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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

#311

Post by khuey »

ghaff wrote: post #169
wwweston wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As much as I'd love to work for a FAANG, retire early, and buy a large house in an idyllic mountain town, I'd hate for that same town to loose its historical roots and what makes it that special idyllic mountain town in the first place. It's already arguably happened; fruit orchards and irrigation turns were big part of the milieu in Orem/Provo a few decades back, and they're all but absent now, and in general the…

The thing is--and I'm not saying you specifically--but worrying about a place losing "its historical roots and what makes it that special idyllic mountain town in the first place" inevitably has to go hand in hand with strong NIMBY policies. Which isn't even "wrong" in any absolute sense whatever the growth at all costs crowd here may want. Though, really, not even that helps because towns can't actually (or really w…

A lot of these people are really only moving into the interior mountain towns because places like coastal California where the economic activity is that allows them to pile up this kind of wealth has become prohibitively expensive due to their own NIMBY regimes.

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

#312

Post by sfeng »

gregimba wrote: post #36

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.

What was it like in Kanab?

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

#313

Post by dublinben »

Loughla wrote: post #250
ramphastidae wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You built a house there eight years ago Sorry, I should've been more clear. I grew up here as well. I've lived here for my entire life (outside of the 6 years I was at college/grad school, and even then I was back to work on the farm on the weekends). It's not NIMBY. I don't care who lives here. That's actually what I like the most about rural living - for the most part if you leave people alone, they'll leave you a…

If a few wealthy people moving in has driven up housing prices so much, then the supply of housing is insufficient. The appropriate reaction to increased demand for housing is to meet it with increased supply. What local and state policies might be inhibiting this and harming these communities?

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

#314

Post by yardie »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #281

My wife and I traded living near a beach and lagoon in San Diego country for a small but nice house in a mountain tourist town (Sedona Arizona). That was back in 1998. Except for some time working as a contractor at Google in Mountain View and managing a deep learning team for Capital One in Urbana/Champaign IL, we have lived a quiet life in the mountains since 1998. One reason for my success in being happy here is t…

Was there just a year ago, right before the pandemic. That is one hell of a beautiful town and you should feel extremely lucky to be able to live there.

I lived in tourist heavy cities (London, Paris, Miami, NYC) and loved chatting with them. And some of them get you to be a tourist in your own city. It took me years before I finally visited the Eiffel Tower. It was always in my periphery and I blended it into the background. Then someone personally invited me to come along.

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

#315

Post by anonfornoreason »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #229
leetcrew wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in my social circle, the number one reason why families leave the city is the abysmal public school system. it's not a big deal to the wealthier families, since they can just send their children to private schools. middle income families usually can't afford that, but they can afford to hop over the county line and send their children to the very good public schools out there. at least in my area, I wouldn't say the…

It’s not the school system that is abysmal, it’s people not wanting their kids to mingle with kids from lower income/less wealthy families. Cities might have various socioeconomic classes living near each other, and so the schools have a more mixed population. Suburbs can restrict their schools to those that can afford to live there, so those public schools can have very few kids from lower socioeconomic classes, and…

I am a parent of a kid who starts kindergarten in 6 months. Moved to a smaller mountain town in the same state six months ago, primarily because of the schools. Our old local school (4 block walk) has a 1/10 rating. The city just put in a homeless camp literally across the street from the school. I would do a needle sweep before letting my kid play on the playground there, and would regularly find needles on the playground (school grounds aren’t aloud to lock up outside of school hours due to federal laws).

I grew up middle class in a upper middle class school district, with attentive and loving parents. My mom stayed at home and raised us. I was still exposed to skipping class, drugs, and alcohol in middle and high school. I almost didn’t graduate myself, due to poor choices. This is in a school with a 92% graduation rate. I understand from intimate personal experience that the more opportunities your kids have to interact with peers making poor life choices, there is a higher chance your kid gets caught up in it despite what you do as a parent. This isn’t sheltering (I certainly wasn’t sheltered), it’s just repeat exposure to exciting but bad choices leads some kids to temptation.

I could have moved to a more expensive neighborhood in the city but the same fundamental problem exists. I don’t care about how much money people have, I care whether in aggregate, the parents in my community try to raise their kids with intention. There’s a shocking lack of that in 40% of the families in the schools in the city we moved from.

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

#316

Post by ecshafer »

nerdkid93 wrote: post #294
mark_l_watson wrote: post #281

My wife and I traded living near a beach and lagoon in San Diego country for a small but nice house in a mountain tourist town (Sedona Arizona). That was back in 1998. Except for some time working as a contractor at Google in Mountain View and managing a deep learning team for Capital One in Urbana/Champaign IL, we have lived a quiet life in the mountains since 1998. One reason for my success in being happy here is t…

> deep learning team for Capital One What!? Capital One has a deep learning team? As a long-time customer of theirs, I can't even begin to guess what that team might do for their set of products, except maybe to optimize their credit card offerings.

Which company doesn't have a "deep learning" team. Not to be cynical but tons of companies that barely even know what it is have AI/ML teams because its the hot thing.

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

#317

Post by lizknope »

_2d30 wrote: post #45
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's check in on the Bozeman population density: 2,448.94 people per square mile Let's check on how San Francisco is doing: 18,790.74 people per square mile. Okay, no worries, Bozeman can keep its current foot print and 8X its population comfortably.

Look at Bozeman on Google Maps with the satellite view. There are mountains to the NE, E, and South.

Many of these desirable mountain locations like Vail are in mountain valleys where there is a limited amount of land to build on.

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

#318

Post by supernovae »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #121
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #120

Earlier 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…

Locals wouldn't get screwed if they advocated for better zoning policy and allowed more housing to be built. This doesn't happen because those same locals that are homeowners love the value of their house exploding upwards

So the answer to beautiful mountain towns, is to destroy the beauty so we can build on it and remove the reason people come to visit/escape?

mmmkay

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

#319

Post by dublinben »

ramraj07 wrote: post #98
xenocratus wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... the comment isn't about where the food comes from or who would suffer from a supply chain collapse, it's about efficiency. I think the point was that cities are efficient because gestures vaguely towards economies of scale . It's easier to distribute goods (or services) to a highly-concentrated mass of people than to multiple disjoint locations.

I’m very confident I had a significantly smaller carbon footprint when I was in New York than compared to my time in Dallas. Even though I lived a much more vibrant life.

You'd be right. Dense cities have much lower carbon footprints than sprawling, suburban areas.[0] You can plug it into this map to compare any place you'd like.[1]

[0] https://phys.org/news/2014-01-carbon-footprint-reveal-urban-...

[1] https://coolclimate.org/maps

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

#320

Post by dcow »

RC_ITR wrote: post #303
mring33621 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as "locals getting screwed" in this scenario. We live in a free country, where people sometimes choose to move. In fact, when the demand for housing in an area goes up, often locals profit handsomely. Unfortunately, "I was here first" sounds a lot like "fuck you, I got mine". And it's not gonna fly.

Listen, nearly everyone largely agrees that wealth inequality at the current US level is bad. Wealthy people moving to low-cost areas (and thus raising cost of living) accelerates inequality for a few reasons. 1) Unlike you scenario, many working-class people in places like Sedona can only afford to rent their homes (25% of total, give or take in Sedona). These people incur huge monetary costs in being forced to move…

So if simply moving creates inequality, then what do people do? Stay in their hometown their entire life? Sounds like you need to revise the game, not hate the player.
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