…Salesforce.com was said to be considering Salt Lake City or Portland for its big expansion; despite their iconic status, cities like New York, Chicago and Boston weren’t on the list. This is not an anomaly but an acknowledgment of the reality that to attract the technical creative class, firms need to locate in the western United States.
The numbers back it up as well: According to a recent report from Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Mont., over the past 40 years employment in the West grew by 152 percent, compared with 78 percent for the rest of the country. Furthermore, this western job growth was almost entirely in industries such as health care, real estate, high-tech, and finance and insurance, which created 19.3 million net new jobs, many of them high-paying, according to the report.
So that leads to a natural question: Why have so many western cities become dominant hubs for software innovation? Other than the Bay Area, we don’t have any particular educational advantage, higher population density or historical incumbency. What we do share is unfettered access to beautiful, wild, protected public lands. To put it in perspective, the federal government manages 355 million acres in the West, or 46 percent of all land in the region; by contrast, the government manages only 15 percent of all land in the rest of the country.…