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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

#351

Post by labcomputer »

bedhead wrote: post #223
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…

Last year I moved from a top 3 city to a small mountain town in Colorado. In my experience, your hostility is extremely common in small towns that have big seasonal influxes. I continue to be amazed by the overt disdain long-time locals have for second home owners and relatively newer full-time residents. The one constant is: "Everything was great until shortly after I relocated here and you people moved in." A week…

> The one constant is: "Everything was great until shortly after I relocated here and you people moved in." A week doesn't go by here where a long-time resident doesn't write an op-ed for our tiny newspaper with this exact message, and delusional descriptions of how their once-great town is now a hellscape.

Twist of twists: Isn't this almost exactly what people have been saying about the Bay Area?

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

#352

Post by randomopining »

I heard all these places, especially Denver and the area around it, are swarmed with "outdoors bros" etc from Cali and the east coast. Overcrowded. Traffic jams to go out to the mountains every weekend. Cultural homogenization.

Is that true, or overblown?

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

#353

Post by giantg2 »

mring33621 wrote: post #321
RC_ITR wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm OK with "ideas of socialism," I think. Especially regarding UBI and universal medical care. But, I also think that it's better to be in a growing area than a static or declining area. I'll never understand anti-gentrifiers. As an adult human being, it is your responsiblility to adapt and decide what is best for yourself and your dependents. No one owes you an unchanging landscape.

"I'll never understand anti-gentrifiers."

I think the main point is being forced out of your life-long home due to increased costs or taxes. Or the destruction of the local cultures/customs through change in local government policies. If you want an extreme example, you can look at the way that cult in Oregon took over a county/town in the 80s or 90s. Nothing legally wrong with it (the population segment with the highest numbers won; not talking the biological attack), but it did make the existing residents subject to their will and angry.

The whole situation (on both sides) was mostly out of a lack of acceptance for other people and their life choices. I think we see this same sort of paradigm with people wanting changes that benefit them but might be detrimental to others in their "communities" (we don't really act like neighbors anymore) without meaningful discussion.

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

#354

Post by slt2021 »

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.

capital one are experts in underwriting subprime consumer debt and seems like they know how to evaluate risk for the most profitable credit products in the market. Won't be suprised if they use suite of ML/DL, although banking regulations discourage using black-box models for anything banking, and requires models to be explainable and free of possible biases.

Looks like a very interesting field to work as an applied ML/DL researcher (explainability, white-box vs black-box, bias, etc)

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

#355

Post by vailprogrammer »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #278
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…

To be fair, it's not just the monopoly money that changes things but also long term changes in economics. I'm old enough that I remember my home town (which has been inundated by California retirees) as having 100% family-owned grocery stores, drug/general/hardware stores, distributorships, all of which started shifting heavily to chain and corporate dominance by sometime in the late 1970's. Since the modern concept…

> towns of that type had to be mostly independent in terms of income for money inflow....small factories, mining, farming and ranching, etc.

> I'd say that this movement of people who can afford it just another side effect of something bigger.

It sort of sounds like you answer your own question (/hypothesis): consolidation of industry. Which also seems to be a pretty big driver in wealth inequality. I've no idea what the correct response is here -- greater regulation to increase competition, so that there are more smaller players across any given industry? Who knows.

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

#356

Post by scythe »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #120
eysquared wrote: post #24

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…

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…

Does your intervention have a control group? Did the residents of Vail, CO circa 1950 wish they could trade their fate for that of nearby Minturn, with similar geography and no ski resort?

Regardless, the geographical narrative is not quite the same. Silver City or Prescott Valley aren't going to run out of space like an alpine creek junction or barrier island/moraine. Water is a different story.

The question is ultimately whether newcomers will participate in the town's development or in its decline, via interactions with the local community, politics, schools et cetera. Just because we built segregated communities over the last century doesn't mean we have to do it for the next one.

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

#357

Post by giantg2 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #349
alistairSH wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ssssshhhh, don't spill the beans. I need those towns to remain affordable for ~15-20 years, until I'm ready to cash-out my suburban home.

They aren't unknown now, they're less expensive because they are less desirable than less humid places with bigger mountains in the west.

Until water scarcity becomes more of a problem. Then some humidity will be looking good. (Even so, it's not nearly as humid in most of Appalachia as much of the deep south)

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

#358

Post by pettusftw »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #278
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…

To be fair, it's not just the monopoly money that changes things but also long term changes in economics. I'm old enough that I remember my home town (which has been inundated by California retirees) as having 100% family-owned grocery stores, drug/general/hardware stores, distributorships, all of which started shifting heavily to chain and corporate dominance by sometime in the late 1970's. Since the modern concept…

Do you believe the alternative is the town dying? I come from a place that is the furthest from a tourist destination you can imagine, and it was booming with local businesses in the 70's and 80's and they died all the same, they just weren't replaced by anything.

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

#359

Post by bordercases »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #212
bobthechef wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

The purpose of increased prices is to incentivize more supply to come into the market. If prices do not rise with demand (and static supply), then you’re left with a market where certain buyers are lucky (or connected) and some don’t get anything.

It's hard to talk about the "purpose" of a price in this way.

In the case of a monopoly, or otherwise any market with large barriers to entry, the purpose of the price increases are to gouge the consumer for profit. And in the case where price raises are stemming from aggregate demand then price increases are about consuming opportunity costs.

Either way the price increase may incentivize market entrants in cases where entry is possible, but the "purpose" of the actors controlling price is always to maximize profit. The market itself cannot be spoken of volitionally.

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

#360

Post by ttul »

I moved to a small island community that is near a cosmopolitan metro area of 3 million or so people - just a short ferry ride away. Before the pandemic, commuting to work from the island would eat 3-4 hours a day of your life, so it was not a feasible option for most people. When work-from-home started last March, a steady flow of city folk started migrating, paying top dollar for the very limited stock of homes available here. Prices surged 40%. Locals who rent have been leaving just as quickly, priced right out of the market.

When the pandemic is over and WFH policies are tightened, I'm sure some people will migrate back after they discover how horrid it is to commute for hours a day. But I sense that WFH is the new normal and so this transformation is likely long term.

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