-30 year old hippie boomers. By the 90s many had cut their hair and started having kids and probably a lack of desire to drop acid in the park in their 40s and 50s.