Yes, I mean by having lots of high-paying jobs. Speaking in the abstract, that means economic success. You're not wrong that high cost of living can often cancel much of that out at the individual level though.

> quality of living is considerably lower.

See my other nearby comment for why this is a "it depends" thing. A lot of people would consider living in Kansas City to have lower "quality of life" than NYC even if it's less crowded and it's much easier to afford a house.

Your comment itself illustrates the disconnect here: we have one side arguing that the other side is wrong in what they want, ala

"Why don't more techies want to come here?? This is ridiculous!"

"Well, because they want to live in places with X Y Z even if they're expensive and crowded."

"Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."

In my experience, your fundamental assumption about what "techies" want is at least partially flawed. Not that no one in tech wants bike Lanes, public transit, and authentic South Indian cuisine. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of people who work at FAANG consider these things important in their life. But there is still a large portion that truly don't care for all that. They live in the bay because if they can find an illegal $800/mo Airbnb they will make a lot of money, if they lose their job there is another close by, and that is where their close friends are. If there were an equal paying, less congested alternative to these tech hives, they would take it. This is, of course, generated from anecdotal evidence. Fundamentally, some people like true urbanism, and others just don't.

You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs.

I focused on it in my original comment mostly just because it's an area I'm particularly familiar with, and it's an area where the cities that are supposedly "desperate" are hardly doing anything at all. (Not that I blame the local governments for that, really, I realize the local residents mostly want their cities to stay that way)

> You are not wrong, but I'm not saying this is the sole factor in city attractiveness here. It's just one factor. Other things equal, I think it's easier to attract top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs.

I wonder if the real situation is that it's easier to attract young "top talent to cities with halfway decent urbanism than to cities that are more like giant suburbs." That's also tends to be kind of talent that's willing to work way more than is really good for them. The suburban lifestyle is more suited for established families and older "top talent."

Of course, there are also suburbs of major metros. Lots of people commute into Manhattan from Westchester every day. And, traditionally, most of the tech jobs in "Boston" were actually out in fairly far-flung suburbs and many still are (with the notable exception exception of biotech in Cambridge and the satellite offices of SV firms).

But you're absolutely right that a lot of new college grads want to live in the city and maybe not even buy a car.

The majority of the established workers already own houses in the suburbs, exurban areas, and even NH. For many of them, a location that's actually in the city is a bug, not a feature.

People who with more settled lifestyles are often already settled, though. So even if you wanted them, you don't have as much access.

> older "top talent."

Older top talent often has the resources to actually buy houses even in expensive areas, anyway.

> Older top talent often has the resources to actually buy houses even in expensive areas, anyway.

Maybe at the toppest-top, but it's a struggle for anyone with even a high normal-range income to buy a home in the Bay Area.

This means they are underpaid ( which I am pretty sure quite a few people in tech are ):

- LIC Queens high rises have 2/2 rentals that go for $17k/mo. ~ 1200sq feet. High floors. Ok views. Ok buildings. - In Manhattan those are $22k-$30k/mo in newer buildings and $15-20k/mo in older hifg rises.

They aren't full of tech bros. They are full of finance and attorney bros. I have an acquaintance that lives in one. He is one of the portfolio managers for one of the hedge funds. He is a salary only manager. By the standards of NYC apartments qualification, it means his take home after taxes has to be at around 65k/mo as proven by his tax returns for last two years.

I suppose I forgot to state my original point. Let's hold all else equal, and look at the labor pool divided into two categories, urbanism and ruralism. Suburbs lie on the ruralism side for this comparison. The labor pool is of course not evenly divided in terms of preference, say maybe 3/4 of protential Google employees prefer urbanism. If a given employee prefers urbanism, and lives in one of the cities mentioned above (NYC, Yay Area, Boston), their resulting employee satisfaction (what the company cares about in this scenario) is improved. However, if a given employee prefers ruralism, their resulting employee satisfaction is worsened. Vice versa for a more suburban, smaller city.

Of course there is some cost to not collocating employees. Google has decided new offices are worth this cost, and thus Google can decide to allocate building/location resources based on employee preference alone (let's assume the other factors are somehwat insignificant, which could be valid taking into account the high proportion of labor cost).

If every additional dollar spent on a given location buys the same amount of office space and equipment in both the urban and suburban areas, then it would make sense to divide the budget for offices according to the proportions of the labor pool preferences. Now of course, a dollar in SF buys a lot less office space than a dollar in Lexington, so that should be a accounted for in budgeting decisions, as well as overhead costs involved in opening a new location.

If we look at Google's actions under this framework, it doesn't make much sense for Google to devote as much of their office budget to highly urban areas as they do, unless the proportion of current and potential employees that prefer ruralism is very low. I would find that difficult to believe. Of course there are other factors to consider, but the trend is what I mean to highlight.

That being said, the true proportion would have to be discovered, and company culture may not allow people to express their true desires. This would apply to many tech giants.

* You also have to factor in that people with suburban preferences are going to be less likely to be willing to move. It's a less accessible demographic.

* The nature of "suburbs" is that they don't scale well. They're not meant to, suburbs are supposed to be the thing on the outside, not the thing everyone comes to. And while costs may be lower in some ways, they may be higher in others: like how Google has to run its own fleet of shuttles to go to Mountain View, because transit is inadequate. They don't do that in NYC.

* Google has a cultural preference for being environmentally friendly. Suburban style living and working is more energy intensive and less environmentally friendly than its urban counterpart.

* There's a large contingent of people that are united in their support for companies like Google to open an office in a more suburban city, somewhere, but I suspect that if you actually tried to pick a particular city, suddenly that support would fracture into a million pieces.

I have lived in West Michigan (Insanely Cheap), Kansas City (Kinda Cheap), and Seattle (Pretty Expensive).

Thing is, renting a 900 sq foot apartment in any reasonably urban area has gotten pretty expensive anywhere. It was about 1000-1500$ in KC when I left. It's about 1600-2200 in Seattle. My salary jump from KC to Seattle more than makes up for the difference in rent. Other things may be slightly more expensive, but I don't really notice.

Major difference is you can buy a house in Kansas City, but even that is starting to get expensive - at least in the areas that I would like to buy a house in. Even Grand Rapids, Michigan is having its own housing crisis. At least the salaries are already high in coastal towns. That said, I sometimes feel like I was saving up enough money to buy a house back in the midwest.

Ultimately affordable housing isn't a factor of price as such. There have always been very expensive parts of town. It is how abruptly the city ends. Once these smaller cities get expensive there it nowhere to go, the rest is suburb. 10 000 new people in NYC is almost a rounding error, while even 1000 people in a smaller city (with a small core) could be significant.

This is also what San Francisco suffers from. It goes from city to essentially suburb extremely quick. While cities like New York, Paris and Tokyo just go on and on. Of course we only talk about those examples because they have developed that way over decades.

>There have always been very expensive parts of town.

Historically, yes. But I'd argue that there are a lot of US cities that got pretty hollowed out by white flight and other factors to the degree that there were essentially no desirable parts of town. What's happened is that any number of those cities now have a revitalized urban core (however small) and living in that small core with the dozen or so restaurants you can walk to, maybe some small markets, new condos, etc. is pricey.

I've either worked in or spend a fair bit of time in a few of those places. The few dozen square blocks on gentrified core is pretty nice as a visitor but it's pretty small.

Yeah, Grand Rapids is getting more and more expensive - currently I'm paying $875/mo for ~700sqft, 1br.

> "Well, they should care more about A B C instead (because I do)."

I'm guilty of this, but I think your formulation is a straw man. All I want to tell people is that they shouldn't reflexively rule out the middle of the country, because a lot of people really would be happier there. Not everybody, but some people.

And the way (some people on) the coasts talk about the Midwest and the South is as though they're a complete and total non-starter that's out of consideration entirely. "Yeah, New York's expensive, but what am I going to do? Live in Cleveland? Obviously I can't do that!"

I think that kind of talk convinces a lot of people who would be happier somewhere else that they shouldn't even bother looking into those places. And that's a tragedy of human flourishing.

Edit to respond to one comment below:

> I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily.

On the contrary, I think you're inordinately focused on your own particular (and somewhat eccentric) issues. Most Americans prefer car ownership. You might think they're wrong to prefer this. I do, too! But, "I don't want to live somewhere where I have to own a car" isn't a mainstream American opinion.

I grew up in Michigan and moved to greater NYC after grad school, and I want to push back a bit against the idea that nobody on the coasts even considers the middle of the country.

My spouse and I would love to move somewhere less expensive than NYC, but we just can't make it work. We're both in fairly specialized tech fields, and prioritize walkability, diversity, great schools and career growth opportunity. Outside of say Chicago, it's hard to come up with a place that checks those boxes.

It would be pointless to try to speak to your particular situation, but I think a lot of people who think they can't get this or that thing out of, say, Nashville or Minneapolis, or whatever, are wrong. I don't mean to say their opinion is wrong. Live wherever you want! I mean to say that they have objectively false impressions about quantifiable aspects of those cities.

> I think a lot of people who think they can't get this or that thing out of, say, Nashville or Minneapolis, or whatever, are wrong.

If a person values a thing, saying, "well [thing] exists in these other cities too, there's just a whole lot less of it there" is maybe not a super effective counterpoint.

Like, I realize that basically every major city in the US does have public transit...technically. But pointing out that out is not useful when for most of those cities, said transit is slow, unreliable, sparse, and infrequent.

I don't just want transit. I want good transit. I don't just want walkability in a few isolated neighborhoods. I want widespread walkability.

Minneapolis does have a growing tech field, and it is laid out in such a way that you can get out into the country quite quickly after the work day.

However, unless your working in medical devices I wouldn't call it a hub like New York, Boston or the valley.

I don't think that is generally people's concern. What people in bigger cities would want from smaller cities are things that are significantly better to offset the lesser verity and upside. If you to a large degree still have to deal with commuting, the housing market, education and health care (or whatever) it doesn't really do that. If these cities want to be competitive they have be attractive in their own right, not relative to a bigger city.

I think you're dismissing people's issues too easily. I've lived in Alabama before, and heeellll no I wouldn't want to settle down there. This isn't the only problem I had with the area (I lived in several different parts), but it felt super, super hostile to not-driving. And I should know, I had to bike around a lot as a mormon missionary there. We didn't even bother checking transit, it was taken as a given that it would be too slow and sparse to be useful.

My wife is even harder on this line than I am. We live in Munich now, and the biggest reason she doesn't want to come back to the US is that she doesn't want to go back to driving everywhere, and there are only a few cities where a family can reasonably and easily get away without a car.

No, I'm not.

Firstly, I recognize this is just one factor. I focused on it because it's one I'm highly familiar with, not because it's the end-all be-all. I've already pointed this out in multiple comments. We could also talk about educational opportunities or tolerance/discrimination, but those things either aren't as clear cut or would be more contentious to discuss.

Americans saying they prefer cars when you ask makes sense when you consider the other options are usually hilariously bad wherever they live, and where they've lived in the past, too. Give them an option where walking and biking and transit actually work, and suddenly many people find those options desirable. Just look at how many American tourists say they love the transit system in, say, Tokyo, when they visit. Americans mostly "love cars" because they've been given no other serious options.

Lastly, while many people may not think of it in explicit terms, they may nonetheless enjoy some of the knock-on effects of urbanism, like a city "feeling more lively".

People prefer car ownership because car manufactures lobbied for laws that shaped most modern american cities around the car. However, New York is so dense that getting around without owning a car is the norm.

Car ownership is a multi thousand dollar expense, every year. Many people would be happier with that cash in their pocket.

It appears that you assume more sq. ft. implies higher quality of life. Are you aware of any studies that indicate that's true? I would think that most New Yorkers would consider the traffic mess in a place like Dallas to be an indication of a lower quality of life. I believe there are studies that indicate this is true.

It's not easy to imagine what other people place value on. I like peace and quiet, so suburban living suits me. Others value nice restaurants, good weather, close skiing, professional sports, access to first class health care, good jobs, inexpensive housing, low crime, etc. How can we judge the desirability of different cities with such different styles?

It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to. The large cities with the most rapid growth are (from Forbes 2018 list[1]):

1) Boise, ID

2) Seatle-Bellevue-Everett, WA

3) Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX

4) Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford, FL

5) Fort Worth-Arlington, TX

6) Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, NV

7) Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin, TN

8) Austin-Round Rock, TX

9) Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL

10) Tacoma-Lakewood, WA

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2018/02/28/full-l...

> It seems there is exactly one reliable way to make this assessment. Look at where people move to.

Not necessarily. Many cities strictly limit how much housing they have, such that there is a hard limit on the number of people who could feasibly live there. SF is a good example of this, since it's also small and geographically constrained. Saying "well, the net increase in people was small, so therefore it must be that not so many people want to live there" is not necessarily true if physically the city cannot accommodate many more people due to regulations.

Looking at where people move to is useful, yes, but high housing prices are themselves often a marker of desirability, particularly in supply-constrained markets.

I lived in other "cities" in the US: Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC.

Here’s why people who can end up electing to live in a place like NYC and here's why the NYC is the economic winner.

I pay $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard ( mine ). If I had a car, I could have parked in in a back - I don't because I have 27 zip cars available within a five minute walk. I also have Maven, Cars2Go and Enterprise -- I have an account with Maven because it is free and I only need to pay for usage of cars.

My commute to work is ~35 minutes door to door - which includes walking and a subway. When the L goes down for two years, I will have J and M and my commute at most will increase by 45 minutes. It won't affect me as I will just adjust my hours to avoid the rush hour shitshow caused by the stupidity of MTA and NYC politicians. Employers of NYC know about it and based on my informal polling seem to be willing to accommodate those who would be affected. I have an unlimited monthly metrocard which gives me all the needed access for about $130.

I have 3 super markets within a 10 minute walk, 1 CVS/1 Wallgreens/1 Rite Aid. I rarely have to use Uber, but if I do, it takes ~4 minutes for me to get one where I live. If I needed a doctor or a dentist, there are dozens within 15 minute walk. There are walkin medical centers, including the ones that are open 24x7 within a 20 minute walk. If I needed a proper hospital with ER, it can be accessed in about ~15 min. And some of the best hospitals in the country are at most with crazy traffic over Williamsburg bridge or Queens Midtown tunnel are ~45 minutes away.

If I feel like getting the biggest variety of produce or proteins or wine for cooking or entertaining, I have access to all suppliers in Chinatown, Koreatown, farmers markets (Union Sq farmers market makes other farmers market look like a stale 2 week old french fry), butchers and Hunts Point Terminal ( in addition to ethnic grocery stores and ethnic markets). All of them are accessible by the subway. Most of them deliver. Same day. Well. not Huntspoint but that’s where I can get whole wild caught King Salmon for $9/lb -- the same price that a distributor that sells to a distributor that sells to the vendor who sells to your supermarket for $22/lb pays. Except that I get it 7 days earlier and $13/lb cheaper. You get the idea.

Depending on how much time I want to spend "commuting" (subway ~ 45min max ) I have somewhere between 3 ( walk of of the door ) to 20 ( ten minute on L, J/M (per train/per direction, not total) to 50 (fifteen minutes) to > 400 (35 minutes) coffee shops/bars/restaurants/lounges/nightclubs. This includes the best restaurants in the country that a person who does not live in NYC needs a 3 months in advance to get a reservation at -- I can stroll into them and get a table in an hour worst case scenario simply because I'm out enough which means I run into people who work in or own those restaurants socially. I’m doing it this weekend - wife’s birthday so we are hitting four hottest places in 4 days, three of which are “not reservable until some time in January”. I made calls yesterday -- happen to meet one of the chefs at a party, the other was sitting next to me in a little bistro where a photographer friend of mine works during the day ( he introduced us ) and two others are industry regulars so I know them from the other places they used to work at.

It also includes hole in a wall places that prove access to all kind of ethnic food ( I live in a PR/Dominican neighborhood which borders Polish/Eastern European and African-American neighborhood) really cheap - $20 would feed a family of 4 for at least 2 days. If for some reason I’m itching so socialize with 20 year olds, I can replace my Italian off the runway jacket that my wife picked up on her way home for $200 (it just has a cut on the inside label to indicate it is 'damaged' and does not need to be taken out of the country to avoid taxes) for a $65 vintage blazer from 1995 and be surrounded by the smash the patriarchy hipster girls that voted for Ocasio-Cortez who decide that I must be a socialist professor that they absolutely must fuck either today or tomorrow.

Within a five minute walk from where I live there are 12 bodegas. Of those 7 now carry the same organic blah/blah staples that one has to get at Whole Foods outside NYC. Those staples are priced the same or slightly less than at Whole Foods. And no, I'm not talking about the new, upscale small marts. I'm talking about bodegas that service local population -- bodega cats included.

I do not do "theatre" but if I did, Broadway is 1h away door to door, using subway only. Off-broadway that happens every single day is between 10 minutes to 1 hour away using a subway.

Galleries/Museums/exhibits are at most 1 hour subway ride away (those are the ones that plonk themselves at the MET or Whitney). The edgier stuff is much closer -- 15 minutes away. Some punkish looking characters have just opened what they think will be a gallery two blocks away (~3 min walk ) -- it will probably flop in about a year for for that year it will be a fun and interesting space. Within a couple of months (at most) after they flop someone else will do something with that space.

My biggest dilemma with my wife in the evenings or weekends when we want to do something is just exactly what do we want to do because there are so many options. If I decided that I was going to go out every night and was to pick a random 5 block area somewhere between where I live and where I work and never went to the same place twice, then by the time I finished with every place I would probably need to do it again because some of those places would already be different.

My wife is a somewhat of a fitness bunny and woo-woo conneserus. She can find something to do to feed her habits every day, also accessible by the subway be that yet another pilates studio -- no, not the ones that do mat pilates but the ones that have cadillacs -- or spend her lunch break on a bike at the Peloton studio -- the one that is streamed to the middle of nowhere Kansas ( and she paid nothing for that because the lunch classes were free when she was into that specific form of exercise ) or aerial yoga or meditation or whatever else happens to show up on class pass. Not dozens places. Hundreds. She gets it all for $125/mo that she pays for the class pass.

I have done the calculations -- our lifestyle costs us less than what my wife’s brothers lifestyle costs him living in Ambler, PA -- a cute little town about 1 hour away from Philadelphia. Not only he makes less money and has less things that he can do, he spends more money doing it -- mostly because the town is small which means that pretty much everything that he can do requires him driving somewhere, which costs money and takes an enormous amount of time. And since there are fewer people around him, everything costs more.

The only place in the US where at least one can get everything he or she can get in NYC is the greater Los Angeles, which of course requires driving everywhere which, in turn, makes so many spontaneous ideas impossible.

This is why people want to live in NYC. It is my second stint here. I used to live here when I was much younger. I thought there's no way I would want this in my thirties because there won't be anything that would interest me in this city -- I was wrong. The older I get the more I appreciate that a city like NYC with the population density provides the most bang for one's buck regardless of what one wants. Twenty years from now I'm probably going to buy a condo so I won't have to do any maintenance and still have everything at my fingertips without needing to drive anywhere. I cannot wait until NYC NIMBY get smashed ( we are finally starting ) so Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens start getting high rises which are needed to push those boroughs into the modern age.

P.S. I'm 44. I used to live here when I was single and in my early twenties. I moved back here in late thirties.

P.P.S. Love the downvotes. It is like a badge of honor.

You've stated my feelings on the matter perfectly.

> $3400/mo for 2400 3bd 2bath two floor apartment with a private backyard

though I prefer single floor condos more, and don't want to pay that much in rent. But, that's 20 years too early to be talking about it.

___

I stay in Boston right now, and Charles bordering Boston-Cambridge neighborhoods are similar to how you describe NYC living, just on a smaller scale.

Sounds awesome. If I was single and 25 I'd be all for it. Being 38, married with 3 kids means my lifestyle preferences are a little different.

Married people with 3 kids and suburban preferences mostly do not want to move to begin with. That's why targeting this demographic is usually going to be less effective if you're trying to concentrate a large number of workers in one area.

Yeah, not sure how Google can recruit folks in this category unless they allow full-time remotes.

This is an excellent effortpost. Thank you.

People don't want 5000 sq ft anymore. I looked at suburban houses as an option and was thinking I hope I never have enough crap to fill this much space. I think I can comfortably fit my family of 4 in 1200 sq ft indefinitely and never own a car.

> People don't want 5000 sq ft anymore. I looked at suburban houses as an option and was thinking I hope I never have enough crap to fill this much space. I think I can comfortably fit my family of 4 in 1200 sq ft indefinitely and never own a car.

That's an incredibly broad overstatement. There are plenty of people, including "techies," who still want a suburban home with a car.

There's a lot of talk in this thread that assumes that tech workers all want to live a minimalist lifestyle in a dense urban area (or even worse: that they should want to live that way). That's frankly false. I assume what's really going on is that people are projecting their parochial preferences onto a large group that's much more diverse than they understand.

Yes, I'm generalizing but it's definitely a trend. The schools in my city used to fight for attendance and now they fight crowding and the PTA rates in 7 figures. Families are staying in the city more than ever.

Do you have kids yet? Genuinely curious.

I have a kid and our current duplex (150 sq m, I think) is basically the perfect size for our family of 3. Maybe even a little too big, honestly.

1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family.

I mostly grew up in the city, in a small apartment, but for a while we did live in the Midwest, in a big house. The only problem with apartment living was that we had too much furniture we didn’t need from when we lived in the Midwest.

> 1200 sqft is plenty of room for a 4 person family.

That's a projection of your subjective preference.

1200 sqft is not enough space for just me, that's my subjective preference. I currently occupy a home by myself with about ~2,500 sqft. I don't utilize all the space regularly. My bills would not go down by much if I reduced that space to, say, 1,500 sqft. Housing where I live is spectacularly affordable. I consider not having to live in a tiny, cramped space to be a quality of life benefit. I enjoy that my kitchen is the size of a small studio in San Francisco or NY, and it costs me perhaps $120 per month as a share of my mortgage.

I’m sure that people richer than me can’t imagine living the way I do. I’m trying to point out that if you’re in the upper middle or upper class, your standard of living isn’t applicable to everyone else. I’m trying to point out that there exist a large number of people who are ok with the living conditions you see as unacceptable, not prove that no one wants a big home.

The average American home was around 1500 feet 30-40 years ago and people raised families in them just fine. Instead of 4br 400sq ft each with en suite bathrooms, you had 120sq ft bedrooms for kids. It wasn't until the excesses of the mid 2000's that 3-4k sq ft homes became somewhat common, and outside the realm of mansions. Now the trend for home size is decreasing.

Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. Once we had our kid, I couldn't wait to get out of our 850 sq ft. house. (which also had an 850 sq ft basement for laundry and storage)

I occassionally work from home, and I need a seperate office with a door to do that. Also, I just like having some space to get away from the rest of the family for a while.

Like you, it's what I'm used to from when I grew up, so that probably plays a big part in my preference.

Yes. Two. We live in <1000 sq ft right now and they don't mind at all.

I have 2 kids and a 1200 sqft house. It’s a good size for many 4-person families

exactly, I don't even have kids but I thought this too. If you have kids or pets, I want a lot of space for them to play and for me to play with them

I grew up, 6 people (With frequent guests) in a ~800 sqft house.

Something like ~2500 sqft. sounds amazing to me, as long as it is all on one floor.