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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

#371

Post by 1123581321 »

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…

You're not accounting for the benefit (from your view) due to the reduction in real estate prices in the cities losing population.

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

#372

Post by khuey »

supernovae wrote: post #346
khuey wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NIMBY is just a symptom of the problem... The problem is development, wealth and consumption at all cost. If people lived in normal houses, had normal job and lived normal lives where they didn't have to escape to feel normal, then we wouldn't seek out mountain towns as places to live, but rather places to explore. Instead, we amass sheer amounts of wealth, property, exclusivity, we build so much of our society aroun…

There have always been people who wanted to live in remote mountain/beach towns. Ski/surf bums are not new. What is new is being able to work remotely through the Internet for a company located in some place where there is more economic activity or being able to pile up enough wealth in places like coastal California to move to a remote area and semi-retire at a youngish age.

If you're retired on a fixed income in Austin and own a house you can defer paying property taxes until you die so there's no reason this person should have to move.

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

#373

Post by waheoo »

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…

[flagged]

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

#374

Post by Helloworldboy »

randomopining wrote: post #352

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?

It’s true

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

#375

Post by hcurtiss »

hoka-one-one wrote: post #42
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…

Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities. You can decide you don't care about any of that, but understand that type of that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated. The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. Will the cycle…

As a kid who graduated with a class of 28 students in rural small town America, I’d say we had a disproportionately high number of kids go to the Ivies, Stanford, or the Academies. I never once felt handicapped. Resumes look pretty good when you letter in every sport, star in every play, and run student government. And today I’m raising my children in small town America.

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

#376

Post by DavidAdams »

volkl48 wrote: post #211
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

This is a more complex problem than it is in many other regions of the country. For the most obvious - Once you're off a municipal water supply (which of course, has to have an adequate source of water in the region), available water resources/aquifers are often very limited and minimum lot sizes have to be large because the land can't support higher density housing. -------- If you build anything even approaching "n…

This kind of thing is solvable. When I built my house in Park City, Utah, I discovered that the growth in the area is projected to overwhelm the municipal sewer system in the coming decade. So I had to pay an impact fee of $3,000 per bathroom in order to get my building permit. I happily paid $15K, knowing that the money will go to the budget of a new treatment plant. There are very few places where there's actually no water. It's mostly a question of the infrastructure being available (enough storage, for example).

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

#377

Post by Ericson2314 »

Hammershaft wrote: post #32
Ericson2314 wrote: post #2

It's pretty funny to see the economist, founded in economic liberalism and against a rural idle aristocracy, semi-chearing-on more government-subsidized shit suburbanization.

The economist has railed against suburbs before, and yes, overreaching suburbs built on massive sparse infrastructure is a huge problem, but this needs to be weighed against other huge problems that have developed in american economic geography, like how the economic gains of technology have accrued almost entirely to a handful of cities with sky high rents.

The solution is to build more city. Denser areas will always be wealthier, just denser chips will always be faster.

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

#378

Post by davidw »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #307
solipsism wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna guess... Bend, OR?

Bend has 100k people, and the Bend metro area has 200k people. If it used to be considered quiet, it most certainly isn’t now.

The legitimately difficult thing that Bend has gone through is very rapid growth/change. It had like 20K people 30 years ago. That's not easy, and I do feel for people who miss the smaller size.

That said, there are tons of small towns that are not growing - indeed, they're kind of stagnant, population-wise . Lakeview, Oregon had its heyday in the 1960ies in terms of the population.

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

#379

Post by wjamesg »

dnndev wrote: post #94

With and without kids makes a huge difference. Without kids and if your an introvert- it’s a no brained. Buy you that 15 acre ranch (just for looks, we know your a programmer) If you have kids stay close to a larger city. Your kids will have more opportunity. For anyone else looking. We took a two month road trip during the worst time of year (climate wise) and took a road trip to see where liked it best. We chose No…

RTP?

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

#380

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

Loughla wrote: post #206
watchdogtimer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with rural communities here in the Midwest. We would love to have FAANG refugees move here.

YMMV on this one. In my part of the midwest, home and land prices have almost doubled in the last year, and went up about 6x since we built our house (about 8 years ago). Two reasons: (What used to be called) Yuppies moving out here and working remotely to 'get more in touch with nature' (read: start a blog or something about sustainable living that is really only possible if one of you has a 100k+ salary) and invest…

If property values go up 5x, shouldn't the mill rate go down 5x, leaving property taxes the same? It's not like these towns have 5x more libraries, 5x more police officers, 5x more roads, etc. The level and number of services in the town isn't changing. It has the same number of street lights, and they all consume the same amount of electricity, and so forth.
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