Midwest: Urbana-Champaign, IL; Bloomington, IN; West Lafayette, IN; Ann Arbor, MI; Madison, WI
South: Asheville, NC; Greensboro, NC; Blacksburg, VA
Mid-Atlantic: Rochester, NY; the Philadelphia, PA area (e.g., Lambertville, NJ)
New England: the Amherst/Springfield, MA area; the outskirts of the Boston metropolitan area (e.g., Norwood, MA); Portland, ME; the parts of NH nearest Boston; Keene, NH; Portsmouth, NH; Burlington, VT
(Marking our favorite no-property-found-yet options with underline.)
Research Triangle Park is on the list of 14+ cities that Alex classified one tier below our top thirty (as of one month ago): “Moved to backburner; had varying levels of initial interest but also flags; investigated and deprioritized; plausible something could bump them back onto our radar, but seems unlikely.” Along with places like Ithaca NY, Salt Lake City UT, Pittsburgh / CMU, Princeton NJ, and Providence RI.
I wasn’t involved in the decision process, so I don’t know why those fell to the backburner (maybe Alex or Blake will chime in later). Them being classified like that is both a positive update (we thought they were promising enough to seriously consider them) and a negative one (we’ve already investigated them and ran into obstacles or flags).
I wouldn’t be shocked if someplace on that list makes it to our shortlist in the future, and am in favor of hearing more impressions/arguments/considerations about places like those. I mentioned there’s maybe a 50⁄50 chance we change criteria (to pivot away from our focus on finding a campus) soon, in which case I expect the set of promising places to look pretty different.
I pitched a particular campus near Providence, RI in an email to Alex which I think meets at least most of the criteria I’ve seen. I’ll mention a few more general thoughts in favor of RI here:
Great beaches, state parks, and hiking trails
Less than an hour drive or train ride to/from Boston (same as I think you’d get from southern NH—Boston rush hour is going to be rough for driving regardless of which direction you’re coming from)
Providence itself is a decent city, although it doesn’t have a big tech scene
Multiple good colleges/universities within a few hours away (Brown is right in Providence)
Less snow in RI compared to NH (NH snow tends to stick around longer too)
Tick/mosquito control may be feasible for the property itself (https://www.bigbluebug.com/mosquito-and-tick-control), though this wouldn’t help for anyone planning to hike all over the state (although if you stick more to beaches than hiking trails, it’s not as much as a problem compared to NH in general)
I live in NH and have family in RI that I visit a few times a (non-plague) year. In general, RI has always seemed similar to southern NH to me both aesthetically and culturally (but with more ocean instead of lakes). So if MIRI were thinking about places in southern NH, I would think RI would have a lot of similar tradeoffs (besides maybe taxes, which I’d guess is better for business/property in RI but worse for individual/sales/income).
I poked Alex about this, and he didn’t have links to specific properties on hand, but he did rattle off some common reasons candidate campuses haven’t worked out:
Too far away from anything else.
Related: lack of Uber / UberEats availability.
Reasons to think building more will be very difficult. E.g., the land is in a conservation easement, or it’s zoned farmland. (Causing something to no longer be zoned as farmland will generally be impossible or very difficult.)
The buildings don’t have enough square footage for us to start researching there in the next few months.
We’re not excited enough about the city and/or area.
The land is too small. We’ve found some really badass buildings, but on a tiny lot surrounded by neighbors, so no space/privacy.
A thing that’s an important bonus is if the property is already split into multiple lots. If it’s not split into lots, that’s another huge preliminary part of the process that has to be done before we develop the property (and it might turn out to be impossible).
Usually you can have one building (and maybe one secondary building) per lot. If you have 50 acres that’s designated as a single enormous lot, then you’re likely to have to split it before building on it, which adds an additional bureaucratic nightmare to the process.
I’m curious about the list of places that would be good except that they don’t have the right kind of property available.
This is basically all the places I mentioned except the Bellingham and Peekskill areas:
West Coast: Bend, OR; Eugene, OR; Issaquah, WA; North Bend, WA
Rocky Mountain: Boulder, CO; Fort Collins, CO; Bozeman, MT; Missoula, MT
Southwest: Austin, TX; Reno, NV
Great Plains: —
Midwest: Urbana-Champaign, IL; Bloomington, IN; West Lafayette, IN; Ann Arbor, MI; Madison, WI
South: Asheville, NC; Greensboro, NC; Blacksburg, VA
Mid-Atlantic: Rochester, NY; the Philadelphia, PA area (e.g., Lambertville, NJ)
New England: the Amherst/Springfield, MA area; the outskirts of the Boston metropolitan area (e.g., Norwood, MA); Portland, ME; the parts of NH nearest Boston; Keene, NH; Portsmouth, NH; Burlington, VT
(Marking our favorite no-property-found-yet options with underline.)
No Raleigh/RTP? They make the top of the city rankings for the US. I spent some time there and concur. https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/region_rankings.jsp?title=2021®ion=019
Research Triangle Park is on the list of 14+ cities that Alex classified one tier below our top thirty (as of one month ago): “Moved to backburner; had varying levels of initial interest but also flags; investigated and deprioritized; plausible something could bump them back onto our radar, but seems unlikely.” Along with places like Ithaca NY, Salt Lake City UT, Pittsburgh / CMU, Princeton NJ, and Providence RI.
I wasn’t involved in the decision process, so I don’t know why those fell to the backburner (maybe Alex or Blake will chime in later). Them being classified like that is both a positive update (we thought they were promising enough to seriously consider them) and a negative one (we’ve already investigated them and ran into obstacles or flags).
I wouldn’t be shocked if someplace on that list makes it to our shortlist in the future, and am in favor of hearing more impressions/arguments/considerations about places like those. I mentioned there’s maybe a 50⁄50 chance we change criteria (to pivot away from our focus on finding a campus) soon, in which case I expect the set of promising places to look pretty different.
I pitched a particular campus near Providence, RI in an email to Alex which I think meets at least most of the criteria I’ve seen. I’ll mention a few more general thoughts in favor of RI here:
Great beaches, state parks, and hiking trails
Less than an hour drive or train ride to/from Boston (same as I think you’d get from southern NH—Boston rush hour is going to be rough for driving regardless of which direction you’re coming from)
Providence itself is a decent city, although it doesn’t have a big tech scene
Multiple good colleges/universities within a few hours away (Brown is right in Providence)
Less snow in RI compared to NH (NH snow tends to stick around longer too)
Tick/mosquito control may be feasible for the property itself (https://www.bigbluebug.com/mosquito-and-tick-control), though this wouldn’t help for anyone planning to hike all over the state (although if you stick more to beaches than hiking trails, it’s not as much as a problem compared to NH in general)
I live in NH and have family in RI that I visit a few times a (non-plague) year. In general, RI has always seemed similar to southern NH to me both aesthetically and culturally (but with more ocean instead of lakes). So if MIRI were thinking about places in southern NH, I would think RI would have a lot of similar tradeoffs (besides maybe taxes, which I’d guess is better for business/property in RI but worse for individual/sales/income).
I’m curious for examples of properties that were ruled out and why.
I poked Alex about this, and he didn’t have links to specific properties on hand, but he did rattle off some common reasons candidate campuses haven’t worked out:
Too far away from anything else.
Related: lack of Uber / UberEats availability.
Reasons to think building more will be very difficult. E.g., the land is in a conservation easement, or it’s zoned farmland. (Causing something to no longer be zoned as farmland will generally be impossible or very difficult.)
The buildings don’t have enough square footage for us to start researching there in the next few months.
We’re not excited enough about the city and/or area.
The land is too small. We’ve found some really badass buildings, but on a tiny lot surrounded by neighbors, so no space/privacy.
A thing that’s an important bonus is if the property is already split into multiple lots. If it’s not split into lots, that’s another huge preliminary part of the process that has to be done before we develop the property (and it might turn out to be impossible).
Usually you can have one building (and maybe one secondary building) per lot. If you have 50 acres that’s designated as a single enormous lot, then you’re likely to have to split it before building on it, which adds an additional bureaucratic nightmare to the process.