[AlotOfReading]

If there was an economy worth building for, the geography wouldn't be a blocker. Look at Seattle, Oakland, or the Hollywood hills. They're all built on rugged, mountainous terrain just as difficult as the Appalachians, but they don't suffer the same issues attracting wealth because their economic situation is so different. In fact, each of them has the opposite problem of demand to build vastly outstripping permission to build.

[stackskipton]

>Look at Seattle, Oakland, or the Hollywood hills. They're all built on rugged, mountainous terrain just as difficult as the Appalachians, but they don't suffer the same issues attracting wealth because their economic situation is so different.

Wrong. Seattle, Oakland and Los Angeles are mostly built on much flatter parts of those areas. California entire geography is about "Hey, check out these massive valleys or coastal land we can build in." Same thing with Washington State, Seattle is in between Cascades and Olympics where there is all this flat land to build on. Yes, they running out of land and building into mountains now. That problem is like having FAANG scaling problems. It sucks but it's good/manageable problem to have and you have massive checkbooks to help solve it.

Have you been to Appalachia? It's not on the coast and does not have these benefits. If you want to compare it to West Coast areas, it's more like Sierra Nevada. Inland Mountains with only small valleys to build infrastructure in.

[AlotOfReading]

I've been to Appalachia. It didn't strike me as notably more rugged than any other reasonably hilly area, and quite a bit less rugged than many places known for it (e.g. the Alpine cities, or the Himalayas). The west coast cities were a reasonable comparison, because they're (1) in the same country and (2) Fairly comparable in elevation and grade, if not a bit worse. The oakland hills (and other bay area communities [1]) rise to comparable heights despite starting at sea level with 25% grades, for example. Queen Anne in Seattle [2] has almost exactly the same elevation gain, but the last 200 feet are basically a cliff. I'm not picking distant suburbs here, but rather historic parts of these areas that have been developed for almost a century. They only maintain the illusion of flatness now because the landscape has been intensively modified over that time to appear less severe.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Sausalit...

[2] https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/9...

[stackskipton]

Instead of just a few pictures showing rich area around a mountain that can afford it because companies like Apple have plenty of flat area, let's use available data provided by government agencies: https://topochange.cr.usgs.gov/topochange_viewer/viewer.htm

Cumberland, MD vs San Francisco. Wow, when I overlay urban areas of Bay Area, it's heavily built up in much flatter areas and gets much less dense as elevation change gets steeper. Not to mention, sea access gives you massive advantage since you are not having to move as much over really tall mountains.

Cumberland, MD has none of these. It's in a valley between two larger ridges of mountains but is heavily constrained. Also, not having sea access means transporting goods there is much more difficult and requires more infrastructure. And since we are one nation, you could just move west to much flatter Ohio and Great Lakes or East to flat parts of Maryland and Chesapeake Bay.

Sure, Bay area built up with creating really excellent schools that created really high paying industries but thinking it was "We lifted ourselves up by our bootstraps" and instead "Our geography and World War with Navy on our coast desperate to win really did help us."

[AlotOfReading]

I'm saying nothing about bootstrapping. What I'm saying is that difficult geography is not a blocker if the economics are sufficient. People built and regraded the hills around Oakland, Seattle, and LA because the economy was there first. The geography is an expensive inconvenience no one wants to deal with, not an unmanageable fact of life.

[alephnerd]

> built on much flatter parts of those areas

Seattle was MADE flat by literally using fire hoses to flatten hills and mountains [0].

That said, I disagree with the role geography has with developing a tech industry - most of it can be directly related to investment put during WW2 and the 1950s into innovation clusters.

For example, Seattle and aerospace (Boeing), Bay Area and computers+electronics+nukes (HP, IBM Almaden, LLNL, LLBL, Los Alamos managed by UCB), San Diego and Biotech+Defense Tech (Salk Lab, Navy), Portland and electronics (INL, PNNL, Tektronics, Intel), etc

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regrading_in_Seattle

[lizknope]

I saw an interactive exhibit at Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle. It showed how different sections were regraded and you could push buttons where that section of hills and lakes would get lifted or dropped down. This wasn't a computer display, this was a real physical model of the city.

The Bay Area really benefits from Stanford and Berkeley being there. You need a steady stream of educated new grads to grow from.

[alephnerd]

> Museum of History & Industry

Love that museum. Paul Allen really made Seattle such a great city - amazing museums, good sports, amazing biotech research, strong entrepreneurship scene. It's like Boston but better.

> Bay Area really benefits from Stanford and Berkeley

Also UCSF (major biotech hub) and SJSU (major electronics hub - imo EE@SJSU makes EE@Stanford look like child's play).