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 route than continuing to need a FAANG salary to afford a larger house and private schools.

Due to this we are taking advantage of the remote work opportunities that have opened up due to the pandemic and are moving to the place we spend all our time anyway: a small town in the mountains. We get to do the things we want to do, have more space for our kids to roam, and a better quality of life without the stress of constantly needing a good performance review.

I understand this is not for everyone and I understand the negative perception of 'outsiders' pushing the price up for locals, but at the end of the day I'm optimizing for my own quality of life. I can't think of a better use of the money I've earned doing what I love than to provide a great life for my family.

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 areas of FL, etc. What industry is there? What opportunity is there? Well unless you want to sell your soul to the tourism industry or run some business that entertains richer people in exchange for their money (best leave your moral compass at the door if you want to succeed in those endeavors) or work in the supporting industries thereof there is exactly squat. Everyone who doesn't stand to inherit a business either gets out or gets addicted to something.

It's not unreasonably negative to not want that for ones' community or want to inflict that on some other community.

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 was still good and everything after them is unwelcome.

I've been told Austin's city council mulishly refused to see the growth trend and didn't annex the hills around the city when they had the chance. Austin waterways like Bull Creek went from summertime swimming holes to unsafe to enter due to septic tank runoff and high levels of coliform bacteria because city services - sewerage in particular - weren't extended to those areas.

People who lived there really hoped the usual waxing and waning of population in cadence with student university attendance would go on forever. But according to an aunt who lived there from the 1960s until property taxes priced her out a few years ago, too many people loved it and moved back after school or just never left and it sort of snowballed from there. Her anecdotal evidence was the cashiers at her Half Price Books stores she managed often had Masters degrees but chose to work there rather than move and find a better job elsewhere.

These days people running a cash register while holding an advanced degree is more of a cliche than remarkable evidence that some place is so special you'd rather be underpaid there than be paid better somewhere else.

But yeah to hear her tell it, in her forty years there every decade that passed brought some unwelcome change to Austin.

  I mean is anybody from here?
  Have you ever met anybody from here?
  Have you ever seen so many condos in your whole damn life
  That were built here in one year?

  Everyone I know that was born here is dope as fuck
  And everybody else sucks

There's no easy fix for this, especially in a place as extremely laissez-faire as Texas, where urban planning and zoning are seen as mortal sins.

Take Vancouver - even though they passed residency laws, with penalties. Average price in 1977: $90k. 2017:$1.05M. Average price dropped to $900k in Dec 2020 ... now $1.4M.

https://www.zolo.ca/vancouver-real-estate/trends

- Yogi Berra

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

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. Everyone needs to feel they have a certain level of agency and control in the world. It's hard to sleep at night if you don't even feel certain that your bed will still be there when you wake up.

The world today often feels like we are ants surrounded by lumbering billionaire and corporate giants, hoping not to get stepped on while we watch climate change slowly dissolve the ground beneath us. People naturally cling to any remaining pieces of agency they can find, and lash out when even that tiny inch is taken from them. So when I see people screaming at a waitress for insisting they put on a mask, or sneering at someone visiting their beloved hiking trail, I wonder if it's only because there is no convenient face they can yell at for all of the larger forces that have actually marginalized them.

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.

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.

Twist of twists: Isn't this almost exactly what people have been saying about the Bay Area?

It's incredibly narcissistic and selfish to believe that "the locals" are only there as a hindrance to you. Would you roll up to a random village in Thailand and just start changing things, and expect the people who live there to worship and serve you?

1980 census shows just over 40M in the west:

https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1981-02.pdf

page 6

2019 figures show nearly 80M in the west:

https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

The new construction methods, building types, and communal land management strategies that are preferred by implants have an outsized effect on the environment. Compare the new construction in Vail to the older buildings, which can still be seen in smaller towns.

I would prefer building preferences to become more harmonious with the natural environment instead of less.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there is a politically tenable solution since everyone likes their own personal vehicles, and for that you need a driveway or garage, and for that you need space and roads, and that does not scale well with population increase.

What you call development in step 1...

> narcissist and selfish

What you call development in step 2. They're both development and urbanization.

> only there as a hindrance to you.

This seems like a projection. You don't seem to consider "them" as having any right to even exist. Indeed, in the next sentence you compare migrating within the US to migrating outside of it, making the xenophobia even more clear.

No, turning a wilderness into viable farmland is not urbanization. There's putting in the time and work to make what you want from scratch, and then there's seeing something nice that someone else made and screaming "mine!"

compare migrating within the US to migrating outside of it, making the xenophobia even more clear.

Putting a false label on something doesn't make the thing become what you label it. The US is not meant to be an open season playground for the rich and the careless.

You don't seem to consider "them" as having any right to even exist.

This sentence seems to perfectly describe the perspective of those who see a small town and want to appropriate it and make it theirs. As someone who has lived in everything from a hometown of a few thousand up to San Francisco, and a variety of suburbs and mid-tier cities in between, it's pretty tiring to see people treating the world like their own giant Disneyland, and all the people who live in it like Castmembers on display for their amusement.

Striving to minimize disruption and maximize cohesion when moving into a new town or building a new development would make for a much better world than the conquistador-style takeover that actually happens in a lot of places.

I'm 90% with you, but we need to be clear that this is not true for the way in which much of the West was settled. It was often not wilderness, but instead land watched over by Native American communities who practiced varying forms of regenerative agriculture, who had only recently been wiped out by disease or war, if they weren't still there. It was settled not by experts looking to "tame the wilderness", but largely by immigrants who were hurried, by job scarcity and discrimination, out of the East Coast and into the interior. They were extremely lucky that the land had essentially been prepared for their monocultures by generations of NA stewardship - people the government was more than happy to enable the displacement and genocide of. (And the Dust Bowl STILL happened.)

That said, after several generations of like stewardship and occupation, I favor those residents and their right to remain over new residents looking to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. What we absolutely need is more respect for the positive aspects of long-lived communities so that we don't trample and dismantle them so casually. It may not be wholly just that the world isn't one's oyster, but as a black person who has to deal with unfortunate and continued existence of sundown towns, the reality that some places are off-limits until the locals have fixed their own issues is one that should be respected. If the lock isn't level you're just going to open the floodgates of trouble.

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.

I say that as a Software Engineer who is 39 and has never been remotely close to affording even a first home.

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's supply of housing anyway.

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.

Of course they pocketed a seven figure profit, because of the lakefront property, and the 100 year old wood cabin was bulldozed.

And then the transient occupants party their asses off. And then the Karens pass local ordinances. And then nobody can have any fun.

This is a collective action problem. If one person decides to not move to Undiscovered Gem, Wild West then there is a large number of others that will.

I grew up in a tourist area, and though I'm one of the ones who left for the Big City I keep in touch. I'll give you a few examples that I think are illustrative.

Immediately after college, a buddy and I shared an apartment in a nice building on a nice street. We both made decent money working in touristy restaurants, as did the three girls our age who lived next door (and, I think, the inhabitants of the other two units in the building, though we didn't have much to do with them: they were older, and had kids, so not much in common with us at the time). During the two years that we lived there, the family home directly next door sold. It was kind of sad, because a nice older couple lived there -- we watered their plants for them once, and the wife baked us an ENORMOUS batch of cookies to say thanks -- but the husband died, and the old lady moved away to live with one of her daughters somewhere else. Anyway, the house was bought by someone as a second home / investment property; during the next year it was used for exactly three days (for a really loud and obnoxious party, but whatever). We snuck in through the backyard to use the Jacuzzi a few times, but even then I can remember thinking that this place turning into an effectively vacant property was a bad sign.

Fast forward twenty-something years, and even more of the "family" homes on that street have become second home / investment properties. The four-unit apartment that we lived in is now exclusively rented out on AirBnB, displacing the service-industry families and twenty-somethings that lived there before.

Just about everyone who actually works in that town now commutes from miles and miles away, and rush-hour traffic -- on rural roads -- is terrible.

The displacement goes much further up the income scale that you'd think, too. I've kept my dentist there, partly out of sentiment: the dentist who previously owned the practice had looked after my teeth since I was, like, eight years old; my regular hygienist has been cleaning my teeth since I was about fifteen. I cleaned their office for them when I was in high school, and they still give me an "employee discount" on fluoride treatments or whatever, so going there gives me all kinds of good small-town feelings. A decade or so ago someone I went to school with partnered with the original dentist, and then bought out the practice when the old dentist retired. We've talked a few times, and I don't think it's gone quite as well as she hoped. For one thing, she has to pay her hygienists and dental assistants a premium, to keep them willing to make the fifty+ mile commutes most of them have to make, since local housing is out of reach. She expected that, though. What I think she didn't quite expect is that she'd have so many fewer patients than the practice used to have. Partly that may be churn that comes with the old dentist retiring and someone new taking over, but also it's because the year-round population has declined, and second-homers and AirBnB-ers aren't looking for dentists in their vacation town. My friend had expected to pay off the loan for the practice and then buy a home in town before her kids got to school age. It's now 8-ish years since we talked about that, and she's still making a ~70 mile commute each way.

Build more homes? Yeah: that does need to happen (I vote the straight YIMBY ticket in the city I live in, so I totally get that argument), but ... rural small-town charm drives the tourist industry around there. Build too much and you kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

It's a really multi-layered problem, that I don't think has a simple solution. That said, there are a few relatively easy things that I think would help a great deal:

1) Raise property taxes (how much? I don't know: double, triple, quintuple, octuple? What's a bigger adjective than that? It should be by whatever multiple it takes) on any property that's not a primary residence for someone. At some level it becomes worth it to rent out your investment or AirBnB property to someone who'll actually live in it.

2) Restore the train line into town (and probably electrify it, too), then run regular commuter trains throughout the day. The right-of-way still exists, and is currently used for touristy sight-seeing and dining trains. Those can still run, but they're terribly inefficient as the only users of the rails. The goal should be to get workers cheaply to work, and tourists off the roads.

3) Charge a congestion fee to anyone who still chooses to drive. I'd make it $300 for a permit that's good for a year: that hits the tourists really hard (and helps subsidize the train), but should be relatively affordable for anyone who works or lives in town.

I dunno. I'm not really arguing with you, but I do want to make the point that the economics of tourist towns are weird, and at least some of the locals' resentment is driven less by entitlement than by economic forces, and enforced changes, that really are hurting them.

Unfortunately, "I was here first" sounds a lot like "fuck you, I got mine". And it's not gonna fly.

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 / switch jobs / etc.

2) Moving causes people to lose social capital. Laugh all you want, but going from a tight-knit neighborhood of peers to a new town of strangers creates costs, at least in the short term. No one to watch your kids, no one to give you a ride if your car breaks down, etc.

3) Even for those who stay, they lose power, since their new wealthy residents likely have better lobbying sway (e.g., the new bus to the airport causes service to decrease to job centers, etc.)

I don't disagree that certain locals benefit from gentrification (parent comment made the same point), but your capitalism-enabled lack of empathy for those who don't benefit is why people are warming to the ideas of socialism. So if you don't want that, I'd tread carefully & try to be a bit more empathetic.

Alternatively, those wealthy people could use their wealth to build civic infrastructure (e.g., better roads, better school, housing for working class people) to mitigate the negative externalities of their move. But generally, those wealthy movers are moving to escape urbanism and would be loathe to do those very 'urban' things.

Again, I don't disagree with you that in the current American system, 'I've got mine, f** you' is a totally acceptable way to approach moving to a new community, but to put it in words you used, "It's not going to fly" at least not in the long term.

And maybe you do all those types of things already. But the tone of your comment comes across as, “Welp, what choice do I have but to myopically try to get the most out of this hustle??”

I agree, the way forward is to revise the structure and incentives. However, I don’t want to completely absolve individuals of moral responsibility just because they’re playing within the rules of “the game”

Low cost _desirable_ areas.

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v80n2/v80n2p1.html

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/labor-mob...

But, I also think that it's better to be in a growing area than a static or declining area. I'll never understand anti-gentrifiers.

As an adult human being, it is your responsiblility to adapt and decide what is best for yourself and your dependents. No one owes you an unchanging landscape.

I think the main point is being forced out of your life-long home due to increased costs or taxes. Or the destruction of the local cultures/customs through change in local government policies. If you want an extreme example, you can look at the way that cult in Oregon took over a county/town in the 80s or 90s. Nothing legally wrong with it (the population segment with the highest numbers won; not talking the biological attack), but it did make the existing residents subject to their will and angry.

The whole situation (on both sides) was mostly out of a lack of acceptance for other people and their life choices. I think we see this same sort of paradigm with people wanting changes that benefit them but might be detrimental to others in their "communities" (we don't really act like neighbors anymore) without meaningful discussion.

I think assimilation is too unprecise of a word.

In the context of these discussions nobody ever complains about foreign immigrants with a small army of kids running around and they're (at least initially) as un-assimilated as one can be. Heck, they might not even speak the language.

Meanwhile everyone agrees that Karen the corporate lawyer who shows up and promptly gets to work building a fence, calling in noise complaints and narcing on everyone for ordinance violations and unpermitted work is in the wrong.

I'm struggling to put my finger on exactly what it is but there's this disdain and unwillingness to respect local norms that makes the latter example of a newcomer toxic and unwanted (and IMO it seems to correlate strongly with wealth of the newcomer).

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.

If housing is actually allowed to be built, someone might be able to stay in the area in a new, nicer, place. However, in essentially 0 places in the US that are hot housing markets do they allow as much housing as is demanded. Houston might actually be the closest. Prices in Houston are way lower than many other in-demand major cities.

It's a huge metro area with no zoning. That dissuades people from building a castle when a toxic waste dump (or refinery) could go in upwind without warning.

The city's large size and the ever-expanding radius to growing exurbs tends to dilute the value of existing homes which slows their appreciation. And the land in the region has no natural beauty. It's scrub. So creating a synthetic upscale suburb would be hard to sell economically. So neighborhood trendiness tends to arise organically, mostly from proximity to central neighborhoods (like University Village near Rice or Memorial in the museum district).

Low home prices in Houston wasn't the result of an engineered or government-driven initiative. Like all economic change in Texas, it happened on its own.

It's the same phenomena that have restrained home price inflation in Las Vegas. There's a lot of surrounding desert there and not much natural beauty to motivate gentrification in upscaleing the homes/suburb near a natural hot spot.

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 schools through property taxes on people without children is essentially the same - tax is used for "the collective good", where you have some people supporting others.

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 identical house next door pays $25k/yr.

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.

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.

The problem is boomers treating property as an investment vehicle the value of which must go up up up. Introduce affordable housing to cool the market off? Not over my dead body if it means people won’t be clawing tooth and nail for properties in my neighborhood anymore.

The incentives are so backwards. I’ve got mine fuck yours. I don't see how demand side regulation addresses any of this...

I do understand that many of the incentives are backwards, so higher taxes, policies to move jobs, etc are all difficult to handle. But I also think that building more high density housing isn't really going to fix anything. In my view, many of the people in this sort of situation chose to be - they could take jobs in other cities but the group-think says they need to be in SV and working for FAANG to be successful. Not to mention that many want a single family home with amenities to come with that.

Urban poor or rural poor, techies/finance/etc displace them all the same.

The missing link here is, IMO, community involvement. Don’t become a ghost resident jacking up rents. Do join a community board, PTA, etc. Become an active stakeholder and learn about and contribute to wherever you live.

Locals, urban or rural, aren’t pissed only about rising rents or home prices, but also millennial wealth moving in and not giving a f about what’s already there.

Empathy and demonstrating community interest towards the locals goes so far but that seems so low on the problem population’s radar as an easy solution.

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, Oregon. Moscow, Idaho. Everyone was staring at me in the grocery store. I got some intimidating comments like "Are you new in town?" "No, just passing through." "Good."

Not welcoming in the slightest.

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_black_exclusion_laws

Replacement of whatever (necessarily small, otherwise the big city money wouldn't be a problem) industry there is/was with entertainment and tourism isn't the issue. The reality of an economy that is dependent on a specific image or perception (many would say facade) of quaintness is the problem.

You get all sorts of terrible "crab-bucket-esque" feedback loops that quash people's desire to do anything different, innovative or ambitious for fear of harming the golden goose. A large fraction of the people who actually want to do things (boring old normal business endavours that underpin a sustainable economy) leave because whatever their trade is doing it elsewhere and not putting up with all the extra overhead crap of doing it in a tourism/entertainment economy. The fact that a much larg(er than in a "normal economy) portion of the customers any given business sees will only ever transact with them ones creates a bunch of perverse incentives to do dishonest business.

It's like everything that's wrong with a college town combined with everything that's wrong with a wealthy retirement community.

Edit: strike CT from that list of examples, I was going for a "Cape cod but in the NYC economic region" and that part of CT is more like NYC's wealthy NJ suburbs.

It's somewhat received wisdom that those who can afford private schooling throughout their K-12 years leave the islands for labor opportunities (outside of tourism and real-estate management) in the lower 48 (the mainland). Meanwhile those who have to suffer through the Hawaii public education system are destined to do their part in entertaining wealthy mainlanders.

Extremely high land and input costs have long pushed many innovative/nascent businesses to the mainland. Consequently the jobs created by those firms are not available to people from Hawaii. I've heard of some promising new ventures that are seeking to change this, but I'm not holding my breath that this dynamic will change anytime soon.

Note: I apologize if I've casted shade upon anyone who's been through the Hawaii public education system and found a career that suits them.

COVID and the resulting remote work might actually be contributing to a better distribution of wealth in the country in general. It might depress salaries for industries that have concentrated in places like SFV and NYC, and thus create incentives to move out of those areas and create less drastic occupational concentrations in some industries. These changes will create conditions that create secondary benefits.

I think this is an under-appreciated fact. Remote work has the potential to be a huge equalizer, by uncoupling people's jobs from where they live.

I want to say no because I feel like I can improve my QoL in ways that don't harm others, but all these examples are telling me that its really that I don't (or maybe even choose not to) see the negative consequences until its compounded by a large enough group and it ends up being another one of your examples.

The best example is land & desirable real estate. It only takes a few people with "outside" money to drive up prices in the market or to purchase land and sit on it in perpetuity, driving up prices by taking it out of the local supply.

"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 willingness to pay constituted a species of fraud in Aquinas's view."

"Aquinas believed all gains made in trade must relate to the labour exerted by the merchant, not to the need of the buyer. Hence, he condoned moderate gain as payment even for unnecessary trade, provided the price were regulated and kept within certain bounds"

So if this is true (and I'm sure certain tacit assumptions are not mentioned in this Wiki page), then it seems that crazy market price fluctuations have to do with the divorce of market value from labor which was "replaced by the microeconomic concept of supply and demand from Locke, Steuart, Ricardo, Ibn Taymiyyah, and especially Adam Smith".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_price

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.

And that means that someone has to pay the costs of doing that. In a free market economy, the people who do the preparing in advance are called "speculators", and they are rewarded or penalized by standard market mechanisms according to how well they prepare. Those standard market mechanisms include being able to charge a higher price during periods of scarcity according to the natural laws of supply and demand.

The alternative is to have some central planning organization that sets requirements and doles out rewards and penalties. And that alternative has all of the same flaws as every other central planning solution--as the very example you give, ERCOT, shows.

Risk assessment (actuarial, engineering, policy, financial) is another. The insurance industry generally is a vehicle for manifesting dispersed or time-variant risks in a predictable fashion, enabling both proper accounting and (as discussed in my earlier comment) management.

Speculation alone cannot do that, though it is also a component of the risk sector.

(My somewhat unorthodox view is that the FIRE sectore, finance, insurance, and real estate, are all fundamentally about risk, in ways other economic activity is not.)

Yes, good point, this needs to be included as well as speculation.

If I understand the situation correctly, Texas regulators opted for lower electricity prices by not connecting to the national grid. In a sense, they opted to forgo paying for insurance for an event like what happened this year. Is this correct?

Also, there is no fallacy, because higher prices do not mean supply will increase. But rising prices are a signal that there is demand if more supply were to come in. Sometimes, it's not practical for that to happen, but it is, over a sufficiently large timeframe, a good signal that alerts others that it might be worth it to jump in participate in that market.

Brief periodic outages may be acceptable.

Portions of Texas were without power for weeks. Because of predictable cold well within historical experience.

The market as designed per "prices will induce supply" failed. And no price incentive will create gigawatts of generating capacity in minutes to hours.

Just as nine women cannot make a baby in one month.

Some processes require time and/or advanced planning.

It is true, though, that this only helps if more supply can come into the market quickly enough to help. If "more supply" means "more electrical power generation plants that will take five years to build", that's not something that increased prices in the short term can fix.

Another way of dealing with cases like that, however, is innovation: finding an alternative way to meet the same need that doesn't have the same supply problem. For example, if people know that their state's power grid is unreliable, they have more of an incentive to find ways to decrease their reliance on the grid--solar panels, individual homes with their own generators, etc. But that requires transparency--people have to know, well in advance of a problem happening, that their state's power grid is unreliable, so they can take action. Which means the government has to be honest in telling them what the state of the grid is. That, I think, is where the actual root problem often lies.

So if I need my house painted, I should pay you a lot more if you do it with a toothbrush instead of normal painting equipment?

> the divorce of market value from labor

Which is simply a fact of life--often an unpleasant one, but a fact nevertheless. Market value--what someone else will trade for something you have--has nothing to do with how much labor you put in to whatever it is you have.

This doesn't happen because those same locals that are homeowners love the value of their house exploding upwards

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.

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If you build anything even approaching "normal" suburban SFH housing, you're just going to have all the wells you'll have to sink run dry in a few months and the properties will be uninhabitable. Seeing a 2 acre minimum lot size isn't necessarily a "keep the poor people out" thing.

To be clear, I am mostly not referring to the cities mentioned in this article, but housing development in smaller mountain towns and the rural/semi-rural areas up in the mountains.

This becomes especially clear when you realise that Los Angeles's watershed extends 1,500 miles eastward (about 2,400 km), to the Colorado River and the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains. Los Angeles has (under western-US water law) senior rights to water, over those of users far upstream of it.

Water supplies, and the rights to them, are based in large part on the economic (and hence legal and legislative/political power) of metropolitan areas. Since a large city with large rights effectively sucks dry land from 100s or 1,000s of miles away, population concentrates into a few centres, rather than being distributed across the land.

This contrast shows up most especially in the "Earthlights" images of the US mainland at night, where east of the Mississippi river settlements are dotted evenly through the landscape, but thin rapidly as one heads further west, dissolving into a few mega-concentrations: the Colorado front, Salt Lake - Provo, Albequerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, LA-San Dieto, the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle. A few more-populated regions exist (the Sacramento-San Joaquine valley, the Willammette valley), but these are sparse compared with the Eastern US.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Earthlights_d...

mmmkay

I think if we can address what makes cities livable for EVERYONE who lives in them, then travel is for experiencing foreign ideas, concepts and cultures and not "escaping the reality of cities and using my wealth to get what i want" kinda thing

Complete zoning and policy failure is a uniquely California problem. Nobody has a structural, and likely unconstitutional inequity in taxation that California does. Some rando Bay Area suburb being more expensive than Manhattan is not the same problem.

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

>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

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

I used to commute to Manhattan a few times a month.

Even in a modern sprawl shitshow like the DC or Boston Metro area, it’s way cheaper and easier to get housing than many California locales.

End of the day, there’s just a shit ton of money combined with insane policy decisions in California. It’s a inspiring, puzzling and disturbing place, all at the same time.

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.

edit: having been a ski bum in Vail, I can't say that I've visited every resort in CO. But across Vail, Breck, Keystone, A Basin, Loveland, Monarch, Cooper, Copper, Beaver Creek, Steamboat, Wolf Creek, Crested Butte, all 5 mountains of Aspen, there are no 10+ story towers. I'm trying to take back some of the pedantic tone of my original comment.

Overall point here is that Vail and other ski resort towns happily build very large buildings for vacationers and second home owners. I just don’t buy that having very large office and residential buildings would have that much greater of an environmental, or even quality of life, impact.

we're trying to preserve these national treasures, but at the same time, choose winners as to who gets to build there...

I'd hate to see towers pop up in Vail and Breck to be honest.. the charm is what it is - the log cabins and resorts that disappear in the mountains.

If this is happening to your town, the town has a choice: The newcomers are coming. Are they going to live alongside the long term locals, or are they going to replace them? Are the locals going to get rich and leave, or are they going to remain poor and stay? "Get rich and stay" is not an option.

But, as you say, someone who plans to remain in their house indefinitely would probably just as soon not have their property taxes double (and may not even be able to afford them in they're retired on a fixed income).

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.

If we'd been better about crack/cocaine, opioids wouldn't have hit so hard. If UI benefits weren't designed to be difficult to acquire, the ongoing problems states are having distributing them in this crisis wouldn't have happened. Right now, people living in small towns that are being effected by an influx of monied transplants have a roadmap of how this process works. If they so wish, they can disrupt it, and insist that, as new wealth pours into their area, a substantial portion of it is put towards improving the area for current residents, and towards securing their socioeconomic right to remain there. Sometimes that means telling rich people no and foregoing a short-term pretty penny, and being ready when they come after you for denying them. But that's much easier than watching your community disperse to parts unknown while yuppies live it up in your childhood home-cum-gutted minimalist smart bohemabode.

Will they heed the warning?

I used to vacation there.

As one of those clueless people who can't buy marijuana in a legal state, I am equally clueless on the signs of terrible addiction if I drove through Cape Cod, MA today.

I'm not sure what makes me more sad -- the existence, or my incapability to notice the existence.

You can increase your "street-smarts" by getting out of your comfort zone, by choice or circumstances, and with life experiences. I locale and talk to the saner homeless people, especially the older who are just there by personal circumstances: I met a former teacher and elevator repairman who makes money today as a tutor; a former hippie, Navy radar and aircraft electronics technician, and Apple II rework technician; and a law school dropout, former hippie, merchant marine, and writer for the Village Voice and the NY Daily News.

* influx of tourism and remote owners -> rising prices

* lack of tourism or property interest -> slow death

I am not sure what would be the right public policy to balance the two extremes.

Maybe Hawaii has the right idea with tiered property taxation - the longer you reside there, the lower your property tax becomes?

For example, Local NIMBYist restrictions, mostly those individuals that have resided there for a long time (and have the lower property tax rate you describe), have resulted in areas immediately adjacent to 40-story downtown developments being zoned exclusively for single-family homes; see Kaimuki, Upper Tantalus, Manoa, Punchbowl (to an extent), etc. Consequently, even homes built over 80 yrs ago with only ~1,300 sqft sell for about $1.1 million; https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1001-Belser-St-Honolulu-H....

The majority of people employed in hospitality and trades that support the local tourist economy (electricians, masons, carpenters, etc.) are increasingly driven to the west side; where commutes to the city can easily be 1-2 hours normally (pre-COVID). This eventually becomes such a stressor that many of the people working these skilled trades leave for the mainland.

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.

Regardless, the geographical narrative is not quite the same. Silver City or Prescott Valley aren't going to run out of space like an alpine creek junction or barrier island/moraine. Water is a different story.

The question is ultimately whether newcomers will participate in the town's development or in its decline, via interactions with the local community, politics, schools et cetera. Just because we built segregated communities over the last century doesn't mean we have to do it for the next one.

I'm old enough that I remember my home town (which has been inundated by California retirees) as having 100% family-owned grocery stores, drug/general/hardware stores, distributorships, all of which started shifting heavily to chain and corporate dominance by sometime in the late 1970's. Since the modern concept of retiree and tourism based economies hadn't taken hold, towns of that type had to be mostly independent in terms of income for money inflow....small factories, mining, farming and ranching, etc.

I'd say that this movement of people who can afford it just another side effect of something bigger. The irony that a lifestyle of living in a nicer small town with a Powerwall and a Model 3 is both less sustainable and less diverse is not lost on me.

> I'd say that this movement of people who can afford it just another side effect of something bigger.

It sort of sounds like you answer your own question (/hypothesis): consolidation of industry. Which also seems to be a pretty big driver in wealth inequality. I've no idea what the correct response is here -- greater regulation to increase competition, so that there are more smaller players across any given industry? Who knows.

There's always the chance that the past is viewed with the optimism of youth of course. There's certainly a difference in social glue in a world where everyone is either self-employed or has a single layer of management above them. Plus, truly local companies are better local citizens (sports teams sponsors, money for charities, build decent and long-lasting buildings).

Dunno what the answer is besides accumulate a financial warchest, live where you like, watch the battle at a distance.

I'm sorry, is that supposed to be an excuse? I mean, on the whole, some displacement of locals isn't that big a tragedy, but "it was good for me, so fuck you" isn't exactly the best moral reasoning I've ever heard.

If its ok for a young person to leave their hometown, move to a city and call it home to make a better life without thinking about the locals, then it must be ok for a person with a small family living in a city to move to a smaller town and call it home to make a better life for his/her family.

The reason that theses two scenarios are not equivalent is so obvious I'm wondering whether or not I'm misinterpreting it.

Whether you like it or not, the pandemic happened, technology has advanced, there was high demand in the cities for decades and now its subsided a little and the smaller towns have some higher demand too. Only difference the culture of the city/small town makes is how welcoming/indifferent they are or how much harder they will make it for the new comers.

[Edit: Having parented teenagers I suspect the awfulness of the 12 to 14 age was probably more about me than anything else!]

Such is the mind of a teenager.

It's fun for the kids - why not? - but I have no fond memories. I commuted via BART every day 2006-2012 (albeit just one stop - W Oakland to Embarcadero, and back), and the stuff I witnessed on a regular basis had me thinking "I'm so glad my children aren't here to see this."

I'm not looking for an argument, I'm genuinely curious. I live in the UK but I've never visited the SF area.

I don’t know if you live in London, but I would say they compare to the Northern Line it terms of quality. But at the end of the day the real difference is about riders. I would say you do notice more issues like littering (including dangerous litter like needles) and robbery in the US train lines though.

However, just like most public train lines, you have to learn to mind your business, be aware and don’t lallygag. Also, stick to using it during the day.

Thanks for this, a new word for me.

Lallygag/lollygag: to loll about; idling lazily. There is an interesting article on it’s etymology in the NYT.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/magazine/25wwln_safire.ht...

Sadly in the US many dense cities have abandoned the things that kids like to do, leaving those who like city things to the suburbs as the best compromise.

I know someone who started a children's museum, when she started the city tried to get her downtown with some nice incentives. She didn't though because there are zero kids who live downtown, and the next ring (in city limits) is either rich no kids, or too poor to afford a to visit. That means everyone who might go is going to drive from the suburbs and so a location with free parking in the suburbs was better able to attract visitors, even though it means half the potential customers will find it too far to drive, the other half will find it more convenient and thus come more often.

I don't know how cities can solve that, but it is a problem repeated in most cities. It didn't used to be that way, cities used to have a lot of people with kids. In general cities have abandoned families as families moved out (you can find lots of people pointing blame as to causes here - I'm not going to speculate), and it will be hard to bring them back. Not all cities have done this as much as others.

at least in my area, I wouldn't say the city has "abandoned" families. rather, it has focused mainly on improving public education for children from poor families. this is a noble goal, but it imposes tradeoffs that the middle class families are mostly unwilling to accept. since they have the ability to leave, they do.

That is true. If my daughter hadn't gotten into a good charter school in the city, I wonder if we hadn't looked a lot harder at moving. However after we did eventually hop over the county line my daughter still 'commutes' back into the city because she doesn't want to change schools.

I grew up middle class in a upper middle class school district, with attentive and loving parents. My mom stayed at home and raised us. I was still exposed to skipping class, drugs, and alcohol in middle and high school. I almost didn’t graduate myself, due to poor choices. This is in a school with a 92% graduation rate. I understand from intimate personal experience that the more opportunities your kids have to interact with peers making poor life choices, there is a higher chance your kid gets caught up in it despite what you do as a parent. This isn’t sheltering (I certainly wasn’t sheltered), it’s just repeat exposure to exciting but bad choices leads some kids to temptation.

I could have moved to a more expensive neighborhood in the city but the same fundamental problem exists. I don’t care about how much money people have, I care whether in aggregate, the parents in my community try to raise their kids with intention. There’s a shocking lack of that in 40% of the families in the schools in the city we moved from.

I'm familiar with the argument that the cohort of students matters more than the quality of instruction. in fact, that is what I'm getting at here. the city has an explicit policy of mixing students from different backgrounds across the school system, the goal being to break the cycle of poor students going to poor schools and staying poor. it's a good goal, but it seems kinda pointless when all the students they are trying to mix them with are fleeing to the county.

Sometimes it's the school, not the school system.

For work ( before covid), it wasn't interesting, definitely not tech related stuff. I'll return when I'm older and have the time to maintain a garden.

I think the bound between people in smaller villages of better too. You're limited to what you have, so you accept persons more to do they are.

In cities, you tend to like up people similar to your interests. And there's more possibility that an interest changes or you don't meet at the same event anymore.

Edit: The Indicator recently had an interesting podcast that demonstrates this effect.[1]

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/15/977533022/please-sell-me-a-ho...

Edit: as an example, I used to live in an area that was relatively poor by US standards. There was a large cohort of retirees who would move in because if the pleasant weather, low cost of living etc. Rather than mingle with the locals, they tended to create little walled enclaves. Additionally, they gradually took over the local government (in part, because the full time political positions were unpaid, meaning only those retired or wealthy enough to not work could afford to fill them). This created an environment where business investment was often stifled because the retirees didn’t want to lose the feel of their retirement settlement by allowing more homes to be built or certain businesses to open. It was difficult to raise any taxes related to investing in schools or infrastructure because retirees tend to be more price sensitive in those areas, particularly if they don’t have children or grandchildren who will benefit. Ultimately, this made it harder for locals to find work (outside of service jobs) or to keep younger locals from fleeing for better prospects. To many locals, it was viewed as almost a hostile takeover of their town by outsiders with money. It tended to exacerbate rather than alleviate those class divisions alluded to in my original comment.

You never thought about your addiction to 2nd day shipping and international cuisine rotation via uber eats.

Quite suddenly, you lose the quietness while gaining the traffic and crime. Trails become packed and not well respected. All that remains the same is Costco except busier.

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?

This is the crux of the matter. There is a lot of demand for less humid, mountainous regions with lots of outdoor recreation nearby. And it’s easier than ever to scope (due to internet) out the nice locations from wherever you are in the world.

So people are taking advantage (or already have) of an arbitrage opportunity to go where they want to that they previously may not have known about, or been able to go. The population of the world also exploded in the last few decades.

There's no shortage of small towns in the US. If I threw a dart at a map of the US, I'd probably hit near one. (OK, a lot of the West is federal land but there are a lot of them.) There are a lot fewer that:

- Are in a climate you prefer

- Have recreational options you like

- Are perhaps gentrified to the degree they have food/cultural options you want

- Are perhaps at least reasonably accessible to major city/airport

- Aren't too susceptible to natural disasters

- etc.

Practically, probably not. Few people talk about that, most dont.

Most will move for affordable, but wont necessary like abrupt change from FAANG and big city to small city and not much to do. They will need to adjust to different culture, new hobbies, find new friends, everything.

And that is not even speaking about those whose partners dont want to move, whose partners have jobs, friends and social networks they like/need. And that is not even speaking about the "what with kids does this makes sense to them" topic.

Versus in the city I live in now, there are almost a dozen public courses in a reasonable drive. Dozens of car dealerships. Dozens of hiking trails. Dozens of beaches. Dozens and dozens of everything. I can vet options. I can do the same activity in different settings easily. If I am in one area of town, I have flexibility to find options in that area rather than going with my usual option close to me. I have choice. I have agency. I can take my business elsewhere if I need to, and come out better from it thanks to this huge population being able to support a variety of choices for any niche interest I might have.

And of course in the old days the argument was you could just make do with online shopping. But these days the signal to noise ratio on the internet is so pathetically low, I really value actually holding an object I buy in my hand before I get fleeced buying something online once again. Reviews can't be trusted. Images can't be trusted. I trust my eyes and my hands and if the price is fair, taking it home with me is the best deal on shipping there is. Being in a huge city means there are a lot of brick and mortar businesses. Businesses that probably closed years ago with the death of main streets in smaller cities and towns, but thrive here thanks to a huge population being able to sustain more businesses in a given area, even if many people opt to online shop.

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 liked going to local beginner art/dance club, but new place dont have equivalent.

Moving to different place, especially when the environment changes comes with changes in lifestyle you may or may not welcome.

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 culture for years before hand.

That's just not going to happen though. The newcomers have nothing in common. Life experience, wealth, religion, ideology, none of if. And then the top it off by showing up and changing the place both intentionally and unintentionally. No wonder the locals don't want them around.

But I don't really see location as a major factor in most hobbies. I grew up as a military dependent and can't remember giving up hobbies just because we moved. You can almost always find ways to continue them.

It's unfortunate that you phrase that as egoistic because I think that apart from real estate price (which is highly location dependent because it depends on zoning laws) locals are better with the influx of money. In my experience in France, some rural places with low real estate tension are very happy to see urban people coming, but in other (like small coastal cities) there is a huge resentment because real estate skyrocket in a relatively short time.

Have you considered that this is the mentality that people take issue with? It's the root of many of today's ills.