[llamaorama]

I guess it depends on the measure of a city.

I think the function of a city is to connect people, in a broad sense beyond personal relationships (buyer meets seller, employer meets employee, etc). This is clearly value-added in an economics sense. It's more than the sum of it's parts. It actively creates wealth.

Communications and transportation technology has for the past 100 years gradually made it less important for everyone to live close together, jobs can be remote, things can be bought online, people have cars to travel further distances, etc. Cities have fewer exclusive name-brand things like a store only found in the biggest malls, you can get in a small town on Amazon now.

But there are so many things that rely on proximity to a large customer and worker base because they are niche. Access to medical care, the long tail of personal services categories. Karate dojos, mentally disabled adult day care that will take your relative and insurance, kitchen and bath tile installation pros who can be out on Wednesday at 8 am, Volkswagen certified paint and body shops, Dermotologists who treat your weird skin thing specifically, restaurants that serve Georgian khachpuri, a vet that's open on Sunday when your cat is looking sickly, a dentist you like, etc.

I think these "long tail of niche categories" activities should also benefit from clustering. A restaurant needs someone who can clean it's vent hood and repair it's dish machine. The repair shop needs to be able to order replacement parts and get them delivered fast and needs a steady supply of qualified tradespeople to hire from a local community college or they'll never be able to keep guys and be understaffed. Also the restaurant is some fast-casual concept and it needs interior design, it needs an architect and they might be remote but the people who install the hipster decor aren't.

All these things are also job creators and small-medium-business markets and none of them can be either sold online or are jobs that can be remote work from home. There's a difference in lifestyle where if you live in a city the answer is always "sure" and if you live in a small town "oh well that won't work out".

Finally at the end of the day Amazon's ability to offer fast grocery delivery for example is dependent on efficient traveling salesman routes for its delivery vehicles which requires density. Even if robot drones bring you things to your home, NYC will always have superior delivery times and you won't get fresh produce air-dropped in the middle of Wyoming.

...

TLDR though, if a city becomes an asset type for the rich, and nobody normal can live there anymore, and it NIMBY's away all the light industry and warehouses and air cargo hubs, etc, then it fails at all this. Then it's not generating the value added from the clustering and we are actually poorer for it.

I guess we can afford to lose a few places like SF to be these kinds of fake show pieces but the US will always need cities that bring lots of things together, which is why places like Dallas will just continue to grow, and why if Chicago got it's shit together it could come back, etc.