> 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.
Note, however, that a lot of people reverse-commute. They don't live in the city because their job is there, they live there because they want to. Some of my coworkers even reverse-telecommute, working from their apartments downtown rather than schlepping their macbooks all the way to an office building in the suburbs.
The Internet was supposed to help by breaking down information barriers but the effect seems to have been extremely minimal. I can now learn almost anything instantly in Nowhere, West Virginia but that doesn't seem to matter.
It shows two things I think:
(1) The Internet has yet to replicate anything close to the "bandwidth" of in-person interaction.
(2) Capital for virtually any endeavor is geographically concentrated and the Internet does not seem to have changed that much.
To add on to your #1 - There's no desire/impetus to bridge that particular gap. It's very easy to just tell prospective employees to show up. I wonder how long rent will have to increase before prospective employees stop showing up.
Note though that with respect to jobs, many or most large companies may be in the suburban/exurban orbit of medium to large cities but aren't actually in high rent inner metro areas. The Bay area is something of an outlier in that Silicon Valley tends to be as expensive as SF itself.
In the Boston area, it's quite recent that a substantial number of tech jobs have sprung up in Cambridge/Boston proper. Historically most tech was out in the 128 and 495 corridors--and much of it still is where rents and house prices are (mostly) much lower than in the preferred neighborhoods of the city.
> I realize now when I said “young folks” I meant young artists and poets and other creative people who were like me about ten years ago: poor, or not wealthy, trying to figure out where to live, and wanting to do something weird and interesting that doesn’t necessarily fit into a traditional model. Not: get a job at a tech company, get big art world gallery shows, etc.
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.