Does the tech industry ruin cities?

[Crawford]

Boston isn't horribly expensive, like Bay Area. Relative to incomes, it doesn't seem much different than NY or DC.

[edale]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

Artistry hubs that have become high-income exclusive and broadly unaffordable tech havens:

• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Denver
• Portland
• Austin
• Nashville

Nashville is a tech haven?? Portland and Denver also don't strike me as belonging in the same group as Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin when it comes to tech.

[edale]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Boston isn't horribly expensive, like Bay Area. Relative to incomes, it doesn't seem much different than NY or DC.

Boston is definitely an expensive city/region. New York and DC are, too. They might not be as bad as the Bay Area (nowhere is), but they're all expensive cities with high costs of living.

[pdxtex]

Originally Posted by edale

Nashville is a tech haven?? Portland and Denver also don't strike me as belonging in the same group as Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin when it comes to tech.

Portland is way more blue collar than Seattle or SF. Our focus is mostly hardware, not software. All of Intel biggest fabs are here. That draws other, smaller device and chip manufacturers too.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by edale

Nashville is a tech haven?? Portland and Denver also don't strike me as belonging in the same group as Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin when it comes to tech.

Dude… Amazon HQ 2.5?

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

Dude… Amazon HQ 2.5?

Thats NOVA

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by LA21st

Thats NOVA

No, that’s HQ2.

HQ 2.5 was shorthand in the media for the giveaway office that Nashville got in the same process:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/job...azon-nashville

But, of course, those details are hard to notice, right?

[SIGSEGV]

Originally Posted by pdxtex

Portland is way more blue collar than Seattle or SF. Our focus is mostly hardware, not software. All of Intel biggest fabs are here. That draws other, smaller device and chip manufacturers too.

yes, tektronix is there, for example. And Linus Torvalds lives in the Portland area, FWIW.

[The ATX]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

No, that’s HQ2.

HQ 2.5 was shorthand in the media for the giveaway office that Nashville got in the same process:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/job...azon-nashville

But, of course, those details are hard to notice, right?

Plus Oracle is planning to build a campus there and once built, Ellison of course said it would be the HQ.

[DCReid]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Boston isn't horribly expensive, like Bay Area. Relative to incomes, it doesn't seem much different than NY or DC.

I read the average condo in Boston now exceeds $1 million. That seems expensive to me even if the incomes are higher. Incomes are also very high in the Bay area and that does not make their cost of living more reasonable compared to places like Chicago and Texas cities. Not discussed here is the impact of wage/income inequality. I am not sure that tech is the cause of it as I don't believe the Bay area has greater income inequality compared to a less tech driven area with high housing prices like LA or even areas with lower housing prices comparatively speaking like Miami. I believe the homes in the Miami or LA area may not be any more affordable than those in the Bay area because average salaries are much lower.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by edale

Nashville is a tech haven?? Portland and Denver also don't strike me as belonging in the same group as Seattle, San Francisco, and Austin when it comes to tech.

True. They have tech, but not in massive proportions. And Portland's is mostly manufacturing, which generally pays less.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by DCReid

I read the average condo in Boston now exceeds $1 million. That seems expensive to me even if the incomes are higher. Incomes are also very high in the Bay area and that does not make their cost of living more reasonable compared to places like Chicago and Texas cities. Not discussed here is the impact of wage/income inequality. I am not sure that tech is the cause of it as I don't believe the Bay area has greater income inequality compared to a less tech driven area with high housing prices like LA or even areas with lower housing prices comparatively speaking like Miami. I believe the homes in the Miami or LA area may not be any more affordable than those in the Bay area because average salaries are much lower.

This is actually a problem in Houston and TX in general; CoL is dirt cheap by coastal standards but there's a lot of poverty and low wages shutting many out from even the cheapest of housing.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

No, that’s HQ2.

HQ 2.5 was shorthand in the media for the giveaway office that Nashville got in the same process:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/job...azon-nashville

But, of course, those details are hard to notice, right?

I mean, I dont remember Nashville getting anything.

[homebucket]

It's also important to note that not all tech is equal, as mhays alluded to. Even when you look at the tech powerhouses of Austin, Seattle, and SF, they're not exactly on equal footing. There's a fairly steep drop off from one to the next (SF >>> Seattle >>>>> Austin).

Using a skyscraper analogy, it'd kinda be like comparing the skylines of NYC to Chicago to Jacksonville. Seattle has the two large companies in Amazon and Microsoft, similar to how Chicago has Willis Tower and Trump Tower, but SF has more tech "supertalls" (Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla) and 2nd and 3rd tier "skyscrapers" (Netflix, Salesforce, Adobe, Uber, X, Intel, AMD, Cisco, EA, eBay, HP, Intuit, PayPal, Seagate, Western Digital) that give it much more overall bulk. And Austin while it does have somewhat of a tech scene, is largely derivative of SF/Seattle's. It doesn't really have any "supertall" that makes it stand out on its own.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by LA21st

I mean, I dont remember Nashville getting anything.

https://www.aboutamazon.com/workplace/corporate-offices

Nashville is basically a 3rd HQ.

[Chef]

It creates something like the resource curse in developing countries. It generates a lot of economic activity but the results of it are so unbalanced that it tends to stifle non-tech industries. The resource curse is largely because of what large amounts of resource exports do to exchange rates whereas tech's issues come from the fact that its money distorts local real estate markets which then crowds out non tech workers and industries.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by edale

Boston is definitely an expensive city/region. New York and DC are, too. They might not be as bad as the Bay Area (nowhere is), but they're all expensive cities with high costs of living.

I'm pretty sure that New York metro's housing burden (housing costs vs income) is substantially higher than San Francisco's. According to this link, Boston's rent burden is also slightly higher than San Francisco's: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/08/thes...in-the-us.html

Granted, that shows rent burden and does not factor in purchasing power, but I suspect the result is similar.

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by DCReid

I read the average condo in Boston now exceeds $1 million. That seems expensive to me even if the incomes are higher. Incomes are also very high in the Bay area and that does not make their cost of living more reasonable compared to places like Chicago and Texas cities. Not discussed here is the impact of wage/income inequality. I am not sure that tech is the cause of it as I don't believe the Bay area has greater income inequality compared to a less tech driven area with high housing prices like LA or even areas with lower housing prices comparatively speaking like Miami. I believe the homes in the Miami or LA area may not be any more affordable than those in the Bay area because average salaries are much lower.

This checks out for the most part.

According to this, the least affordable housing markets are LA, Miami, Irvine, NYC, Long Beach, Newark (NJ), Anaheim, SD, SJ, and Boston. SF is 11th and Oakland is 13th. Austin is 17th and Seattle is 20th. DC is 37th. Chicago is 62nd.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by homebucket

Chicago is 62nd.

And Philly is 75th!!

If you wanna live like middle class royalty in a properly urban big American city, you know where to go.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by homebucket

It's also important to note that not all tech is equal, as mhays alluded to. Even when you look at the tech powerhouses of Austin, Seattle, and SF, they're not exactly on equal footing. There's a fairly steep drop off from one to the next (SF >>> Seattle >>>>> Austin).

Using a skyscraper analogy, it'd kinda be like comparing the skylines of NYC to Chicago to Jacksonville. Seattle has the two large companies in Amazon and Microsoft, similar to how Chicago has Willis Tower and Trump Tower, but SF has more tech "supertalls" (Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla) and 2nd and 3rd tier "skyscrapers" (Netflix, Salesforce, Adobe, Uber, X, Intel, AMD, Cisco, EA, eBay, HP, Intuit, PayPal, Seagate, Western Digital) that give it much more overall bulk. And Austin while it does have somewhat of a tech scene, is largely derivative of SF/Seattle's. It doesn't really have any "supertall" that makes it stand out on its own.

Although I agree with the grander premise, I do think the final two sentences are wrong and ignore that Austin has had a tech presence longer than Seattle and before Microsoft ever existed.

1957: Austin Area Economic Development Foundation (local group dedicated to luring manufacturers of electronics and scientific equipment)
1962: Tracor
1967: IBM
1969: Texas Instruments
1974: Motorola
1977: UT’s IC2 Institute
1982: Microelectronics and Computer Consortium
1984: Dell

And I’m not so sorry, but Austin has plenty of “supertalls” beyond the above. Tesla and Elon Musk, for instance, or Samsung’s single largest plant anywhere. IBM, for instance, houses most of their design work in Austin.

https://www.academia.edu/5618347/A_H...olis_in_Austin

Compare these dates to Seattle:

1962: World's Fair
1969: Boeing Computer Services
1979: Microsoft relocates
1981: MicroRim
1984: Washington State Software Industry Development Board (the Austin equivalent happened in 1957)
1985: AMI

Seattle's Boeing presence starting in the 1920s is less akin to modern computer tech or San Francisco's early tech industry and more akin to Detroit's motorized vehicle industry, and I personally do not include their flight history in Seattle's tech scene even if it is one reason that made Seattle a natural fit for a computing technology industry (the skills in manufacturing and designing the former are transferable to the latter with some additional training and education). In fact, local leaders at the time saw it this way, too. I split the difference and included the Boeing division dealing with computing above.

Seattle’s presence in recruiting computing tech started in 1962 at the World Fair, Microsoft was founded in Albuquerque in 1975, and most contemporary accounts describe Seattle as “emerging” as a tech center when they relocated in 1979. Biographies largely describe this as being for familial reasons, and less for business and recruitment purposes (he moved away from his biggest client in Albuquerque and didn't even move to the city they were HQed in, Boston). Even after Microsoft moved there, local governmental and industry reports described the Seattle economy and workforce as unable to support the nascent industry. Seattle didn't get around to luring other major tech companies beyond Microsoft or develop local incubators and P3s until the mid 1980s after Microsoft moved there and needed the help.


https://www.historylink.org/File/9190

Fact: Austin's government and economy had long established the region as a tech hub before Seattle's tech scene ever got off the ground.