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Yesterday, this trend occurred to me: living in the city is expensive and cramped. So people move to the suburbs because housing is cheaper, the schools are better, and you can get more land. But now they have these long commutes. So companies start moving out to the suburbs too, so suburban professionals will be more attracted to the shorter commute. But now those suburbs start getting pricey and overbuilt, so people move further...lather, rinse, repeat.
(If you're familiar with California geography at all, my mom, who works in Mountain View, had some coworkers who commuted in from Los Banos: that was the nearest place that was sufficiently affordable that they could live, even if it came with a 90-minute-each-way commute.)
To some extent, none of this is new. When I lived in southern New Hampshire, Digital already had lots of locations around 495 and even in Nashua on Spit Brook Road. The last time I drove through Hudson, though, it was a lot more built up than it had been 20 years ago. And there are established problems with sprawl, ranging from transit (getting people from "somewhere in Rockingham County, NH" to "somewhere around Burlington, MA" is harder than getting people from "Dorchester" to "Cambridge") to Wal-Mart (there wasn't one of those in Hudson in 1986).
(If you're familiar with California geography at all, my mom, who works in Mountain View, had some coworkers who commuted in from Los Banos: that was the nearest place that was sufficiently affordable that they could live, even if it came with a 90-minute-each-way commute.)
To some extent, none of this is new. When I lived in southern New Hampshire, Digital already had lots of locations around 495 and even in Nashua on Spit Brook Road. The last time I drove through Hudson, though, it was a lot more built up than it had been 20 years ago. And there are established problems with sprawl, ranging from transit (getting people from "somewhere in Rockingham County, NH" to "somewhere around Burlington, MA" is harder than getting people from "Dorchester" to "Cambridge") to Wal-Mart (there wasn't one of those in Hudson in 1986).
