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Comment by mathgeek | Hacker News Reader

The article is measuring struggle in aggregate. Your hometown, while it sounds like it is indeed booming, is a single data point.

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That was partially my point though. If success begets success, cities are biased by the fact that they have already been successful. All communities started with nobody. A major business success of some kind is why these particular locations became cities over other communities.

Without a major success story under the belt of a small town, there is lack of capital, lack of expertise, lack of attention from the rest of the world, etc. that places with those success stories are able to thrive with. I mentioned my hometown because it would appear that if a small town can break out with a success story, then it starts to attract all the same things that cities do, suggesting to me that it is not so much the people as much as it the history that has resulted in cities booming.

Chattanooga is a fairly good example of this.

Also anecdotally, I completely agree with you. I actually run a company that's still very small and only focused on two neighboring towns right now as case studies, but we're cataloging all the things that "boom towns" (as opposed to boom cities) are doing right to continue to grow and find success. And then we're leveraging that to push harder for the things these cities have done right and correct the things they're doing wrong. Outside of these two towns, we hope to find more towns with similar structures that could be successes in the future.

Every town can succeed with the right structures in place. The biggest thing is human capital: having people, and not only that, but keeping them in your town as much as possible. Easier said than done. Your idea of a "success story" driving that human capital is a great example of like-begets-like. The more successes you can point to, the more successes will exist.

What have you found in “boom towns” that may be taken for granted (or not exist at all) in “boom cities”? In other words, it’s easy for us to think of things that cities have and towns don’t; have you found a counter example?

I think it's really easy to point to things that successful towns have that successful cities don't have. The only hard part about it is somewhere out there, there is of course going to be exceptions to everything. If I say "a good town has this thing that a city doesn't", of course somewhere there will be a city that has that thing. So it's always a bit of a comparison, but that's how most people approach their city selection anyway: they know what general area they want to live in (likely close to work or family) and then they compare towns and cities in that area. It's rare to find someone comparison shopping between Austin, Texas and Lebanon, New Hampshire. I'm just prefacing my answer because of course this being the Internet, someone will find an exception to the rule and use it to say the rule is completely invalid.

The biggest difference between successful towns and successful cities, I think, is the exclusivity. If you're one of five million, you're going to look for smaller groups to align yourself with. You're not connected with New York, you're connected with SoHo. You're connected with the Upper East Side. You're connected with the Village. But in a small town, you tend to identify with basically the entire town. You can feel the pulse, you know the rhythms. It's your "stomping grounds".

There are a ton of other elements we're still working on feeling out. People in towns are more likely to own their own transportation than people in cities, so any activity or business that depends on that factor will thrive more. People in towns seem more likely to stay put longer term. They're more likely to own a home. They're more likely to be connected with nature, and those towns are more likely to be centered around recreational activities like recreational (as opposed to commercial) rivers or lakes. You're less likely to have to pay for parking, which makes getting in and out of town easier.

Sure you may not be able to walk to a Starbucks. You might not have fiber Internet. You can't find a Uber, and good luck with Postmates. Amazon doesn't have same-day delivery and UPS comes later in the day, and you might have to drive a bit to get to the city. But by far the biggest thing I've found about people who live in "boom towns"? They don't care about that, because they never go to the city. They have everything they need right in their own backyard, only cheaper and easier.

And the data points for the cities exclude places like Detroit and Charleston WV...

Are you saying the author excluded those places? Have you read the book and found them missing?

No, I read the article, not the book. Apparently he does consider the other cities which are declining (based on a quick read of the Amazon description), but it isn't clear how much time he spends on them.

But this would belie the title 'Why Cities Boom...' and comments here implying that urban centers are destined to prosper compared to rural areas. The reality is that some cities prosper and some cities are more horrible than nearly any rural area.

This may be a case where the headline writer did not read the article. The article itself does make the distinction you are making:

"[...] the widening split between dynamic urban areas on the one hand and struggling cities and small towns on the other."

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