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The article's point is that the churn of spillover-boomtowns will continue: once the current crop of towns starts getting built out and accumulating problems li

The article's point is that the churn of spillover-boomtowns will continue: once the current crop of towns starts getting built out and accumulating problems like unaffordable housing, nightmarish traffic, lack of easy greenfield land to develop with cookie-cutter houses on tiny lots and giant office parks, the developers will find the next wave of towns to exploit, probably long before most of the human misery materializes in the one they just left behind. Boise/Meridian/Nampa may be the flavor of the day now, but by the time you're commuting from Fruitland because you couldn't afford a home in Boise, the region will have become just another dusty built-out suburban disaster buoyed by but a handful of overinfluential employers -- like Tucson -- and you'll be reading articles about whatever buzzword is being used for the new generation moving to Hermiston and Hickory and fortunately-placed small towns no one has never heard of. This is not at all different from the cycle of suburbs that plays out within every metro [1][2][3]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880734 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13665669#13666473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13665669#13666473 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744401#16746390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16744401#16746390

Rapzid 8y ago
It's interesting how much blame you attribute to the developers. I would lay this squarely at the feet of city planners and voters; they hold all the keys.
- niftich 8y ago
  It's both. City planners are constrained to their own jurisdiction, so they're trying to come out ahead by ensuring that the next wave of growth doesn't leave them behind. They're trying to solve a local optimization problem, where their competition is often the neighboring localities with whom they will share the wider trend of whatever the future may bring, but the resulting wealth will be allocated depending on exact settlement and zoning patterns. It's a prisoner's dilemma. Meanwhile, developers -- as a loose cohort -- are absolutely the executors for the nationwide phenomenon. Their loyalty is to not to the land or their products, but to the cycle of plan, build, and profit. Wherever they are, they're deeply entangled in local politics, and lobby the local officials to let them build homes on farmland to be upzoned. They leave behind subdivisions that don't actually generate enough revenue to the town to make up for their hookups to utilities and services, but the population growth looks good for the town in reports that businesses look at to expand or relocate. Just like a B-roll of the cities now scrambling to attract Amazon, these suburbs are hoping they'd be picked instead of the town one over when some company with national pockets wants to build a 200-job call center, data center, or distribution warehouse. In mainstream America, these tiny battles between neighboring towns are fought and lost thirty, fifty jobs at a time.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    The availability of housing probably does encourage household formation and childbirth, so you're right, developers share in the blame. But if you take population growth as a given, some kind of housing development is necessary, and there's an ironclad bipartisan consensus that it had better not be the urban kind (especially not near existing urban centers). I hate cookie-cutter greenfield subdivisions as much as anyone, but we get them because they are what we allow at scale.
chrisdhoover 8y ago
please shut yo mauff about Hickory. Us old folks need a place to go once we cash in on our SF flats and fully vest.

Rapzid 8y ago

It's interesting how much blame you attribute to the developers. I would lay this squarely at the feet of city planners and voters; they hold all the keys.

niftich 8y ago
It's both. City planners are constrained to their own jurisdiction, so they're trying to come out ahead by ensuring that the next wave of growth doesn't leave them behind. They're trying to solve a local optimization problem, where their competition is often the neighboring localities with whom they will share the wider trend of whatever the future may bring, but the resulting wealth will be allocated depending on exact settlement and zoning patterns. It's a prisoner's dilemma. Meanwhile, developers -- as a loose cohort -- are absolutely the executors for the nationwide phenomenon. Their loyalty is to not to the land or their products, but to the cycle of plan, build, and profit. Wherever they are, they're deeply entangled in local politics, and lobby the local officials to let them build homes on farmland to be upzoned. They leave behind subdivisions that don't actually generate enough revenue to the town to make up for their hookups to utilities and services, but the population growth looks good for the town in reports that businesses look at to expand or relocate. Just like a B-roll of the cities now scrambling to attract Amazon, these suburbs are hoping they'd be picked instead of the town one over when some company with national pockets wants to build a 200-job call center, data center, or distribution warehouse. In mainstream America, these tiny battles between neighboring towns are fought and lost thirty, fifty jobs at a time.
- closeparen 8y ago
  The availability of housing probably does encourage household formation and childbirth, so you're right, developers share in the blame. But if you take population growth as a given, some kind of housing development is necessary, and there's an ironclad bipartisan consensus that it had better not be the urban kind (especially not near existing urban centers). I hate cookie-cutter greenfield subdivisions as much as anyone, but we get them because they are what we allow at scale.

chrisdhoover 8y ago

please shut yo mauff about Hickory. Us old folks need a place to go once we cash in on our SF flats and fully vest.