You want MTV sized? Asheville. Boulder. Greenville. Santa Fe.
Slightly bigger: Ann Arbor. Berkeley. Cambridge. Lafayette.
Good chunk bigger: Savannah (140k), Madison (250k)
Smaller: Bozeman. Port Chester.
Elsewhere: Plenty of cities all over Europe that are in the 100k pop range and _much_ more vibrant than MTV.
The point is, Google's presence doesn't magically improve the place. It's still a bland suburbia, like, yes, 99% of US cities this size. Google's presence won't improve SJC, either.
Upvoted for the city suggestions - that's really helpful. But I'm still going to vigorously disagree that MTV is "bland suburbia" :-), even if it's not better than these cities (and I personally did not enjoy Savannah when I visited). There's a spectrum of city interestingness - all I'm arguing is that MTV is very much not at the boring end of it. It might be somewhere in the middle.
As you can see by my "99%" statement, my cut-off point is simply at a different point on that scale :)
You're right that there are cities that are worse than Mountain View. What's upsetting about it is not merely the blandness, but the fact there could be tremendous potential. A rural city of the same size, with a historically uniform population and a relatively small tax base, has very little choice. Mountain View does, and they squander it.
But even if they didn't, "it could be worse" has never been a statement that attracted me to a city ;)
You want MTV sized? Asheville. Boulder. Greenville. Santa Fe.
Slightly bigger: Ann Arbor. Berkeley. Cambridge. Lafayette.
Good chunk bigger: Savannah (140k), Madison (250k)
Smaller: Bozeman. Port Chester.
Elsewhere: Plenty of cities all over Europe that are in the 100k pop range and _much_ more vibrant than MTV.
The point is, Google's presence doesn't magically improve the place. It's still a bland suburbia, like, yes, 99% of US cities this size. Google's presence won't improve SJC, either.