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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

> in most of the cases you are priced out of property ownership

This is only true for a selection of coastal cities. The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.

The narrative you are parroting that this is because of corporations is another distraction designed to keep people from actually addressing housing issues with large legal reforms crushing NIMBYism.

Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.

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>The property ownership ladder is still available all over the US to the lower middle class and up.

It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.

>Take as much money as you want from Google and Apple, it won’t change the fact that there are only enough houses in the Bay Area for about half of the people that live there.

There's enough space in the U.S. to build new housing. Like nice 2000+ sqft houses with lots, owned by the people living there. If only a huge chunk of the economy wasn't tied to a few megacorporations located in a handful of cities. So instead, we keep fighting for a right to live in a rented 500sqft box with barely enough space to sleep.

I think you are confusing cause and effect. Cities like SF aren't crowded because megacorporations are located there, but rather megacorporations are located there because they are crowded. SF, NYC, Paris, and London are cities that people have moved to for well over a century, because they were excited to live in places with so much culture, shopping, and restaurants. This has always meant that housing in these cities is much more expensive than elsewhere. People have tried to start tech centers elsewhere, which generally fail (In the 1990s the big new thing was the so called "Silicon Prairie" in the Midwest, but that didn't really take off). Some new centers, like Austin, TX do seem to be taking off, but that's because Austin is an exciting city.

Silicon Valley was built in the valley because that was cheap available land that was mostly empty but still accessible to a major coastal port. It only became the crowded modern environment after the corporations were built there and became successful. San Francisco became big because it was a major shipping port.

Not that long ago it was Detroit, Buffalo, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Princeton, Pittsburgh, Trenton, and more than I can count that were the bustling megalopolis' of America where you went to if you wanted engineering talent or culture for that matter.

I can't speak for the others, but why do you think Dallas and Houston are moribund? Based on the last decade of population growth, their respective metro areas certainly seem to be doing well for themselves.

The Valley and SF are different, despite being near each other. The Valley, as you say, started as a chip manufacturing hub and has transitioned over to software and services now that manufacturing mostly gone to Asia. SF is different. While it indeed started (as did NYC) as a shipping port, it has more recent history as a center of creative workers such as authors and artists. The reason that many Internet companies are located now in SF rather than the valley is that they (and the workers they want to attract) want to suggest that their work is cool and creative like that of authors and artists. Of course, an unfortunate side effect of this is making the city even more expensive and displacing the creative people that made the city "cool" to start with.

You are very misinformed.

Austin is not "new". It was at competition with Silicon Valley and used to be referred to as Silicon Hill. A lot of hardware manufacturing happened in Texas. At some point, between favorable business laws and Google starting large scale recruiting events it sucked a lot of the talent out of places like Texas.

So your statement is more accurately framed as, "Austin is finally recovering as a tech hub."

While businesses these days may move to SV because of the large population and other businesses, that was not the case in the beginning.

I think the modern attraction of Austin has a bit more to do with its reputation as a "cool" city with its music scene than its history of chip manufacturing.

It’s funny how all of people crowding in will price out the entire crowd that makes it cool.

> It is available outside the coastal cities if you have a coastal city salary. That kind of defeats the purpose.

This is false, why would you think this? My youngest sister makes $70k and bought a 3br/2ba house with a 2 car garage for $215k that’s 20 mins from where she works. That is in just a random medium city in the Midwest.

I have another friend who works in San Antonio. Got his house for $300k and makes $90k as a SWE.

Housing is seriously just an isolated problem in particular hot spots. Unless you need to be there, get the fuck out. The governments are broken.

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