...snip...to the edge of civilization you're bound to lose half of your staff, probably the best ones, and when you're located there it's extremely hard to find staff willing to live there. It didn't work out that well in the Netherlands. ......snip.... remote locations......
Wait, really?
edge of civilization..remote locations... Netherlands
I'm usually good at geography, but I'm having some cognitive dissonance about that paragraph.
I suppose us Dutchies have a different perception of distances.
If you want to know the details, the military barracks I was talking about was planned for Vlissingen, which is on an island with extremely limited public transit and 1,5 hours away from the nearest city by car during quiet hours - probably an hour longer in mornings. Plus on arrival in the city you'd have to pay €€€ to park. Driving (both getting a license and operating a car) is extremely expensive here so most under-25s don't have a car and everyone who owns a car avoids driving long distances if they can. Outside of the tourist industry there's not much highly skilled work in that province so a working spouse would either have to drive to Rotterdam or to the Breda area, which is a little bit closer and is still a decent enough city but not a big city.
We also built a public university in Heerlen, which is such a deprived area that none of the academic staff live there. They commute long distances or get hotel rooms. I wouldn't want to live there either. Unlike Vlissingen which at least has beaches, Heerlen offers nothing but a very deprived, ugly city, massive social problems and the locals are generally unfriendly to strangers. It's a former mining community and when the mines closed there was not much left. The closest city of Maastricht is not that far away, but the closest big city with tons of job opportunities is Eindhoven which is also more than an hour away outside of rush hour. Also limited public transit there.
They sent the student loan company to Groningen which is two hours away from the big cities, but they also have a public university so the city itself is quite a nice place to live if you've secured a job there. It's just so far away from the rest of the country that no one in your family will ever visit you. It's why some people move there in the first place.
All those areas are maybe geographically not that remote, but extremely limited transit connections (usually one road in and out) and the lack of amenities in the area make them extremely unappealing for many people, which in turn means that people that have other options leave asap. I come from an area like that. Of the people I went to highschool with, almost all dropouts are still there, but maybe two people with degrees still live there.
