Although—yeah—any small town could begin to capitalize on this piecemeal to some good effect, here is how I predict the big swells will go…

Yes, young professionals _will_ seek to leave the big city! I live in the Bay Area, and of course, San Francisco is _insane_! You literally have these kids who are making $100k-$200k, but they barely feel like they are _middle class_. Although S.F. does have a lot of nice things about it, it does also have lots of problems, too.

At the same time, young people like to be around other young people—let’s segment into pre-married with kids, and post-married with kids, because of course that changes things a lot. The pre married with kids ones will want to congregate in _clusters_ where they can be around other “cool” kids like themselves. So I predict that small towns/small cities with a particular accumulation of amenities will start to become hubs. —Perhaps around college towns, good transportation hubs, other nice things that people would be attracted to. Once these trends start to pick up in certain towns/small cities, there will be an exponential “runaway” effect of certain ones becoming “cool”. (As a gen-xer in the 90’s, the equivalent was Austin or Seattle.)

Part of what I predict is very attractive about this, is that I think it _might not_ be as destructive as it has been to, say, the Bay Area. Tech has just ravaged my hometown and home area. Even the ones who make the big bucks are not having the best of lives. On the other hand, if you take that same population and dilute it over lots and lots of places, I feel it could actually provide a lot of value to all of these small towns and cities. Imagine, more people who are happy to pay a premium for artisinal wares, and highly value special places, quality of life, etc. I think it could provide a second life for lots of small downtowns.

I also think if I were working for a small town, I would look into creating coworking space, and subsidizing it to get off the ground. Create some attractive infrastructure, and of course good wifi is absolutely essential as well. (If you are interested in the coworking part, my friend Iris is a consultant in this, so I will give her a shoutout: https://coworkingwithiris.co/)