We keep expecting the internet to change this, and it keeps not happening. Why doesn't it? Why haven't remote workers or remote teams spread into the smaller towns and countryside?
Because the Internet has enabled clusters like Silicon Valley or Hollywood to be even more prominent. Before the Internet, if you wanted to do something in tech, you probably would have only looked for local opportunities, but now because of the Internet, you have the impression that SV is almost the only place where you can do something notable in tech.
Big names have gotten bigger and global, a lot of them becoming de facto monopolies.
The Internet makes access to information easier, but at the same time it narrows information sources enormously because it puts all of them on the same playing field, leaving only very few winners.
For example, pre-internet you might have read your local paper to be up to date with the news, now instead you probably read the news at the website of a global news company. It's almost impossible for the local paper to compete with the global company.
Basically the Internet has created a global winner-takes-all market where everyone is competing for attention, and mostly only the big players win, or at least that's what the Internet makes us believe.
Numbers such as market cap, net income per employee, and median average salary clearly indicate this is true.
And bigger cities in general. But I also think people tend to underestimate changes. Small and medium sized cities have been hit hard by the recession and rising housing markets. There are increasingly no good deals to be had anymore. Unless you go to Chiang Mai or something.
A few long-term trends I see driving the move to big cities are:
1. Jobs are becoming more specialized, and so it's more difficult to find every specialty you need for many businesses in a smaller town.
2. There are many more two earner households. In the past, many people would conduct a job search over a wide area and move the family for the man's new job. If the woman already has a job she likes, especially one that would be hard to replace in another town, the couple is much less likely to move for a job opportunity.
3. Businesses know this and have noticed that it has become harder to recruit people to move to a smaller "company town" for an opportunity. They therefore have tended to locate new operations in bigger cities.
Most people who earn $100+k aspire to more than a lower-middle class lifestyle, which makes most rural towns unattractive. Small semi-rural towns composed primarily of high-income people exist but they are the exception rather than the rule, and the lifestyle in these places often suffers from a high percentage of part-time residents.
I also highly value being able to watch non-mainstream movies in a real cinema and I also very much like being able to physically touch and purchase books from a real bookstore. All of these things are impossible for me to do were I to move to a small town.
When both parents work a high end job, chances are the car gets dropped off at a mechanic to change the oil or for a tuneup. And many meals are carry out or in restaurants.
Good schools.
Many HN readers don't have kids so they don't realize what a profoundly important factor this is when choosing where to live for many people. Once you have kids, their well-being and opportunity in life typically becomes the dominant attribute you're trying to maximize.
Parents would live in an active lava field where it rained urine every afternoon if the schools in the area were top notch.
Schooling is generally expensive. Nothing compares to one-on-one attention from a skilled, experience teacher and that doesn't scale, so to have a better school, you really need to simply have more money to put into hiring more and better teachers. In the US, a lot of school funding comes from local taxes, which means the amount of money schools have varies widely [0].
You could argue that this shouldn't be the case and that schools should be funded more equally out of larger pools. But if you are a parent with some money, it is your logical incentive to want to use that to improve your own child's schooling, so money naturally tends to flow towards schools that have more wealth children.
Many of those local taxes are local property taxes, so often the places that are affordable to live are by the very same process places that don't have great schools.
There's a nasty feedback loop here. You want your kids to go to good schools. The best schools have lots of rich parents. Those parents can afford expensive housing. Thus, most of the places with good schools have expensive housing.
Good government can and does push against this instinct, but it is a difficult, uphill battle.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...
Teaching is important, but I would argue that even more important are the goals and resources of the other students, which correlate nicely with wealth/income of their parents, and hence the neighborhood, and hence the school they all attend.
This is all barely noticeable when everyone is not so far apart on the wealth/income ladder, but over the past few decades, as that gets wider and wider, the data gets clearer and clearer about the consequences.
It certainly doesn't seem to here in the UK, where quite a few of the top schools are old fashioned 'public schools' located in rural/semi rural areas.
I lived a significant percentage of my life in rural towns across the US. While I really enjoy spending time in rural American towns because it is very comfortable and familiar for me, I am under no delusions about what actually living there entails. The lack of access to goods and services even for those that fit within the economic class of the town (which I did last time I lived in one) is inadequate enough that it is considered normal to drive 50-100 miles each way once or twice per week to get to a "real" city for various errands. You spend a lot of time in vehicles; instead of spending hours each day stuck in traffic, you spend hours covering distance at speed.
By the way, a 250k population city (i.e. larger than e.g. Geneva, Switzerland) is a very different animal than your average rural town, which is more commonly thousands to tens of thousands of population. I find cities in this range (also lived in these) to be the worst of both worlds, being neither as rural or intimate as a small town while also having few of the benefits of a real urban city. Of course, this is a personal preference.
Fort Collins is also a college town, and has a fairly educated population.
And if Fort Collins is too big for your taste, there are a ring of smaller towns (Loveland, Ault, Windsor or Westminster or something to the north) maybe 10 miles away.
Note well: It is my impression that this is my ideal. I've never lived there.
I live about an hour west of Boston which is certainly close enough to go in for a tech event or theatre/dinner for the evening. But my house is a lot cheaper than it would be in the city or a more expensive near-in suburb and you simply wouldn't be able to get the land I have near-in.
I get a lot of the advantages of a semi-rural lifestyle while still living close to decent supermarkets and having access to pretty much anything I would want within an hour.
I think resort communities might do better, like Bali, Jackson Hole, Bend, Gulf Shores, but not Hawaii, COL is just too high. Also, decent schooling for kids is still a problem in those areas.
I can see it as a huge problem if one lives in Chicago, I guess. The Midwest isn’t a great place for that kind of thing.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education/p...
From "Census data shows that Hawaii has the highest median home value in the entire US, at $617,400. CNBC also ranked Hawaii as the state with the highest cost of living in 2018, with the cost of a half-gallon of milk coming in at $3.64."
Citation: https://www.insider.com/the-top-10-states-people-are-moving-...
Oh and there's a lot of housing regulation.
Because there are benefits to living in the city even if your job can be done in arbitrary locations. It's easier to deliver goods and services (on a per capita basis) in dense population centers. It also means that people have much more options for entertainment, dining, socialization, dating, and plenty of other advantages. Really, the only disadvantage is space but that's mitigated by skyscrapers (effectively multiplying the surface area of a city). Urbanization is directly correlated to educational attainment, income, and other quality of life metrics. Urbanization is also nothing new. Humanity as a whole has been on an continuous overall trend towards urbanization since the industrial revolution. Really, the only reason why we weren't urbanized until now is because postindustrial societies couldn't function without >70% of their population working in agriculture.
That's the reason.
Also, many techies in the USA aren’t even Americans, they are even less likely to be craving for the countryside lifestyle.
There's a pretty broad continuum between living/working in a city where you can walk to everything and living somewhere that's hours from "civilization."
But that's a lot different from people arguing that tech people like big cities specifically, as that tends to suggest that they can walk to coffee shops, take public transit to work, etc. which does not describe the bulk of the space in greater metro areas.
> It depends on what you like to do. Countryside living is appealing to many people.
My reply:
> Technologists are probably not typically the ones that find it appealing.
Your reply to that:
> What do you think is so special about technologists that they uniquely prefer urban (or suburban) living? reply
Putting your last reply in the context of the entire reply chain, I'm confused about what you think we are arguing about?
I often notice that this sizable community is brushed to the wayside because they aren't the in-crowd of city-based IT enthusiasts, with their regions being considered "flyover" and their opinions devalued. Yet still, in small towns, we do have Slack and hackerspaces and lots of professional development, just like the cities.
More income savings to spend on new gadgets, space to build things (plus No HOAs to say you can't run a business or put up a big antenna on your property), and relative peace and quiet in your environment are quite appealing. I know some brilliant technologists who work remote and wouldn't trade their life-style for any salary in a big city. I'm a city-lover myself, but easily understand the appeal of working in tech while living in the country.
Edit: to add some more specific flavor my wife liked to ride horses, play her guitar, swim, and watch TV. Her parents were pretty busy but they would hang out with friends and liked to cook and play in what was essentially an Irish folk band in the area.
NB Personally I garden, walk and look at mysterious old stuff. But plenty of people doing the others.
Edit: Until 2 years ago I lived in the very centre of Edinburgh - which is quite a nice place to live. So far I've never regretted moving out of town to the country.
Let me assure you, there is plenty to do if you're into this lifestyle. Don't knock it just cause it's not something you're into.
I think as more people get good remote jobs that many of them will realize that living in nice small towns is really desirable.
Edit: Ah, I'd have to move to Canada. Not a deal killer :)
I wonder if there are fewer people that like the outdoors lifestyle now. New generation prefers xbox and eating at restaurants and doesn't like yard work or hiking.
I'd love to move somewhere quieter but my wife would kill me.
Living in small towns is incredibly stifling for people that prefer to use their feet to get around, at least in America. It always seemed fittingly ironic that people move to small towns so they can drive out to their outdoorsy hobbies.
Small towns and nature have no end of things to do. But it has way fewer people. I think modern society has a bigger problem with loneliness than with not having enough entertaining activities.
Go fishing, go hunting, go hiking, do some trailriding on an ATV or a snowmobile or a horse. Plant a garden or an orchard and tend to that. Have a barbecue with the neighbors. Get involved with the community. Work up your firewood. You can read books, or watch TV or engage with the internet just as easily as anywhere else, and you can get anything in the world delivered to you with two-day delivery from Amazon. You can look up at night and see the stars, rather than just washed out orange halogen haze.
I have a active loop for HF RX, which does a good job of rejecting local noise, but would still be better in rural area.
Because when you live in an area you become entrenched. I would love to move out of the Bay Area for cheaper everything, but all my friends and family are here.
This is the element that people forget about in these discussions.
Ah. That explains quite a bit, actually.
But it doesn't explain everything. It explains why people who are there stay there. It doesn't explain why people have to move there to make decent money.