Since I first moved to California in the first week of August, 1995, I've been asked about moving back to Chattanooga. I've actually thought a lot about it and occasionally the thought is quite tempting.
To start off, let me make it clear that I am not entirely fond of California.
We rent a small house, 2 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, an office that's a converted garage from which I can see daylight through the cracks, a back yard that's paved with flagstone in a crowded neighborhood, and for this we pay over twice what we paid for a 3 bedroom 2 bath house in a good neighborhood with a livingroom I could have played hockey in it was so huge. If I felt like buying a house I could probably find a fixer-upper with no land for a quarter of a million dollars. Literally.
Taxes out here are huge.
We mountain bike, restricted to 15 miles per hour on dirt fire roads only. Marin County, home of Gary Fisher and the self-proclaimed birthplace of mountain biking is reduced to lycra clad folks riding $3,000+ fully suspended bicycles in these conditions. To top it off, those fire roads are often better maintained than the paved streets, bad enough that inline skating is not much of an option, which have been known to cost up to $4k/inch and still aren't up to the massive population density this area supports.
Whitewater is, at the very least, a 2.5 hour drive, rock climbing is generally done indoors in gyms. We look up at the so-called "golden hills", actually the dead brown grass just waiting for an excuse to explode like so much flash powder, nervous that they'll slide down on us during the rainy months or collapse when the next earthquake hits.
Granted there are things to love out here, and there are few things as therapeutic as staring out at the ocean while the breakers pound the cliffs below, but I don't plan on making this a long term home.
I think regularly about Chattanooga. I've got a circle of friends there, people I trust and with whom I find stimulating conversation. In Chattanooga I'd be 20 minutes from rock climbing, 50 minutes from fantastic whitewater during the summer, and during the winter there's more whitewater than I could possibly imagine. I'd have mountain biking, hiking, I could regularly pick a day and spend it in the woods without seeing a soul.
So in many of the categories I rank by, Chattanooga is one of the top places in the country.
Why not move back?
I get asked often about starting a company or working as a technology evangelist. After my track record with Chattanooga On-line and my experience with Pixar, I've apparently got something of a reputation. But when I look at the problems of starting a company, I look at staffing.
As a place to set up a couple-of-person most hired locally consulting shop, assuming that the staff would spend 5-10 weeks of every year elsewhere at trade shows or schmoozing, Chattanooga is fine. But to grow larger than that you'd have to start attracting technical talent, and that's where it's going to become quite difficult.
First up is the matter of lifestyle.
Michael Eisner, as quoted by Jerry Falwell, recently estimated that 30-40% of Disney employees were gay. I can buy that, and I think Catherine's experience there backs that up. I'd hate to guess for various technical fields, but at the very least the art department for anything involving entertainment is gonna have a staff that's a little bit lavender.
Even for the straight folk many of the same caveats apply. On one of the lists I read someone was mentioning that NewTek made lots of enemies in wherever-they-are (Lawrence?) Kansas because the company fought to keep a strip bar open in the face of opposition from the guy who runs the http://www.godhatesfags.com site because this was something important to keeping their employees happy.
Of the three areas that have high concentrations of successful high tech and entertainment right now, Seattle, the SF Bay, and Austin TX, you certainly can't throw a stone in the first two without uncovering an amount of sexual permissiveness that makes even me blush, and I think that there's a correlation there. And where's the nearest S&M club to Chattanooga, Masquerade in Atlanta?
Now maybe I was a little bit out of the loop, but I don't think Chattacon makes up for the rest of the open hostility in the community. Now if the adult motel on Lookout mountain were still open...
But to a large extent sex is just a symptom of the rest of cutting edge society. "Renegade Theatre" didn't survive, nor, for that matter "City Beat" (although that may have had different reasons). Having to drive to Atlanta for "Spike & Mike's Animation Festival" might be acceptable, but to what advantage if it'll be in your neighborhood theatre here? And in a town where "Oh, Calcutta!" came under fire, you think the "Sick & Twisted" version is gonna get within 100 miles?
The next is the job sinkhole/cross-pollinization problem.
Part of what keeps the SF Bay area vibrant is the heavy traffic between jobs. Waiting all 4 years for your options to vest is a long time on a resume, I've seen tons of resumes with quite a few 8 month to a year stints on them and this is normal. In Chattanooga you'd have to pay to move these people in, then someone else would have to pay to move them out. We know this doesn't happen, as a matter of fact Eric keeps running into the guy who preceded me at Signal Data. So despite the fact that he's switched jobs a couple of times he's still working with the same small pool, and it's hard to grow in that environment.
And then there's the education issue, but I won't get started on UTC.
I think about moving back. But when I consider all the resources I lose, all the evening parties I can schmooze at, all the red-eyes I'd have to fly, I think it'd be quite difficult for me to get enough other people to fall in love with that area versus where they came from. And it's gotta be something I'd do when I was really sure of my income and have all my contacts in place, not a place to start a company that'll be contracting with folks from elsewhere anyway.
Dragging high tech to Chattanooga means fundamentally changing the character of the town. And it means trying to impress people who put their jobs first and are willing to work long hours with the recreational opportunities of the area.
This is not easy.