In yet another indication that quality of life is increasingly affecting economic development, a HUD newsletter had the following snippet:
“California has begun losing college-educated residents, on net, to other states, in large part because of the high cost of housing,” Virginia Postrel notes in Atlantic Monthly. “The South’s population growth since the 1980s has come from the lure of cheap housing created by liberal permitting policies, according to new research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Kristina Tobin. By lowering the cost of housing, these policies give residents higher real incomes compared with similarly paid workers elsewhere – a strong incentive to move, even if you don’t like bugs or hot summers. The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable.”
Smaller cities that have affordable housing and affordable broadband would seem to have a valuable edge over communities that can't offer one, the other, or either of them.