It's the same problem with kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals to live in lofts built on the same foundations: your renewed neighborhood loses all the reasons it was appealing. In Boulder already you cannot really afford living in town with a service industry job, but people who want to work in Google also want to go out and have a beer after work. Those service industry workers need to commute into town, which is time-consuming, adds expense, worsens traffic, and lowers their quality of life.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, in Boulder.
For a city that's not so into building new housing, and most especially affordable housing, the writing is on the wall about what's going to happen to current housing prices, not to mention the general cost of living, in Boulder.
The elephant in the room when it comes to any housing boom (like in Denver) in the west is water: the current supply is already strained. Do remember we pump water through massive tunnels under mountains from the western slope to feed the current demand. We need more people on the front range? I dunno.
So artists are wonderful, interesting people, and professionals are boring and unappealing? Wow.
I'd rather have lunch with the mathematician. In fact, Feynman is at the top of the list of people I'd like to have lunch with, and it's not about his bongo drum playing.
(P.S. I learned to play the trumpet in my youth.)
It sounds like you know some pretty terrible artists, though. I mean, seashells on a model house?
PS. Feynman is Feynman for a reason.
And all art has a wide expanse between commercially available and popular, and the avant garde, and within that range is another range between simplicity and complexity.
Art also encompasses film, fiction, the visual arts, music. All of which have a massive range of intellectual importance and depth.
No offense, but I feel as though you're showing your ignorance much more than proving your point.
Of course they do. I'm merely challenging your claim "Great art is heavy on intellectual complexity." There's no doubt at all that "She Loves You" is a great song. Personally, I prefer the earlier Beatles tunes rather than Sgt Pepper. Perhaps you could quote from the latter some lyrics that have deep meaning to you?
I also greatly enjoy Led Zeppelin, have every album, even cover albums, but am under no illusions about the intellectual complexity of "squeeze my lemon".
Nobody celebrates Led Zeppelin for their lyricism, but I think you knew that already.
I was always baffled by what that was supposed to mean.
And they also work with people who don't take an intellectual approach to their production but rather follow intuition.
One thing is certain: it's a more heterogenous environment. I find that to be extremely stimulating.
Deciding to become an artist doesn't make one profound or conceptually interesting. Rather few artists achieve that. The starving artist community generally has not, which is why they are starving.
After all, how many TV shows you watch are "pretty intellectually profound"? And those artists are good enough to get paid for their work, most aren't.
Wouldn't agree on the 'wonderful' or 'unappealing' value judgments though; I think you added them for rhetorical emphasis.
Well, this fine article is partly about Richard Florida, and that's basically what he's saying: keep the creative class around, because they are the ones that add value to a city. Boring professionals flock to neighborhoods put on the map because creative people making them destinations.
In Denver, see the River North neighborhood. What once was a very vibrant place to see DIY shows, gallerys, etc, is now just a brewery neighborhood. Some underground venues were closed by the city and the one-year anniversary of this is coming up. The city shows no interest in providing an alternative. I guess this isn't very important to most, but these spaces were a safe place for many people to go: homeless teenagers, trans-folk, etc.
http://www.westword.com/music/rhinoceropolis-diy-venue-shut-...
There's only so much after-work talk I can tolerate about app servers. I want to go to the theater, watch plays, and see bands. The people who have those interests are not particularly enchanted by traditional professional careers.
In Boulder at least, I'm not there to drink at a cool bar, work at a cool bar, or own a cool bar. I'm there because it's a livable city. Or was a livable city.
kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_warehouse_fire
Now, as you point out, the barriers to consolidating industry into mega-hubs like Shenzhen are dissolving.
The only reasons to start or keep a business somewhere now are 3: 1. Physical resource dependence (ex. mining operations need to be where the mine is), 2. Regulatory (ex. tax policies), and 3. Talent.
Small towns used to rely on #1, which is now a losing strategy since global markets have dramatically driven down the costs of extracting and moving physical resources.
Now they're trying to do more of #2, which works for a little while but there's always another government somewhere willing to cut a better deal.
The only way small towns can compete is to focus on #3: Talent. They have to develop highly skilled workforces. That's literally all they can do.
Developing talent does no good if you can't stop the brain drain.
But the rise in global supply chains - the shipping container in particular - meant that it makes more sense to build just about everything in a few massive hubs (Shenzhen as the prime example), and then ship things all around the world, at a much cheaper rate than if the widget or smartphone were made at home. Likewise for services, like IT and finance, it makes much more sense for all of these professionals to work together in the same places, which is why a handful of cities are crushing the Information Age while hundreds of other towns and cities are either dying slowly or are on life support (higher education economy, tax-break-driven manufacturing, etc)
Will we see the same resurgence of sprawl as followed the petrochemical revolution? I'm not sure. Remote work has its niches but I couldn't imagine a serious major company like Google or IBM existing without a lot of corporate real estate and proximate workers. And as I've argued elsewhere on HN, today's professionals have professional needs: doctors, lawyers, teachers, all things they expect to have within their area. Rural areas and even small to medium sized cities have trouble competing for the best-in-class services that the upper echelons of professionals demand (and given that this class is both responsible for and generally the beneficiary of globalization, that makes it very hard to say that, say, Rochester, NY could become the next great tech hub (a decent tech hub perhaps, but no Silicon Valley) without a LOT more to attract the highest end professional class.
Maybe self-driving cars (personally I predict RVs) will be able to make sprawl great again, but even then it would still be a concentration around a (albeit larger) major metropolitan area.
Urban/rural was the most important divide of the 19th-20th centuries. It looks like it will continue throughout the 21st.