Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming • Hacker News Board

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

#571

Post by YeBanKo » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:43 AM UTC

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…

Every time I go to Hawaii I try to start a conversation with a “local” and pretend to be a Californian exploring the island looking to move and buy a house. It’s really weird to me how not self aware people are. Last example few years ago was a guy from Kentucky who had moved in 2000s and started bitching about me relocating.

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

#572

Post by vram22 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

consensusform wrote: post #275

bedhead wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sentiment isn't unique to small towns either. Residents of Austin, TX have been complaining that the city changed or got too crowded shortly after they moved in, whether that was a year ago or decades ago. People who moved to SF in 2010 complained about the people moving there in 2015. Same thing happens at a neighborhood or district level too. Everybody feels like they were the last person to move in while it w…

"Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded."

- Yogi Berra

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra

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

#573

Post by chalst » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:57 AM UTC

lizknope wrote: post #415

qshaman wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lived in South Florida for a while, this is exactly how it is. Also those "small mountain towns" are deeply conservative and intolerant, if you are white you are in luck, but I don't think they are thrilled to see an influx of non-white folks coming to their town, same with LGBTQ+ people. Those places fit a certain type of people but definitely not everybody that have the money to move there.

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…

European here, who has clocked up about 3.5 years of living in New England: in cosmopolitan areas, I didn't see much racism against what I might call "melting pot" ethnicities although I heard of some, but I often saw and heard of racism by middle-class Americans against American blacks, including by white fellow students of a black Yale undergraduate. I think that racism in the US is very much a two-lane thing.

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

#574

Post by chalst » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 7:00 AM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #532

lizknope wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 C…

Boy, do I doubt "how welcoming the people were to their Chinese immigrants", given Oregon's history with non-white folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

Lots of supposedly liberal states had Black Laws.

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

#575

Post by lotsofpulp » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 8:19 AM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #513

vkou wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most farmers can't make ends meet because food is a commodity, because it benefits from economies of scale, and because their competition is highly optimized mega-farms with large warchests. Without the machines and chemical inputs, roughly half of the world's population would starve in a few months. They significantly increase yields, and reduce required labour, at the cost of... Problems that future people will…

Certain cultivars of fruits and vegetables are commodities; there are others that aren't, until the market for them grows beyond a certain size. Look at the price history for Honeycrisp apples for an example. Farmers choose to grow commodity cultivars because they're easier to sell in standardized markets. Of course, you could also sell in un-standardized markets, which is how a lot of producers pay their bills witho…

> People obviously don't just want cheap food, given the success of Whole Foods.

Whole Foods is only able to exist in a tiny portion of markets consisting of the top quintiles of income and wealth. A simple search on Maps shows it’s not available for 80%+ of people in a city.

And even then, it had to sell to Amazon because it wasn’t doing so hot. Most Americans can’t afford anything but cheap, or one level up from cheap food.

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

#576

Post by throwaway6734 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 11:46 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #426

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

Most people who are trying to live somewhere don't want their house price exploding, because then they get forced out by rising taxes and insurance.

This is absurd. You could just as easily refinance or take out a heloc to take advantage of the rise in price that would greatly offset the rise in tax/insurance

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

#577

Post by Loughla » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 12:46 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #313

Loughla wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

It's quite a number of people, not just a few wealthy people. The few wealthy investors are buying up huge tracts of land, but the people who actually move here are large in number as well as income. Again, the average income in the area for a family of 4 is around 55k. It doesn't take much money to upset that system. And it would be different if the folks moving here actually spent money in the local economy, or integrated into the community at all. They do neither of those things.

Also -

>What local and state policies might be inhibiting this and harming these communities?

Literally none. There are no housing policies regarding number or type of dwellings. There is no zoning, zoning restrictions, or any other type of restriction. It's very rural. Those things don't exist. There are no home inspections, there is no building code you must follow to get a mortgage approved or anything like that. In essence - if you can build it, you can live in it or rent it to someone.

I have no idea why people keep coming back to local and state policies. They don't exist.

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

#578

Post by ubermonkey » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #419

ubermonkey wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Big cities are (and were pre-pandemic) only useful for conducting high-level economic activity due to the density of connectedness and potential for rapid wealth accumulation, but in general, they often tend to be terrible places overall" yeah, seriously "citation needed" here. Cities offer a LOT of things not usually found in rural areas. Try explaining to my trans sister about how cities are bad, and that she shou…

> Try explaining to my trans sister about how cities are bad, and that she should live in a rural area, for example. Unless your trans sister has special medical needs only available in big cities, there is nothing special here. There are plenty of liberal small communities and there would be even more as people leave cities.

LOLNO

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

#579

Post by throwaway6734 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #432

deepakhj wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single family homes is exclusive. You’re choosing to build a mega mansion on a big plot of land vs letting 100 people enjoy that land. The latter will be more affordable.

There is way more than enough land for everyone to live the lifestyle they want. This isn't about land, this is about people with money and an obsession with density falling in love with the decades of hard work that locals put into making a place a home, and then destroying what they fell in love with.

>There is way more than enough land for everyone to live the lifestyle they want.

This is objectively not true in urban areas like San Francisco or New York City

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

#580

Post by CuriouslyC » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #541

CuriouslyC wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain cultivars of fruits and vegetables are commodities; there are others that aren't, until the market for them grows beyond a certain size. Look at the price history for Honeycrisp apples for an example. Farmers choose to grow commodity cultivars because they're easier to sell in standardized markets. Of course, you could also sell in un-standardized markets, which is how a lot of producers pay their bills witho…

I'm well aware of all this, my parents run a small profitable hobby farm selling $25 chickens and eggs for $8/dozen to wealthy patrons. A friend of mine does microgreens in her back yard for local restaurants in a small resort town. Four of my great-grandparents were kolhoz farmers. It doesn't scale, though, and you're going to get bread riots if you tried to. > If the places people lived were integrated with diversi…

It doesn't scale to New York city. It could easily scale to suburban areas and small/mid-size towns.

People "pick" their stuff at the grocery store. If you have a few acres of diversified permaculture within a mile of your house, it's not that different to walk a trail through a food forest and forage for everything you need. I guarantee it'd be cheaper and higher quality than the grocery store too. Animal products would cost more, but they're artificially cheap in a very unsustainable way now, so that's fine IMO.

Permaculture does a great job of reducing the labor involved in farming. Harvest is still a lot of work because of the sheer quantity of it you have to do if you're taking things to market, but if people are coming to you and harvesting themselves for a discount on food, I think that makes it workable for everyone.