I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of ambition and how it relates to the places people decide to live. I’m almost finished reading Triumph of the City, a 2008 book by urban economist Ed Glaeser. In a nutshell, the book attempts to explain some of the basic tenets of urban economics like agglomeration, critical mass, and housing supply and demand and put them in laymen’s terms. Glaeser makes a number of interesting arguments, but I found his take on cities and ambition to be particularly fascinating.
He uses entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Silicon Valley and New York, as examples of why cities are great places for connecting the most ambitious and entrepreneurial people. He contends that the last several centuries of industrial and technological innovation could not have happened without cities. Cities, he argues, have been integral to advancing ideas, wealth and power in the industrial age. Cities are essentially networks of people and those with good ideas and the drive to see them through will find each other, or at least find the people who they need to make their ideas a reality. In the case of the tech entrepreneur, Silicon Valley and Bangalore are great places to be because of strong networks of venture capitalists, coders, and educational institutions from which to cultivate new talent. Another great example is Los Angeles, which is a great place for those in media and entertainment because of the network of writers, film crews and producers to help bring stories to the silver screen. Cities are successful for the same reasons why tech companies (particularly social media) experience exponential growth: network effects. Tech companies grow exponentially because every new user attracts several other new users. I’m no expert in tech, but the same seems to be true of high growth cities: they create networks of people looking for the same thing and those networks grow rapidly as word spreads that x city is a great place to achieve y goal.
This book was written in 2008, so obviously things have changed. COVID suddenly made working from home (hereafter “WFH”) a reality for millions of people, challenging the status quo for cities as places where the young and ambitious go to reap the benefits of the network effects that cities create. The question of whether these changes are permanent and how damaging they will be to cities in the long run is still very much open. I’ll draw on a few anecdotal interactions I’ve had recently to demonstrate why I think ambitious cities will ultimately win out and the case for declining and stagnant cities.
I was in Washington DC this past weekend and talked with a number of people who, like most young people who move to Washington, work for a government agency or a non-profit. DC is an ambitious city that connects people who seek virtue and/or power (Montesquieu thought that the defining characteristic of democratic governments was virtue). Most young people who move to DC do so because they want to change the world in whatever way that they think is best, regardless of their political affiliation. This makes sense, because the city is the seat of the US Government, a great place, in spite of itself, to seek the qualities of power and virtue. People move there with a goal in mind, and are willing to put off things like marrying, having children and buying a house in order to pursue their dreams and goals. Despite the high cost of housing, several people I met expressed zero interest in moving out of the area, simply because all of the employers that they’re interested in working for are concentrated in DC and Northern Virginia, despite the fact that many of their jobs were partially or fully remote.
In another case, I have two friends who flipped cities, one who moved from Pittsburgh to Boston and another who moved from Boston to Pittsburgh. Both are what I would describe as ambitious people in their own rights. One is a tech entrepreneur and the other an urban planner. In similar ways, they’ve both moved to places where they can pursue their dreams – the tech entrepreneur to a coastal city with an established tech scene, the urban planner to a declining rust belt city in need of re-building. Interestingly, both have told me that they don’t think they could live in the places they moved from, as they have different goals and sought a different environment in which to achieve those goals. The tech entrepreneur explicitly told me that his hometown did not have enough ambitious people, and that he enjoys surrounding himself with the mix of smart and well-heeled people he has found in Boston. On the other hand, the urban planner feels more comfortable surrounded by people who are less focused on chasing money and status and is happy to be able to afford a home in Pittsburgh, living what he described as a comfortably middle class lifestyle on a middle income salary, which would not have been possible in Boston’s prohibitively expensive housing market.
I thought both of these experiences were interesting because they demonstrated that cities are still useful as places to make your goals a reality. Obviously, my sample sizes are small, I’m self-selecting for people who already live in cities and these are only anecdotes, but they were interesting because they went against what I often see in the headlines these days, arguing that remote work will permanently kill cities and so on. Despite working from home and office life being temporarily suspended, upwardly mobile people continue to move to places where they can find like-minded people who can help them further their goals. Ambitious cities remain places where networks are simply too advantageous to ignore, despite high costs of living and WFH. The benefits of being around people who think similarly and are working as hard as you inspires you to work and push yourself even harder.
But what about cities that aren’t “ambitious” or don’t have a key industry like tech, finance, politics or entertainment? Pittsburgh is one such city (though it is increasingly dominated by eds & meds and robotics). I live in Philadelphia currently, which is another example. No single industry dominates here in the way that media dominates Los Angeles or politics dominates DC. Growth in Philadelphia is slower and the city still faces many of the problems of de-industrialization: under-employment, blight, high crime and economic stagnation. The city has made an impressive turnaround in the last three decades, but only in a small concentration of neighborhoods which have experienced rapid growth, while most of the rest of the city continues to languish in post-industrial decline. The state of affairs in Philly is still better than other industrial cities like Baltimore or Youngstown, but the question of what will become of non-ambitious cities is an interesting one.
Some cities where ambition is not as handsomely rewarded will continue to attract those who want to live an urban lifestyle at an affordable price point, so long as an urban lifestyle remains fashionable. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh likely fall under that category. Philadelphia won’t transform as rapidly as New York or DC have over the past twenty years, but changes will gradually come piece by piece, neighborhood by neighborhood. This city is a great place to start a life – homes are generally affordable for a wide range of people and the city does not lack in urban amenities like public markets, bars, restaurants, concert venues, etc. It’s more exciting than the suburbs, but not quite at the center of the world like some of its more ambitious coastal neighbors. These cities offer a value proposition that will continue to have a regional attraction, if not a national or international attraction.
As for truly declining cities, the case is probably a bit more desperate. Most large rust belt cities like Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo have enough amenities to continue to attract small cohorts of new residents based on their size and price point. On the other hand, smaller declining places like Scranton or Youngstown will likely experience continued decline for the next several decades as older generations die off and younger generations continue to leave for ambitious coastal cities or warm sunbelt cities. Smaller industrial cities don’t offer network effects like high growth cities or the same value proposition as slow-growth cities.
Obviously, most of these ideas only apply to upwardly mobile people. Many people lack the resources to move across the country and are simply stuck where they are, whether in LA or Detroit. Of course, many low income people have no desire to move, either. But for those that want to move but can’t, living in a city where you can’t maximize your potential is frustrating and limiting. Cities are most beneficial when they can be used as networks, and in the 21st century, a century focused on ideas as Glaeser says in the book many times, the cities that are the best at facilitating intellectual capital are the cities that will flourish in the new century.