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Comment by madballster | Hacker News Reader

I have always wondered if the 'big productive urban center' (like London, or Paris, or Warsaw) is a boon or a curse for the 300 miles around it. Does it soak up young talent and capital from the surrounding areas, leaving the latter behind and exposed to deindustrialization, demographic problems and poverty? Or - through network effects in science, technology and productivity, does the metropolis create excess wealth that indirectly finds its way back into the rural areas, negating negative effects of the pull-effect? What are some good books on this topic?

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It’s a curse even for the urban center itself. How many middle class people who grew up in London (or San Francisco or New York City) can afford to buy a house and raise their kids there?

Mid-sized cities with stable local industries are much better for the average person. We have no tech, banking, etc., in Annapolis where I live. We have the Navy, farming, and tourism. The city is full of people who grew up here. Low level retail jobs are staffed by teenagers, not immigrants or some other underclass. Housing is affordable. Similarly in adds Moines Iowa. The unemployment rate is 2.7%. The average house price is less than 4x the median household income, compared to over 10x in San Francisco.

We could fix the housing price problem pretty quickly, if we wanted to.

How easily could it be, considering that “large productive cities” all over the world—in diverse political and cultural contexts—are suffering from this same problem?

They suffer from it to different extents. We have in fact a pretty clear idea of what the problem is: artificially constricted supply.

Surly demand (and lots of wealth sloshing around for the top 10%) is part of the problem too. The DC/NOVA area had pretty reasonable housing prices 20-30 years ago. It seems like they’ve been building housing pretty aggressively in that area. But prices used to be capped by what a GS-scale worker could afford. Now those same folks are competing with Google engineers and kids of rich foreigners.

You could read an Yglesias post, or 1,000, talking about how effectively DC is confronting artificial housing scarcity.

I subscribe to his substack. As far as I know, Virginia is allowing lots of housing development.

So is Illinois. Not so much Oak Park.

I've been contemplating the idea that over the 20th century, human civilization's essential constraints that defined our working environment and dictated essentially everything we were capable has changed. The human species in fundamentally in a new context, one which we collectively have no experience, and due to the new scale of our civilization and the new communications capabilities within that scale - we're flying blind in a spaceship filled with dangerous weapons and personalities all far too immature for this journey. We're about to hit the Fermi Paradox Wall at damning full speed.

For the immediate area it looks great, the counties surrounding London are generally the wealthier parts of the country. It's the regions further away that can't link-in to a megacity that suffer, they get the same brain-drain without tapping into the wealth generated.

300 miles is possibly excessive: https://www.mapdevelopers.com/draw-circle-tool.php?circles=%...

Based on the population of French people, London is the 6th biggest French city.

If anything, 300 miles may be a bit small.

It is, but you try getting a decent pain au chocolat aux amandes here ...

People who work in the city may live outside the city, so I think the way the city is planned (or not planned) would make a difference. So you might look for books on urban planning.

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