
Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-cities-boom-while-towns-struggle-1520983492
======
montrose
This seems a very important point, if it's correct. It affects so many of the
big stories we see in the news, from SV's housing shortage to the widening gap
between Republicans and Democrats. It would also mean that Y Combinator making
founders move to SV (at least temporarily) turns out to be perfectly aligned
with the times.

"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant
innovation, which turns out to be a social process. To succeed, cities need a
critical mass of highly educated workers engaged in the regular, often
informal, exchange of ideas. Once this critical mass comes into being, it
feeds on itself: Innovation hubs attract new innovators in a self-reinforcing
process, while areas lacking this critical mass fall further behind.

In the early stage of the information revolution, it was fashionable to argue
that new technologies would eliminate distance. People could do creative work
in rural Colorado and communicate their ideas anywhere on earth with the flick
of a finger.

This thesis rested on an excessively individualistic understanding of
creativity. In fact, remote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the
elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do
their work in isolation; they stimulate one another."

~~~
nawitus
"The emerging knowledge economy, Mr. Moretti argues, depends on constant
innovation, which turns out to be a social process."

Why can't this happen online?

~~~
closeparen
Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new
problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?

 _Can_ it happen online? Probably. But proximity vastly decreases friction and
increases the chances of success. Even between offices with enterprise-grade
fibre and high-end videoconferencing-integrated conference rooms, telepresence
isn't that good yet. There's no substitute for unscheduled hallway
conversations and impromptu whiteboarding. These things might be unnecessary
distractions if your job is to churn out code that fulfills well-defined
specifications, but if you're doing something new and innovative and not fully
understood yet, or something complex enough to require deep interactions with
your coworkers (beyond task assignment and status updates), they are a major
boon.

~~~
viraptor
> Have you ever tried working on a difficult bug or vague and ill-defined new
> problem space with a combination of local and remote coworkers?

Yes. It works if you agree that "local" doesn't exist anymore. If one person
is remote, everybody is "remote". As long as that's the agreed medium, many
issues go away - it actually gets better sometimes, because that private
water-cooler conversation which would be interesting to other parties is
sometimes available for copy-paste.

~~~
0x445442
Yeah, I work in an open space environment but we get to work at home from time
to time when the need arises. I'd say I'm at least twice as productive at home
than in the office.

~~~
Bizarro
I would say I'm about twice as productive too.

Open office is the complete disaster result of an unholy alliance of
management trying to skate by on the cheap and agile consultants pimping their
latest slogans.

Even without open office, there is so much chit-chat, gossip, politics,
posturing (how about a meeting to discuss the upcoming meeting), and other
crap that gets swept under the rug as collaboration.

Don't forget that certain personality types just can't handle working from
home or in a quiet environment. They'll just go bonkers, so they run around
telling everybody else that you can't be creative and collaborate without
chatting someone up in the urinal next to you.

The top comment spin is so humorous that you would almost think it's a troll,
but probably not.

~~~
closeparen
I'm about twice as productive at home too, when I have a concrete solo task.
But early in a project, when we're not sure what it is yet, collaboration
matters.

~~~
Bizarro
Nothing beats a white board early on, but there's no reason (and somewhat
counterproductive) for everybody to be co-located 8 hours, 5 days a week.

~~~
closeparen
Sure, it's great to have a 1+ days/week to work from home, but to do that
you're still living in the same city.

------
powerstructures
The power structures (formal and informal) in towns are stifling. They tend to
be fairly unified or homogenous.

Formal (new businesses challenging established players, even indirectly such
as competing for talent) and informal (personal and/or political
nonconformity) challenges to these power structures are punished mercilessly.

This is less true in cities, because with greater scale (and broader power
structures with more players,) small "threats" to the established order can
emerge and incubate, or even be nurtured by large competitors (think VC)
without being directly crushed.

~~~
CSMastermind
This is absolutely backward. Cities enforce cultural homogeneity _much_ more
than small towns. Try being conservative (or even moderate) in NYC or San
Francisco.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
NYC is home to one of the biggest Hasidic communities in the world. You can
hardly get more conservative than that, and they seem to do just fine.

Also, the perceived mainstream culture of a city should not lead you to ignore
the presence of ample subcultures within that city that are opposed to it. In
those big cities, it might be hard to be a conservative if you still insist on
having liberals be the main demographic of your social life, but if you
actually seek out those with similar views to network and build community
with, then the conservative population of definitely NYC and probably even SF
is more than big enough to live your life among.

~~~
mistermann
> they seem to do just fine

A Hasidic community is an identifiable minority group so would receive no
criticism, similar to how ultra-conservative Islamic people are given a free
pass by progressives and feminists.

~~~
emj
> ultra-conservative Islamic people are given a free pass by progressives and
> feminists.

This is not how the world works; if you are in a group with differing opinions
it's a bad strategy to think that everyone who do not share your ideas are
colluding against you. Over here ultra-conservative religous people are much
more likely to agree on topics, than some strange mismatch of other
ideologies.

I also find it strange to state that Hasidic communities receive no criticism,
I know nothing about how they live in NYC but based on world events I doubt
they live a frictionless life.

~~~
mistermann
> This is not how the world works; if you are in a group with differing
> opinions it's a bad strategy to think that everyone who do not share your
> ideas are colluding against you.

This is fine advice, if I personally did that I would certainly take it under
consideration.

> I doubt they live a frictionless life

Considering no one leads a frictionless life, you're probably correct.
However, you may have noticed that criticizing Jewish people is _generally
frowned upon_ moreso than other groups. Or, would you have me believe that all
groups are treated mathematically identically by all other groups across all
cultures?

~~~
emj
I'm sorry, I've must have misinterpreted your post, but it seems unlikely
based these short comments, you concentrate on how other groups affect you but
seems to miss the reason the people might have for saying or doing certain
things, and these ideas seldome represent homogeneous groups. From my
perspective you should always take a step back when you think "those _OTHER
GROUP_ are so _SOMETHING_ ". The long european monotheistic struggle is a sign
post of fear, uncertainty and doubt (I'm sure the Islamic conquests also did
something similar, re: my comment above).

I'm not sure what part you mean should be mathematically identical it seems
like a strange measure for social interaction, too many unknown variables, and
too many individuals.

~~~
mistermann
I suspect the problem might be on topics like this, the human mind has a bad
habit of becoming impractically pedantic. So, when I write "ultra-conservative
Islamic people are given a free pass by progressives and feminists", your mind
interprets that (correctly) as an absolute statement, rather than a (correct)
generalization.

> I'm not sure what part you mean should be mathematically identical it seems
> like a strange measure for social interaction, too many unknown variables,
> and too many individuals.

This was me returning the sentiment of extreme pedantry.

~~~
emj
I've seen your meme before and I wondered why this specific connection is
popular. Because your statement goes beyond being a generalization it might be
acceptable in a closely knit group where everyone know who specifically you
are talking about, but know this there are alot of feminists, you might as
well be generalizing about drivers. So unless you are aiming for a chuckle
from your friends the statement above will get you nowhere.

Your statement is a very radicalized view of reality, in this specific context
and worse without context.

------
bsder
I, personally, would flip this around.

It's that towns have far too much friction.

If I'm in a city, the airport is probably less than 30 minutes away. A town
means 2+ hours to the airport or a ticket that is triple or quadruple from the
tiny commuter airport.

If I'm in a city, a lot of office space already has a fiber connection. If I'm
in a town, people will shrug and wonder what I'm talking about.

If I'm in a city, I probably get daily early deliveries from UPS and FedEx--
maybe even multiple ones. If I'm in a town, I get a late delivery and pickup
and that's it. In my hometown, the FedEx office _wasn 't open_ 3 days a week.

I can go on and on.

Running a business is risky enough without adding all that friction on top of
it.

~~~
analog31
There's also friction for workers. If you work in a town, and your job sucks
or your employer fails, you may have to move to another town. In a city, you
pick up your bag and walk across the street.

On the other hand if you live in a city and the schools fail, then you're
hosed.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I’ll take my economic chances before having to live in the city. The quality
of life just isn’t there.

Lower costs in the suburbs or rural areas means my runway is much longer than
in the city, which offsets the job availability (6 months of city non-
discretionary expenses is a year or more outside the city). I can also afford
a 4 bed/2.5 bath house with a pool on a quarter acre, which would be
_impossible_ in the city.

------
neonate
Wow, this is striking:

"In 2016, Hillary Clinton won only 472 counties, but they represented fully
64% of GDP. Donald Trump’s 2,584 counties accounted for only 36%."

~~~
dahdum
I wonder if a good portion of that is due to the continued collapse in
manufacturing, mining, timber, and other areas that are now predominantly
imports.

~~~
ebikelaw
I don't really see how it could be that, since manufacturing in the USA is
more valuable today than it has ever been, has a higher output than any other
country but one, and more than some other continents, and makes up 1/3rd of
GDP.

~~~
dahdum
The GDP was relative, so even if the pie did get larger it doesn't mean the
ratio couldn't go down.

"Manufacturing gross output and value added shares of the economy declined
steadily between 1997 and 2013, as shown in Figure A. One reason for this
decline is the rapid growth of manufactured imports, which have reduced the
demand for domestically manufactured goods. Total imports of manufactured
goods increased from $744 billion in 1997 to $1.83 trillion in 2014, rising
from 8.6 percent of GDP in 1997 to 10.9 percent in 2013. Had it not been for
the increase in manufactured imports, and of the U.S. trade deficit in
manufactured goods, manufacturing output and GDP would have been significantly
higher in 2013"

> [https://www.epi.org/publication/the-manufacturing-
> footprint-...](https://www.epi.org/publication/the-manufacturing-footprint-
> and-the-importance-of-u-s-manufacturing-jobs/)

------
hownottowrite
Archived Version: [https://archive.is/9yDHx](https://archive.is/9yDHx)

------
adventured
You can hardly talk about cities booming, while ignoring the obvious and
dramatic other examples.

The big epicenters of intense poverty and murder are all hyper concentrated in
the cities, not in towns or rural areas. Baltimore has a murder rate 20-25
times that of a typical US town.

Or: LA's massive homeless encampments. Chicago. Detroit. etc.

West Virginia is really poor right? Considered one of the poorest states in
the US, and has among the highest unemployment rates. You won't see
homelessness, murder and extreme poverty in the towns around Morgantown like
you do in the aforementioned cities.

The entire state of West Virginia has 1/5th as many murders as Baltimore, with
three times the population.

~~~
rtkwe
Cities partially just make the poverty more visible. There's extreme deep
wells of poverty all over the country, it's just more spread out so it goes
unnoticed. In a city with tight space though the homeless get pushed together
with the rest of society so they get noticed more. Cities do exacerbate it
some because of tight housing supply and cost where other places poverty means
they might just have a really bad house in the city there's not the space for
it. It is also partially self feeding because there's just a lack of services
for the homeless/poor outside of big cities and because cities are booming and
productive there's just a lot of extra that can support a homeless person than
in a rural or small town.

------
thesumofall
Cities are the future for the foreseeable future. Beyond benefits in
information exchange they are also much more efficient in terms of energy
usage and hence a great way to reduce energy consumption until we’ve finally
solved our energy-related issues

~~~
randomdata
On the other hand, in Canada, a smaller share of the Canadian population live
in cities now than did in 2011. Small towns saw the largest growth.

It would appear to me that the efficiencies cities can provide are at odds
with the cost of being able to provide sufficient shelter for the people of
those cities. The high cost of housing, which is a large concern in Canada's
major cities, is pushing people from these cities.

~~~
spoonie
Interesting! Do you have a source for that? I’d like to learn more. Is it
really small towns, or just suburbs/exurbs/bedroom communities? Regardless,
it’s a good reason to focus on making housing more affordable in cities (build
more!).

~~~
randomdata
Statscan[1]. The actual numbers are by population size. I use the term town
and city colloquially here (technically speaking Canada has towns with
hundreds of thousands of people and cities with thousands).

[1] [http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-
recensement/2016/ref/dict/...](http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-
recensement/2016/ref/dict/geo049a-eng.cfm)

 _> Regardless, it’s a good reason to focus on making housing more affordable
in cities (build more!)._

I am going to have to disagree. Seeing the economic activity spread out to
smaller communities has been the best thing to happen to Canada in a long
time. I would argue that much of the countries woes are directly related to
the drive into the big city that happened 10-20 years ago. As we've seen in
Germany, a decentralized economy comes with many benefits.

~~~
thesumofall
> As we've seen in Germany, a decentralized economy comes with many benefits.

I’m not sure if I would call it decentralized. The economic powerhouses remain
the big metropolitan areas (which are sometimes just a bunch of merged mid-
sized cities). But yes, some of the richest cities are quite small such as
Wolfsburg and Ingolstadt. However, that’s mostly driven by a single big
company and not really by a truly sustainable network of economic activity. In
addition, I know few people who’d really love to live in Wolfsburg...

------
thriftwy
Towns were hot where they had to motivate people to move there. Most of towns
are XX century phenomena.

Now that people are already there and many of them are unemployed, they can
pay peanuts and still expect workers to show up. The dynamics became toxic.

Only when local business sees such need in work that they need to expand, they
have to offer good salaries to be competitive.

------
randomdata
How do we measure struggle here?

Looking at data for the small town I grew up in (current population: 1,200),
it has grown by nearly 20% in the last five years. Compared to the nearest
major city (~150 miles away), the median household income is 16% higher and
the median individual income is 32% higher. The unemployment rate is 22%
lower. None of that seems to indicate struggle to me, and anecdotally being
able to get back and visit time to time, it doesn't feel like it is
struggling. Booming seems more appropriate.

What may be notable is that the largest employer in town is a tech company who
seems to have done quite well for itself, now employing about 150 people. I
would suggest the town is doing well because of this company and the spinoffs
that have come from it's success. That suggests to me that it may simply be
that success begets success. Cities boom because they have have preexisting
success stories to build from, small towns not necessarily.

~~~
mathgeek
The article is measuring struggle in aggregate. Your hometown, while it sounds
like it is indeed booming, is a single data point.

~~~
randomdata
That was partially my point though. If success begets success, cities are
biased by the fact that they have already been successful. All communities
started with nobody. A major business success of some kind is why these
particular locations became cities over other communities.

Without a major success story under the belt of a small town, there is lack of
capital, lack of expertise, lack of attention from the rest of the world, etc.
that places with those success stories are able to thrive with. I mentioned my
hometown because it would appear that if a small town can break out with a
success story, then it starts to attract all the same things that cities do,
suggesting to me that it is not so much the people as much as it the history
that has resulted in cities booming.

~~~
freehunter
Also anecdotally, I completely agree with you. I actually run a company that's
still very small and only focused on two neighboring towns right now as case
studies, but we're cataloging all the things that "boom towns" (as opposed to
boom cities) are doing right to continue to grow and find success. And then
we're leveraging that to push harder for the things these cities have done
right and correct the things they're doing wrong. Outside of these two towns,
we hope to find more towns with similar structures that could be successes in
the future.

Every town can succeed with the right structures in place. The biggest thing
is human capital: having people, and not only that, but keeping them in your
town as much as possible. Easier said than done. Your idea of a "success
story" driving that human capital is a great example of like-begets-like. The
more successes you can point to, the more successes will exist.

~~~
ccmonnett
What have you found in “boom towns” that may be taken for granted (or not
exist at all) in “boom cities”? In other words, it’s easy for us to think of
things that cities have and towns don’t; have you found a counter example?

~~~
freehunter
I think it's really easy to point to things that successful towns have that
successful cities don't have. The only hard part about it is somewhere out
there, there is of course going to be exceptions to everything. If I say "a
good town has this thing that a city doesn't", of course somewhere there will
be a city that has that thing. So it's always a bit of a comparison, but
that's how most people approach their city selection anyway: they know what
general area they want to live in (likely close to work or family) and then
they compare towns and cities in that area. It's rare to find someone
comparison shopping between Austin, Texas and Lebanon, New Hampshire. I'm just
prefacing my answer because of course this being the Internet, someone will
find an exception to the rule and use it to say the rule is completely
invalid.

The biggest difference between successful towns and successful cities, I
think, is the exclusivity. If you're one of five million, you're going to look
for smaller groups to align yourself with. You're not connected with New York,
you're connected with SoHo. You're connected with the Upper East Side. You're
connected with the Village. But in a small town, you tend to identify with
basically the entire town. You can feel the pulse, you know the rhythms. It's
your "stomping grounds".

There are a ton of other elements we're still working on feeling out. People
in towns are more likely to own their own transportation than people in
cities, so any activity or business that depends on that factor will thrive
more. People in towns seem more likely to stay put longer term. They're more
likely to own a home. They're more likely to be connected with nature, and
those towns are more likely to be centered around recreational activities like
recreational (as opposed to commercial) rivers or lakes. You're less likely to
have to pay for parking, which makes getting in and out of town easier.

Sure you may not be able to walk to a Starbucks. You might not have fiber
Internet. You can't find a Uber, and good luck with Postmates. Amazon doesn't
have same-day delivery and UPS comes later in the day, and you might have to
drive a bit to get to the city. But by far the biggest thing I've found about
people who live in "boom towns"? They don't care about that, because they
never go to the city. They have everything they need right in their own
backyard, only cheaper and easier.

------
intrasight
Great towns near great cities are the best compromise, IMHO. Cities are too
noisy and stinky for me. But I need to have one close by for events that only
a city can host. And for better air transport.

------
QasimK
Is there any way to actually read this? I can’t get past the first couple of
paragraphs before a subscribe/log in

~~~
thesumofall
That’s what the “Web” link in HN is for

~~~
QasimK
I did indeed try this to no avail.

~~~
neonate
Those don't seem to work for all publications but a bunch of us have been
posting links that do work. There's one here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611464)

