Los Angeles. New York.

You want MTV sized? Asheville. Boulder. Greenville. Santa Fe.

Slightly bigger: Ann Arbor. Berkeley. Cambridge. Lafayette.

Good chunk bigger: Savannah (140k), Madison (250k)

Smaller: Bozeman. Port Chester.

Elsewhere: Plenty of cities all over Europe that are in the 100k pop range and _much_ more vibrant than MTV.

The point is, Google's presence doesn't magically improve the place. It's still a bland suburbia, like, yes, 99% of US cities this size. Google's presence won't improve SJC, either.

Upvoted for the city suggestions - that's really helpful. But I'm still going to vigorously disagree that MTV is "bland suburbia" :-), even if it's not better than these cities (and I personally did not enjoy Savannah when I visited). There's a spectrum of city interestingness - all I'm arguing is that MTV is very much not at the boring end of it. It might be somewhere in the middle.

As you can see by my "99%" statement, my cut-off point is simply at a different point on that scale :)

You're right that there are cities that are worse than Mountain View. What's upsetting about it is not merely the blandness, but the fact there could be tremendous potential. A rural city of the same size, with a historically uniform population and a relatively small tax base, has very little choice. Mountain View does, and they squander it.

But even if they didn't, "it could be worse" has never been a statement that attracted me to a city ;)

There are far more interesting cities in the US and the world than MTV. Berlin is one of them. In the US I like Austin and San Diego.

That's moving the goalposts though. I was originally disputing the categorization of MTV as a "pit". I'm not at all arguing it's comparable to Berlin - that would be crazy.

You also asked what cities would you recommend. I recommended some :)

Nope, that was someone else. I'm just defending MTV being called a "pit" and a suburban dystopia - it's not the most interesting city in the world but it has interesting parts and tons of opportunities not available elsewhere.

Some cities just never develop "good" living conditions for values of restaurant diversity,art and things to do - whether out of apathy or bad luck.