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Comment by PhilipA | Hacker News Reader

As a Danish company who a year ago moved to Minneapolis, I can tell you that there is hidden gold in the mid west.

Especially in Minneapolis there are tons of universities and cost of of living is much lower than the west coast. It makes it a lot easier to keep your employees once they want to start a family, something far too many companies neglect.

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Unless you want a bunch of people from CA to show up and ruin it you should stop bragging about how great it is.

Sincerely, Denver

Yeah, that's the irony of other cities trying to compete with Silicon Valley. If a city succeeds at this and a lot of well-paid engineers move there, that city will end up a lot like Silicon Valley, including the high housing prices and the traffic.

well, mainly the problem is the city doesn't prepare for it. For example, not keeping up with housing demand, public transit demand etc. THEN you get the bay area ;)

And if you try to tax businesses to pay for infrastructure, they threaten to leave the state.

And businesses barely pay employees enough to afford a mortgage, or even rent, so you can't tax the residents. How do we get our infrastructure?

The private market will make the housing available and keep rent low, which you can then serve with infrastructure via. property tax. San Fransisco and other coastal cities are the only ones that haven't figured out to just build homes.

Well, I think they have, but there is a vested interest in keeping the housing prices high.

And as much as I hate it, I do understand it. CA asked for this problem and now it will be hard to reverse. What would you do if you had millions of dollars tied up in your home and it was your only asset of value?

Argh- I'll save myself some typing :) - I commented on this here on another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540488

The worlds population has gone from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.6 billion in 2017. This will keep happening. This is not California's fault.

Except that most of the places in the world that were responsible for that population boom have vastly decreased in children per family as of late.

As long as those new liberals don't outnumber the existing population, they should continue to allow for growth and hence housing won't be a problem. Housing doesn't get expensive because highly paid workers go there. Housing gets expensive because voters and politicians don't allow enough housing to be built (lack of supply).

I doubt they will last through our the winter. It is still in the best interest that the area continues to grow.

>I doubt they will last through our the winter.

That's what Denver said.

>It is still in the best interest that the area continues to grow.

Best interest of who? How so? For every person who benefits there's gonna be another who loses.

It is not a zero sum game. I don't know of Denver, but Minneapolis can grow quite a bit before we will see the issues that SF & SV have.

We have Little Canada.

We'll just have to found a Little Valley and store them all there.

I thought the tech scene in Minneapolis revolved almost entirely around healthcare. Is this incorrect?

I must admit I am a bit too busy to network a whole lot, so that might be the case. I am more looking at it from a talent perspective.

Not really. It's more that healthcare is probably the single largest software industry around here. But there's a pretty good mix.

Huh? There's UHC/Optum sure, but also Best Buy, Target, and a bunch others. Most of the people I know don't know or care about the healthcare scene here.

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