Is It Time for the US to Drag Jobs Out of Silicon Valley and into the Heartland?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It's kind of like Los Alamos for nuclear physics. Sure, you can put a team together elsewhere, but it's never going to be quite the same because those happenstance conversations won't have the right people in them.
Let's say for a minute that you could break this thing up into dispirate groups. What's the advantage? You'll be splitting up the best team ever created and hoping they somehow reconstitute. Sounds dangerous to me.
The government even used eminent domain to force ranchers out of the area. I feel SV has developed much more organically.
More affordability for the people in those groups, and thus less separation of tech people from members of other sectors and socio-economic levels.
It's good to have enough people concentrated in one region to form great teams and give people options and mobility. But, beyond that, it starts becoming a negative to tech people and non-tech people.
SF and Seattle are insanely expensive. Most of my friends here in Seattle are in tech, and over the past few years, I've watched most of my non-tech friends get priced out and be forced to leave the area.
I don't think it's good for individuals or humanity as a whole for people to spend all of their time in a bubble surrounded only by people like themselves.
The bell curve in the valley is no different than any other city of comparable size. The only exceptionalism is ego.
https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816
You can't make this stuff up.
If immigrants/engineers are getting murdered in hate crimes in your city, why should the whole country pay to subsidize the fact that your city is an unpleasant place to work and live?
What the govt can do is fill the role of VCs and make good returns in pure financial terms as well. Missouri has a small fund that's been very successful, but the new GOP governor cut funding as soon as he got in.
Overall though I think the concept is very good.
On top of that, being a major employer in a city gives your company sizable clout when it comes to lobbying the local government. Don't like the new tax plan? It will probably work out in your favor to let the city know that it would really hurt hiring and salaries at the biggest employer in the city. Heck if it hurts enough, you might even have to move to that nearby competitor city who is offering all those sweet tax breaks. You don't want to but it's the only responsible thing to do for all of your employees. It would be a shame to see a bunch of those employees leave the city and cause housing prices to drop for all the rest of the citizens. What's that? You're reconsidering that tax bill? I knew you'd make the right choice for your constituents.
The barrier to entry of a high tech job sector is primarily internet connectivity. You can't run a web server out of your house if your ISP doesn't allow it.. or if the top speed is 3Mbps. Sure, you could push stuff to a third party, but that increases development costs (in dollars and knowledge). And if you're doing a lot of data pushes, a 256Kb upload speed will be painful if you're pushing a 90MB container up to the cloud.
IT people flock to areas that have internet. It was a requirement both times I moved that there's >25Mbps high-cap wired internet. I would NEVER move to a place with less. I would be eager to move to a place that offers gigabit fiber that I could run a server behind (I mostly do cloud work, but I do enjoy having some at-home services).
However, I have friends in the heartland interested in tech jobs. I tried to help one learn HTML and CSS over Zoom calls and quickly discovered internet quality (speed, latency, etc) is a barrier to entry. When your internet isn’t even good enough to pair program that’s a problem. We even went to the trouble of finding the nearest buried fiber (half a mile away on a major road) and calling the owner (Sprint) to see how much it would cost to splice him in as a customer (a ridiculous sum).
I still can’t comprehend how we had an extended period (nearly a decade) of high unemployment across the heartland and the most portable job which pays a living wage was importing talent from the other side of the globe.
Internet access may suck in many places, but not everywhere. Don't assume that you need to be in SF to get good internet. Most metropolitian areas in the US have good internet.
If I'm not on the outskirts of this small town, I have to move 45 minutes away for equivalent service
So for someone down the street, assuming they have the infrastructure set up, it's about 4.5x my monthly cost for useful up speeds. No I'm fine with my existing download, that can stay where it is and I won't hit issues any time soon. But for decent upload people around here are out... $135 a month just for internet.
My in-laws live a couple of blocks from Stanford, and they've got grandfathered SBC DSL at like 6 down and 0.5 up. You can't even ORDER DSL at their house anymore through ATT, they just begrudgingly support it (sort of).
Atherton started their own fiber network just to solve for this problem.
There's plenty of money and demand for good internet in the bay area. The regulatory environment is killing it, not lack of demand or money.
No evidence of it, but I think the FCC definition of broadband changing had a lot to do with it.
I live in Chattanooga TN where we've had consumer gigabit fiber for the better part of a decade (and 10GB for a while now) and the tech scene is good but not amazing (particularly where startups are concerned).
> The barrier to entry of a high tech job sector is primarily internet connectivity. You can't run a web server out of your house if your ISP doesn't allow it.. or if the top speed is 3Mbps.
In my experience, after a certain point, most tech businesses don't really need better connectivity; most of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud these days.
However, 24 million Americans do not have "broadband" access as of 2018[0]. Rural USA is 60 million americans[1].
It is _my guess_ that nearly all of these 24 million Americans without broadband are almost entirely rural, since they are the lowest priority for ISPs (too expensive per customer)... and this is 97% of the USA land mass[2] which is why ISPs avoid them (infrastructure too expensive).
So when people say tech startups can be anywhere... in reality, only 3-4% of the US land mass is reliably covered with high speed data, and those people must be happy to live in homes on ~1 acre or less lots (typical maximum for suburbs).
Running a server from home was not the best example, perhaps nowadays "reliable video calls with screen sharing" is a better metric for reliable, consistent, moderate bandwidth service.
[0]: https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_areas_in_the_United_Stat... [2]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210...
I agree and would add that the government shouldn't try to "drag jobs" from anywhere to anywhere else (per the article's headline). The U.S. government wasn't designed to do that, won't be good at it and will likely fail after spending a bunch of money that would be better spent on one of the other priorities they are supposed to be doing (and are already failing at).
"Looking next at the remaining top 20 metro areas with the most innovation sector jobs, only those that saw population or real GDP growth slower than the nation as a whole since 2010 are considered eligible to become designated growth centers. By dint of that, cities such as Raleigh, N.C., Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin are set aside because they are already self-sustaining superstars. They are safe bets for any new tech graduate looking for a job or any tech firm looking at add a few hundred jobs somewhere. Allowing these places to be eligible would simply reinforce existing spatial imbalances."
This decision disqualifies growing Sun Belt metros including Austin, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta from inclusion, specifically because they are already growing. The result is a list that is biased towards metros in the northeast and midwest, which are shrinking for a variety of reasons, not strictly due to job opportunities.
This has two problems:
1. It sets the program up for failure: Targeting shrinking metros means that the policy intervention needs to offset existing decline before it can demonstrate any positive growth. This is not easy! There are lots of public programs already targeting these metro areas (particularly state-level programs), and they are still shrinking.
2. It makes it very unlikely that the program would develop a new "superstar" tech city comparable to NYC, because you've already excluded the most probable candidates.
Adding some regional balance for fairness and (valid) political concerns is a good idea, but a program that proposes to subsidize growth in Chicago and Minneapolis while excluding Atlanta, Dallas, and Raleigh-Durham seems neither fair nor sensible.
If electric vehicles are the future, young people shouldn't be afraid to creat their own new cities with scattered companies and minimum infrastructure investment, you only need roads and charging stations. Cheap land make for cheap houses and low living cost, in fact, isn't this what their fathers did to achieve the American dream life young people nowadays so pine for?
This seem to be the only way the American dream can still be realized.
Personal cars are a failed experiment and a total aberration from historically successful modes of human development.
It would be very difficult to build tech hubs without making them friendlier towards an immigrant workforce.
I spent 6 days in Houston visiting a friend, here's what I remember from the trip:
- Random airport check in a private room (check) - Called random names more times in 6 days than in my entire life (check) - Stared down actively in every bar I went to (check)
Imagine being on an evening out, people staring at you trying to figure out "what" you are and knowing that they may be carrying a gun on them. Silicon valley (and NYC) is a place where its okay to be whoever you are, and that is something government intervention can't inject no matter how hard they try.
I hope my comment doesn't come off as offensive, just trying to provide an important perspective which I believe the article misses.
That’s consistent with my experience as a Bangladeshi immigrant. I grew up in a DC suburb in the early 1990s, before that area became diverse. A few remarks aside, I’ve always felt welcome, including in rural parts of Virginia, Illinois, Georgia, etc. I was on a plane to Dallas a few months ago. My seat mate was delicately trying to figure out my ethnicity. I explained I was Bangladeshi, and he didn’t know what that was. Then we had a very good conversation about how had really gotten into Indian food, and had put together a tandoor. Speaking for myself, I’d rather live in Houston or Kansas City or Pittsburgh than anywhere in the coasts.
Also, where would I go, besides back to Bangladesh? You think the Berlin tech scene is more welcoming than the Salt Lake City tech scene? Maybe people will not say anything uncomfortable or offensive. But a Bangladeshi immigrant can become American, and people will recognize that as substantive and not merely a euphemism. But he’ll never become German, or Japanese, or French. The United States elected a son of an immigrant President. Not just New York and California, but Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa. That’s never happened in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, or Italy, or any EU country that I’m aware of.
I don’t say this to diminish anyone’s experience. But I think to the extent that people on the coasts are wondering what the rest of America is like, they get a balanced picture.
> That’s never happened in Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, or Italy, or any EU country that I’m aware of.
Ireland.
Addendum to my earlier comment- Leo Varadkar is the son of an Indian immigrant, but even in the '40s Taoiseach Eamon de Valera had a Basque father from Spain. Interestingly enough, Boris Johnson was born in New York, but already in that same era Prime Minister Winston Churchill had an American mother.
In fact, they have a very common and very American immigration story. Even as children of first-generation immigrants living in the south, it was so easy for them to assimilate that they grew up identifying as "American" more than "Indian-American." This is the story of many children of immigrants. My dad, for example, hates the labels of "hyphenated American." So my brother and I grew up identifying as just "American." But this isn't possible most places.[1] Its not just about how you identify yourself, but how other people identify you. In most countries, society forces immigrants to identify with the country they left or their ethnicity. There are only a handful of countries that are so welcoming that the children of immigrants can choose to identify with nothing other than their new homeland.
[1] Ironically, as I've gotten older, I've started to identify as Asian more than before. But I'd chalk that up to the balkanization of American culture and the drift away from what I can easily reconcile with my Asian immigrant values.
To some extent I have as well, but I think in my case it is more to stick it to Pakistanis who think I don’t have any rights on the first part of the hyphen
Blue America lets conservatives live however they want; Red America asks the rest of us to live their way, and then wants to know why we won’t take the jobs there, why we "fly over," reassure us that Houston is “more cosmopolitan thank you think.”
Anyway: I feel terrible about your experience there, I am sorry that this nation let you down.
New cities, we desperately need. The entire housing fiasco is caused by an imbalance between the number of jobs and the amount of housing. all the jobs are, ironically, in places that really don't want to grow. so the logical thing to do, is to move those jobs to new places that do want to grow.
This could really ignite the economy in a way that's not zero sum (like most other solutions). There's so much free wealth out there for the taking (land that's not being used for any productive capacity ~ you could literally create wealth out of thin air).
If you don't create new cities, the people still need to end up somewhere. You can move jobs to smaller cities or create new ones, whatever. the point is, you need to move jobs to areas that want to grow.
Have you seen the new neighborhoods that are being built in places like CA? Every single tree gets chopped down, ever last one. That's because developers are forced to build with density because the cost of land is so high. if you want to prevent the slaughtering of trees, you'll need specifically create minimum distance regs or reduce the # of trees that can be cut down legally. at the current rate, there's no nature for anyone to enjoy in the neighborhoods that are currently being built.
There's a lot of chickens unhappy about $1600/month 200sqft apartments. (a real example from SF - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti... )
Because that's the dystopian nightmare in SF, and to move jobs out of silicon valley to elsewhere, would be to export that same dystopia to more places.
We already see this in Michigan of all places. You can make a SF salary and pay $1600/month for a micro-apartment. Or you can take a 50% pay cut, to pay $800/month for ~200sqft micro-apartment. They are equally ridiculous and equally unaffordable, once you account for the currency/wage differences, despite the fact that we have no zoning restrictions in this town.
We obviously need more housing, and need to build more housing, but housing is inherently pollution-heavy. You can not build your way into affordability alone, because the act of new construction inherently generates more unaffordability. It alone can never solve it.
> The only reason (cheap apartments) doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies.
No, that's only a tiny part. Zoning is a small reason, but not the primary one. The biggest reason CA apartments are expensive, is the financial pollution generated by the companies there.
If you built a brand new city in an empty cornfield somewhere, with no laws or zoning of any kind, it would be somewhat cheaper than San Francisco, but every single apartment would still cost ~$1100-$1600/month. Because most of that price is due to the financial pollution from the companies, not the zoning.
They’re not equal. You almost certainly end up with significantly more disposable income in SF.
The whole idea that increasing supply will drop the price isn't 100% accurate. In Chicago we've had lots of new development in an area that wasn't that expensive to be in. Now we have 900sqft 2br places that are 3.2k a month and studios for 1800 in that same area.
That simply means there isn’t sufficient new supply proportional to the new demand. New supply may make an area more desirable, inducing more demand. But there is a limit to the total demand, so one just needs to keep adding supply.
That's a very tech focused idea. Chicago is currently having infrastructure issues due to demand. (the city wants to use that to show "see we need more money" the transit system is always busy.. yet isn't considering how to address that issue)
Anyways, new developers are only choosing to build "luxury" apartments.
Here's an example:
when I moved into logan square: I was paying 1350$+100$ for a garage 2br/1ba. That was about 200$ more than the places around it.
Now that 10+ high rise buildings have been built near by. A place similar to mine costs $3200, and studios are going for 1800. (Either limited parking [as in you are competing with others to rent a space] or no parking at all)
Has the area improved? Nope. Businesses are having an even harder time staying open.
Unfortunately, current regulations and voters make it impossible to create another Chicago/NYC/SF.
Moreover leaving a few trees up in a lower-density development isn't a way to respect nature; whatever trees are left are there to decorate human properties.
We need new cities designed to be high-density from the start, and we need higher density in most existing cities. When humans live in urban areas, nature can be left alone, and you don't have to go 100 miles outside the city to reach undeveloped land.
Extremely efficient high-density cities that combine car AND bike friendly streets with mass transit. Numerous green parks and public spaces as well.
The rest of the country is rapidly turning into wilderness as people move into the cities for jobs, and the elderly rural-dwellers die off. Fortunately, the government still keeps the roads well-maintained so people such as myself can drive into the countryside and get our Initial D on.
The poop in SF is from growing rates of homelessness, not from density. SF ranks low on density compared to NYC and Hong Kong, yet only SF has a poop problem.
NIMBYism crops up in every place where there is growth, and it seems to create a system that rewards luck of being born in the right time and place over contributions to society.
No one is doing any of that to anyone in SF.
People that find it acceptable move in, those that don’t move out
"World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100"
https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/world...
People use up remarkably little space to actually live. In dense cities, multiple stories mean you can fit 3-10 times as many people as in single stories in the same area. But even with single stories, not much land is used.
What IS important is area used for agriculture. It's vastly more than land used for roads and houses and other buildings. Cut down on that (without sacrificing amount of food produced--possible using technology and policy together) and footprint on nature is reduced. In fact, less land is now used for agriculture than was used in the late 1940s, even though population has more than doubled: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/march/data-feature...
That is due to vastly higher yields. We can go further and eliminate much farmland altogether by growing most of our calories from single-celled organisms. Given the processed food of the current industrial food system, the end-quality would be unchanged for the most part and may even improve. Even if not used for human consumption, it can displace animal feed (and already is used to some extent). Meat substitutes can also help.
> According to calculations of the United Nations Environment Programme, the calories that are lost by feeding cereals to animals, instead of using them directly as human food, could theoretically feed an extra 3.5 billion people.
> Feed conversion rates from plant-based calories into animal-based calories vary; in the ideal case it takes two kilograms of grain to produce one kilo of chicken, four kilos for one kilogram of pork and seven kilos for one kilogram of beef.
- Global Agriculture[1]
Your point re: human living space density in cities is totally spot on. Urbanism is much more efficient than suburban sprawl. Rigorous public transit makes having a car optional / disadvantageous if you live in a city. It's no wonder the automobile industry has always sought to stifle transit.
Look at the successes of the Houston light rail system METRORail. Opened in 2004 and has cut back traffic and lead to high-density apartments, shops, and offices near stations.
All that is evidence of why population growth isn't a real root issue. It could be problematic, depending on what other systems are at play to mitigate increasing resource needs of people. Even so, our current food production is enough to feed the projected 2050 population of 9.7 billion[2].
[1]https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/meat-and-ani... [2]https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.310...
The trouble with small cities is that no one wants to see their character changed. In New York they built the subway ahead of development, making high density possible immediately, and regularly bulldozed existing properties as demand increased to make them even higher density later.
When my friends and I talk, we value things such as a family leave act or parental leave, assisted suicide, legal marijuana, and bans non competes. As well as weather (humidity isn’t popular), and natural features, such as oceans and mountains. No one considers going to a state that is still dealing with women’s rights.
The thing is, companies aren't moving to expensive places for the cheap land for office space, or the low salaries for cleaning and food service employees, They aren't moving to cities because of vast cheap and free parking. They are moving there, because the talent that can live anywhere it wants to is living in these cities. I'd love to work remote, but then I'd work in my basement with my legal weed and fast internet and still in the middle of the city I live in now.
There's a fundamental misunderstanding here thinking that the people who can move anywhere they want haven't already. So if they want to make a difference, the best way would be to encourage the arts, federally support human rights, and move the whole country forward, break internet monopolies, pay for education. I'm not moving my daughter to a state that's still challenging abortion rights or teaching creationism in schools, or still has their head in the sand about confederate statues. I don't want my kids growing up in a place where the war on drugs isn't just a failed experiment.
Come to the Midwest! Make half as much and live in a house that you can sell for half as much profit when you retire! Come for the flat outdoors with nothing to do, stay for the lack of ethnic and cultural diversity!
Half of the people in Seattle are Midwest refugees who came here despite not having a job lined up. It's laughable to think they'd move back for a salary cut despite cheaper housing. The financial incentive would have to be overwhelmingly positive so they could work in the Midwest for a few years then move somewhere better.
That wouldn't be what we want in life. So we have a little house in a big city with a little garden and the ability to bike with our kids anywhere that's worth going. There are music venues, and museums, and restaurants, and lakes, and ocean, and beaches. With a weekend drive there are mountains and forests. Week nights can get you an $8 dollar show with a good band just around the corner and most nights there is a choice of 6-8 bands within a mile.
Most of the people I know and live around could live in cheaper places as well, either apartments, or cities, but they live here because that's where they want to live.
Does that make you one of the NIMBYs?
I'd like to see everything in the city rezoned from single family to multifamily with the option for high density. I write/ speak up at every zoning city council meeting in favor of density, I back candidates that support dense zoning, I've supported city lots on my block being turned into low income, subsidized housing instead of a park. My neighborhood specifically is the one in my city with the highest density growth since I've moved here with the population tripping in the last couple years and outpacing the growth of the city by 1/2. I'd like to see more done to continue that trend.
I didn't buy a little house with a garden because I needed a little house with a garden, I bought it because that's what I could afford in the neighborhood that I wanted to live in. I'd have been just has happy in a townhome, or in a multi-family condo, but that wasn't available when we were looking for a place to live.
There's some things that are really fucked up with the way our city's have grown so fast. But I hope that we can make them places for all, to enjoy the same things that I've been privileged enough to enjoy.
I just moved from what was effectively a state capital/ college town to a largish town without much going on and man having a music venue that plays various local and touring underground artists from all sorts of genres is something I miss. I'm closer to two cities that get large headliner concerts now, but it's still to rare someone I enjoy enough to take the trip is coming.
Housing should not be an investment.
We didn't make this reality, we just live in it.
The problem isn’t really just housing costs (though that is a huge pain) it’s the cost of everything, the commute, and the near requirement to have two incomes just to pay your bills every month. The benefit of higher coastal salaries only works if you can somehow contain the overall cost of living from eating it all.
For my situation personally, it's never been an issue, and it's not for the people in our social circles. We were never going to be a single income household, it's not something either of us have ever wanted. The thing with cities, is you can't move to a city and do things the same as you do when you didn't live in a city. You've got to find a way to drop commuting, live in smaller spaces, be closer to thing things that you love. I know a lot of people who have moved to the city but can't live in a small space, so they buy a house out on the edge then spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours commuting into the city and it just breaks them. I can understand how they'd want to live else where but even then, when I talk to them, they are turning down job offers in non-coastal cities.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/03/your-money/mi...
When I worked in NYC, I literally saved more, after taxes and all expenses, than I could make in total before taxes (or any expenses) where I live now.
Even a zero cost of living wouldn't begin to make up for that. People simply refuse to understand this, though. They just keep on repeating "but muh cost of living!" even though it's clearly not relevant.
It's their prerogative I suppose, but the thing that gets me is that these same people are constantly complaining about how they can't hire anyone!
Have you considered paying more, I ask?
We pay more than enough already!
No, you obviously don't.
Why are the talent moving to those cities? Because they want to pay $4000/mo rent? Or because that's where the jobs are?
All of the other advantages you describe are side-effects. California has historically been a fairly conservative state (Remember Ronald Reagan?), and I suspect it still is if you get away from the coast.
"I don't want my kids growing up in a place where the war on drugs isn't just a failed experiment."
Didn't SF recently ban vaping?
Because even after paying $4,000 they have more left over than in other places
Also job security in numbers with their being more employers in the area
The Federal government has played an outsized role in how our geography and economy have developed. They've favored urban coastal areas by explicitly allowing manufacturing centers in the rust belt to be dismantled and shipped overseas without penalty. They've flooded the heartland with millions of illegal and visa workers to do jobs Americans used to do, and would continue to do at acceptable wages. The House just approved millions more this past week.
They've encouraged housing in various areas to far outstrip supply via subsidized mortgages, bailing out lenders, tax deductions for high tax and high home price states.
Do you think Google and Amazon might consider building out smaller regional offices in St Louis, Omaha, Cleveland if they weren't able to scam off thousands of workers on of H1B, L1, etc. visas each year to come work in SV and Seattle, instead of being forced to search for talented citizens outside of their areas? How bout if they were severely punished for colluding to hold down wages in SV?
This isn't the 'Invisible Hand of the Free Market' at work. It's government policy which creates the system we have. And it can be government policy to change things.
https://www.numbersusa.com/news/house-approves-amnesty-inden...
https://insights.dice.com/2019/08/27/h-1b-visa-use-state/
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/mortgage-interest...
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
This doesn't make any sense. Google or Amazon could "scam thousands of workers on visas" to come work in St. Louis, Omaha or Cleveland too.
I used to think about going full-time with my consulting and moving back to where I'm from in (very rural) southeastern Ohio to raise my kids. It's incomprehensible to me that the state is moving backwards on women's rights. It's all so sordidly stupid.
Also there is the caveat that things like a vehicle become a lot more important for day to day life.
Those caveats given, if someone were to find some land unsuitable for farming and build a tech center there.... It could go well.
I like doing outdoor things in the mountains and the queer culture on the "left coast" that is anathema to more conservative areas of the country.
So no thank you, I'll keep my high salary, access to mountains, and ability to retire anywhere I like after I sell my ridiculously overpriced house to someone else.
Living in most of the U.S. sucks if you're not a cookie-cutter copy of the socially acceptable suburban family with 2.5 kids and a dog. It's not all about money.
My last job was on a deep learning team located in a university research park at UIUC in Central Illinois. The area was rich in local entrepreneurship and had a critical mass of skilled people.
I retired and moved back to my home in Sedona Arizona, but I can strongly recommend UIUC for both the great tech community, great tech meetups, and also good quality of life with a low cost of living.
I compare this to working as a contractor at Google, which was a really nice experience but my wife and I burned through $6500/month in living expenses in Mountain View and the traffic was so bad that I was dissuaded from driving to tech meetups.
It's also a terrible idea for the Feds to be in charge of doing this in any meaningful capacity aside from tax incentives and banner waving, and it'd be up to the state/city to want to be selected.
edit: removed suggestion that the heartland was lacking bars and restaurants
As someone in a mid-sized heartland city, we've got nice bars and restaurants (no, seriously). Main pain points:
1) decent "ethnic" cuisine of certain types falls in the mid-range-and-up category, price-wise, for the most part, with few delicious but cheap options like larger coastal cities may have (Indian food, for example). I do not know why this is. Actually-good bread is also weirdly expensive. We do have surprisingly-good fine dining and good bars, and a ton more food variety than a coast-dweller might think, so there's that.
2) Really far from any decent "outdoorsy" stuff unless you like fishing on kinda-ugly lakes, or hunting in kinda-ugly woods. Hiking? Most of a day to reach mediocre mountains, a long day to reach real ones. Local "hiking" is largely indistinguishable from a neighborhood walking trail in terms of what you'll see (which is to say, not much). Beautiful desert vistas? 1.5 days or so. Any part of the ocean? Again, 1.5 days of driving, minimum. Great lakes? Not close enough to those either, 1.25 days to reach parts of those other than Chicago (1 long day for that). No such thing as a long-weekend getaway to anything outdoorsy that's much fun, let alone single-day trips of that sort.
Even if this strategy did work (it doesn't), it's a terrible idea for the environment and quality of life. This is how Los Angeles got super-commutes from the never-ending sprawl of the Inland Empire.
> That's 30 hours a week
It's 15 hours per week, unless parent is a time traveller. (3 hours per day, not 3 hours one way.)
I also used to be in the Bay, and that's about right; 3-4 hours per day. It's fucked.
For decades now, I've not understood why companies don't relocate to places like Des Moines or Kansas City. Labor was cheap, land was cheap, governments are willing to give you credits to move your business there, etc. The midwest is crawling with small colleges churning out educated people. After spending a decade in Seattle I moved inland for cheaper real estate (and this was back in 2010 because I thought Seattle housing had already gone insane back then). I've been a remote worker / road warrior type since 2005, and the opportunities for remote work or to work from where you want have only gotten easier. Why would I hire the $250K+ developer in the Bay Area, have to cover office costs, etc there, when I could encourage them to live in Boise or some other lower-cost area?
So, to my thinking - employers need to get more creative and drop the industrial era mindset of control. Certainly there are jobs that require people and equipment being in one physical location. Certainly the most profitable large companies - the Googles, Microsofts, Apples, etc of the world might choose to establish centralized corporate campuses. For everybody else though, the economics make far more sense in other parts of the country.
I work for a tech company in North Carolina. Cost of living is very reasonable and there are plenty of tech companies here but in my experience getting someone to move here for work is hard. It's not just the employers you need to convince.
Furthermore, Charlotte is heavily banking and finance, and thus lean heavily on H1B visas for most of their enterprise jobs. I've had recruiters contact me for jobs in the area and the salaries were a joke. Honestly, I don't know if they were for real or just using it as 'proof' that they couldn't hire any Americans so they could forward off a few hundred more H1B petitions to USCIS...
Median hourly wage, Computer and Mathematical Occupations, Durham-Chapel Hill: $42.77 ($85,540 ann.)
Fewer hot (HOT! HOT! HOT!) tech jobs? Probably.
I just ran the numbers for a $100k salary in NC and $130k in California. The person in NC will pay $17203.92 in federal taxes and $5250 in state taxes for a total of $22453.92. The person in California pays $24403.92 and $9094.69 for a total of $33498.61. This brings their post tax income to $96501.39 for California and $77546.08 for NC. The person in California only makes about $1.5k extra a month.
There are plenty of non-monetary reasons why someone might choose to live in one state or the other but you do need a lot more money in California to cover the cost of basics like housing. Not properly accounting for that could give someone quite a shock if they relocate there.
I don't know what other places in the area pay but I only took a small pay cut when I moved here. Once you factor in the cost of living that pay cut works out to be a decent raise.
I get the impression that IBM will start using more Red Hat tech, but for the most part we are keeping the two companies pretty separate.
Here's an example from a recent client in Seattle. Two year old company, approx. ten employees, hiring at least one person a month. Couple hundred square feet of class-a office space, likely $42/square foot and increasing. Turned over nearly all of their staff on a yearly basis because they couldn't compete with comp at Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Had a number of entry-level type clerical jobs that they were outsourcing to India but doing so unsuccessfully (IE: the resources they had weren't particularly cheap but also didn't really have the necessary skills). Same entry-level jobs couldn't pay quite enough in Seattle to incentivize someone to either stick around or be willing to commute from the suburbs (unless they were really desperate).
My point to them time and time again was - they were a small company, undercapitalized like many small businesses, and they were spending stupid money every month on people and office space that made no sense given their business. They could have moved to Spokane, Yakima, the Tri-Cities or lots of other cheaper places even in the same state and been able to find the talent they need and cut their office costs in half. Given the nature of their business, sure, maybe they needed to keep a couple people (mostly sales / execs / bizdev) in Seattle - but even those could have worked from home.
Last I checked, the largest concentration of PhDs in the country is in... the Tri-Cities, Washington. The state with the greatest number of college graduates per capita is... Iowa. These are not exactly places on anyone's radar. Bend, Oregon has a growing number of people who "commute" to Silicon Valley. I live in the middle of nowhere, but there are a growing number of people from Seattle willing to move here (and occasionally take the 45 minute commuter flight) in order to escape the cost and crowding of living over there. Boise is growing entirely by people fleeing from coastal cities.
Someone in this thread posted Paul Graham's essay about startup hubs, which I recall reading and it gels exactly with my thinking as well - go to these micro hubs around the country and be part of growing them from within.
I can tell you exactly why: these cities aren't places senior management want to live. I know this because I've worked for three companies over the years that have moved technology centers from cities on that list, to places like NYC & SF. The labor cost increase didn't seem to bother them, nor the price of real estate.
What happened was the company hired a new CEO, the new CEO hates living in Smallville, USA, and creates an initiative to relocate the company back to where they want to be. Ostensibly, this move is part of plan to improve technical innovation. They all claimed that coastal workers were superior to those from the Mid-west. Whether because they are higher educated, have more exposure to cutting edge technology, or whatever ("[SF, NYC, Dallas, etc] is home to (famous university/tech company"). It's pretty obvious what the real reason is, as the new executives are the first people out the door.
The only way to keep these companies is to either force them, or make the region desirable to rich people.
1. Originally, the area was home to several very good universities. Today, these provide a ready source of workers with advanced job training. On the other hand, I'll bet they are a small minority of the workers in the area now.
2. That's where the money is. Much of the "capital"[1] comes from previously successful businesses and those people don't want to move (and don't have any problems with high rents).
3. Density promotes density. More workers there makes hiring new ones easier (and replacing old ones), and the availability of "attractive" jobs draws more workers.
The area hasn't (and probably can't) adapt as fast as money and immigrants, hence the infrastructure issues.
It's hard to fix that from the top down. Take Austin, which did it from the bottom up; a number of foresighted rich folks boosted UT's tech training, leading to it's success in recent decades, but it's now facing the same problems.
Options:
Hold your nose, go to CA and make your money and get the hell out.
Wait for the next cyclic bust, buy property when the prices collapse.
Organically start the process elsewhere, with the same results.
Choose to go elsewhere and accept the salary reduction.
Don't look at me, I'm not the one you need to convince. That'd be the hordes of newly-graduated who think they have to move to <dense coastal city> to get a good job (although how much of that money will stick to them, I can't say).
These tech hubs exist for very good reasons. Maybe you can make some more hubs, but you'll never spread these kind of jobs evenly all over.
Do you have time to actually take advantages of the cultural resources of a city or visit mountains during the work week? Or is that a weekend thing generally?
I suspect that for most tech workers, it is a weekend thing. I'd like to see more companies optimize for that.
For the Bay area that would mean putting tech offices away from San Francisco and SV in smaller cities, but close enough that driving in to SF for the weekend would not be too arduous a trip to do regularly.
Modesto, for example, is a 2 hour drive from SF if you avoid rush hour on the SF end, has much cheaper housing than SF, and is a lot closer to the mountains.
I say this having grown up with endless smooth moss-like rolling hills in every direction as far as the eye can see. Rain on an annoying unpredictable day-to-day schedule ruining plans got old very quickly.
Clear skies and beautiful mountainous skyline haven't gotten old so far for me. In fact, weather is the very first thing I'm reminded of when I travel anywhere else.
Sorry to say this (as an outsider) but not all areas of the US are the same and are not as desirable to live in, also for those planning a family you may be limiting their career choices in 20 years.
One of my friends has move back near London from one of the cheaper (more depressed regions of the UK) because her v bright daughter through the only job for her was working on the tills.
But that would require a complete rebalance of power from states to federal government.
The US government is one of the largest employers in the USA. And they are responsible for the expansion of major metropolitan areas around the US. Washington DC is an obvious example, but for one from that list, Dayton Ohio owes most of its technology sector to the US Air Force due to its proximity to Wright-Patterson Air Force base, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the glut of technology contractors in the area.
I'm sure Dayton is not a terribly desirable place for technology workers to emigrate to, but it does demonstrate the feasibility of special economic zones. The US is full of beautiful places that would be highly attractive to workers, if only jobs were available in sufficient numbers. The US government could even work with public-private partnerships to ensure that enough private investment occurs to bring culture to the area so that it doesn't sit around as some stagnant boomtown.
The challenger disaster was caused by this as for "political reasons" the plant that made the boosters was a long way away and thus required the design with the O rings.
Cool o-ring non-sequitur!
That's a little misleading. True, SF and Seattle have zoning laws which are a significant part of the reason for housing unaffordability (e.g. 75% of Seattle is zoned for single family dwellings, prohibiting even short townhouses), but it's likely that many of the smaller cities in the article either do have such zoning laws already or would adopt them once increasing density motivates local homeowners to "protect" their neighborhoods. (Heck, in many smaller towns it is illegal to grow veggies in your front garden or let your lawn grass go brown.) An overbearing notion of house-property-values and everything associated with that mindset is not the province of big metros alone.
Meanwhile, the recent efforts of cities like Seattle to enable smart urban planning, public transit, and bicycling, even though laughably puny by European standards, are still significantly ahead of the rest of the USA.
Most importantly, sprawl is devastating from an environmental point of view - it massively blows up per capita carbon footprint. Well-planned, dense cities can include parks, green space, and even urban wilderness while still accommodating density and drastically reducing car travel. It is a matter of political will, not technical feasibility.
No. It isn't.
Funny the regionally exclusive monopolies that we seem to have tolerated for literally decades and the ones we suddenly, for some reason, don't.
Or maybe it isn't funny at all. Maybe it's a totally predictable outcome of a system that is highly tolerant of calcified, politically-connected regional monopolies. A system that is intolerant of disruptive, politically-indifferent or unestablished regional monopolies.
In other words, this isn't about economic efficiency or anti-trust law. It's about political sour grapes first. Everything else second.
Unfortunately I think the tide is moving in the direction of this being an acceptable way to govern and while people may get individual things they want out of it I think the end result is a net loss for everyone.
For starters, when it comes to this sort of thing, the government is inevitably running toward where the ball just was instead of where it's going to be. That's just the nature of the game - legislation is (or at least should be) a slow process. Second, these kinds of interventions inevitably result in rent-seeking behavior. I don't want the kinds of games that agricorps played with the dairy subsidy being related to how far you are from Eau Claire, WI getting imported into the tech industry. And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution.
(Perhaps only after the eventual dissipation of the reality distortion field being fueled by a certain generation of techies' determination to heat their own backyards by burning the money that fell into their laps during previous tech bubble. But still.)
>And finally, capitalism: If it's really most economically efficient for tech to hyper-concentrate in silicon valley, then fighting that will probably produce a whole lot of deadweight loss. If it isn't, then market forces will guide the situation toward a natural resolution.
Capitalism trends toward more efficient usage of resources. But it doesn't care about humans and their quality of life. It works with that (people spend resources on their healthcare for themselves and their families), but it's perfectly "efficient" for some people to stay impoverished.
The government is a great entity to cover this gap. And Brookings' proposal isn't so bad: fixed 10-year duration, cities chosen by RFP instead of by politicians, and funds focusing on R&D instead of "make money now" projects. Most R&D moves as slowly as the government, so it's not a bad target.
It's a singular failure of Silicon Valley that so many tech jobs still need to be done in person. All physical infrastructure is going to need a contingent of warm bodies onsite (or at least on-call locally), but there's no reason in 2020 that the vast majority of tech positions can't be remote.
I’ve attempted the same thing remote.
Unfortunately, there is nothing more creative / better than having those in person sessions. I hope one day VR can replace this, but today there just isn’t anything there.
I should note, we are an internal research and consulting group inside a large corporation. So it is specialized, arguably most full-stack jobs can be done remote.
My personal suggestion is to build teams in cities (5 people per team). These teams can be setup in a small office and maybe you get 3-4 teams per office. That’s how my group is currently setup and it works fairly well. The only issue is ensuring facilities are decent and backfilling team members because it can be a challenge to backfill and often attrition snowballs
The downside is that, absent serious discipline, that proximity also lends itself to a preference for tribal knowledge vs proper documentation.
Even if they could be done remotely, people still want to live in cities for lots of good reasons - reasons that are centuries old.
Today, a large number of people who live in cities work without a common central office. This goes beyond tech workers to include lawyers, accountants, designers, in-home businesses like child care, and trades conducted strictly at client sites like landscapers and handymen.
The density of cities supports those sorts of work arrangements, and other things that a significant number of people value, like museums, libraries, parks, etc.
As a social technology, cities have demonstrated a tremendous amount of value per unit of investment, which makes them a natural target for investment.
I often tell my anecdotal story about working for a valley company who was 'forced' to hire some midwesterners and there was a serious bias towards valley hires for jobs that really could be done elsewhere. TL;DR Valley company thought tech support HAD to be in the valley / required some high spec resumes ... it very much did not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21746219
I do wonder if those POVs towards the existing tech centers would make any government incentives irrelevant.
Silicon Valley's culture is hard to replicate, and by culture its just the consolidation of venture capital firms and the aspirations of liquid wealthy people who want to play angel investor themselves. Would newly wealthy tech aficionados in the midwest really stay in opioid land with its extremes of temperatures, or would they just get the condo in south beach Miami and disappear?
Having one local Warren Buffett means only insurance and real estate plays get funded, as an example. Having only a couple Warren Buffetts means you get some people that "only invest in what they know" and aren't willing to learn anything.
You really need a market of venture capital, run by people that got rich there. So pumping an area with federal funding is a much better step than just slapping a "Silicon" label on the nearest geographic formation.
How can you "drag jobs" out? Government ordered migrations of people? Massive subsidies?
As for tax revenue, Amazon pays about $200M total in annual US state taxes, and negative federal tax in 2018. There's no way this would have ended up a profitable deal for NY.
Amazon asked for large tax breaks for their offices. Empirical economics research is at best mixed on whether or not those tax breaks are a good choice from the standpoint of growth and overall tax receipts. AOC and other representatives said they were opposed to those tax breaks, not that Amazon couldn't open an office.