This is mostly applicable to white people. I would not move to some of these places as a person of color.
Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
151–160 of 592 posts
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#152Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#153I actually really want to move to a mountain area that is secluded and has nature with snow. The problem is, it's very hard to figure out where to go when all you've lived is in a city or one state. I've researched a lot of properties on zillow but I have no idea how to investigate the proper area. Maybe someone can give me a tip. I like snow, and I like people, I just want enough space to experiment with my own land…
The mountains of North Carolina are almost certainly what you are looking for. You will get all four seasons and have lots of diverse beautiful nature around you. I recomend you start with Asheville (probably way too big for you to want to live in since you want to avoid neighbors and HOA) and then start moving WEST on the map from there and you will find what you are looking for.
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#154There 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…
You're seeing negativity because it's getting harder and harder to deny that this "dream" involves the locals getting screwed when tech monopoly money turns their local economy upside down. Sure the guy who had the foresight to start a brewery wins but everyone else loses. You know what the end game of this looks like? It looks like Vail CO, Cape Cod MA, coastal Long Island and CT, the Hamptons, wealthy retirement ar…
Have you lived in any of these places? I grew up in Fairfield County and you seem to greatly exaggerate its dystopian qualities. What's more, industry's flight from the area has nothing to do with folks coming from NYC.
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#155There 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…
You're seeing negativity because it's getting harder and harder to deny that this "dream" involves the locals getting screwed when tech monopoly money turns their local economy upside down. Sure the guy who had the foresight to start a brewery wins but everyone else loses. You know what the end game of this looks like? It looks like Vail CO, Cape Cod MA, coastal Long Island and CT, the Hamptons, wealthy retirement ar…
> Cape Cod MA
I used to vacation there.
As one of those clueless people who can't buy marijuana in a legal state, I am equally clueless on the signs of terrible addiction if I drove through Cape Cod, MA today.
I'm not sure what makes me more sad -- the existence, or my incapability to notice the existence.
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#156As 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…
Dairies are consolidating because scale factors make the big ones more competitive than small ones.
Though with modern shipping taking milk from the middle of nowhere makes sense.
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're seeing negativity because it's getting harder and harder to deny that this "dream" involves the locals getting screwed when tech monopoly money turns their local economy upside down. Sure the guy who had the foresight to start a brewery wins but everyone else loses. You know what the end game of this looks like? It looks like Vail CO, Cape Cod MA, coastal Long Island and CT, the Hamptons, wealthy retirement ar…
Have you lived in any of these places? I grew up in Fairfield County and you seem to greatly exaggerate its dystopian qualities. What's more, industry's flight from the area has nothing to do with folks coming from NYC.
I grew up in one of those places. How else would I have developed such disdain for that economic model?
Replacement of whatever (necessarily small, otherwise the big city money wouldn't be a problem) industry there is/was with entertainment and tourism isn't the issue. The reality of an economy that is dependent on a specific image or perception (many would say facade) of quaintness is the problem.
You get all sorts of terrible "crab-bucket-esque" feedback loops that quash people's desire to do anything different, innovative or ambitious for fear of harming the golden goose. A large fraction of the people who actually want to do things (boring old normal business endavours that underpin a sustainable economy) leave because whatever their trade is doing it elsewhere and not putting up with all the extra overhead crap of doing it in a tourism/entertainment economy. The fact that a much larg(er than in a "normal economy) portion of the customers any given business sees will only ever transact with them ones creates a bunch of perverse incentives to do dishonest business.
It's like everything that's wrong with a college town combined with everything that's wrong with a wealthy retirement community.
Edit: strike CT from that list of examples, I was going for a "Cape cod but in the NYC economic region" and that part of CT is more like NYC's wealthy NJ suburbs.
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the question is, is quality of life zero-sum? I want to say no because I feel like I can improve my QoL in ways that don't harm others, but all these examples are telling me that its really that I don't (or maybe even choose not to) see the negative consequences until its compounded by a large enough group and it ends up being another one of your examples.
The quality of life is not zero-sum, bot on a local level and a short timeframe, many things are indeed zero sum. The best example is land & desirable real estate. It only takes a few people with "outside" money to drive up prices in the market or to purchase land and sit on it in perpetuity, driving up prices by taking it out of the local supply.
From [0]:
"Aquinas believed that it was specifically immoral to raise prices because a particular buyer had an urgent need for what was being sold [...] Aquinas would therefore condemn practices such as raising the price of building supplies in the wake of a natural disaster. Increased demand caused by the destruction of existing buildings does not add to a seller's costs, so to take advantage of buyers' increased willingness to pay constituted a species of fraud in Aquinas's view."
"Aquinas believed all gains made in trade must relate to the labour exerted by the merchant, not to the need of the buyer. Hence, he condoned moderate gain as payment even for unnecessary trade, provided the price were regulated and kept within certain bounds"
So if this is true (and I'm sure certain tacit assumptions are not mentioned in this Wiki page), then it seems that crazy market price fluctuations have to do with the divorce of market value from labor which was "replaced by the microeconomic concept of supply and demand from Locke, Steuart, Ricardo, Ibn Taymiyyah, and especially Adam Smith".
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#159There 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…
> at the end of the day I'm optimizing for my own quality of life
This kind of self-centered thinking, at scale, is what lowers the baseline quality of life for everyone.
Re: Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming
#160There 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…
I honestly don't get a lot of the comments on this thread. So, say I can work remote or retire and live basically anywhere I want. Is the suggestion that I have some moral obligation to live somewhere that's already expensive?