Reply to What is stopping NoVA from reaching SV level prices?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]the future center of power of the US will be NYC and Silicon valley, all other areas will be irrelevant and NYC will be permanently on the decline[/quote]

Honestly, I think that SV isn't sustainable as it is now.  The housing market is just too restrictive for firms to grow flexibly, and the infrastructure isn't good enough.  Some of that has been alleviated by expansion into SF, but the housing problem continues to get worse with no end in sight.

There are good reasons for industries to agglomerate, and that's not going anywhere.  But I think that tech is big enough now to maintain a handful of highly innovative clusters across the country, along with operational clusters in major cities.   Being an "innovation cluster" requires access to money (VC), top-level talent, and sources of new ideas to commercialize (e.g. premier STEM research universities as well as existing highly innovative firms). Being an operational center requires an educated workforce as well, but money and ideas can live elsewhere, and firms can be more attuned to things like cost of living with regard to operational center because the cost savings aren't overwhelmed by the need for money and ideas.  As the bigger tech firms mature, more and more of the things they do can be operationalized, and that allows them to be peeled away from the expensive innovators geographically.

Seattle, Boston, and NYC are basically already on the innovation cluster path because they're sufficiently strong in all these areas.  DC is a pretty obvious candidate to be on it too because of its highly educated workforce, but it has kind of an unusual set of circumstances owing to the role of the government in the economy and the lack of a premier STEM research university. Lots of the ideas generated here aren't commercializable beyond the scale of one large customer, and the research that is demanded by the government that might be commercializable often isn't intrinsically tied to this locale by things like local researchers in academia or existing related industries (NIH being one exception here).  We have a sizable VC industry, but in per capita terms it still lags behind places like Austin and the Research Triangle, not to mention the top tier cities listed above.

SV/SF will always be a major tech center, probably even the biggest one, but the cost of living differential between it and the other tech centers will stabilize.  The question with Amazon HQ2, I think, is how closely the "operational" tasks that will definitely be performed here (sales and customer management, lobbying) end up being tied to the high-risk, high-reward innovation work.  Otherwise, we're just the Nashville campus with more lawyers.  From what I know of Amazon, they're very interested in being innovative and data-driven throughout their business model, which is probably a good sign for DC.  I'd also pay close attention to things like the scope and success of the new VA Tech campus and changes in the scope of Hopkins' DC operations. Those are the kinds of things that can bring DC a more durable advantage.[/quote]

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