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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

> Hoberman makes clear one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: “cheap rents.”

I keep seeing this in various places. The rise of the "College Music" scene in Athens, Georgia during the 80's has also been in part attributed to the cheap rent in the student ghettos (typical of many college towns).

Growing up in Kansas City, the neighborhoods around the Kansas City Art Institute were also low-rent. Child (impressionable) me remembers walking through the neighborhood at night, let by my mom, for the free Friday night film ("Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", "Fantastic Planet" to name a few I recall). There was a large chicken leg sculpture, perhaps 8' tall in one yard that always spooked me to walk past. Some kind of sculpture of broken bits of mirror and glass made another small lot look like an alien set from "Star Trek"....

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It turns out that when it's more affordable to live, more people will have things to live for and focus on beyond just grinding to pay rent and scrounging dollars to buy food.

We've collectively destroyed this concept for the next generation of young people and we need to desperately course correct.

> We've collectively destroyed this concept for the next generation of young people and we need to desperately course correct.

Sorry, turns out it's economically way more important for the richest two dozen people in the world to turn all of our collective resources into computer programs that will tell them how special and cool and inventive and totally not "the man" they are. Anything that gets in the way of that must be destroyed.

It was actually just everyday people who chose to destroy the concept of cheap housing, not "the richest two dozen people in the world". By limiting supply in the name of neighborhood character, boomer environmentalism, and property values.

No, it was the banks that held the mortgages, and the builders and real estate agents who make the most on rising prices. You can't buy a house without selling the one you live in... without leverage!

I don't know what kind of backwards logic that is. Banks help first time homebuyers purchase their house. Builders build houses and add supply that helps meet demand (everyone needs a place to live). Real estate agents help navigate the process for people who are unfamiliar with all the different steps.

There are bad actors in all of these (banks caused the financial crisis and agents are probably paid more than they're worth for $1M+ houses in CA), but the biggest root cause that's missing from your comment is NIMBYs blocking new development almost everywhere.

Not seeing "NIMBYism" in Nebraska.

Instead I am seeing developers who would rather build an upper-middle class neighborhood, not a starter home one, because they can get a much larger profit for only a little more effort/material-cost.

I suppose when they are finally unable to sell them they'll start addressing starter homes. I have no idea who could still be buying all of these though. (Perhaps people leaving CA like I did after retiring — they're not going to like the property tax rate though.)

NE seems relatively affordable?

Expecting starter homes to be a category of real estate that is newly built seems naive. Starter homes are some combination of older, smaller, bad location which makes them more affordable. Why wouldn't real estate developers satisfy the demand at the high end before moving down market? Seems like the easiest way to turn a profit to me. Rational actors etc

I’m still not clear that this actually a problem. If they overbuild more expensive housing, isn’t the inevitable result that they’ll have to eventually undersell it? There’s only so many wealthy persons, and no matter how fancy the house is I only have so much money to spend.

So in the long run, I’d expect that developers are really funneling money into the lower class by overbuilding upper class housing, when they eat the losses on their poor planning.

I’m also fairly positive a 30-year old upper middle class home makes for a fairly good starter home

Nope. Unlike the wealthy, the people who need the cheaper housing do not have the time or money to spend lobbying for their own interests. The wealthy are taking all of our resources[1] and spending them[2] to turn our water & energy into computer programs that will steal and extract even more wealth from the people who actually create things.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/private-investment-in-art...

Who shows up to the public comment meetings to register their complaints about new housing being built? Who empowered those meetings to exist in the first place? Who created the laws about needing an environmental review for a building being built in the middle of an existing city?

It was everyday people. Not the 1%.

There are lots and lots of nice cheap housing in small towns. Example, when all my coworkers were fighting over insanely overpriced condos and apartments in San Fran, I bought a 1300 sq ft house outside of Tracy for less than $200k (1/3 of rent in the city)

Get out of the cities...

Great, now most people can spend their lives driving. I see so many people on their phones on the road, and I'm sure that part of it is that they don't want to be commuting as much as they have to.

Not to mention, it's more inefficient to sprawl.

1/3 of the staff where I work are remote and it's a super conservative run factory. Most live within 20 minutes of the site.

Customer support, sales, accounting, HR, IT, etc., all don't need to go into the office most of the time. Why force them? It also opens up the job market to a larger pool, cuts health care and child care cost, insurance, etc.

As it should be. All I'd do is occasionally try to get staff onsite or offsite for team building or when it's crunch time. Most of the time, work can be done remote - it just dehumanizes things a bit. Some on/off site team building can mostly bridge the gap.

> Get out of the cities...

This is a terrible public policy if it's the plan. And while I think selfishly it might be better for individuals if they did, I don't think it's actually helping anyone. Cities used to be a place where you made a life for yourself and could earn more and innovate more than you could in rural/suburban areas. Now it's a luxury to live in one and that doesn't bode well for the future of the country.

But that was before tech became so common.

You don't need to live in the city to earn more and innovate.

Warren Buffet didn't move to Wall Street and he did ok...

Your argument seems to be, "That might be better, but it would mean change, and that's bad!"

Better for individuals in the short term but worse for society as a whole.

Cities have always been the most expensive option... they are meat grinders for careers. There's plenty of jobs but it is very diffcult to get ahead. Always has been that way.

I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.

I don’t think it has always been that way, actually. But I don’t have hard data.

I promise you this is only a short term solution that will eventually ruin the small towns and their youth as well.

Canada is seeing that right now where so many people from big cities flooded small towns. All that has happened is something to the tune of 200% appreciation in small housing prices over the last decade with almost no appreciation in wages. It's crushed housing for the smaller towns and the individuals that lived there. It's truly just a kick the can down the road approach.

That’s just money supply increase cascading through different markets. Closest to money printer gets hit first, it goes out from there.

Your assertion seems intuitively correct, but I can't say I've seen any studies that explore the idea.

I think this is mainstream Austrian school thinking. They seem ideologically opposed to the kinds of studies that the branches that pretend to be a science do, though. I Am Not an Economist, though, open to being better informed by those more Austrian than myself.

This discussion is in the context of how creative scenes like those of 60s NYC develop.

We were discussing "one crucial factor in the city’s creative energy: cheap rents".

Apparently we now need to discuss another crucial factor notably absent in small towns: "density of and proximity to other creative types"

Density has to be even higher today to reach the same quantity of interactions as the past, given how many in the city will sit in their apartment and be online instead of outside.

Real estate and rent, just like bitcoin, designer fashion, "art work", and watches. Unfortunately, you need somewhere to live. If it's more profitable to hold empty real estate than or less dense/improved property waiting for it to go up then that's what will happen.

If people can effectively speculate on something in a leveraged high liquidity environment, they will, and prices will go up. Look at the terrifyingly overbuilt real estate in China with pricing comparable to NYC or London and huge vacancy rates.

I always believed in that narrative but nowadays I do think there's some selection bias at work- no one mentions all the other places that have some creative people that were never the birthing ground for a cultural movement.

Because after a certain point I realized- lots of places are cheap (sure slightly less now) but not everywhere is going to produce some kind of large scale cultural movement.

The one that a lot of people seem to know is Detroit- for the last 20 years everyone has been saying wow, lots of artists, wow, you can buy a house for $10 or whatever, but that hasn't been enough.

Sadly a part of me believes that maybe physically localized culture isn't a thing anymore with the internet. Being able to make beats / tiktoks anywhere is too much of a counter-force to people being in the same physical space, no matter how much people seem to love the idea- and this is the true boring reason why this doesn't happen anymore, not that *blame the boomers* rent has gone up.

I think for localized culture to develop it needs to be exclusive in addition to the need for it to be cheap for people to focus on cultural rather than economic output.

Outsiders hate being excluded though so the barriers all get knocked down. In face our modern social norm considers any kind of exclusion a moral failure, even excluding people who dislike the social norms. Maybe this results in a more efficient (perhaps even more pleasant) society but the cost is unique local culture.

I think it's more about Capitalism. It took about 6 weeks for grunge to make it from a Seattle basement to a Paris catwalk, and that was three decades ago.

If it might make money, it'll get amplified.

Nirvana debuted in 1988 and it wasn't until 1991 that they hit it big and brought grunge to the larger music world outside of the region.

We were drowning in crappy corporate driven pop prior to that for years (with bright spots like techno, industrial, etc.)

idk, I think cultural elitism is alive and well.... no matter which area of culture you're in. If anything "curator" culture is making it worse, everything needs to be categorized, rated and put on tier lists.

Shades of The Tipping Point. You can't replicate it because a slightly different melting pot is at the root of every cultural explosion.

(But I reckon cheap rent, leisure time and a laissez faire attitude to drugs are almost always in the mix).

I think you need a place with cheap rents that is within striking distance of places with very expensive rents. Artists can afford the former, but their customers (literal art buyers, or culture vultures of various other kinds, media execs, journalists, etc) are located in the latter.

The counterpoint is in the GP post though- Athens, Georgia. It's sort of close to Atlanta, I guess?

Athens GA is a big college town though. The dynamics and lifecycles are different.

Agreed that being two hours from Atlanta is too far for high relevance.

Right. Necessary, but not sufficient.

San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out in the 1990s (first slowly, then much more quickly -- it's all long gone now. Apologies to anyone who would like to believe otherwise :).

This is also true of New York, on approximately the same timeline.

In the early 2000s, Austin and Portland tried to take up the creative mantle, with some success. Both are struggling to maintain it now, for the same reasons but on a slower timeline.

Cheap rents are a prerequisite, but there are other sparks required for a place to catch fire.

I don't know of any US cities that are doing anything interesting today. Not at the scale of SF and NYC certainly, but also not even at the scale of 20ya Portland and Austin.

I think part of the issue is that rent is not adequately cheap in any US cities now that have critical mass plus tolerable living conditions (climate, economy, politics). This worries me.

It seems relevant that now it's extremely accessible for US people to move abroad to another country. It feels like Mexico City, Costa Rica, Bali, Thailand, etc. have taken up some of the slack from Austin and Portland.

Edit: More specifically in terms of cost of living anyways.

Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chattanooga, the (far) suburbs of Nashville...

Pittsburgh was on that list.

Then we got Uber and Google, and our nationally-cheap housing prices have jumped up closer to the norm - which is too high for the bottom half of earnings population.

I was close to moving to Pitt a while back and was stunned when the house I was looking at doubled in price in less than 6 months...

Indianapolis has been going through the same thing (we are getting some of the overflow from the housing crunch in Nashville, etc.)

I snagged a house at a decent price last year after looking for over a decade.

I wonder if the “out of steam” phenomenon is due to just aging out without sufficient replacement rates of equally creative people. E.g. 70s SF had a lot of 20-30 year old hippie boomers. By the 90s many had cut their hair and started having kids and probably a lack of desire to drop acid in the park in their 40s and 50s.

Wait until you read about how the CIA funded artists and other counter culture icons in the 60s. Yeah winners were artificially chosen. All in the name of convincing the youth of europe to follow western artists and culture vs slipping into communism with its supposed lack of culture.

There was a connection between deindustrialization in American cities (and the crappy property market in the 80s) and the music and arts scenes in the 80s and 90s. It was relatively cheap and easy to set up studios, galleries, music venues, or just squat in empty industrial buildings. Property owners were happy to have someone to keep the lights on and keep the bums out. Stages and makeshift bars were built out of scraps, and bands were booked, and people came. Music scenes used to require physical spaces (and arguably still do) to breathe and take shape.

I've watched interviews in which veteran musicians from one city in Texas describe how things developed in the 80s - it was all made possible by rock bottom rents and tons of empty warehouse space. I think the situation was similar across much of the US. Space was cheap enough to allow for low-profit activities and businesses to take root. The stakes were very low compared to today.

An analogous situation emerged in other places (in part for different reasons) such as the former East Berlin. I would guess similar circumstances also emerged in the UK around the same time - perhaps someone here can confirm.

Mark Fisher was arguing the point about cheap rent ages ago in 'The Slow Cancellation of the Future'. As an example, he used London squats in the 70s enabling punk rock.

Barry Miles book "London Calling" about the evolution of london counter culture post-war also cites this with all the artists living in squats

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