Yes Detroit has a high unemployment rate, but it is in the best interest of companies to go to detroit, and bring their work forces with them which they are refusing to do due to the belief that you can only find talent in the bay area.

I believe that this is just a self fulfilling prophecy, if companies invested in new cities, it would lead to more and more tech workers choosing to live in those places rather than in California.

> bring their work forces with them

You can't just shackle them up and put them on a train though. Plenty of people don't want to live in Detroit, and have other opportunities in the Bay Area or elsewhere. Perhaps they prefer the climate in CA, or perhaps they want to be someplace where there are plenty of other opportunities if the one job doesn't work out.

I wonder what fraction of Bay Area tech workers want to live there?

If every major tech company in the Bay Area switched to remote work, allowing employees to work from anywhere they wanted to as long as they stayed on the same schedule as those who remained in the Bay Area offices, my guess is that there would be a large exodus.

If I weren't constrained by work, I'd be looking for some place where • houses are far enough apart that I rarely hear my neighbors and they can't hear me if I decide to watch an action movie or listen to music at a good volume in the middle of the night, • there are enough trees, bushes, wild plants, and lawns in my neighborhood that plenty of wild critters hang out and are visible from my living room window, • it is not a long drive to reach some place with dark skies, • it is warmer than where I now am (Western Washington, west side of Puget Sound).

I currently have the first two (sonic isolation, wild critters). Here's the view out my living room window from my computer desk [1].

[1] https://imgur.com/LVna5KN

> If every major tech company in the Bay Area switched to remote work, allowing employees to work from anywhere they wanted to as long as they stayed on the same schedule as those who remained in the Bay Area offices, my guess is that there would be a large exodus.

Yes, but the problem is that many companies have found that remote work is significantly less efficient.

So if you need to cluster your work force somewhere, the Bay Area is probably where you'll have to given the desires of your top people to live there.

If it's climate, access to outdoor activities, diverse population, downtown hipster living, near by university, maybe Sacramento, CA would be a good fit:

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-sac...

https://www.selectsacramento.com

Close to Tahoe, Sonoma Coast and Silicon Valley VCs.

Sacramento is really, really hot in the summer. This is one of the big reasons the population in CA clusters on the coast.

True, but its a pretty close approximation to Pleasanton, Dublin, Antioch, Concord, Brentwood, etc. I'd imagine its not that much hotter than anywhere in Texas, Arizona and not as dreary as the Pacific Northwest and not simultaneously extremely cold in the winters and extremely hot in the summer like the proposals for Minnesota/Detroit/Northeast. Plus solar panels can provide low cost HVAC when its really hot.

Some lively discussion: http://www.city-data.com/forum/city-vs-city/991635-austin-vs...

I'm not saying everyone would need to move, but if you polled your work force, and asked them if they wanted to start a new office in a new city, who would be interested in moving to which cities from a list. I'm sure you'd find enough people to start a new engineering office with at least one team.

From there you can grow. This is sort of the logic I'm going by here.

Some of that is bound to happen, sure, but there are a lot of forces that push people to stay in a place that's already successful too. We should let both happen.

Sure, I'm also not saying that companies shouldn't keep what they have in the bay area, I'm just suggesting that they should target future growth in other regions instead.