[iso1337]

NIH should build more institutes in cheaper areas (eg not NoVa). It’s a win win since it will help revitalize poorer areas of America and save on costs.

It will also tilt more senators/congresspeople to vote for NIH funding, similar to military base funding

[uncletaco]

I work for a national lab and in my experience it will take a lot for someone to give up a place like the Eastbay for East Tennessee. If the national lab were near Nashville that might be different. Los Alamos has to give software developers a sizeable bonus each year just to keep them from flying to greener pasteurs in a less remote location. I know I left partly because my wife had such a hard time finding work and the remoteness made the area too expensive for what we were getting out of it socially and careerwise.

[pnpnp]

I've thought about this a lot, so thanks for getting the neurons firing again. In my case, I worked for some agencies and had an absolute blast. In this phase of my life, I'm living somewhere else & would fight tooth and nail to stay here.

I wonder if it would be worth it from a talent perspective to create more, larger, and strategically placed SCIFs (Sensitive compartmented information facility) around the country so that there was less of a physical requirement for information workers to commute every day.

Some of the jobs I worked were a blast with really great and interesting people. I do miss it, but would never move back to the physical locations required.

[robwwilliams]

ORNL region is gorgeous and there are plenty of jobs and relatively inexpensive housing.

[petsfed]

Its gorgeous for some. My own experiences in the Ozarks made it a non-starter for me. Its hard to calculate the exact impact it had on me, but I do wonder if I would've worked harder in grad school if I wasn't actively dreading actually getting the most prestigious research positions in my field (I was studying material science of optical and electronic materials at the time).

Granted, a lot of academia is repeating "just keep going, the end is in sight" until you die, but it is frustrating that it has to be that way.

[Retric]

Military personnel move where you tell them, manufacturing jobs can train people up just about anywhere, but research isn’t so simple.

It’s a real chicken and egg problem around local talent. Bethesda/Rockville/Baltimore has several different organizations doing medical research which makes the attractive locations for researchers to live. Locate in say Boise Idaho and positions are open for longer and you will need to compromise more in terms of talent.

On top of this there’s a huge pool of government contractors which again provides significant advantages.

[michaelt]

Los Alamos National Lab is a 12,700 person [1] government research facility in a town of 13,200 population [2]. Median household income $98k, highest millionaire concentration of any US city, highest percentage of people with doctorate degrees in the nation. Nearest IKEA store? 500 miles away.

A government lab can get scientists to relocate their families to the middle of nowhere. All it takes is a budget of $3.92 billion or $300k per job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos_National_Laboratory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Alamos,_New_Mexico

[kkylin]

By all accounts it's very hard for grad students and postdocs at LANL (much less locals) to find affordable short-term housing near LANL due to (1) the very small amount of housing available and (2) enough people leaving the lab but continuing to live there while taking up remote work in tech. This is despite LANL paying relatively well (as you noted) to try to keep talent from moving into other industries (tech, finance).

Not to say that government investment can't make people move, but it creates problems too, not least for locals.

Source: mainly anecdotal, from talking to people at LANL at various career stages on a recent visit.

[tomrod]

Seems like this would be addressable by the government making affordable living facilities.

[ecshafer]

That sounds like an issue with local zoning, otherwise the market would fix that issue.

[jfoutz]

I haven't been there in a while, but last I recall, they sort of ran out of land. It's very hilly, the airport basically ends at a cliff. A lot of the land is government controlled and fenced off to provide buffer for secure areas.

A lot of land around that is national park/BLM land, and not accessible. So you've got like, white rock, espanola or Santa Fe to commute in from. I did know a guy who had a light plane and would commute from the east side of Albuquerque to Los alamos by plane.

So, sort of like local zoning, but more like DC. an act of congress to free up some of that land, not as straightforward as visiting some city council meetings.

[michaelt]

Taking a look at some randomly selected roads in Google Street View [1], it looks like it's been built at extremely low density, by most standards.

I mean, if you've building a single-storey home, then putting a double garage on the side, then a gap between properties two cars wide, plus a driveway with parking for two cars, then on-road parking for 3 more cars? Of course you're going to run out of land fast.

I've no idea whether it's a zoning issue, though.

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/ZCtDFNsaoe5ePsp16 https://goo.gl/maps/tTRb7vzw5mVHskHHA etc

[LeanderK]

why not increase density? it looks like single family home zoning. A denser core would surely be possible

[dlivingston]

Los Alamos is on a mesa, with cliffs on one side and Jemez mountains on the other.

There were some local controversies related to zoning when I was there (namely, commercial real estate), but the issue is much broader and long-standing.

I used to work for a PI who, during his internship days in the ~1980s, lived in a tent in the mountains the whole summer (he was a delightfully quirky person though).

[Retric]

Los Alamos got kickstarted in WWII when the government literally got to tell physicists where to go and it became a major hub of such research.

That might work if the NIH wanted to spend 50% of it’s budget in one location, but their proposal was to spread across not just one second tier city but dozens of such locations.

[tomjakubowski]

Were Manhattan project scientists really ordered around like that? Was anyone working at Los Alamos against their will?

[Retric]

I don’t know.

The scientists apparently had some wiggle room: An offer was made to the Princeton team to be redeployed there. "Like a bunch of professional soldiers," Wilson later recalled, "we signed up, en masse, to go to Los Alamos.”

But the subtext was there was a draft going on and most of them would be eligible unless they were working on such a critical project.

[pnpnp]

Is that budget salary-only? They have some mighty expensive material requirements for some of their projects.

[michaelt]

No, that's the budget for everything - salaries, equipment, grants given to outside bodies, and so on.

I mention it merely because, although LANL demonstrates the state can create pockets of prosperity in poorer places by moving science jobs, we should not imagine that it's particularly cheap.

The LANL example also doesn't show economic success spreading out from the lab, in the way Silicon Valley is sometimes seen as spreading out from defence research and Stanford University. Of course, LANL is deliberately geographically isolated, and you wouldn't expect startup spin-outs from a top secret nuclear research lab.

[rflrob]

I think the biomedical academic job market is tight enough that you could fairly easily attract a strong class of researchers to nearly any second tier city. Maybe not the best of the best of the best (at first), but there’s enough bright people doing 6+ year post docs that you’ll recruit junior faculty in a flash.

Credentials: did my PhD and postdoc at R1 institutions, before going to greener pastures in industry.

[robwwilliams]

There is no best-of-the-best at this stage. Only those who seem hyper bright. Success in biomedical research is much more about other factors—persistence and inquisitiveness being two that are crucial.

[selimthegrim]

That’s interesting, because Tulane seems to be having a lot of trouble with this.

[petsfed]

Boise (and elsewhere in Idaho) is thriving when it comes to materials research and agricultural research, because of the combined influence of Micron and Simplot. So its ultimately a question of what kind of industry you want to talk about.

But the issue still remains: if your industry relies on your workforce moving every 5 years or so, and does not itself involve travel, then you have a structural problem.

[robwwilliams]

Disagree. We have FedEx and Zoom now. My own intimate research community is now 8+ time zones—16 hours if you count where our RNA samples are sequenced.

[tomjakubowski]

How often are you grabbing a coffee or lunch (over Zoom) with randomish subsets of that community?

[robwwilliams]

Bravo for this start at unionizing. Important step forward—-finally.

I made $13,500 as a postdoc at Yale (New Haven CT) from 1983 to 1985. $75/month went back to Yale for family health. Even the rent was $525/month.

That scales to roughly $38,070 per year today. And my pay as a grad student at UC Davis was $325/month for my last three years. No taxes—whoopee. Talk about delayed gratification.

Agreed: NIEHS is in North Carolina. NIA is in Baltimore. More of this please. And yes, this does engender strong local and state support. ORNL in Tennessee is a case in point.

East Tennessee has Oak Ridge National Labs and the region around Knoxville is gorgeous. So why not move the National Eye Institute (NEI) and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) there ;-) in this Zoom day-and-age.

[alistairSH]

NIH isn't in NoVA. It's across the river in Bethesda, MD.

The problem with opening remote locations is attracting people. Montgomery County, MD (where Bethesda is located) and the broader DC metro region has lots of biotech, medical, and software opportunities.

[ghaff]

And it's an even bigger issue once professional specialists have partners and families. Even elite schools in relatively remote from major population center areas have long had some trouble attracting faculty whose partners may well be inevitably underemployed if they move to the small town/city where the school is.

[dekhn]

this is called "the two body problem" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem_(career) in reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-body_problem and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem

[ghaff]

I didn't know it had a name. But having been associated with both Dartmouth and Cornell, I've definitely heard complaints about the issue.

[robwwilliams]

Disagree again. Here are some towns and smaller cities that more than rival DC.

Ann Arbor, Davis, Durham, Urbana, Princeton, New Haven, Memphis, Madison, Portland, Eugene, Nashville, Kansas City…

[svnt]

The data for much of this list of cities has changed substantially in the past two to three years. Many of these are now unaffordable for someone on $45k/year, and they do not have the employment robustness of the larger metros.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

But the traffic is a nightmare (I-270 is the Tenth Circle of Hell).

Like most high-density commute areas, homes close to work are pricey, so people have to live in the boondocks, and commute.

I know people that live in Frederick, and commute to DC.

Of course, Frederick has Ft. Detrick. That's a fun place. I think it was the model for the biolab in The Stand.

[alistairSH]

so people have to live in the boondocks

Homes are pricey, no question. But, DC is one of the more affordable top-tier cities in the US. Especially if your work is in the suburbs.

For software people, you can buy a reasonable[1] TH in Reston for around $600k and have a reasonable commute to most of the NoVA tech corridor. Or Metro downtown. Or ride your bike to many employment centers. Or, if you're really lucky, you can walk to quite a few employers in Reston (Google, MS, Ellucian, Walmart Labs, various three-letter agency IT offices, etc).

1 - mid-70s build, 3-bed, 2.5 bath, 1500-1800sqft, in a good school district and with walk/bike access to schools, grocery/pharmacy, many doctors, and Metro.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Sigh... It's sad to see a $600K townhouse in Reston termed "reasonable."

I know a lot of folks on this site are from the Bay Area, where something like that would probably be twice that, but it's actually more expensive than around here, which is considered one of the more expensive areas to live.

It's astounding to see kids out of college, starting at more than I ever made, in my career, and yet, they can't afford to buy a house.

But I'm not one to talk. My father never made more than $40K, and had a house in Potomac, two cars, and a stay-at-home wife.

[alistairSH]

I meant the house is reasonable (good condition, nice neighborhood, workable size).

$600k is still a lot of money, but under the county average home price of $700k (which includes condos, THs, and SFHs).

[metaphor]

> But, DC is one of the more affordable top-tier cities in the US.

Is it?

This 2023 study[1] featured on Bloomberg[2] ranked DC at #7 of 76 most expensive large cities in the nation, requiring $245k gross pay to feel like $100k after normalizing taxes and cost of living.

[1] https://smartasset.com/data-studies/new-100k-how-taxes-costs...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-15/making-30...

[alistairSH]

I'll see if I can dig out the source, but the study I saw had COL vs incomes.

IE, DC is expensive, but also pays extremely well.

[underlipton]

People could just live in PG.

[robwwilliams]

Not relevant at all. Many locations are stronger than the DC area. Just an example of NIH inertia. There are many.

[6DM]

Until we normalize working for a company until we’re ready to retire, I don’t even see that as an option. What am I gonna do 3-4 years later? That’s why I won’t leave the city, because I know when it’s time to look again there are plenty of jobs close by and I won’t have to uproot the whole family.