Here are two really interesting pieces from the pages of the New York Times (sub required). Randall Stross writes about the importance of distance to investors and new ventures in Silicon Valley — sharing the 20 minute rule (which I heard all about more than twenty years ago when Martin Kenney and I did our orignal project on venture capital and intreviewed Gene Kliener of Kliener Perkins, Donald Valentine of sequioa and Tommy Davis, the founder of the Mayfield Fund.)
The second piece takes a look at residential real estate in a suburb of Kansas City named Olathe. The piece, by Susan Saulny, is titled Rents Bite is Big in Kansas, Too… From the article…
“I think that’s a sign of success,” Mr. Copeland (the Mayor of Olathe) said. “It shows people are willing to pay a lot to live here.”
Susan Sherman, the assistant city manager, said, “It might just be that the location comes with such amenities that they’re willing to spend their hard-earned dollars on it.” She added, “We don’t have mountains or oceans, but we have some of the greatest people.”
Some builders and residents say the growing lack of low-cost housing cannot be viewed as good.
“It’s been unfortunate from our perspective in the last few years to see so many people who’d like to live in Olathe not be able to because the housing prices have gone up so much,” said Matt Derrick, the spokesman for the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City. “We have builders who say, I can’t build housing that my kids could afford to live in. That’s when it really starts to hit home.”
The growth in Olathe through the 1990’s was driven, incidentally, by what was then its affordable housing and by the rapidly developing high-tech industries here, experts said. But, over the years, demand for the area has priced out some long-term residents and newcomers whose wages are moderate to low — mainly the workers in retail and construction, whose numbers have been steadily increasing, too.
The question of balancing growth with prosperity is one of the great challenges facing the US in many locations.
October 26th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
In his book The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby writes (48-9): “Gentrification has also brought in its wake accelerating rents and a new homogenization; both of these threaten city diversity and bohemian culture. None of this is especially new. Jane Jacobs in 1961 commented upon the dangers of urban success, at the time a rarity. Desirable neighborhoods attract the affluent, who squeeze out the less affluent. Jacobs writes, ‘So many people want to live in the locality that it becomes profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity, for those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people…and…people who can or will pay the most for the smallest space. Accomodations for this narrow, profitable segment of population multiply, at the expense of all other tissue and all other population. Families are crowded out, variety of scene is crowded out, enterprises…are crowded out.’”
Apparently true in New York as well as Olathe.
November 1st, 2006 at 8:15 pm
Brian,
I always remember what Jane Jacobs told me when I asked her about this kind of gentrification cum homogenization… She said,”When a place gets boring even the rich people leave.” Staid, boring places which lack diversity and no longer tap into human energy won’t thrive for very long.