This was a thought I had the other day. As a city becomes more wealthy and grows and with ever larger companies forming / coming to the city, the city becomes more wealthy. This drives up the cost of housing to the point where while the on paper the average person makes much more money than in a smaller city. Any increase in wealth gets effectively absorbed by landlords and increasing property taxes. Making it more difficult and competitive for the average non tech non finance worker to be able to live there. In the end it seems kind of pointless? A lot of cities could very well be better off being composed of mostly traditional jobs. Baristas, barbers etc rather than these higher paying jobs.
Most of the world’s cities look a bit like your putative utopia. Almost everyone works in low-skilled jobs: market vendors, barbers, cafe owners, “baristas” in fake Starbucks. And most of these cities are not places you would choose to live in.
I would include trades people also. Yes you’re right that many of those places I wouldn’t like to live there due to other conditions, but then the question I have is. Are these places how they are due to a lack of big business / wealth driving up housing costs? I’d argue that you could very much have a city be a good place for more average people to live without the expensive cost of living that some industries end up bring to their cities.
Having these higher paying jobs in an area effectively just makes everything else more expensive due to increased costs of living, which just brings us back to square one, if not even lower since some of these low skilled jobs, which are arguably the most important in making an actual city function may not be able to keep pace with the increases. What’s the benefit of this
This boils down to a critique of economic inequality. And I agree with you. Reducing inequality has the potential to solve lots of problems, including this one.