Unfortunately, founder effects are all too strong. MIRI was looking to decamp from the Bay to Bellingham, Washington a year or so ago, to save money and encourage people to move to a lower-COL area, but ended up quietly abandoning this because having the established community was just too important.
I do think it’d be good to have a “cheaper” alternative EA city to avoid turning away EAs who have/want kids. Maybe Philadelphia or Chicago would be a good place for a few orgs to coordinate to move to, especially with both cities having top-tier universities?
Upvoting this interesting post, but strongly disagree that it’s positive-EV to hold off on eliminating factory farming. There’s a chance that holding off could result in larger long-term gains for sentient-being-welfare by forcing us to more explicitly codify moral reasons for getting rid of factory farming. But I think this is almost certainly outweighed by the much lower chance of actually getting it abolished for moral reasons alone.
Also, re: how future generations are likely to view factory farming elimination—I think the strong tendency is for most humans to ascribe a moral dimension to historical events that actually had more complex economic/political/geographic causes.