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Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

economist.com

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Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#21

Post by refurb »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #4

Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. People that wanted to retire to rural or remote area…

What is your solution? Have internal passports? Government owned housing? Price controls?

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#22

Post by diamondhandle »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #4

Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. People that wanted to retire to rural or remote area…

America isn’t even 250 years old. That’s, what, five generations? Do remember that most American “settlement” of these areas was specifically designed to drive out the real locals, whose basic planning took on a seven-generation timescale.

With a lot of problems of this nature, especially social issues, the key is to “zoom out” to get a clearer, more sane picture of what’s going on. Humans were made to migrate, and these “locals” can adjust.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#23

Post by Jtsummers »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #17
Swizec wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But that was 70 years ago in USA. The affordable housing ship has all but sailed for our generation. Except apparently in tiny towns where we’re now ruining it for the locals.

In fairness, These aren't really tiny towns and haven't been for a generation. It's classic sunbelt boom-sprawl-puke. (Never mind Colorado isn't actually sunny at all.)

Colorado is reasonably sunny, just not in the winter when the sun sets before you've finished your first cup of coffee (I kid, it's at 4:30-5pm in the winter). At least here in Colorado Springs the sun set at 7:40pm today with our latest sunset being around 8:30pm in a couple months.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#24

Post by eysquared »

There seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments so far. Is this not the dream that is often touted on hacker news? Work at a FAANG and "retire" somewhere more affordable?

I'm personally doing just this. I was lucky enough to land a good job out of college, buy a house in a desired area, and see it appreciate in the last 10 years. This increase plus the birth of my kids left me wondering if there wasn't a better route than continuing to need a FAANG salary to afford a larger house and private schools.

Due to this we are taking advantage of the remote work opportunities that have opened up due to the pandemic and are moving to the place we spend all our time anyway: a small town in the mountains. We get to do the things we want to do, have more space for our kids to roam, and a better quality of life without the stress of constantly needing a good performance review.

I understand this is not for everyone and I understand the negative perception of 'outsiders' pushing the price up for locals, but at the end of the day I'm optimizing for my own quality of life. I can't think of a better use of the money I've earned doing what I love than to provide a great life for my family.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#25

Post by seanmcdirmid »

koboll wrote: post #18
Swizec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. 2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. 3. Housing can’t be both a right and subject to free-ish market mechanisms.

>2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. Yep. If you want to blame someone, blame local governments in California and their chronic refusal to build adequate housing, citing dubious progressive buzzwords to push policies whose outcomes always curiously seem to further enrich property owners and screw over everyone else.

This isn’t really the root of the problem through. The government can’t get more housing through because the voters don’t want it, the voters don’t want it because the traffic is already bad enough and there is nowhere to build more roads, and they don’t consider taking the bus or funding more public transit. And even if you climb that hump you become New York City or Shanghai, both of which are plenty dense with public transit but still not affordable at all.

Seriously, without Singapore-style public housing, you just aren’t going to solve this problem in any reasonable way. But that would ruin housing as a good investment outside of a small niche market at the super high end.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#26

Post by georgeecollins »

koboll wrote: post #18
Swizec wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. 2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. 3. Housing can’t be both a right and subject to free-ish market mechanisms.

>2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. Yep. If you want to blame someone, blame local governments in California and their chronic refusal to build adequate housing, citing dubious progressive buzzwords to push policies whose outcomes always curiously seem to further enrich property owners and screw over everyone else.

California had a population of 10m in 1950, and 40m today. So presumably some housing was built. In that period California added the GDP of a mid sized European economy. Such a disaster.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#27

Post by big_youth »

isaacimagine wrote: post #15

As someone who lived in a small city in the American Mountain West, the boom does have consequences. Sleepy farming towns are becoming endless suburbia, hiking up prices as developers spill over from the Lehi 'Silicon Slopes' area. Midway, for instance, a town on the Wasatch back situated in a location that feels similar to Switzerland, has gone from about 150 diaries to 2, as expanding housing developments buy out t…

Great post but one point, Whole foods sells 1/2 gallons for $6! I don't drink much milk but would gladly pay a premium for high quality, local, organic milk.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#29

Post by stouset »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #4

Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. People that wanted to retire to rural or remote area…

I used to believe this “wealthy Californians fleeing” narrative and… I’m just not sure I buy it any more.

135,000 more people left California than moved in last year. Even if they overwhelmingly moved to only ten other states, that’s just 13,500 extra ex-Californians in each one of those unlucky states. And not all of them are going to be wealthy, surely some non-negligible portion will be less well off. Maybe they’ll be wealthier on average, but it’s not 100% tech millionaires.

Somehow this is supposed to be responsible for skyrocketing prices in Austin, Portland, Atlanta, Denver, Boulder, Seattle, Aspen, Jackson, Tahoe, and hundreds of other cities, towns, and locales across the country. All the while the price of housing in California suburbs is going up too!

At the same time, interest rates are plummeting. For a given house sale price, this can dramatically affect the affordability of monthly payments: refinancing last year from 4.325% to 3.375% cut my payment by a full 20%. Sub-3% loans aren’t too hard to find right now. In a competitive market like housing, this has the extremely well-known effect of causing sticker prices to rise. Put another way, if you can afford $1,500/mo payments and the rate drops such that you would only need to pay $1,150/mo, the market will quickly react to increase prices to keep the overall monthly payment the same.

This isn’t a novel mechanism. It’s part of the reason housing has been such a wildly successful Investment vehicle over the last few decades. Interest rates fell, prices went up accordingly.

Are emigrating Californians responsible for some of these price increases? Sure, both generally and probably in some specific markets, I totally buy it. But everywhere simultaneously? I’m skeptical it’s responsible for as much of an effect size as people appear to believe.

Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

#30

Post by 01100011 »

I envy the folks who are able to do this. If I had the means, I'd probably have already fled back to the country.

I can't help but think that it is unsustainable though. Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs.

Global warming, increasing global competition... I can't help but think the people fleeing the cities will be forced back by incentives and economics in a decade.

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