I dont understand it. We seem to have decided as a culture that absolutely everything had to be in like five cities. Its a major contributor to division and polarization and a trend that is destroying the middle class.

Taking the slider to the other extreme, you end up with company towns everywhere, and there are a whole lot of burned out husks of civilization that are memories to that.

Until we truly solve remote, there will be some concentration. And there's value to that as an employee. If your employer goes kaput, or you're stagnating in your career, or you have an abusive boss, there are plenty of opportunities available, and enough of them that one shock to the system won't break the local economy.

Of course, the flip side of that is that real estate values go through the roof.

>Taking the slider to the other extreme, you end up with company towns everywhere

Why would you go to the other extreme? There are hundreds of large cities around the US that could easily headquarter these big companies and not become company towns.

Hundreds is a stretch. When you get down to the hundredth-largest city you’re at Des Moines, population 217k. At that point, if the company were to say “zero our taxes or we leave”, the city would do as told.

How small can a city be and have a healthy relationship with an employer of 25,000?

These kinds of demands for special treatment need to be made illegal. That would help.

I mean there are a lot of economic reasons for that, right?

Yep.

A company like Amazon will have some natural needs. No other city can really beat NYC for meeting those needs.

Not Chicago. Not Toronto. Not Raleigh. Not Jersey.

And certainly not Texas.

By air, land, and sea the best and most bountiful transport links to the rest of the US, or to the Europe-Africa side of the world, are out of NYC. Now maybe we can change that? But we don't seem to be working towards changing it. So as of today, and for the foreseeable future, NYC is the best hub.

I think they could meet those needs elsewhere but they can be choosey so why not.

At least we have five of them. Pity those poor English, for example.

I feel like not many places are willing to do the work in order to attract an Amazon; or better yet, foster an environment where one could build one organically.

Too many pundits are trying to shame Amazon into moving to a city like Detroit or a city in the American heartland. But these areas are unattractive places for obvious reasons and it seems like Americans want to deny it. Want to attract an Amazon? Invest in colleges, reduce business regulations, attract an international and diverse populace which would in turn create an interesting culture, invest in local secondary schools, and (I hate to say this) drop the social conservative politics. One of the reasons why London, Paris, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, etc. are attractive internationally is the liberal populace and progressive culture - nobody wants to move to a socially conservative place.

I feel like the partisanship that America is experiencing is only going to accelerate. As of now, America's future is in the cities and for whatever reason, cities tend to generate a certain culture that many people in America's heartland don't want. They're going to have to be more welcoming of it if they want to attract these sort of businesses.

This doesn't really explain why they didn't pick NJ or Boston which are liberal, well educated, incredibly diverse and multicultural. Also the sentiment of "reduce business regulations" goes together with conservative politics more often.

I also disagree that "nobody wants to move to a socially conservative place". CA, Florida, Colorado, Nevada are all examples of places that were conservative or still are but appear to be going through shifts as population moves there.

The areas with the most growth are cities, not states. And Boston is already wealthy. The states you mentioned all have major cities that are seeing the type of growth I'm talking about.

The real "losers" in this situation are heartland states without major metro areas, like most of the plain states and rural America.

Northern Virginia is full of data centers and tech workers and has been since the dotcom days.