I'm from near Research Triangle Park in NC and have to say that the weather is miserable all summer, just horrible. The traffic is abysmal, and everything is strip malls and McMansions. You can top that off with the insane gerrymandering in NC that prevents the most populace areas from having any political power. Locals are quite hostile to new-comers, and the government keeps trying to tell people which bathrooms to use which is just bizarre. Yeah, BBQ is great, the schools are good, and low taxes are nice, but NC really misses the mark for me in a lot of ways. Having grown up in the area, I am not a fan.

I don't know too much about the other places.

> everything is strip malls and McMansions

Say what? I visited Durham recently and had a blast -- lots of cool local businesses (Fullsteam Brewery was an amazing find) and neat old warehouses and charming old houses and such. Carrboro was also great, people biking everywhere and local hippie markets and stuff.

Yes, Durham is very nice (and Fullsteam is pretty great), but the part you visited is very small and not representative of the rest of the region at all. Raleigh also has a tiny, and nice downtown. However, the region is still a snarl of highways and unsustainable suburban sprawl.

A quick googling of `${city} housing crisis`:

https://www.nashville.gov/Portals/0/SiteContent/Human%20Real...

https://www.wral.com/officials-describe-wake-county-as-affor...

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2018-02-02/whose-afford...

https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/03/15/orla...

Unless (in America) we start approaching housing differently, we'll see the same problem happen over and over again, until the whole economy is choked by housing costs and wealth is transferred from productive uses to land owners seeking rents.

Nashville, TN just voted down an important public transit initiative.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/what-went-wro...

Minneapolis if you ignore the weather for 6 months..

I currently live in the Bay Area. I would never even consider any of the places you just listed, due to the weather alone.

This is very HN-centric thinking (rational but not scalable). People move to Silicon Valley to "move to Silicon Valley". They're chasing a dream and they want to be in the thick of it.

Sure you might find a couple good job opportunities in Nashville or Tampa, but its hard to compare that to being in the thick of tech industry where you're right in the middle of the world's top companies, surrounded by lots of talent to push you further.

Invest in technologies and processes to make remote work a reality so you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to work there.

Agreed. Imagine what might be possible if SV employers were willing to spend $15k per employee annually on making remote teams awesome, as opposed to paying (I'm just guessing) $25k/year in salary and rent to keep them in SV.

I don't know what a real solution would cost, but it's a question worth asking IMO.

Remote work is fine, and should be more available, but agglomeration effects are real. Putting a lot of smart interesting people in a few dense places just makes sense.

The technology isn't the problem. It's the companies.

While that will always exist, the majority of people moving to the bay area are moving to work for a company like Facebook or Google rather than to work on their own startup.