We actually ban nice places to live with walkability in the vast majority of the country. Our urban planning in the US been entirely focused on keeping out mixed uses, keeping out dense housing, the things that enable public transport to function at all.
Land and climate are much easier to manage if we were to simple legalize density and mixed uses. We are reaping decades of bad planning for car-centric lives, without planning ahead for future generations and their ability to find a home.
If you want great live music you can find that in a 1 in 10 bars around the country. (less if you want original music instead of covers). Likewise if you want to watch a dancer, though perhaps a different venue. If you want anyone sexy you can see sex better at a local strip joint. If you want to sleep with someone you can pick someone up in any bar (you probably couldn't sleep with Tayler Swift even if she was the type looking for a one night stand). However the shared experience of being a Tayler Swift fan is not something you can find if you stick to the local scenes. That national/international shared experience can only belong to a few people at any one time and no amount of schools, talent shows, scouting... can change that.
Not everyone can live in San Francisco, but there exist other equivalent "nice places" of which there are too few.
Likewise if you need a famous musician there isn't room for everyone to know 10,000 different musicians. However if you can accept any musician there are 10,000 great ones to choose from.
It seems to me that we already have multiple Taylor Swifts so having even more shouldn't be a problem. For many people, the school system is the reason why they own the house they do.
In my experience, many of the schools self-report having pretty bad math/reading comprehension amongst their students. I'm not picking a house based on it being "the best" or the one "I hear about the most". I picked it based on it actually having good outcomes. If other districts had that too I would've considered theirs.
Absolutely. And in fact there are lots of places that could support such things. In the US we call them "small towns" and "rural areas" and "the rust belt."
Areas where a lack of good jobs (as manufacturing left and farming became much less human intensive) drove folks to where decent jobs are (were?) more available.
Which drove up the costs of housing and, well, pretty much everything else, in those places.
However, with the technological changes we've seen over the past eighty years or so (Interstate highways, compute/semiconductor industries, ubiquitous networking, etc., etc., etc.), revitalizing those areas that have been left behind could boost both local economies as well as broader ones.
However, ALEC[0] and its corporate backers have sabotaged efforts to do so in pursuit of destroying competition and maximizing rent seeking. a lack of infrastructure maintenance is part and parcel of that -- as a lack of economic activity reduces the amount of tax revenue available for necessary infrastructure repairs and investments.
If companies could get symmetric, multi-gb internet, decent office space with decent road and rail connectivity to/from regional hubs in small towns and rural areas, more people would move in, prompting more housing development, more local businesses, more tax revenue, better infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.
This type of investment could have instant positive economic effects in poorer areas, and longer term (coupled with more housing), reduce the insane housing prices you see in NYC (median apartment rent in Manhattan is ~$4500[1]), SF, Boston, etc.
Unfortunately, statehouses appear to be fully captured by big corporations wanting to maintain their rents by stamping out any competition, the economies of those states be damned.
Sadly, the above can't happen unless the folks in those areas stop voting (in municipal/state elections) for the folks who are supporting policies designed to maintain the penury endured in those places.
There are so many good reasons to reinvigorate these areas, but we keep electing folks that won't bite the hand that holds their leash.
[1] https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/nyc-manhattan-brooklyn...
Edit: Added the missing links.
your analogy requires the assumption that the stadium is already "at capacity" for the maximum comfortable number of seats
99% of American municipalities are nowhere even close to this capacity.
Companies want top talent for their workforce. They naturally will set up shop where they have easiest access to this talent (hence why you get industry hubs in different locales). The companies move to the spots for workers, and the works move to those spots for the jobs.
There's an alternative world where SF and San Jose look like Singapore or Hong Kong, and policy is one of the big differences
There's a ton of affordable housing outside the top ten cities.
For the most expensive places I'd advise young people to consider going there temporarily to get your career started, but don't stay unless you are making serious money -- enough to offset real estate costs. E.g. for the Bay Area I'd say if you're not making over $350k/year by age 30 you should leave.
Or taking a smaller venue and expanding that?
To keep your analogy... well, analogous, this is also a stadium where you have to buy tickets in groups of at minimum four seats, with generous buffer zones of at least two seats between each group, specifically to cater to a handful of extremely vocal Swifties who couldn't bear to sit next to a stranger in their life. We could easily double the capacity of the stadium without impacting anyone's experience.
Everyone* wants to go see Taylor Swift. She comes to a stadium and the sell out is instant, the aftermarket is bloody and ruthless. The stadium has 90,000 seats, 2,000 floor spots, and they are gone before you can reload the ticket page.
Taylor Swift is the embodiment of "good jobs". The stadium is the local housing market. Those VIP booths side stage with room to move around? The mega mansions. The lower tier seats? Upper-middle class. Nose bleeds? Upper lower class/bottom middle class.
Now solve the problem of the true value of these seats being so expensive. You can add more seats (this stadium happens to be extremely modular) but the experience for everyone becomes worse in a multitude of ways. You can add seats above the nosebleed, but it doesn't really do much to affect the closer seats.
So how do you solve this? How do you handle people who want to sell their ticket? Is it even possible to give people who can hardly afford nosebleed a shot at mid tier seats?
*Yes, I know you have no interest in seeing Taylor Swift.