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by rglullis
5133 days ago
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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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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).