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Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

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

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you lower the cost of housing in desirable places? Make them less desirable? Prevent people from moving there? Build more housing?

You don’t, you can’t build your way out of these kinds of problems, not without some sort of government intervention (like Singapore as mentioned before).

Yes, you can. Tokyo and Houston are perfect counterexamples.

Obviously government is required for the planning and zoning reform aspects but the idea that any solution to housing price issues isn't building more is non-sensical. Singapore's solution is just building HBDs!

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

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that kids in an urban environment can be very rewarding. I disagree that the urban environment found in the Bay Area is conducive to kids. Visiting the local park is great. Visiting the local park when the walk is littered with human excrement and discarded needles, not so much. No parent in their right mind would ever go on the BART with a child.

Why wouldn't you take your child on BART? I'm not looking for an argument, I'm genuinely curious. I live in the UK but I've never visited the SF area.

One of many, many, many reasons: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...

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

#523
post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. The costs are rising because there is demand to mo…

Ah yes, the old single family housing issue. I painfully remember a moment from the 2020 election cycle where CPAC or something had someone, amid much other nonsense, framed Democratic opposition to single-family zoning as ruining our way of life. This is, of course, while 90% of zoning is single-family. It's not just urban areas that need (at minimum) some zoning diversity. I don't know what the most cost effective…

I mean, we don't need to figure out the right height of buildings or the right way to zone specific areas, we just need to remove restrictions and let the market figure it out. Just let people build stuff on the land they own, and the out-of-control rent spirals will eventually stop when there's enough housing.

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

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"However, in essentially 0 places in the US that are hot housing markets do they allow as much housing as is demanded." And thus my question/comments about controlling the demand side, as the supply side changes haven't worked well. "Good intentions to help the old people stay in their homes but it means that the new people moving in support the people that lived there earlier." Well, the system of funding the school…

Here is an image that shows you what California's property tax system has done: https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192 Keep in mind that the tax break can be passed on to children when the owner passes. I fail to see the collective good in that system. But at least the owners of that $3.5M home never have to leave while they pay $800/yr in property taxes and the newcomer that moved into the identic…

The greater good is that you don't force people out of their homes. If you worked at 1960s-1990s pay, there's no way you're affording $30k a year in tax, so it makes sense to lock it at the purchased value. Sure the child inheritance of the old tax rate might not be. The real question is why not use income tax? This would avoid kicking out the elderly, and only collect money from those who are actually making it.

I don't generally like the idea of taxing people on things they already have. I would rather see it on the people who are making money. If you are benefiting from the system (income) then pay part of it (tax). Under these other schemes, it could be that the system has failed you, left you behind, etc and then the tax is like the nail in the coffin. It makes the most sense to take the money from the people who are making it.

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

#525
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall with some relish a comment I read on the Seattle subreddit a while back. The commenter was furious at how all of the recent transplants were screwing up their previously wonderful city. Eventually, they happened to mention that they themselves had moved to Seattle from California less than a year prior. There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined…

And this is what frustrates me so much about recent attempts at social justice activism. It’s like we find the only thing we can see on the surface and start screaming at it while the rot in the core goes unaddressed. I resist the screaming because I want to fix problems in the core. But the screaming, while not entirely unjustified, often just serves to further obfuscate and conceal the rot within. It’s hard not to…

Part of the mismatch between your interests and the others mentioned here is that your interests are long term and flexible and theirs are short and inflexible. They need to pay this months bills, and at the same time, I suspect they see their current lifestyle and job security at risk. Long term climate change isn't where they focus.

This is why all solutions to climate change also have to address shorter term worries if the political tide has any chance of getting buy-in from those with global AND those with local concerns. Problem is, both the voters and our political leaders have ignored BOTH kinds of problems (and at least one perspective) for far too long. Now both interests have become entrenched into dissonant encampments that, stupidly, are unwilling to talk about how we could take steps to address both purposes at the same time.

This sounds a lot like the US's recent social war over unshared political priorities, and I think it is. The 1%, the middle class, and the dispossessed all have different needs and interests that can't be met if we all feel free to overlook the perspective of those who don't share our priorities. Those experiencing local displacement due to the arrival of well-heeled haves aren't wrong. Nor will today's haves be wrong one day should they find their world turned upside down and then express their unhappiness when others show them no pity, which is likely if they live long enough.

The solution, I think, is to not dismiss dispossession. It's to acknowledge it and start an earnest discussion about what can be done about it.

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

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. I was born in the US to Asian Indian parents. We lived in a small town in the southern US and dealt with a lot of racist crap. I went to college in a big city and while racism still exists the majority do not have racist views and are more accepting of people that do not look like them. I've travelled to 47 states and I am most scared when I am in a small town in the mountain west. Burns, Orego…

I live in a pretty backwoods part of Washington and even as a white but liberal looking person I get that to a much lesser extent. I can't imagine what you've had to deal with.

After my trip through Burns, Oregon where I got some of those comments at the grocery store I went to John Day, Oregon. I mainly went to see the fossil beds national monument but I also stopped at this small museum which was a Chinese run store and apothecary in the late 1800's and early 1900's

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kam_Wah_Chung_%26_Co._Museum

The tour guide mentioned how welcoming the people were to their Chinese immigrants. She went on to say that when the Aryan Nation tried to set up their headquarters there the people organized to tell them to go away. Unfortunately they keep trying to come back. This story is from last year.

It's great that the people of John Day are fighting against racism but I got the feeling on my trip that the Aryan Nation would be welcome an hour south in Burns.

https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/john-day-to-aryans-w...

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

#527
post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By making that home unavailable for people who actually need a place to live, you're reducing the supply, thus increasing prices, and contributing to unaffordable housing. I say that as a Software Engineer who is 39 and has never been remotely close to affording even a first home.

f I build a vacation home somewhere where there wasn't a house, and I neither live in it nor rent it, does it diminish anyone else's supply of housing? No, it doesn't. You may say that it could have increased someone else's stock of housing. And that's true. But if I built it as a vacation home, then if it wasn't going to be used as my vacation home, I wouldn't have built it, so it wouldn't have increased anyone else…

Maybe we’re too focused on the word “home” rather than “real estate”. That lot you built your vacant vacation home on could be someone else’s primary residence lot. As the saying goes, “they aren’t making any more land” so there is at least a theoretical supply constraint within city limits.

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

#528

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…

> Sure the guy who had the foresight to start a brewery wins but everyone else loses.

This is HN, the owner of the brewery probably cashed his stocks a few years earlier and saw the opportunity.

A lot of folks on this website are entrepreneurs and are completely detached from the folks that don't want an influx of money in their town.

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

#529
post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is the money firehose. Getting rich steadily is fine. Getting rich quickly because of outside factors is what provides perverse incentives, room for bad things to hide and screws everything up. Using fat paychecks to lay waste to small towns is one of the few things tech yuppie and oil pipeline workers have in common. Best (i.e. least worst) case scenario you end up as a rich people playground like Tahoe…

I'm confused, how is owning a bar or cafe in a hot spot an immoral activity?

I think we've all seen a charming local dive bars with cheap, strong drinks get bought out, and turned into a soulless clean well-lit place that overcharges for gimmicky cocktails.

I don't personally think it's immoral at all: things change, and I'll always respect the entrepreneurial spirit. But I do view the situation with some sadness, and I can understand why a long-time local might view it as wrong.

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

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key is assimilation. If you move into a place with the goal of becoming one of the community and understanding and blending into the local culture and economy, people will be a lot more accepting. If you expect everyone to get out of your way, expect them to fight back.

> The key is assimilation. Agreed, but it goes both ways. "We welcome your money, but please keep your opinions to yourself", isn't a great way to assimilate new migrants. Also, see top comment by Mark Watson.

True, but the ones you hear about are usually not just sharing their opinion, but trying to force that opinion on someone else, and usually rudely (think Karens).
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