Atlanta feels more like Chicago than SF to me -- the sprawl is worse, the weather is better (but it's certainly not the California coast), and the meathead culture is substantial although I'm not sure I can compare it to Chicago's.
The Olympics were a good thing for the downtown area, and there is some government willpower to make it more appealing to entrpreneurs -- notably in biotech. With the CDC, Emory, and Georgia Tech, things could certainly be worse for startups, but I still wouldn't pick Atlanta as a likely new startup hub. The same government support that keeps the city afloat also feels a bit stifling. Poverty in the city center and sprawl everywhere else is depressing. And the general perception of Georgia in the existing startup hubs is even worse than the area actually is; offering a group of hackers $1 million to move to the deep South sounds like a mind game or a social experiment, not a serious offer.
Compare: When the last tech bubble burst it seemed like a lot of engineers left the Bay Area and resettled around San Diego. La Jolla has UCSD, a pool of biotech serial entrpreneurs and angels, even better weather than Palo Alto, and decent burritos and pho. Public transportation could be better, and it is getting better. So, it would take some extreme persuasion to keep me from heading right back to the west coast when I finish grad school.
Chicago isn't a sprawl city. San Diego and San Jose definitely are. I don't know what a "meathead culture" is, but your favorite band is more likely to play here than in Atlanta or San Francisco.
Chicago has much more sprawl than San Jose. The latter is confined somewhat by geography and several open space preserves, while there is apparently nothing to stop the westward migration of Chicago's suburbs. After spending my university years in the Chicago area it was very bizarre to visit last week and realize that you can almost drive from the loop to Rockford without leaving suburbs/exurbs along I80. It is somewhat similar to how Austin and Round Rock used to actually be cities separated by open expanses of empty space and now the trip between the two cities can be navigated just by hopping from one strip mall parking lot to another...
You had to predict that someone was going to offer up a bespoke definition of "sprawl" to defend San Jose, and there you go. Thanks!
First, if you want to define "sprawl" geographically, then the Bay Area and Chicago are almost identical: it's 40.4 miles from the loop to Elgin, and 40.2 miles from the Sunset to Pleasanton. In both cases, that drive is an unbroken parade of suburbs.
Second, the conventional definition of "sprawl" is by population density. Chicago's is 12,500/sq mile; 2.8M people live within the borders of the city. San Francisco is more dense, but has only 800,000 people. No valley city even comes close.
Finally, your anecdote about the drive to Rockford would apply just as well to NYC --- drive 50 miles in any direction from NYC waiting for the suburbs to stop. Apparently NYC is also a sprawl city.
Notice I'm giving you the most favorable possible comparison here, pretending you compared San Francisco to Chicago and not San Jose. Saying "Chicago has much more sprawl than San Jose" is like saying "Chicago has much more sprawl than Oak Brook, IL". San Jose is a suburb with a couple tall buildings, surrounded on all sides by 10-15 miles of flatter suburbs.
I think public transportation in the NYC area makes the "sprawl" into Jersey, Connecticut or even parts of PA not so bad. Hailing from that region, but living now in the western outskirts of Chicagoland, I can attest to the very strange difference of the sprawl here versus what I'd term as "cohesive" outgrowth in NYC.
If you're out by Plainfield or (god help you) Dekalb, you're dealing with the impact of the mortgage bubble over the last 10 years, which has totally over-developed the former farmland that surrounded Chicago. Much of the Chicago suburbs have public transportion access that rivals the NYC suburbs.
Sorry, no disrespect intended by the "meathead" phrase -- the edit link is gone now, but I meant whether a city council would rather invest in 1000 startups or a football stadium. Sports seem pretty popular in Chicago and ATL, less so in SF, with SD somewhere in the middle.
SF city apparently killed off its own music scene in cold blood during the last decade, but Atlanta's is alive and well right now.
The Olympics were a good thing for the downtown area, and there is some government willpower to make it more appealing to entrpreneurs -- notably in biotech. With the CDC, Emory, and Georgia Tech, things could certainly be worse for startups, but I still wouldn't pick Atlanta as a likely new startup hub. The same government support that keeps the city afloat also feels a bit stifling. Poverty in the city center and sprawl everywhere else is depressing. And the general perception of Georgia in the existing startup hubs is even worse than the area actually is; offering a group of hackers $1 million to move to the deep South sounds like a mind game or a social experiment, not a serious offer.
Compare: When the last tech bubble burst it seemed like a lot of engineers left the Bay Area and resettled around San Diego. La Jolla has UCSD, a pool of biotech serial entrpreneurs and angels, even better weather than Palo Alto, and decent burritos and pho. Public transportation could be better, and it is getting better. So, it would take some extreme persuasion to keep me from heading right back to the west coast when I finish grad school.