Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

I lived in a rust belt city in for many years, and in recent years have been witnessing a slew of "rust-belt renaissance" articles pop up every now and then about how things are turning around in deindustrialized cities (Pittsburgh is often cited as a shining example of a city that has seen a turnaround).

These articles typically state something along the lines of the low COL (cost-of-living) luring young people back from coastal cities. Some even overstate their case quite a bit by projecting they'll be the next Silicon Valley or startup hub. I wonder how folks here feel about such articles?

I can't help but notice there's some element of boosterism that misses a something fundamental. To be sure, it makes people who live in rust belt cities feel better about themselves (I was one of those people), but it doesn't seem to really move the needle in attracting the very ambitious to these places. In my observation, the truly ambitious are insensitive to cost-of-living arguments.

Paul Graham wrote an article entitled "Cities and Ambition" [1] which speaks to this. It tracks with my observation that people at the top of their games tend to cluster, and are willing to suffer discomfort to live among their peers.

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Some quotes:

"How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time."

"No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

I think these articles speak with the ambition of these cities themselves despite the loss of their industrial base; to my mind this ambitiousness is correlated with boosterism. And it does makes people feel good, and it might work, too, at supporting ambition. Just like how folks in NYC and SF often speak highly (as well as ill) of their homes. It feels good!

I'm not sure of how some cities are more expensive correlates with overall ambition so much as it does class. People from all classes can be very ambitious even if they're unequal in wealth.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I think you're right -- positivity does create virtuous cycles.

On a related note, I suspect cities primarily relying on cost-of-living arguments to attract people may actually be subtly signalling the reverse of what ambitious people are drawn to. A city's primary signal should be the vibrancy of the place, not the low cost of living.

In my old rust belt city, many were proud of the fact that folks who left for New York City were coming back because we offered a low cost of living. But the people returning were also those who had "given up" on their ambitions... whose dreams were broken by NYC. I realize this is a bit of an unfair generalization, because it's not universally true (some ambitious chefs who returned -- and they are very good -- were those who trained in NYC but simply found NY's restaurant economics too oppressive). But supposing we were subtly attracting folks who had "given up"... in large enough numbers, they are likely to set a certain cultural tone for the city. Great cities are not built on low cost-of-living is all I'm saying.

Side: as a historical example, consider Canada vs U.S. -- Canadians are generally a more risk-averse people than Americans, and it's partly because the United Empire Loyalists were American loyalists who chose the safer route of siding with the British, whereas U.S. Americans forged their own path. The Loyalists set the tone for much of the country.

As to your second point, cities with ambition tend to be expensive because people want to live in them, often in spite of the expense. However, the reverse is not true -- just because a city is expensive doesn't mean it attracts ambition. Nantucket's pretty expensive but it's not brimming with ambition. Not sure about expensive cities correlating with class... New York is very expensive, but still manages to attract ambitious working class people who are trying to make it there.

On a related note, I suspect cities primarily relying on cost-of-living arguments to attract people may actually be subtly signalling the reverse of what ambitious people are drawn to. A city's primary signal should be the vibrancy of the place, not the low cost of living.

Yes. What makes me unlikely to return to Michigan long-term, as much as I liked where I lived, is the limited career options I would have there. I am apparently willing to put up with a rather high cost of living to work on what I find interesting.

I do agree that top-tier cities are not built on low COL as their prime selling point.

However, I will also point out that low COL can have advantages of it's own for the ambitious, particularly for those pursuing their own ideas rather than climbing the corporate ladder.

When rent is $500/month (or less with a roommate) and bars, restaurants, etc are also cheap, it requires much less difficulty to pursue your idea. Even modest savings will let you live a normal life and last you years of trying to make a go of it, and you could get by indefinitely with a part time job if you don't have that.

I think it's important to consider observations in the context in which they were made. PG made those observations back in 2008. Things have evolved substantially since then. SF (and other coastal cities) are much different today than they were 10 years ago, as are rust belt cities and those in the south, heartland etc.

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