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> the experience for everyone becomes worse in a multitude of ways.

your analogy requires the assumption that the stadium is already "at capacity" for the maximum comfortable number of seats

99% of American municipalities are nowhere even close to this capacity.

Taylor Swift (and other super stars) don't play shows in 99% of American municipalities.

Companies want top talent for their workforce. They naturally will set up shop where they have easiest access to this talent (hence why you get industry hubs in different locales). The companies move to the spots for workers, and the works move to those spots for the jobs.

Yep, and these changes take place for reasons. For example, California and the Bay area have had 40 years of opportunity to make it easier to build, and ample people willing to pay.

There's an alternative world where SF and San Jose look like Singapore or Hong Kong, and policy is one of the big differences

Even worse, a lot of municipalities are losing population. But no-one wants to drop everything in their lives and move to a dying city, specially not high intelligence individuals who tend to gather causing home prices to skyrocket. Worse, those individuals tend not to buy into the types of housing typically seen by large developers building "relief" housing.

Analogies are always bad, but in this case, I would say that if I wanted to walk to see Taylor Swift within 15 minutes, then most municipalities are at this capacity.

Nice analogy. So it seems the solution would be to create more Taylor Swifts then, by investing in music schools and programs, talent shows, scouting, etc., where the analogous thing would be to create more "nice places to live" with all the desirable attributes like walkability, jobs, public transport, etc. It's a tall order since land and climate are the ultimate scarce resources, but there are probably some underutilized spots that could support it. The rest would also be difficult due to property rights.

> where the analogous thing would be to create more "nice places to live" with all the desirable attributes like walkability, jobs, public transport, etc. It's a tall order since land and climate are the ultimate scarce resources

We actually ban nice places to live with walkability in the vast majority of the country. Our urban planning in the US been entirely focused on keeping out mixed uses, keeping out dense housing, the things that enable public transport to function at all.

Land and climate are much easier to manage if we were to simple legalize density and mixed uses. We are reaping decades of bad planning for car-centric lives, without planning ahead for future generations and their ability to find a home.

MUD of commercial/residential are popping up all over in suburban Maryland. I'm all for it - it's both pretty high density for burbs (townhomes/rowhomes), and local to shops and parks. The only thing that is really missing is bike lanes and better train transit. Some of it is nearby transit, but we need more transit faster to track developments.

>...where the analogous thing would be to create more "nice places to live" with all the desirable attributes like walkability, jobs, public transport, etc. It's a tall order since land and climate are the ultimate scarce resources, but there are probably some underutilized spots that could support it.

Absolutely. And in fact there are lots of places that could support such things. In the US we call them "small towns" and "rural areas" and "the rust belt."

Areas where a lack of good jobs (as manufacturing left and farming became much less human intensive) drove folks to where decent jobs are (were?) more available.

Which drove up the costs of housing and, well, pretty much everything else, in those places.

However, with the technological changes we've seen over the past eighty years or so (Interstate highways, compute/semiconductor industries, ubiquitous networking, etc., etc., etc.), revitalizing those areas that have been left behind could boost both local economies as well as broader ones.

However, ALEC[0] and its corporate backers have sabotaged efforts to do so in pursuit of destroying competition and maximizing rent seeking. a lack of infrastructure maintenance is part and parcel of that -- as a lack of economic activity reduces the amount of tax revenue available for necessary infrastructure repairs and investments.

If companies could get symmetric, multi-gb internet, decent office space with decent road and rail connectivity to/from regional hubs in small towns and rural areas, more people would move in, prompting more housing development, more local businesses, more tax revenue, better infrastructure, etc., etc., etc.

This type of investment could have instant positive economic effects in poorer areas, and longer term (coupled with more housing), reduce the insane housing prices you see in NYC (median apartment rent in Manhattan is ~$4500[1]), SF, Boston, etc.

Unfortunately, statehouses appear to be fully captured by big corporations wanting to maintain their rents by stamping out any competition, the economies of those states be damned.

Sadly, the above can't happen unless the folks in those areas stop voting (in municipal/state elections) for the folks who are supporting policies designed to maintain the penury endured in those places.

There are so many good reasons to reinvigorate these areas, but we keep electing folks that won't bite the hand that holds their leash.

[0] https://alec.org/

[1] https://www.brickunderground.com/rent/nyc-manhattan-brooklyn...

Edit: Added the missing links.

You cannot do that. Taylor Swift is what she is not because she it better at music, dancing, or looking sexy, or sleeping with the record label executives (I don't know anything about her: the above list are the common things done to get positions like her, but not necessarily what she has done). What Taylor Swift is that is special is that nearly everybody knows about her (I'm a rare exception) - you can talk about her to strangers and have something in common because you know her music.

If you want great live music you can find that in a 1 in 10 bars around the country. (less if you want original music instead of covers). Likewise if you want to watch a dancer, though perhaps a different venue. If you want anyone sexy you can see sex better at a local strip joint. If you want to sleep with someone you can pick someone up in any bar (you probably couldn't sleep with Tayler Swift even if she was the type looking for a one night stand). However the shared experience of being a Tayler Swift fan is not something you can find if you stick to the local scenes. That national/international shared experience can only belong to a few people at any one time and no amount of schools, talent shows, scouting... can change that.

It may not be a perfect analogy but I disagree that it's completely invalid. Use some imagination to make it work, e.g. with institutional support instead of having just local acts now there is Taylor, and Beyonce, and a few dozen other famous musicians.

Not everyone can live in San Francisco, but there exist other equivalent "nice places" of which there are too few.

That is the point: There is only one San Francisco. If you insist on living there you will have to pay the price. If you can move across the bay you can get a different price - is this the entire bay you could move across from or is the north/south side better? Or maybe you can move to a suburb of Omaha there are some nice ones, but most of us couldn't even name one (most of us wouldn't even think of Omaha if asked to list world cities)

Likewise if you need a famous musician there isn't room for everyone to know 10,000 different musicians. However if you can accept any musician there are 10,000 great ones to choose from.

But there's tons of places where the cost of housing is going up. If everybody was uprooting from Philadelphia to go to NYC then only NYC's prices would go up.

It seems to me that we already have multiple Taylor Swifts so having even more shouldn't be a problem. For many people, the school system is the reason why they own the house they do.

In my experience, many of the schools self-report having pretty bad math/reading comprehension amongst their students. I'm not picking a house based on it being "the best" or the one "I hear about the most". I picked it based on it actually having good outcomes. If other districts had that too I would've considered theirs.

I concluded long ago that the only solution to unaffordable housing is geographic diversification. You can only cram so many people into one city before costs spiral for a myriad of reasons. The root of today's housing unaffordability is geographic consolidation of opportunity into a handful of places.

There's a ton of affordable housing outside the top ten cities.

For the most expensive places I'd advise young people to consider going there temporarily to get your career started, but don't stay unless you are making serious money -- enough to offset real estate costs. E.g. for the Bay Area I'd say if you're not making over $350k/year by age 30 you should leave.

Nearly every city in the world has plenty of room for more. Most cities in the US dedicate more than half of their space to just cars, a great transit system could nearly double the density of the city while increasing the quality of life. Even in cities with good transit, they all have a lot of space dedicated to cars for people who don't find transit good enough (most of that isn't about snobs not wanting to mix with poor people, it is quality of service)

In many places though it's more like most of the stadium is made up of various levels VIP booths. So one of the options is to replace those VIP booths with more dense traditional stadium seating. Only it's not enough to convince the ticket holders of one VIP booth to sell their tickets so more dense options can be sold, for some reason all of the VIP booths around that one also have to agree, and they're not so excited that plebeians might get to sit in dense seats right next to their pristine VIP booth to watch the show.

The real problem driving up prices, both in housing and concerts, is scalpers. They create artificial scarcity. If you want to fix these sort of problems, you have to do something about scalpers.

What adding a new showing?

Or taking a smaller venue and expanding that?

There is nothing to solve; this is the best overall outcome.

> You can add more seats (this stadium happens to be extremely modular) but the experience for everyone becomes worse in a multitude of ways.

To keep your analogy... well, analogous, this is also a stadium where you have to buy tickets in groups of at minimum four seats, with generous buffer zones of at least two seats between each group, specifically to cater to a handful of extremely vocal Swifties who couldn't bear to sit next to a stranger in their life. We could easily double the capacity of the stadium without impacting anyone's experience.

Please continue the analogy while including Ticketmaster.