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by jseliger 5133 days ago
but what he ought to be thinking about is bars.

No. What he really ought to be thinking about is housing. In Boston—like Silicon Valley—virtually no one can afford housing: http://www.wbur.org/2009/10/26/housing-report (for Boston) and http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... (for Silicon Valley). Part of the way Boston needs to compete is through housing policy, and especially allowing much denser development that will help alleviate the extreme housing shortage. Bars are nice, and I'm not opposed to them, but the biggest weakness of many areas that are appealing to tech people, and people in their 20s and 30s more generally, is the cost of housing, which has largely become a consumer good.
1 comments
rglullis 5133 days ago
If we take that Silicon Valley is the undisputed Mecca of technology, then your argument falls through. Like you said, Silicon Valley is also expensive, and yet they still manage to attract more and more people every year. New York, another city who is one of the most expensive in the US, is managing to pass Boston as the tech center of the East Cost.

We need to take a look at things where Boston is substantially different from the Valley. We can't change the weather and make Boston sunny year round, but we can provide an atmosphere that is more friendly to recent-grads.

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jseliger 5133 days ago
yet they still manage to attract more and more people every year

See the second link:

Meanwhile, San Francisco—one of the most expensive cities in the United States—added just 418 new housing units in 2011, the fewest since 1993. What’s more, 149 existing units were removed, leading to a nearly nonexistent increase in housing supply.

Farther south in Menlo Park, Facebook raised billions of dollars in an IPO, instantly putting millions of dollars in the hands of early employees and investors. But as Trulia’s economist Jed Kolko notes, the surge of cash will create losers, by bidding up the cost of local housing. “If Facebook were in Texas or North Carolina,” he observes, “developers would have been building new homes in anticipation of this day,” but in Silicon Valley—as in San Francisco and Marin County farther north—it’s essentially impossible for new construction to meet rising demand for living space. So some of the people living in the area who didn’t just reap a financial windfall are poised to be priced out of their homes as high rents get even higher.

Silicon Valley has largely become zero-sum, population-wise (see also Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City on this subject).

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rglullis 5133 days ago
And yet, it still is the Mecca of technology, isn't it?

If we are talking about population growth, I'd agree with you. But the point was in changing the demographics, not just growing it.

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