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Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

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Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#131

Post by __initbrian__ »

mjayhn wrote: post #124
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural broadband is certainly an issue generally. But a lot of people seem to be under the impression that as soon as you leave the city limits of a major city, you're in the wilds of Wyoming. Somewhere like Massachusetts, there are a ton of towns and smaller cities not called Boston that have broadband.

I didn't know it was a big thing in MA. But thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. I hope to go back to the NE/E in the next few years (Maine/VT/MA). I tried to move to a small town this year, one that was woodsy and if possible in the mountains, AK, CO, WA, OR. My requirement was 100mb+ internet that didn't require me paying Spectrum $25k to cable another road. Honestly I would've been fine with DSL at a bun…

I’m doing this exact search! What’s been your best resource for finding fiber? Are you plugging in addresses to the providers webpage?

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#132

Post by nimish »

throwanem wrote: post #12
nimish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild that landlords having to deal with their investments losing value and having to negotiate a commercial transaction is "grim" The market dynamics shifted. No big deal.

Yeah, no shit. You were careless with your capital and lost some or all of it? My heart bleeds.

They don't lose any capital until it's re-valued or sold. It's purely a short-term loss in income.

Eat the loss, move on -- that's what most landlords would tell their tenants in the opposite situation.

I am playing the world's smallest violin for them as a class.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#133

Post by stonogo »

sudosteph wrote: post #119
dontremeber wrote: post #38

> Many Americans — especially 30-somethings who remain employed — are ditching their tiny rental apartments in hip districts of expensive cities and moving to buy houses in more affordable cities or the burbs... I suppose I fall into this category but even houses in the burbs seem more expensive than they should be. I’m specifically looking at up and coming towns, not any random burb but buying a house that’s literal…

Lots of cities in the southeast are still undervalued IMO. I'm a North Carolinian, and there's been no shortage of northern transplants over the years. Charlotte and Raleigh have grown like crazy, and show no sign of stopping. Tons of young people moving here despite the well-deserved reputation of this area being pretty boring. I guess boring is a plus these days. West coasters largely haven't caught on, but I don't…

I moved west to avoid the bizarre laws that are common in the south -- weird restrictions on arbitrary divisions of product, state constitutional amendments banning gay marriage, laws demanding that schools teach creationism, and so forth. When I lived in Fayetteville, you could buy beer at a grocery store, but liquor was only for sale by the state government. I bought a house once that required a lot of legal fees and paperwork to have a covenant removed from the property prohibiting its sale to black people. All these little quality of life setbacks added up to a real desire to get out of the south as soon as my military work was done.

I'm just not sure the allure is there, depending on which of these issues actually affects you.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#134

Post by war1025 »

davidw wrote: post #105

I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a l…

> A town of 100K people

I know it doesn't really mean anything, but it always just seems peculiar to me when people refer to places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents as "towns"

I guess mainly because the general consensus is that a "town" is smaller than a "city".

The "town" I grew up in had about 3k residents. To us, the place a half hour away with the big box stores where we'd do our shopping was the "city". It had all of 30k people.

Then again, that was 10x the size of where we lived.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#135

Post by mjayhn »

__initbrian__ wrote: post #131
mjayhn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know it was a big thing in MA. But thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. I hope to go back to the NE/E in the next few years (Maine/VT/MA). I tried to move to a small town this year, one that was woodsy and if possible in the mountains, AK, CO, WA, OR. My requirement was 100mb+ internet that didn't require me paying Spectrum $25k to cable another road. Honestly I would've been fine with DSL at a bun…

I’m doing this exact search! What’s been your best resource for finding fiber? Are you plugging in addresses to the providers webpage?

Yeah I just type the zip in to each ISP I find in that area (another fun search).. it sucks. You eventually get rate limited and it will make you constantly change addresses, so just incognito mode it. Some of the ISPs will have the distribution maps but when you're looking at something not in a suburb you're kind of at the behest of the city or a recent neighbor having built out the infra in my experience (which is mostly south/texas/pnw). SOMETIMES theres a local WIFI provider.. I haven't gone that route I'm not sure the investment or quality there. I have done a lot of satellite, BGAN internet etc. I think now everybody is just giving up and waiting on 5G.

This is the muni fiber map https://muninetworks.org/communitymap

I really wish Trulia or one of them had some way to tie into ISPs and tell us whats there.

This improved my house search a LOT; Get the Clickup (no relation) extension and create a space to send your zillow/trulia/mls links to directly, there is a template for apartment searches [1] you can edit it and put in your own fields - it basically grabs a snapshot of different keys and you can add columns and rows and start to quickly grab house listings then filter with your own database. It's stupid simple, like airtable, you can probably use that too. I added ISP sections, stars, comments.. All the real estate apps are terrible for critiquing en masse.

I never got around to checking if the ISPs have apis you can interface with..

I'm going to NEXT year try the mountain thing again.

[1]: https://clickup.com/teams/personal

edit: Wow this link is looking positive, I didnt realize there were so many 500Mbps+ connections https://broadbandnow.com/fastest-cities

edit2: Oh, another stupid ISP tip, the business ends will usually be WAY more lenient if you open your wallet. If you cant get X cable, try to get X cable biz they'll happily run a line down a pole for a new $200/mo customer, I've done it in desperation. You don't need to be an actual biz, just tell them youre hackernewsman LLC and they'll sign you up if they can.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#136

Post by CamperBob2 »

pbourke wrote: post #75
epistasis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The picture of a house they show nestled in the trees is incredibly dangerous, incredibly resource intrnsive, and just ecologically unsound. We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. Instead we lock down any new construction in cities, which requires the least amount of infrastructure and environmental damage, and instead let pretty much a…

> We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. All else being equal, Americans will choose to live in a detached house on a 1/2 acre lot with an SUV or pickup in the driveway.

The people advocating dense inner-city housing for everyone don't plan to make it a choice. They know better than the rest of us, you see.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#137

Post by __initbrian__ »

mjayhn wrote: post #135
__initbrian__ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m doing this exact search! What’s been your best resource for finding fiber? Are you plugging in addresses to the providers webpage?

Yeah I just type the zip in to each ISP I find in that area (another fun search).. it sucks. You eventually get rate limited and it will make you constantly change addresses, so just incognito mode it. Some of the ISPs will have the distribution maps but when you're looking at something not in a suburb you're kind of at the behest of the city or a recent neighbor having built out the infra in my experience (which is…

thank you for such a detailed reply!

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#138

Post by thatfrenchguy »

ghaff wrote: post #32
ssequeira wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of Bay Area towns? It seems like everyone in my friend circle in tech lives in San Francisco and puts up (or used to) with the long commute.

Quite a few of the towns in the South Bay have walkable cores: Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo... You also have smaller cities all over the country. Now, you get into truly small towns in places like New England and there really isn't a lot in the town center and it's unlikely you'll be living walking distance from it.

Come on, Mountain View’s downtown degrades into there-is-not-even-trees-to-shade-you after like two blocks sideways, and no grocery store. Palo Alto is better, but unless you live in downtown south you won’t be walking distance from a grocery store, and you can basically not walk for more than 20 minutes without being in boring ass McMansion suburbia.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#139

Post by seattle_spring »

mjayhn wrote: post #124
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural broadband is certainly an issue generally. But a lot of people seem to be under the impression that as soon as you leave the city limits of a major city, you're in the wilds of Wyoming. Somewhere like Massachusetts, there are a ton of towns and smaller cities not called Boston that have broadband.

I didn't know it was a big thing in MA. But thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out. I hope to go back to the NE/E in the next few years (Maine/VT/MA). I tried to move to a small town this year, one that was woodsy and if possible in the mountains, AK, CO, WA, OR. My requirement was 100mb+ internet that didn't require me paying Spectrum $25k to cable another road. Honestly I would've been fine with DSL at a bun…

Tons of towns in the Puget Sound region have gigabit. For example, Wave services Union, Shelton, and Belfair.

Re: Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

#140

Post by wtracy »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #126
cactus2093 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly possible that people have taken a liking to remote work and decided it's the right move for themselves. Whether in 5 years remote work is much more prevalent than it was in Feb 2020 or about the same doesn't necessarily affect your own individual decision making.

If you’re used to receiving BigCo pay and bought a mansion in a remote vacation hotspot, you could be in for a rude awakening if you find other remote jobs pay half as much and your employer knows that and stops giving you refreshes.

This.

The FAANG crowd is used to pulling down $100k-$150k. Developer jobs that are advertised as remote from day one tend to be closer to $50k-$70k.

(These numbers are based on a combination of rumors and job board postings, so no, I don't have a source to cite.)

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