231–240 of 592 posts
For those outside of these bubbles, it’s almost unbelievable how much the housing market has completely exploded the last two years. My family is squarely in this situation - bought our home a few years ago in an extremely fast - growing area, and watched prices climb to levels that we didn’t believe at first. Imagine purchasing a home in 2019 for $500k and selling it today for $1.2M. That’s the reality in some of th…
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…
Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities. You can decide you don't care about any of that, but understand that type of that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated. The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. Will the cycle…
Desirable towns popular with outdoor recreation enthusiasts are generally not suffering any sort of widespread brain drain issue (if anything, they have the opposite issue - too many highly educated people, not enough of the people to do the jobs lower on the ladder).
They have about nothing in common with some rural town in the Great Plains that's been slowly depopulating for a century.
I can't say for sure whether this boom has been good or bad on the whole, but I can say there are lots of people like myself who are excluded and are left wondering where we went wrong or what we could have done differently.
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What is your solution? Have internal passports? Government owned housing? Price controls?
Raise interest rates and kill federal backed mortgages except for low income. Limit fed backed loans to 1 per household. Tax housing income as normal income. Remove 1031b exchange. Remove depreciation of homes. Tax all housing sale gains. Housing would then be affordable.
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YMMV on this one. In my part of the midwest, home and land prices have almost doubled in the last year, and went up about 6x since we built our house (about 8 years ago). Two reasons: (What used to be called) Yuppies moving out here and working remotely to 'get more in touch with nature' (read: start a blog or something about sustainable living that is really only possible if one of you has a 100k+ salary) and invest…
This is the pure definition of NIMBYism. You built a house there eight years ago that has increased 6x in value. Now others are trying to do the same thing and you demonize them for it. You should be complaining about state policy, not the people seeking a better life for themselves.
It's possible he's a local. That could also mean he didn't move there with a 2x salary. So it's not really the same thing.
While there's nothing wrong with people moving for a better life, there's also nothing wrong with someone lamenting fundamental changes in their community that they see as detrimental.
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…
> but at the end of the day I'm optimizing for my own quality of life. Have you considered that this is the mentality that people take issue with? It's the root of many of today's ills.
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> Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs. Whenever I see statement like this, it makes me wonder if you know where your food comes from. Because for the most part, the rural populations are supporting the cities. If the supply chains in this country were to fail, it is not the rural communities who would be scrounging for food and water. We'd be just fine.
Farmland owned by city banks. Can we just stop with this BS? Human civilization is the tale of cities- has been for 5000 years.
The idea that the city banks are going to come operate (or, in fact, even own) the rural farmland is BS.
If the pandemic hasn't demonstrated to you how fragile the global supply chain is, I'm not sure what to tell you. People have been unsupported by cities for a lot longer than 5000 years.
Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate crisis is a problem and a big one, then you could be for a rude awakening as most experts now consider the collapse in biodiversity to have far bigger impacts on human lives and living conditions than climate change[0]. The only reason why there are fewer headline…
> We must increase the density of our cities. We could also try to make a few new cities, instead of ten thousand new suburbs
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Same with rural communities here in the Midwest. We would love to have FAANG refugees move here.
YMMV on this one. In my part of the midwest, home and land prices have almost doubled in the last year, and went up about 6x since we built our house (about 8 years ago). Two reasons: (What used to be called) Yuppies moving out here and working remotely to 'get more in touch with nature' (read: start a blog or something about sustainable living that is really only possible if one of you has a 100k+ salary) and invest…
I know of places where houses sit empty or are even demolished because they are no longer needed with the shrinking population.
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It's not just the locals being impacted. This was my parents' plan, too. My dad retired a few years back after 40 years of working for LA County and seeing the house I lived in as a child tremendously appreciate in value. Unfortunately, they found out in retirement that any small town worth actually moving to has also seen prices tremendously go up, they're on a permanent fixed income, and now instead of living the d…
> any small town worth actually moving to This is the crux of the matter. There is a lot of demand for less humid, mountainous regions with lots of outdoor recreation nearby. And it’s easier than ever to scope (due to internet) out the nice locations from wherever you are in the world. So people are taking advantage (or already have) of an arbitrage opportunity to go where they want to that they previously may not ha…
There's no shortage of small towns in the US. If I threw a dart at a map of the US, I'd probably hit near one. (OK, a lot of the West is federal land but there are a lot of them.) There are a lot fewer that:
- Are in a climate you prefer
- Have recreational options you like
- Are perhaps gentrified to the degree they have food/cultural options you want
- Are perhaps at least reasonably accessible to major city/airport
- Aren't too susceptible to natural disasters
- etc.