The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are.
This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you imagine two or three San Francisco tech companies all uprooting at once to a brand new city, where costs might be half the cost in San Francisco? And at the same time, maybe you could convince a couple other big tech companies to open satellite offices in the new city. To get more economic diversity, perhaps the startup-city could also buy up established, small-scale manufactures and move them to the city. Still -- these kind of moves would be very, very hard, as it would be very difficult and risky to try to uproot enough employees to actually make the move successful.
Any other ideas for how the economy could be bootstrapped?
Build a top-notch research university and convince a dozen of the smartest professors and a few independently-wealthy angel investors to move there, and you'll soon have a city. Because where top professors go, students will go. Where you have smart & ambitious students and adventurous money, you'll have startups. Where you have startups, you'll get jobs. And where you get jobs, you'll get cities.
But it could probably apply to other cities. I've read that Bordeaux was somewhat transformed via university. Other lively and attractive towns are often considered college/uni towns.
They attract nightlife and breakfast spots. And businesses that support those (accountants, cleaners, etc). I think interesting and lively socialising/dining would be a key consideration for me if I were to move to a smaller city.
I thought this wasn't a "libertarian utopia for techies?"
When you look at how ordinary people choose a city to live in, the most important variable is who else gets to live there. Everything else is a rounding error.
Boulder, Colorado is a beautiful little city. Its population is roughly the same as that of West Point, Liberia. Compare a city with the legislation and architecture of West Point, but the population of Boulder, to a city with the legislation and architecture of Boulder, and the population of West Point. Which would you rather live in?
When you treat human beings as generic, interchangeable parts, you're missing the first lesson of Christopher Alexander's approach: design real solutions for real people. You probably wouldn't fund a YC company that assumed the world consisted of 6 billion interchangeable customers.
This is a key insight. So many want to talk about rules and architecture, but habits outweigh everything else. When I lived in Singapore a long time ago, it was impossible to get off the subway during busy times, because of the solid mass of humanity who were trying to get in the door before anyone else got out. When I visited later, it was easy, because in the interim they had passed a law about where you have to stand while waiting. I've lived in lots of other cities with subways, and none of them needed that law, because the people there were not in the habit of being morons on the subway.
Problem with moving startups is that they are more fragile, and need every edge to beat out their peers. So if two startups are competing, and startup A is in the middle of nowhere, and startup B is connected to a pool of talent, advice, potential early customers, early adopters, and investors, then startup B has a huge advantage. That was PG's main reasoning for why YC startups should all move to the valley, right?
That said -- perhaps you guys have the brand and connections now where you could nurture the talent/advice/investment ecosystem in an entirely new location. If so, that could be a really great thing.
I'd be interested to see a large group of remote workers move to a small town and try to build a community. You don't have to move the entire company to these places, only some of the people at each company.
Small towns frequently offer tax incentives for manufacturing / government contracts. The same thing could be provided for those working remotely. It seems absurd but I think it could work. Two examples:
- Local/state tax credits for remote workers that live in a given area for > 2 years
- Subsidized loans for remote workers that decide to buy property
It might be considered unfair by the existing population, but the workers would provide a major jolt to local economies. One would assume that service industries would build up around them, in turn creating jobs.
The point about transit to other big cities is another interesting possibility, and I could imagine that as a path to bootstrap a city's own economy. If this hypothetical new city was ~30 min from somewhere like downtown SF or the Google campus via a high speed rail (admittedly a huge "if", given the poor track record of getting high speed rail or really any new rails built in the US in a reasonable timeframe), I think you could get a lot of people to move there for cheaper housing and commute to work. Then you could (somewhat simultaneously) get restauarants, bars, grocery stores, a hardware store, etc. to open in the new city to serve the new residents.
Once there are a lot of people living there (and, importantly, the area is widely accepted as cool and up-and-coming), startups and other companies would have incentives to move there or open offices there.
This basic process seems to have played out in places like downtown Oakland and in DUMBO and Greenpoint in Brooklyn in recent years. But Brooklyn and Oakland both have their own rich histories and existing neighborhoods and economies, which keeps them from evolving quickly, and big changes can cause big problems like gentrification.
It's definitely a moonshot idea but I can imagine this process being even more successful, and avoiding some of the biggest drawbacks, in a new city.
You build housing and commercial stores at time. Have one major transit line into some major city.
The stores, you get department stores and the like. Lower rent than downtown but relatively easy access. Maybe one parking silo for people who come via car. Make it nice.
The housing will slowly fill because of the transit line, rent could be much cheaper than downtown.
Office developers will at one point just put the offices in the nice area.
This is the strategy used by rail companies in the greater Tokyo area since the beginning of time and it works great. Giant shopping centers with good mass transit connections will get a lot of people on weekends (even if it's at the end of a line). Walkable housing nearby. Etc
If anything I prefer more companies to move to SF and Oakland from SV and create more awareness around solving homelessness and transit first development. I am really happy how Twitter & co transformed Tenderloin. Western Waterfront and Oakland is SF's future, Central Subway (if its extended to F.Warf) is going make it pretty easy to get to Mission Bay/Dogpatch from other parts of the city.. We need a big tech company in Hunters Point and extend the T line all the way down to HP.. More companies need to move to Oakland and push for the second BART tube..
This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you imagine two or three San Francisco tech companies all uprooting at once to a brand new city, where costs might be half the cost in San Francisco? And at the same time, maybe you could convince a couple other big tech companies to open satellite offices in the new city. To get more economic diversity, perhaps the startup-city could also buy up established, small-scale manufactures and move them to the city. Still -- these kind of moves would be very, very hard, as it would be very difficult and risky to try to uproot enough employees to actually make the move successful.
Any other ideas for how the economy could be bootstrapped?