Boston Bar Buzz-Kill

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/05/26/boston-bar-buzz-kill/KbPYBLYiTjLsykcpPi0mRJ/story.html

by ryanwjackson • 14 years ago

38 31 14 years ago

aberkowitz2• 14 years ago

Extending bar and club hours doesn't even make my list of things Boston could do to improve the entrepreneurial environment.

maybird• 14 years ago

I'd really like to know what your top 3 would be.

aberkowitz2• 14 years ago

1. Keep The T open until three or four, so busy entrepreneurs can get home for a few hours of sleep.

2. Get nonlocal VCs and Angels to come to Boston to make deals, and show the locals how it's done.

3. Encourage school to offer indefinite stop out programs. Too many students stash their ideas and suspend their leave of absence lest they lose financial aide or have to reapply to college.

jseliger2• 14 years ago

but what he ought to be thinking about is bars.

No. What he really ought to be thinking about is housing. In Boston—like Silicon Valley—virtually no one can afford housing: http://www.wbur.org/2009/10/26/housing-report (for Boston) and http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... (for Silicon Valley). Part of the way Boston needs to compete is through housing policy, and especially allowing much denser development that will help alleviate the extreme housing shortage. Bars are nice, and I'm not opposed to them, but the biggest weakness of many areas that are appealing to tech people, and people in their 20s and 30s more generally, is the cost of housing, which has largely become a consumer good.

rglullis2• 14 years ago

If we take that Silicon Valley is the undisputed Mecca of technology, then your argument falls through. Like you said, Silicon Valley is also expensive, and yet they still manage to attract more and more people every year. New York, another city who is one of the most expensive in the US, is managing to pass Boston as the tech center of the East Cost.

We need to take a look at things where Boston is substantially different from the Valley. We can't change the weather and make Boston sunny year round, but we can provide an atmosphere that is more friendly to recent-grads.

jseliger2• 14 years ago

yet they still manage to attract more and more people every year

See the second link:

Meanwhile, San Francisco—one of the most expensive cities in the United States—added just 418 new housing units in 2011, the fewest since 1993. What’s more, 149 existing units were removed, leading to a nearly nonexistent increase in housing supply.

Farther south in Menlo Park, Facebook raised billions of dollars in an IPO, instantly putting millions of dollars in the hands of early employees and investors. But as Trulia’s economist Jed Kolko notes, the surge of cash will create losers, by bidding up the cost of local housing. “If Facebook were in Texas or North Carolina,” he observes, “developers would have been building new homes in anticipation of this day,” but in Silicon Valley—as in San Francisco and Marin County farther north—it’s essentially impossible for new construction to meet rising demand for living space. So some of the people living in the area who didn’t just reap a financial windfall are poised to be priced out of their homes as high rents get even higher.

Silicon Valley has largely become zero-sum, population-wise (see also Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City on this subject).

gms• 14 years ago

Nightlife/bars in Boston are absolutely not the issue here. Compared to Boston, everything in San Francisco closes much earlier and public transport is inferior to boot. Yet people still flock there.

ctide• 14 years ago

Public transportation is a million times better in San Francisco. Not once have I ever felt like a car was necessary in the ~5 years I've lived here. In the 7 years I spent in Boston, at no point did I have a commute that was less than 3x as long with public transportation compared to just driving. The only time public transportation works in Boston is if you don't have to diverge off the red line.

djacobs2• 14 years ago

(Anecdotally,) I disagree: I didn't discover many of the best parts of SF until I started driving around here. It feels like SF geography is really designed to keep you out of certain neighborhoods unless you're driving there to see friends.

In Boston, though, even when I had a car, I didn't feel like I was hanging out in better places than when I was riding the T everywhere I went.

Again, just an anecdote, but one shared by several friends.

draggnar• 14 years ago

I'm from boston and visited san francisco. Public Works with dj harvey until 4am. Would never, ever, happen in boston.

p_monk• 14 years ago

Many cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, require bars to obtain a specific license for dancing.

sneak2• 14 years ago

States in America require businesses to get a license to sell a beer to an adult.

mbell4• 14 years ago

Here is my problem with Boston:

If you look even remotely like your 25 or younger and not dressed 'like a business person', your presumed to be some random college 'kid' who doesn't know anything. If you live anywhere nice this is often immediately followed by awesome questions like "your parents pay for you to live here?".

To me the Boston business ethos is anti-youth and of an 'old guard' mentality. Your either young, stupid and in college or your in 'business clothes' going to do 'real work' (aka climbing a corporate ladder).

There are definitely some very good groups and things going on for the younger builder crowd but its a long ways from overriding the general stigma that exists in the city. Creating a place where creative young people want to live and have fun would require a number of changes in general city culture to really have an impact.

All that said, I hate how early Boston shuts down, not just the bars but this city as a whole seems to be built around a early to rise, early to sleep mentality.

ZenPsycho• 14 years ago

Your inability to write in proper english is not helping your argument.

54mf• 14 years ago

(I used to live in Allston, currently living in the "greater Boston area".)

"If you look even remotely like your 25 or younger and not dressed 'like a business person', your presumed to be some random college 'kid' who doesn't know anything. If you live anywhere nice this is often immediately followed by awesome questions like "your parents pay for you to live here?"."

This is purely personal experience, but every single one of my friends when I was living in Allston was, at least, getting money from their parents monthly, and none had any kind of full-time work to speak of. FWIW.

mbell4• 14 years ago

> This is purely personal experience, but every single one of my friends when I was living in Allston was, at least, getting money from their parents monthly, and none had any kind of full-time work to speak of. FWIW.

I'm not saying its a bad assumption to make, and that is the difficult part of the problem to solve. Given the college population of Boston its a completely reasonable assumption to make that a casually dressed 20-25 year old is in college. On the same note in SV its statistically reasonable to assume a casually dressed 20-25 year old is doing something interesting. None the less, that assumption creates an additional barrier to communication in Boston. First you've got to get past the initial visual presumption to get the conversation started, and then often spend some time vetting that your not a member of the presumed 'college kid' crowd. As a result there is a much larger barrier to getting down to the interesting parts of a conversation in Boston that I don't feel exists nearly as much in SV.

Part of it is just that SV has an advantage in that the young people that go there have already demonstrated some level of drive by simply being there.

localhost3000• 14 years ago

Boston has a great bar scene. Our bars and restaurants are regularly recognized as some of the best in the country. We also have many, many bars for such a small geographic area. IMO the bar scene in Boston is superior to SF.

These are the real pain points for living in Boston as a 20-something:

The T is miserable, always. The weather is miserable, 9 months per year. The attitude is cynical, usually. Massholes are real. Prices are high. We spend too much time comparing ourselves with NYC.

Otherwise, Boston is excellent. The city is clean. People are educated. Some are even attractive. The bike sharing is great.

Bar closing time is not a real issue. It's just a symptom of an old-fashioned, stuck in its ways, puritanical city.

rradu• 14 years ago

Agree with your first two points, especially in the comparison to NYC. They're just not comparable from the outset--NY is way bigger (469 sq miles and 8+ million residents, while Boston is 90 sq miles and 600,000 residents).

But I'd say bar closing time is a real issue. I hate having to end my nights at 2, especially if I have to cab it back anyway because the T isn't running.

Actually, that's what I'd say the biggest issue with Boston is--the T service. Not only does it suck when it is running, it doesn't even run when I need it the most. The MBTA is very poorly-managed and many hundreds of millions of dollars in debt (very few actual improvements to the system are done because of this; it will take the MBTA until ~2050 to pay back all its debts under the current structure assuming it incurs no other expenditures)

sneak2• 14 years ago

As soon as more small, smart companies begin taking a holistic approach to recruiting, this is going to become more and more of an issue.

People who work hard and play hard and can live anywhere will choose the places that maximize fun/convenience to cost. It's not a one-dimensional continuum, either - places like Berlin have cheap cost of living _and_ a fantastic nightlife, but government bureaucracy makes it more inconvenient for small businesses here.

It's funny how these pockets of win always seem to work out by chance and circumstance.

In another decade, governments will be playing this game with tax laws for information workers, too. Naturally, the ratio of gross/net income is just as important to the final value of this "happiness equation" as the cost of living, or gross salary.

JoeAltmaier• 14 years ago

I guess nightclubs are important - if you are the club-going sort. I've never made a deal in a club, solved a problem in a club, or even actually held a decent conversation - its too dang loud for that.

As for a break from codeing or whatever, I get on my bike and ride. Builds me up instead of tearing me down, physically and emotionally.

I'm just not sure the bar-hopping sort is whom I want to meet/hire/work with. Probably makes me puritanical and staid; but I get things done. The best developers I know get things done; none of them frequent/even care about the nightclub scene.

In fact the nerdy, knowledgable deep-think architect/designer crowd I hang with would look absolutely ridiculous in a nightclub.

So I'm thinking, no, its not a lack of clubs that keeps a city from being a tech hub. Its more likely an accident of history, not yet reaching critical mass, some missing tax incentive or something like that.

lmm• 14 years ago

The best developers I've met were all serious clubbers (well, one of them was an ex-serious-clubber when I met him, mid-30s). Your anecdote is not data; no doubt you hang with people with similar interests to yourself (and do you actually know none of them go clubbing? You'd be surprised how geeky certain club scenes are)

Boston Bar Buzz-Kill

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