Recommended Reading - The Unaffordable Urban Paradise

High-tech companies should—out of self-interest, if for no other reason—embrace a shift to a kind of urbanism that allows many more people, especially blue-collar and service workers, to share in the gains of urban development. The superstar cities they’ve helped create cannot survive when nurses, EMTs, teachers, police officers, and other service providers can no longer afford to live in them.

Here’s how they can do it. First, they can work with cities to help build more housing, which would reduce housing prices. They can support efforts to liberalize outdated zoning and building codes to enable more housing construction, and invest in the development of more affordable housing for service and blue-collar workers.

Second, they can work for, support, and invest in the development of more and better public transit to connect outlying areas to booming cores and tech clusters where employment is—and to spur and generate denser real estate and business development around those stops and stations.

Third, they can engage the wider business community and government to upgrade the jobs of low-wage service workers—who now make up more than 45 percent of the national workforce—into higher-paying, family-supporting work.

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