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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

#581

Post by kpierce »

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…

Reminds me of the George Carlin joke. "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"

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

#582

Post by grecy »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #566
grecy wrote: 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.

That's because you prioritized spending your money gallivanting around Africa. You could be the owner of a fixed up fixer upper outside Buffalo or Cleveland if that was what your priorities were.

No, I'm not American. I take it you haven't looked at the housing market in Vancouver or Toronto lately.

The same is happening even in small town now - a friend bought a place just before Covid for $480k, now it's worth $740k. This is a town of 10k people, in the middle of nowhere. Tiny lot, house is almost 100 years old.

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

#583

Post by yepthatsreality »

panzagl wrote: post #338
yepthatsreality wrote: post #241

More urban sprawl and Starbucks for those who lack culture.

Colorado is also getting In n Out and Whataburger. Most of my favorite local restaurants have slowly closed over the last 10 years. Which I guess is ok, since all my favorite businesses are gone too because of the rising rents caused by legalization. Instead I can sit in my house and Doordash Chipotle while I order stuff on Amazon, just like those culturally sophisticated urbanites who are doing us such a favor by br…

I wouldn’t mind if people moved and visited places while expecting something local and new, but instead they just look at a town and wonder “why doesn’t this place have an X?” Well they do it’s just not called X and they don’t need X because who cares about brand recognition?

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

#584

Post by nitrogen »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #576
nitrogen wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If your income hasn't increased, that HELOC is just another mechanism that will force you out of your property if you spend it and can't repay it.

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

#585

Post by jjav »

zip1234 wrote: post #510
giantg2 wrote: post #464

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…

> https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1265719788875272192

No idea where that is so can't comment on it.

However, I do know that some of these sites that report propery taxes do have incorrect information.

In my neighborhood (where I bought before it was built and have lived there ever since and know well who has lived for how long in each house) I see most houses on my street reported with their correct property tax but there are a few outliers which are completely wrong. Those show a property tax far lower than it ever was.

If someone were to take a screenshot of the property tax reported for my street, they'd think there is a 100x difference between the lowest and the highest for similar homes. But those lowest numbers are not true.

The real spread is more like 2.5x from lowest to highest. Which is not nothing, obviously, but way closer than it would seem.

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

#586

Post by marcusverus »

munificent wrote: post #472
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…

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…

> There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the rising anxieties of climate change, economic inequality, corporate political control, and even more recently the pandemic.

I have this feeling from time to time. I find that it magically disappears when I stop consuming media. I'm not saying "it goes away when I ignore it", either. I do not get the same sense of an "angry society" when I interact with other human beings, and rarely hear anyone express any kind of urgent anxiety about climate change or economic inequality.

We face serious issues, sure, but none are the urgent societal threats they're made out to be. The real danger are the anxiety peddlers and the fear-amplifiers among us, who want to influence and then monetize your emotional state, or to transmute it into political capital.

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

#587

Post by Kerrick »

giantg2 wrote: post #512
asdff wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say a lack of buffer capacity from fewer options for a given thing is huge. I've lived in small cities and currently live in a huge one. In a small city, yes, you might have one of most of your hobbies represented. But maybe there is literally only one Indian restaurant, only one golf course, only one movie theater, only one bar, only one car dealership, only one grocery store, etc. If that one thing sucks, y…

It sounds like you are talking about small towns not small cities? All the small cities I know of have multiple options for the amenities you described.

I live just outside a small town and there are zero of many of those amenities. No Indian restaurant, movie theater, new car dealership, etc.

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

#588

Post by erikpukinskis »

wwweston wrote: post #53
isaacimagine wrote: post #15

As someone who lived in a small city in the American Mountain West, the boom does have consequences. Sleepy farming towns are becoming endless suburbia, hiking up prices as developers spill over from the Lehi 'Silicon Slopes' area. Midway, for instance, a town on the Wasatch back situated in a location that feels similar to Switzerland, has gone from about 150 diaries to 2, as expanding housing developments buy out t…

> As much as I'd love to work for a FAANG, retire early, and buy a large house in an idyllic mountain town, I'd hate for that same town to loose its historical roots and what makes it that special idyllic mountain town in the first place. It's already arguably happened; fruit orchards and irrigation turns were big part of the milieu in Orem/Provo a few decades back, and they're all but absent now, and in general the…

> California problems follow California popularity.

Apologies if this sounds exasperated, it’s a genuine question:

How is this a California thing?

Money flows out of cities. That’s globally true. Is this not happening everywhere on the planet?

California happens to have two massive cities, so it’s a major example of the phenomenon. But what is specific about California here, other than the random fact that California’s specific top industry happens to be the global top industry at the moment? As New York was in the 1980s, Detroit in the 1950s, etc.

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

#589

Post by dredmorbius »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #561
ghufran_syed wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“fallacy”? Or just an edge case? Are you really claiming that increased electricity prices wouldn’t increase supply of electricity in the long-run?

I think they are claiming that instantaneously and drastically increasing prices during an emergency effectively does nothing to incentivize supplies, because there are no additional supplies to be had, and that the right way to handle that is to heavily penalize failure to provide those supplies, and manage the risk proactively and in advance. So their solution would be more like raising the long term electricity su…

Correct.

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

#590

Post by ajmurmann »

simonsarris wrote: post #215
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #79

Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate crisis is a problem and a big one, then you could be for a rude awakening as most experts now consider the collapse in biodiversity to have far bigger impacts on human lives and living conditions than climate change[0]. The only reason why there are fewer headline…

> We must increase the density of our cities. We could also try to make a few new cities, instead of ten thousand new suburbs

One more comment on this, since I now heard the exact same point from a friend and talked more about this: we don't build cities. We build villages that grow into towns, that grow into cities. There are very few exceptions like Brazilia, which has lots of issues. Generally this to me is indicative that we are thinking wrong about cities. Cities aren't like massive buildings, but more like organisms. Three best results are achieved if we allow them to grow somewhat organically.

I recommend the book Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities or the short podcast of the same name.

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