Cleveland is a great city
Find a new city
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: Find a new city
#22Depends on the field and type of work.
If you work from home then sure, the location doesn't matter much. But for more traditional occupations (pretty much anything other than creative work or location-independent business), big cities are better because they offer more opportunities and often higher paying jobs.
Re: Find a new city
#23I love the sentiment. Silicon Valley and NYC became what they are because of people hacking on things in garages / shitty apartments. Now those shitty apartments cost $2,000/month. The equivalent of those places, where things like Apple started, isn't Silicon Valley and NYC. It's places like Detroit. Or wherever people doing cool things decide to move and congregate. Then again, it is still possible to live cheaply i…
Detroit is an actual city with deep history. It may be in decline, but it still seems like to have more going on, or at least the potential to have more going on, than small towns. There's likely a lot of other second- or even third-tier cities that are overlooked, but are still more interesting to live in than a town in "Northeast Ohio."
Austin, Portland, Boulder are becoming the new NY/SF because of the process of saturation. We just need to find the next Austins and Portlands.
Re: Find a new city
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post is very misleading because it's not about absolute cost of living, you should also suggest data for other towns where an artist could have lived, for example some small town in Ohio. If Patti Smith lived somewhere in Colorado mountains to do her thing, she probably wouldn't be where she is today. Artists require audience, and cities like New York have them, ready to spend money. That's why people moved to Ne…
It's a fair point that the only way for these artists to have become successful in a significant way at the time was to move to a town like New York that can supply the necessary patronage, but I'm not sure that I'd characterize the post as "very misleading". Even with the city's money, the artists still did have to do the legwork to create a scene that was worthy of investment. Rich people aren't gullible saps who w…
You know,, Berlin is the capital city of Germany, so your Berlin example exactly supports my point. People who are motivated to succeed naturally flock to a city with access to the largest audience, as long as they can afford it, since that raises your chance of success.
I was just pointing out this Patti Smith person is completely mistaken about what made herself successful, she thinks it's all her doing but she's forgetting she was at the right place at the right time (and of course with the right content she provided). My whole argument is if you compare larger cities with any other smaller towns, everything is easier (only drawback is money), and that's why people naturally flock to larger cities. My argument has nothing to do with whether legwork is necessary or not, it's just about how people can only create "scenes" where it makes sense. It's delusional to think that they could have created it anywhere else.
Re: Find a new city
#25I love the sentiment. Silicon Valley and NYC became what they are because of people hacking on things in garages / shitty apartments. Now those shitty apartments cost $2,000/month. The equivalent of those places, where things like Apple started, isn't Silicon Valley and NYC. It's places like Detroit. Or wherever people doing cool things decide to move and congregate. Then again, it is still possible to live cheaply i…
Detroit is an actual city with deep history. It may be in decline, but it still seems like to have more going on, or at least the potential to have more going on, than small towns. There's likely a lot of other second- or even third-tier cities that are overlooked, but are still more interesting to live in than a town in "Northeast Ohio." Austin, Portland, Boulder are becoming the new NY/SF because of the process of…
>a town in "Northeast Ohio."
She basically lives in Cleveland. Cleveland, like many rust belt cities, is very old and its borders surround a small percentage of the area. But that's an entirely arbitrary line. In practice, she lives in "Cleveland."
Re: Find a new city
#26I used to live in Nowhere, Florida, and would move back in a heartbeat, but from an employment standpoint it became too risky. Most places outside of The Usual Tech Hubs are one-horse towns when it comes to tech employment, major opportunity risk.
If you're a software engineer and live in the Bay Area and suddenly lose your job, depending on the economy you're probably in for a 1-6 month job search at local companies where you can show up for an interview at any moment's notice. If you're a software engineer and live in flyover country and suddenly lose your job, you better plan on moving somewhere else. Interviewing involves 2-5 hour plane trips all over the country, and then when you finally find something, you need to negotiate relocation costs or fork over $5-10K to move. The prospect of repeating that cycle is pretty unpleasant.
So we put up with 2 hour commutes, tiny homes, and sky-high cost of living, because that's where the companies are.
Re: Find a new city
#27I love the sentiment. Silicon Valley and NYC became what they are because of people hacking on things in garages / shitty apartments. Now those shitty apartments cost $2,000/month. The equivalent of those places, where things like Apple started, isn't Silicon Valley and NYC. It's places like Detroit. Or wherever people doing cool things decide to move and congregate. Then again, it is still possible to live cheaply i…
Can anyone comment on how and why this price increase happened? Has supply not kept up with demand?
Re: Find a new city
#28This view ignores the benefits of the large cities. The rents are high for a reason. You want to go there. And not just for the cultural opportunities. Most people want good jobs. You can't have everyone starting startups, or working remotely. To put it another way, almost everything important and interesting you do will require other people.
> You can't have everyone starting startups, or working remotely. Not everyone, but let's face it, a HUGE number of existing in-office jobs could be fairly easily made remote, which would cut down on the appeal of large cities. I think if even 10% of all currently in-office jobs became remote, you would see a significant movement away from the big cities.
Definitively this. Most in-office jobs involve using a computer a lot for data crunching or whatever, or it requires a lot of meetings that you can have just as well over Skype or Google Hangouts. Even meeting with clients can be done remotely, and there are technical solutions for transferring and handing off documentation and the like.
The only things that absolutely require on-site are things that deal explicitly with the site itself: construction, custodial services and maintenance, hosting parties 'n shit, whatever. The average 9-to-5 pencil pusher job, on the other hand, has no reason not to be remote.
I firmly believe that the modern concept of the "office" will change drastically enough in the coming years that an office will no longer be a physical place, but a state of being - "in the office" now becomes "in job/work mode". We as employees just need to push for this change, now that commutes are getting dumber and dumber. In places like Boston, anyway.
Re: Find a new city
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fair point that the only way for these artists to have become successful in a significant way at the time was to move to a town like New York that can supply the necessary patronage, but I'm not sure that I'd characterize the post as "very misleading". Even with the city's money, the artists still did have to do the legwork to create a scene that was worthy of investment. Rich people aren't gullible saps who w…
You know,, Berlin is the capital city of Germany, so your Berlin example exactly supports my point. People who are motivated to succeed naturally flock to a city with access to the largest audience, as long as they can afford it, since that raises your chance of success. I was just pointing out this Patti Smith person is completely mistaken about what made herself successful, she thinks it's all her doing but she's f…
Right, Berlin is the capital of Germany, but the reason I brought it up as a counterexample for New York is that the Cold War and aftermath left it economically depressed for decades. Until quite recently, rents there were very cheap (on all kinds of interesting spaces), and the art scene flourished.
(And meta note: thank-you for editing your post to be more civil. It looks like your account is relatively new, so I'm going to leave a link here to HN comment etiquette in case you haven't seen it before [1].)
Re: Find a new city
#30I used to live in Nowhere, Florida, and would move back in a heartbeat, but from an employment standpoint it became too risky. Most places outside of The Usual Tech Hubs are one-horse towns when it comes to tech employment, major opportunity risk. If you're a software engineer and live in the Bay Area and suddenly lose your job, depending on the economy you're probably in for a 1-6 month job search at local companies…
Exactly. I came to live in Boston because there is shit-all for tech companies in Jacksonville, FL. I wasn't about to start one for myself, and I wanted to both make a good salary and get lots of experience. If you want to work a job, you go where the jobs are - and those are in places like the Bay area.
Of course, none of this would be an issue if we would all just work remotely, but that's not going to happen for a while.