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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

#361

Post by Diederich »

This is basically us.

My wife, son and I lived in the Midwest where I worked in tech from the mid 1990s until 2009, when we moved to the SF Bay Area. While we could technically afford to buy a small place in California at the time, the difficulty we experienced selling our home and land in Missouri soured us on buying, so we rented in Mountain View until 2020.

In our early 50s, and rent for a descent 1000 ft^2 two bedroom apartment approaching $4800/month, and the pandemic raging, I transitioned to a full time remote position and we bought an enormous property about 10 miles outside of Olympia, Washington. Our total cost of living, including food, rent/mortgage, utilities went down by not quite 50%, but I was still getting paid "Silicon Valley" rates and benefits, and I still am....and I will likely continue to be.

My wife's various businesses have long been fully online, and her income has gone up tremendously during the pandemic, with no sign of that changing.

One thing that facilitated this move for us was our son attending High School from home via https://cava.k12.com/ in California, and we were able to transition to the Washington State version of k12.com for his senior year, which is finishing up shortly.

To the article at hand: while we don't have any solid data, anecdotally we understand that there's a skyrocketing housing crunch in the making in and around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia,_Washington and our property has appreciated about 17% in less than a year.

More to the point, from the perspective of our read on NextDoor (which so far has been a LOT more healthy than the NextDoor in and around Mountain View), https://old.reddit.com/r/olympia (and /r/seattle) and various personal conversations, there is a huge influx of 'money', and the long-time folks are pretty unhappy about it. My wife and I are pretty chill and we get along with people, so it hasn't been directed at us.

Yes, we definitely feel bad that we've done a small part to negatively impact the life of our new neighbors. Our plan is that this is our 'forever home'...I don't know if that 'offsets' things or not, but we're certainly not looking for a quick flip.

I don't know where/how this ends, but in my high level estimation, there's far more possibility of building new housing in Olympia + Colorado Springs + many other places than there is in just the SF Bay Area.

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

#362

Post by throwaway6734 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #344
supernovae wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This argument has always bothered me too. I'd rather a place be relatively inaccessible but great, rather than accessible but shitty.

How do you decide who gets to live in the great places?

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

#363

Post by DavidAdams »

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…

I lived in Park City for a decade, and it's the same. If you live your life being mad at the traffic during the Sundance Festival and Christmas vacation skiiers, you're just an old man yelling at clouds. That tourist money pays for so many of the amenities that make our town a nice place to live during the rest of the year. Lighten up!

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

#364

Post by grecy »

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…

> I continue to be amazed by the overt disdain long-time locals have for second home owners

Housing can not be both affordable and a good investment.

Given second homes are an investment, by definition having one means you're helping make homes unaffordable.

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

#365

Post by vailprogrammer »

davidw wrote: post #266
vailprogrammer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this sentiment in cities, however, I believe that this approach in the mountains would result in skyscrapers being built in areas of natural beauty, and be harmful to all of the wildlife that live there. The Eagle (Vail) Valley is relatively small to begin with.

No, it might look something like Innsbruck, Austria, which is a beautiful city. It may come as a shock to Americans raised in suburbia, but there are housing types between single family units and skyscrapers that are very human-scale and attractive. Look at pretty much any mountain town in Europe.

As an American with an EU passport, thanks for the idea. I had been leaning towards moving/retiring to Grenoble, France for the engineering university nestled in the Alps, but I will look further afield.

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

#366

Post by throwaway6734 »

supernovae wrote: post #331
throwaway6734 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning failures are widespread throughout the country. If more people want to live somewhere, those regions should make it as easy as possible to develop housing and incentivize it

And then what happens when the reason to live there is now gone? You seem to frame it as an exclusivity problem - they're trying to exclude people from affordable housing... while the people who live there look at it as preserving what makes it livable neither are right or wrong on their own, but surely build at all cost isn't a solution to mountain town charm

It will reach an equilibrium

>while the people who live there look at it as preserving what makes it livable

And they're free to buy up all the land and choose what they want to do with it

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

#367

Post by bufbupa »

danjac wrote: post #128
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…

> but at the end of the day I'm optimizing for my own quality of life. All well and good, but the economic and environmental effects of everyone "optimizing for their own quality of life" without regard for others means everyone loses out, don't they?

Only if it is indeed a zero sum game. I think most agree that on a sufficiently long timescale life is not a zero sum game, so everyone optimizing for their own quality of life increases the size of the pie for all.

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

#368

Post by throwaway6734 »

poilcn wrote: post #224
throwaway6734 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or because they don't want to live in a giant anthill? They are not obliged give any piece of their land to the people who want to live there. It's in their interest to fight to preserve local communities and local businesses, putting obstacles to the "nomads" and corporations.

I agree if they own the land. Telling other people they can't build duplexes/apartments on their own land is illiberal and authoritarian

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

#369

Post by giantg2 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #292
watwut wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not fundamental difference between small vs big city. Options, people and culture are different in this city versus different city - no matter which one is larger. Say you liked boardgames with friends. The new city have different people, the play different games, you dont like either new games or new people. Say you liked swimming and the swimming pools in new city are too full or otherwise dont suit you. You…

You also have the issue of the wealth divide. Its gonna be very difficult to hang out with locals when your annual income is more than they have made in a decade. Jealously alone will tear things apart, nevermind the near complete lack of overlapping life experience. So you end up with the wealthy newcomers only interacting with other wealthy newcomers. Essentially a new culture in a place that had an established cul…

I think that can happen, but doesn't have to. It depends if the person integrates into the local system. There are usually some wealthy people in the area to begin with, like doctors, lawyers, etc. If the community feels you are a part of it, then the wealth shouldn't be an real issue.

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

#370

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

ERCOT's dismal failure the past several months has once again shown the fallacy of this thinking.

Raising prices to infinity cannot induce supply of a good or service for which there is simply no capacity to provision. Nor does discrimination by price for life's essentials result in fair or equitable distribution when there is a tremendous inequality in purchasing power among the population, much if that itself the result of random chance, inheritence, or nonproductive gains.

There's another market mechanism for addressing probabalistic risks, which is to prepare in advance, to assess penalties for failure to provision, to maintain stockpiles and emergency response plans, and to move stochastic future costs to present expense through mechanisms such as risk premiums. These create present incentives for managing such risks, and are based on data and modeling which ground those costs in the likely long-run and widespread average experience. Moving expenses to the present also creates opportunity and incentive to manage, mitigate, and avoid risks.

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