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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

#31

Post by davidw »

georgeecollins wrote: post #26
koboll wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Here's a chart showing California housing production. It's a pretty big failure over the past 15 years or so:

https://bendyimby.com/2018/11/03/california/

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

#32

Post by Hammershaft »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #2

It's pretty funny to see the economist, founded in economic liberalism and against a rural idle aristocracy, semi-chearing-on more government-subsidized shit suburbanization.

The economist has railed against suburbs before, and yes, overreaching suburbs built on massive sparse infrastructure is a huge problem, but this needs to be weighed against other huge problems that have developed in american economic geography, like how the economic gains of technology have accrued almost entirely to a handful of cities with sky high rents.

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

#33

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sien wrote: post #10
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…

That local may well have a better paying job because more people are moving into the area. Also, it's the US mountain west. There is a lot of space there to build more houses. Housing isn't a zero sum game unless you have poor zoning.

Is there though? Arable land is at a premium in the mountain west, because of all those mountains. And it’s not just land, but water is lacking...build a bunch of houses and then what will they drink? And infrastructure, if you build without building roads and schools...well, they do that in China and Russia and it doesn’t always come eventually.

It is easy to say the problem is that we just aren’t building enough in those places, but it really isn’t that simple.

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

#34

Post by bpodgursky »

client4 wrote: post #16

I can't wait until people are required to move back to cities for in office work. Small towns are becoming faceless neighborhoods of urban areas with a SouthWest or JetBlue commute. New residents want to ignore their neighbors and put up gates to their home. Small towns have heart because people interact with each other and work to make the community better.

This is a romantic view that ignores that many, if not most, small towns in the rural US are dying.

I'm from Missouri and I can tell you that most of the small towns are not idyllic rural paradises. They are farming towns which now have no purpose, no young people, and serious drug and suicide problems. These are not all friendly places.

They would all KILL to have an influx of young energetic people move in. They want to see the town survive.

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

#35

Post by bane »

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…

It's not unusual for businesses to move up the value chain when their segment commoditizes. Dairies are actually a couple steps up the chain from the farmers who grow feed or hay. Cheese, ice cream, etc. are next up.

In some places it's grass to baskets to warehousing to shipping. In others it's grass to sheep to wool to textiles to fashion. Still others it's trees to lumber to paper to stationary.

Other industries have their own moves.

In areas that can't manage this move up tend to see the local industries consolidate until some final monster exists and either also eventually fails too (to external competition) or rent seeks its way to a zombified existence.

There's other alternatives to when vertical value growth isn't possible -- like in developing countries, the businesses all coexist together, but tend to price each other into nearly unsupportable levels. Strong regulations tend to kill this alternative off leaving an up or out path one of the few viable ones available.

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

#36

Post by gregimba »

As someone who recently spent a couple days in Kanab, UT the collision course of rural natives with Californian expats has made me accelerate my plans to buy enough land to escape the cities and further enforced my feeling about the cultural divide in America.

EDIT: I was born in a small western town and find myself missing certain aspects living in a larger city working in Tech.

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

#37

Post by davidw »

> but in doing so they may jeopardise the very things people move there for: space, quality of life and proximity to wilderness

This makes me roll me eyes a bit. The Economist is generally pretty YIMBY, but this sounds like the "character of the neighborhood" nonsense I hear from local wealthy people who are doing their damndest to pull up the drawbridge behind them.

* There is so much space in the American west.

* Quality of life depends on a lot of things. The 'quiet mountain town' where I live in Oregon has benefited greatly from having some more things going on locally. There's even a fantastic Italian restaurant run by a guy from Tuscany. You wouldn't get that in a true small town of which there are still so very many all over the west. For every 'hot' market like Bend, there are various depressed former resource towns like Burns or Lakeview.

* Proximity to wilderness basically means being near public lands like BLM and Forest Service. Those are generally pretty hard boundaries: just because your city is growing doesn't mean the Forest Service will cede land to it.

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

#38

Post by isaacimagine »

big_youth wrote: post #27
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.

Thanks for raising that point!

The dairy I worked at does sell high quality local raw milk; they have a pasteurizer to produce cheese, but they can't use the same one to produce pasteurized milk.

Additionally, the cows usually produce an excess volume of milk, which is sold so it doesn't go to waste: it's important to remember that even if the milk is sold for, say, $6 at Whole Foods, not all of the markup goes to the farmer.

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

#39

Post by georgeecollins »

davidw wrote: post #31
georgeecollins wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's a chart showing California housing production. It's a pretty big failure over the past 15 years or so: https://bendyimby.com/2018/11/03/california/

Plenty of houses in Detroit.
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