The Social Club is now lodged in an old firehouse built in 1937, and has a theater, classrooms, bars, art gallery, and adjoining restaurant [...] Mannheimer created something that would have taken the rest his life and $300 million to complete if he'd stayed in New York. It took him seven years and $12 million.Ok, I haven't seen Mannheimer's place, but something that matches this description just opened up across the street from me in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I guarantee that the hipsters who opened it didn't have a budget greater than $12 million, and nobody was thinking about this neighborhood more than a few years ago.
In other words, while New York can be a hard place, things still happen here, artists still live here and produce amazing work, and it's hard to imagine there's a better place for performing artists to work anywhere in the US. For some reason, there has been a move recently to declare the big coastal cities impossible to live in, yet they remain great places to live, which is why so many people want to live here.
On the other hand, if you're going to start a company and have an extremely limited budget, by all means do it somewhere other than NYC or SV. Artists need an audience. A tech company just needs an internet connection.
Edit: also, I want to address this quote: "In the world of hipsters, is there anything more ironic than coming to live in Des Moines, as opposed to living in Brooklyn?"
Anyone still talking about irony with regards to hipsters clearly has no idea what the kids in Bushwick are doing. These are the most earnest people you can imagine.