12 ms·

Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas

89 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago
Talking about house prices, saying something about less supply, but not fully comparing the volume of sales is IMO very misleading.
almost_usual 6y ago
You’re also living in a prime wildfire area in Truckee. There’s too much fuel in the Sierras as it is, it’ll burn sooner or later.
- epistasis 6y ago
  The picture of a house they show nestled in the trees is incredibly dangerous, incredibly resource intrnsive, and just ecologically unsound. We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. Instead we lock down any new construction in cities, which requires the least amount of infrastructure and environmental damage, and instead let pretty much anybody build in ecologically disastrous ways. California is ruled at the local level, where decisions like this are made, by an older generation of conservatives that have convinced themselves that their personal pastoral aesthetic preferences of cars and suburbs and low density sprawl that consumes vast amounts of wilderness is somehow conservationist. It’s a massive problem!
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    We really need to better price the negative externalities that come with these different choices into the market. Massive price increases for fossil fuels are an obvious step.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      I agree, but if we have no alternatives to current development styles, then taxes can not correct the bad practices. We literally outlaw the alternatives to building in the WUI.
      - ajmurmann 6y ago
        Agreed. I think those regulations cause so many societal problems, many of which are quite indirect and I am sure many of us don't realize. For example the decline of rural areas would be less of a problem if it would be a real alternative for people to find a better fortune elsewhere, but prices make this impossible unless you are already well off.
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    Come on now, Truckee is half second homes - the resource intensiveness is based on gluttony not existence of housing.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      A 2000 sq ft home in Truckee, be it a second home or a primary home, is going to require far more roads, more vehicle miles travelled, require cutting down far more trees, more heating and cooling, more water and waste water infrastructure than a 2000 sq ft apartment in a city. That not to say that we should ban all Truckee homes on long roads like we ban apartments in cities, but we should definitely legalize apartments cities. And rural Truckee tree consuming development should be highly controlled and taxed in proportion to the amount of public money that needs to be spent trying to protect these fire traps.
      - jessaustin 6y ago
        Yeah, there's no way the public should spend anything trying to save the house pictured in TFA. The owner who can afford that house can certainly afford to cut some trees. The trees weren't cut, so the house must not be very valuable to anyone. https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-ready/defensible-space/ https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
  - ipnon 6y ago
    Housing density is not generally a problem outside of the United States. Developing economies seem to have no bias against dense housing. I think this is because there is no politically powerful land owning class outside of the United States. So it is in the interest of the majority to have an abundance of affordable housing. This protects against global warming too.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Housing density is definitely a problem outside of the United States. Many countries handle it in much the same way, while others handle it by shoving their working class into what's basically a human rights violation. I've seen discussions of Singapore's good housing policy, for example, that fail to mention the worker dormitories with 10 or 20 people per room. I certainly wouldn't claim the US has good housing policy, but there's no perfect solution to the conflict that arises when the market-clearing housing price in an area creeps above what most people can pay.
      - asdff 6y ago
        Have you seen how the working class lives in the U.S.? It's honestly not much different than a developing country. Multiple families in a tiny apartment is common in places like LA. People hold full time jobs while going back home to a tent on the sidewalk. Tenement conditions are very real in the U.S., and invisible for the most part by anyone fortunate enough not to live in them.
        reducesuffering 6y ago
        LA doesn’t represent the entire U.S. Most of the US, especially outside of the west coast and NYC, has plenty of housing. US median income is 64k and median home price is 310k. Most of those are 1500+ sqft SFH easily afforded by the working class.
  - silveroriole 6y ago
    > We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. How many people would ‘like’ to live in a city centre if they didn’t have to for work?
    - epistasis 6y ago
      I would! And I’m constantly surprised at the number of people that don’t like cities that assume that everybody else just must be like them somehow. Cities are expensive because they attract lots of people to them because lots of people prefer them. So when you say “how many” the answer is clearly far more people Han are currently allowed to live there. We should build in cities until it’s cheaper to live in them than it is to live in less environmentally friendly ways.
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      > How many people would ‘like’ to live in a city centre if they didn’t have to for work? I think this is a very personal thing. I wouldn't consider living far from a city centre, work or no work, personally. Some people love outer suburbs or the country, and that's fine; just wouldn't be for me.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    > We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to A model/example where this has been done well? I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along narrow-sidewalks without proper public spaces and reasonable bike/pedestrian zones, etc. I think the resistance comes from not showing the grand plan around these kinds of in-fill demands. I can't imagine living in the American version of them, and I've lived (happily) in the dense(r) city centers of Amsterdam, Berlin and Brooklyn. I've also lived in SF -- never again. It's a terrible version of urban development.
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      > I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along narrow-sidewalks without proper public spaces and reasonable bike/pedestrian zones, etc. So we...don't do that. Bluntly speaking, it's trivial: all of these issues are of our own making in America. We have hundreds of examples just in Europe of how to make car-lite, walkable, nice cities and towns and that's just on a single continent. And that's artificially restricting ourselves to a single continent with societies that look the most like ours. A quick pivot to most of eastern Asia will show much more variety in how to build those areas. (I will pause here and throw right out the idea that "Europe is much smaller than the United States so we couldn't possibly..." There is no reason we cannot duplicate those same cityscapes all across the United States; we have sub-national states and counties for a reason.) We are car-centric and spread out because we choose to be. So we either change those choices and make the commensurate political and financial changes to go along with it, or we don't and we accept the consequences of things like "large swaths of the West Coast burn to the ground" and "we are stuck in our metal boxes powered by carbon fuels or batteries backed by precious rare earth minerals." We already spent a couple trillion dollars propping up the stock market for nothing more than paper gains; the argument that we "can't afford it" is laughable.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      The resistance comes from a tiny number of people, and is not representative of the majority. Blocking the wants of the people requires subversion of democracy and subversion of the housing market by a few very wealthy and connected and powerful people. California and many other states’ governance has enabled a small number of people to veto what the majority wants. For example, all of SF’s safe streets program during the pandemic have been held up by the actions of only two people [1]. Two people subverting changes that are wildly popular just because is is change rather than maintaining the status quo. Similarly, Minneapolis’ legalization of triplexes city wide is popular with a majority of the city, [2] but during the government process the representation was quite different, and unrepresentative of the city. Yet that unrepresentative process is somehow considered “democratic”. My question to you is that, if you don’t like living in SF, why are you interested unmaking sure others can’t live there? Do you assume they don’t like it? Do you assume that you know what’s in their best interests? Sooooo may people love living in SF, in fact almost everybody who lives there loves it. It works well for them. Let the people that love it enjoy it. It will leave suburbia emptier for those who prefer suburbia. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/San-Francisco-lets-just-one-person-stop-15561164.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa... [2] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/crosstabs-MN-NH-NV-WI.pdf/80f8e4634fe6f880/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/crosstabs-MN-NH-NV-WI...
  - cactus2093 6y ago
    > A generation of conservatives Very true, even though they convinced themselves and everyone else that they were progressives and environmentalists, just because they don't hate minorities and they like the vibe of trees. (Not to downplay the importance of socially progressive measures, but it's one dimension and they are very conservative on most other dimensions).
    - epistasis 6y ago
      I don't disagree at all, but would like to point out a dark streak of nastiness in some of the older crowd. The funny thing is that there's not much of a good history for racial justice from this style of "environmentalist," quite the opposite in fact. Lots of eugenics and white supremacy in the past [1] which has changed into "population control" (of whom?) these days. A lot of it seems, to me, to center on allowing wealthy white individuals to live in isolation without having to be around other people, and the "environment" becomes about preserving their privilege. [1] https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2020/06/it-s-past-time-dismantle-racism-outdoors https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2020/06/it-s-past-time-d...
  - pbourke 6y ago
    > We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. All else being equal, Americans will choose to live in a detached house on a 1/2 acre lot with an SUV or pickup in the driveway.
    - CamperBob2 6y ago
      The people advocating dense inner-city housing for everyone don't plan to make it a choice. They know better than the rest of us, you see.
    - epistasis 6y ago
      This is simply untrue. Some people will, but this sort of “everybody who doesn’t want what I want is lying to themselves” is elitism that destroys people’s chances to live th way they prefer. The higher cost of living in cities is pretty strong evidence that city living is under supplied compared to suburban living.
      - Gibbon1 6y ago
        You can argue back and forth whether people in flyover country hate the idea of living in dense housing or not. But if you peruse city and county planning documents you find that most places it's completely illegal to build greenfield projects with urban density. Instead of being able to build 25-35 units an acre you're allowed 3-4. And no mixed use allowed. Seems to me the answer is people don't get a choice a most places. Would people outside of old dense cities want to live in a walkable mixed use development? We have no idea because those have been banned since before WWII.
      - pbourke 6y ago
        How is it untrue? The proportion of Americans living in urban counties (31%) has not changed in 20 years. The proportion living in suburban counties has increased slightly (53% to 55%) [1] The proportion of new vehicle sales that are SUVs or pickups has been steadily climbing for over 30 years [2] > The higher cost of living in cities is pretty strong evidence that city living is under supplied compared to suburban living. Is that true for all cities or just a few large ones? I don’t see how you can conclude that. The narrower conclusion is that demand for city housing exceeds supply in a few key markets. > this sort of “everybody who doesn’t want what I want is lying to themselves” is elitism that destroys people’s chances to live th way they prefer. You have apparently without irony proved my point. My broader point is that rather than force people to do things that they apparently don’t want to do (move to dense housing, ditch or downsize their vehicles) we should seek ways to invest in the efficiency of our existing housing stock, and provide incentives to improve the efficiency of new vehicles. A carbon tax also looks like a promising approach. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e... [2] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report#Highlight3 https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...
alex_g 6y ago
"Many Americans — especially 30-somethings who remain employed — are ditching their tiny rental apartments in hip districts of expensive cities and moving to buy houses in more affordable cities or the burbs for a life of shopping at Home Depot and spending their Friday nights eating mozzarella sticks at Applebee's." oof, that's a savage take for NPR.
- almost_usual 6y ago
  Who cares about NPR elitism. Why shame people for doing what they want. Hell, the Buffalo Wild Wings in Daly City has a more diverse crowd than any bar or restaurant in SF.
  - mire_rustling 6y ago
    Too true.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Better mozzarella sticks, too, not that that's a high bar. It's not an accident they called out Applebee's by name. They knew what they were doing.
  - katzgrau 6y ago
    Honestly, BWW had the best tap lineup in my area for a long time, which has no shortage of trendy bars.
    - rconti 6y ago
      The first time I walked into a BWW (maybe 10 or 15 years ago) my eyes opened wide when I saw all the taps. My excitement wore off when I realized that it was literally all budweiser products and most of them had the exact same thing.
      - katzgrau 6y ago
        Ah yea. Good beers took a while to come to my area (maybe 5-10 years ago). I'm guessing other parts of the country might have been a little different, especially as Big Beer tried to catch the craft wave and smaller breweries didn't have any distribution yet. Maybe it's different now in most areas (hopefully)
ultimoo 6y ago
Right now, being a landlord in SF is looking pretty grim given that tech workers who used to rent are fleeing in droves and those that are not are negotiating their rents. I wonder whether this trend will reverse in the next 1-3 years or this is the new permanent dynamic of the SF rental market.
- nimish 6y ago
  Wild that landlords having to deal with their investments losing value and having to negotiate a commercial transaction is "grim" The market dynamics shifted. No big deal.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Yeah, no shit. You were careless with your capital and lost some or all of it? My heart bleeds.
    - nimish 6y ago
      They don't lose any capital until it's re-valued or sold. It's purely a short-term loss in income. Eat the loss, move on -- that's what most landlords would tell their tenants in the opposite situation. I am playing the world's smallest violin for them as a class.
  - refurb 6y ago
    You have the same attitude when prices go up? “Wild that tenants having to deal with rent going up and having to negotiate a commercial transaction is “grim””. “The market dynamics shifted. No big deal.”
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      > You have the same attitude when prices go up? No, but the people on the opposite side of the transaction (the landlords) for damn sure do. "Market price has gone up, what can you do" is something I've been told when trying to negotiate lease renewals, and I'm outside the Bay Area. Landlords could, as a group, have pushed to help make pricing stable and make their investment a long-term, very secure asset. Instead, just like virtually every other part of this fire-encrusted economy, they grabbed for the short-term gains at the expense of plodding consistency. Landlord groups are pushing back on the idea that tenants should do anything except blithely pay whatever duly-increased price is passed onto us and we should thank them for the privilege besides. My heart bleeds.
the_cat_kittles 6y ago
in case it is not obvious, the housing market, and real estate in general is the front line of a very real class war. it is very effectively bifurcating the population, as this article describes. i find this really upsetting and immoral, but im sure other people will interpret the same thing differently.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think a lot of people living in cities think there's only two options - living in an apartment downtown in a megacity, and living in a car-bound wasteland suburb. But there's a third option - towns. I know you have them in the US! I've been to a few of them. Walkable towns with coffee shops, restaurants, bars, culture, dating. You can even find a few in the Bay Area if you don't want to look too far. Isn't the small town an icon of American living? Why are people so incredibly snobby about it?
- ssequeira 6y ago
  What are some examples of Bay Area towns? It seems like everyone in my friend circle in tech lives in San Francisco and puts up (or used to) with the long commute.
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    Alameda comes to mind. Completely walkable, charming, great community feel. It's an island, so going over bridges or through the tube to go anywhere can be a bit of a hassle, but it's well worth it.
    - randycupertino 6y ago
      The pinball museum in Alameda is one of my favorite spots! I hope it survives the shutdown, they always seem to be operating on a shoestring budget. Super cool place if anyone hasn't checked it out before, highly recommend!
      - alex_g 6y ago
        I second this, spent my birthday there last year and it was a blast!
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Quite a few of the towns in the South Bay have walkable cores: Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo... You also have smaller cities all over the country. Now, you get into truly small towns in places like New England and there really isn't a lot in the town center and it's unlikely you'll be living walking distance from it.
jamestimmins 6y ago
"Still over 7% of active mortgages are in forbearance," This seems incredibly concerning, and could suggest an especially hard market in the coming months/year.
rhacker 6y ago
So a pandemic hits and everyone screaming NIMBY is suddenly moving out?
iwonderwhy 6y ago
Curious what will happen to prices in these zoom towns once people return to office work? Wouldn't it be more prudent to shop around in areas where we know people will return in a year or two?
- asdff 6y ago
  Probably depends whether or not there is a ski resort nearby to sustain property values. reasonably convenient lots to the resort would eventually all be infilled, at which point prices would surge exponentially. Otherwise it's an overpriced mountain lodge, and mountain lodge supply increases exponentially.
dontremeber 6y ago
> Many Americans — especially 30-somethings who remain employed — are ditching their tiny rental apartments in hip districts of expensive cities and moving to buy houses in more affordable cities or the burbs... I suppose I fall into this category but even houses in the burbs seem more expensive than they should be. I’m specifically looking at up and coming towns, not any random burb but buying a house that’s literally 2-3X what it sold for 3-5 years ago is hard to justify. I really want to finally purchase something but I’m worried the market will fall out from under itself in a year or two after COVID financial aftermath settles down and I end up way underwater. EDIT: typo
- randycupertino 6y ago
  I was thinking that the high-end vacation towns of the affluent would be a pretty good investment bet, because even when remote work isn't popular there still is high end demand for vacationers. Think places like Jackson Hole, Aspen, Maui, Nantucket, Newport RI, Hilton Head, Scottsdale, etc... could see places like that retaining their value no matter what happens.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    Some of those places you listed crashed hard after 2008 and others didn’t. I think there are trends in vacation destinations that can cause speculation. Also, many of the the buyers are leveraging wealth from equities that is more variable than the salaries the average homeowner uses. If there’s a prolonged stock market drop during a recession, many may be forced to liquidate when buyers are fewer and poorer (you’d prefer not to sell anything in a downturn, but the vacation home might be the first to go). I saw people take huge losses on vacation properties after 2008.
- sudosteph 6y ago
  Lots of cities in the southeast are still undervalued IMO. I'm a North Carolinian, and there's been no shortage of northern transplants over the years. Charlotte and Raleigh have grown like crazy, and show no sign of stopping. Tons of young people moving here despite the well-deserved reputation of this area being pretty boring. I guess boring is a plus these days. West coasters largely haven't caught on, but I don't think the migrations will stop, especially with COVID. Charlotte and Raleigh are fairly safe bets, but Winston-Salem seems like it might be on a similar path (but much earlier on in that path if so).
yalogin 6y ago
I wonder how sustainable this is. Part of this is obviously going to remain but I can see a big swing in the other direction saying employees and groups need to be together to generate the feeling of a team and that remote work doesn't give you that.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  That’s likely true. But it's probably cheaper to fly the entire company and their families to a ski resort every quarter, then it is to pay for Bay Area cost-of-living and office space.
blueyes 6y ago
Can we please call these bed-Zoom communities? ;)
Merrill 6y ago
The disassociation of how you make your living and where you live will have interesting long-term social consequences. Until recently, most people have had to live where they made their living. Farmers lived on farms. Workers lived near mines, mills, factories and offices in which they worked. Even rich people lived in the cities where their businesses and investments were located, at least until the late 1800s when rail commuting to nearby suburbs allowed them to live in more pleasant surroundings. Even so, the wealthy continued to identify with their cities, participated in civic life, indulged in philanthropy, and were reasonably concerned about their city's quality of life. In the 1960s, jet travel became cheap and frequent for the wealthy. The really rich became detached from the cities and moved to enclaves of wealth in Newport, Carmel, Palm Springs, Palm Beach, etc. from which they could reach cities occasionally, but from which they could safely ignore urban problems. The urban cores declined, in part, because the wealthy no longer cared. Information technology enables a whole new slice of the population to detach where they live from where they make their living. Their political and social interests will shift to where they live, and they will abandon where they make their living.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  For almost all of human history, people have "worked from home". The workplace as a distinct separate space from the home is only about a couple of centuries old.
zachware 6y ago
This will all depend what % of employers stay with their current remote structure. It’ll be somewhere between 1% of 80/90%. The point is that we’re making long-term decisions based on short-term problems. Specifically this week JP Morgan asked its traders to return to the office. You can counter this with examples like Facebook opening an office in Austin some years ago because that’s where the talent had moved. Similar in Boulder. There will certainly be some % of employers who keep remote-first. And another scenario where they are forced to or the employees decide they love their lifestyle (which is likely). In the latter employers are either forced to adopt it or or the employees just leave or in some concentrations big companies start building offices in a distributed way. We’re severely limiting our job choices if we stay remote but most employers don’t. Before when we go off and buy houses or sign long-term leases we should really just wait this out until the Spring or whenever the virus is neutralized.
- nickff 6y ago
  I hate to ask for a citation, but where are you getting that 1% number? It seems made-up. I would guess that more than one percent of office workers will be permitted/encouraged to go remote, but I think that few companies will go remote. There is no reason why remote needs to be a company-wide Boolean selection.
  - xivzgrev 6y ago
    well what we've heard from remote-first companies is that remote culture is a very deliberate thing. if you have hybrid model and don't actively work to include remote folks, they will naturally become second class citizens - less visibility, less in the loop, and less likely to get promoted. so i think that's in part where the boolean pressure is coming from.
    - alexpetralia 6y ago
      For people who strongly prefer to work remotely, doesn't this seem like a cost they sign up for?
fortran77 6y ago
We're "fantasizing" about relocating from Silicon Valley for our USA home (we spend about 5 months/year overseas) but we've always thought it would be foolish to stay in California because of the tax situation. If you could live anywhere, a more tax friendly / less income-hostile state would be a good idea. (However, if your employer is in CA, good luck not having California try to collect anyway. They even are proposing a "wealth tax" that would apply retroactively to people who left in the past 10 years!)
davidw 6y ago
I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a lot of fun stuff to do in the outdoors, but are still relatively cheap because they aren't "on the radar". I facilitate a local YIMBY group here in Bend, but it's an uphill battle. A town of 100K people can enact some good policies (and we have), but if even 1K people from the bay area decided to move here, that would massively change our housing market. Perhaps moving onwards into the 'next hot spots' is what will keep happening? But that still leaves people in service jobs that can't be remote and don't earn as much as all the remote workers in a really bad spot. Who's going to teach their kids? Take care of them in the hospitals? Fight fires? I wrote about it here: https://journal.dedasys.com/2018/07/27/fight-or-flight-yimbys-and-the-exodus-to-smaller-towns/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2018/07/27/fight-or-flight-yimby...
- war1025 6y ago
  > A town of 100K people I know it doesn't really mean anything, but it always just seems peculiar to me when people refer to places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents as "towns" I guess mainly because the general consensus is that a "town" is smaller than a "city". The "town" I grew up in had about 3k residents. To us, the place a half hour away with the big box stores where we'd do our shopping was the "city". It had all of 30k people. Then again, that was 10x the size of where we lived.
  - stephenhuey 6y ago
    I was born in a town of similar size and have always been fascinated by my friends who grew up their entire lives in Houston who have no relatives in such small places and really have no concept of how different it can feel an hour outside of the city. Recently I was surprised to read that at the time of the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia was the nation’s largest city with only 20,000 residents!
  - 6y ago
jdhn 6y ago
Ah, Truckee. Really, NPR should've lumped Western Nevada into the article as well. I left Nevada in the mid 2010's, but housing prices were well above their Recession lows. Now I look at houses in that area on Trulia, and the prices just seem to go forever upwards. Scenic mountain views + no income tax on the Nevada side + remote work + Tesla moving in = housing boom.
jtdev 6y ago
Can we stop referring to anything video conference related as “zoom”?
ponker 6y ago
I think the concept of a “Zoom town” is important vs a “Zoom hamlet.” It’s a lot easier to work with a remote 50 person engineering team than 50 remote engineers, because you can just interface with the head of the group and his/her direct reports. So I think long term 2nd tier cities will get engineering hubs but the fully remote concept will remain niche.
cjonas 6y ago
I live in western Wyoming and the market (which was already pretty bad) has been flooded by people trying to just get away from the city. Winter will certainly spit the "softer" folks out, but it will be interesting to see what sticks. To the point about making less for remote work... You don't need 200k to have a very high QOL in most these places (assuming you value an outdoor lifestyle). I would personally take a 50% pay cut before I'd consider moving to the city for a 50% raise.

89 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

Talking about house prices, saying something about less supply, but not fully comparing the volume of sales is IMO very misleading.

almost_usual 6y ago

You’re also living in a prime wildfire area in Truckee. There’s too much fuel in the Sierras as it is, it’ll burn sooner or later.

epistasis 6y ago
The picture of a house they show nestled in the trees is incredibly dangerous, incredibly resource intrnsive, and just ecologically unsound. We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. Instead we lock down any new construction in cities, which requires the least amount of infrastructure and environmental damage, and instead let pretty much anybody build in ecologically disastrous ways. California is ruled at the local level, where decisions like this are made, by an older generation of conservatives that have convinced themselves that their personal pastoral aesthetic preferences of cars and suburbs and low density sprawl that consumes vast amounts of wilderness is somehow conservationist. It’s a massive problem!
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  We really need to better price the negative externalities that come with these different choices into the market. Massive price increases for fossil fuels are an obvious step.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I agree, but if we have no alternatives to current development styles, then taxes can not correct the bad practices. We literally outlaw the alternatives to building in the WUI.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      Agreed. I think those regulations cause so many societal problems, many of which are quite indirect and I am sure many of us don't realize. For example the decline of rural areas would be less of a problem if it would be a real alternative for people to find a better fortune elsewhere, but prices make this impossible unless you are already well off.
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  Come on now, Truckee is half second homes - the resource intensiveness is based on gluttony not existence of housing.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    A 2000 sq ft home in Truckee, be it a second home or a primary home, is going to require far more roads, more vehicle miles travelled, require cutting down far more trees, more heating and cooling, more water and waste water infrastructure than a 2000 sq ft apartment in a city. That not to say that we should ban all Truckee homes on long roads like we ban apartments in cities, but we should definitely legalize apartments cities. And rural Truckee tree consuming development should be highly controlled and taxed in proportion to the amount of public money that needs to be spent trying to protect these fire traps.
    - jessaustin 6y ago
      Yeah, there's no way the public should spend anything trying to save the house pictured in TFA. The owner who can afford that house can certainly afford to cut some trees. The trees weren't cut, so the house must not be very valuable to anyone. https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-ready/defensible-space/ https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
- ipnon 6y ago
  Housing density is not generally a problem outside of the United States. Developing economies seem to have no bias against dense housing. I think this is because there is no politically powerful land owning class outside of the United States. So it is in the interest of the majority to have an abundance of affordable housing. This protects against global warming too.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Housing density is definitely a problem outside of the United States. Many countries handle it in much the same way, while others handle it by shoving their working class into what's basically a human rights violation. I've seen discussions of Singapore's good housing policy, for example, that fail to mention the worker dormitories with 10 or 20 people per room. I certainly wouldn't claim the US has good housing policy, but there's no perfect solution to the conflict that arises when the market-clearing housing price in an area creeps above what most people can pay.
    - asdff 6y ago
      Have you seen how the working class lives in the U.S.? It's honestly not much different than a developing country. Multiple families in a tiny apartment is common in places like LA. People hold full time jobs while going back home to a tent on the sidewalk. Tenement conditions are very real in the U.S., and invisible for the most part by anyone fortunate enough not to live in them.
      - reducesuffering 6y ago
        LA doesn’t represent the entire U.S. Most of the US, especially outside of the west coast and NYC, has plenty of housing. US median income is 64k and median home price is 310k. Most of those are 1500+ sqft SFH easily afforded by the working class.
- silveroriole 6y ago
  > We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. How many people would ‘like’ to live in a city centre if they didn’t have to for work?
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I would! And I’m constantly surprised at the number of people that don’t like cities that assume that everybody else just must be like them somehow. Cities are expensive because they attract lots of people to them because lots of people prefer them. So when you say “how many” the answer is clearly far more people Han are currently allowed to live there. We should build in cities until it’s cheaper to live in them than it is to live in less environmentally friendly ways.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > How many people would ‘like’ to live in a city centre if they didn’t have to for work? I think this is a very personal thing. I wouldn't consider living far from a city centre, work or no work, personally. Some people love outer suburbs or the country, and that's fine; just wouldn't be for me.
- jasonv 6y ago
  > We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to A model/example where this has been done well? I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along narrow-sidewalks without proper public spaces and reasonable bike/pedestrian zones, etc. I think the resistance comes from not showing the grand plan around these kinds of in-fill demands. I can't imagine living in the American version of them, and I've lived (happily) in the dense(r) city centers of Amsterdam, Berlin and Brooklyn. I've also lived in SF -- never again. It's a terrible version of urban development.
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    > I hear this all the time, but if you build more dense versions of the cities/towns we have now, it'll be miserable. Thin-walled apartment homes built along narrow-sidewalks without proper public spaces and reasonable bike/pedestrian zones, etc. So we...don't do that. Bluntly speaking, it's trivial: all of these issues are of our own making in America. We have hundreds of examples just in Europe of how to make car-lite, walkable, nice cities and towns and that's just on a single continent. And that's artificially restricting ourselves to a single continent with societies that look the most like ours. A quick pivot to most of eastern Asia will show much more variety in how to build those areas. (I will pause here and throw right out the idea that "Europe is much smaller than the United States so we couldn't possibly..." There is no reason we cannot duplicate those same cityscapes all across the United States; we have sub-national states and counties for a reason.) We are car-centric and spread out because we choose to be. So we either change those choices and make the commensurate political and financial changes to go along with it, or we don't and we accept the consequences of things like "large swaths of the West Coast burn to the ground" and "we are stuck in our metal boxes powered by carbon fuels or batteries backed by precious rare earth minerals." We already spent a couple trillion dollars propping up the stock market for nothing more than paper gains; the argument that we "can't afford it" is laughable.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    The resistance comes from a tiny number of people, and is not representative of the majority. Blocking the wants of the people requires subversion of democracy and subversion of the housing market by a few very wealthy and connected and powerful people. California and many other states’ governance has enabled a small number of people to veto what the majority wants. For example, all of SF’s safe streets program during the pandemic have been held up by the actions of only two people [1]. Two people subverting changes that are wildly popular just because is is change rather than maintaining the status quo. Similarly, Minneapolis’ legalization of triplexes city wide is popular with a majority of the city, [2] but during the government process the representation was quite different, and unrepresentative of the city. Yet that unrepresentative process is somehow considered “democratic”. My question to you is that, if you don’t like living in SF, why are you interested unmaking sure others can’t live there? Do you assume they don’t like it? Do you assume that you know what’s in their best interests? Sooooo may people love living in SF, in fact almost everybody who lives there loves it. It works well for them. Let the people that love it enjoy it. It will leave suburbia emptier for those who prefer suburbia. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/San-Francisco-lets-just-one-person-stop-15561164.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Sa... [2] https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/crosstabs-MN-NH-NV-WI.pdf/80f8e4634fe6f880/full.pdf https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/crosstabs-MN-NH-NV-WI...
- cactus2093 6y ago
  > A generation of conservatives Very true, even though they convinced themselves and everyone else that they were progressives and environmentalists, just because they don't hate minorities and they like the vibe of trees. (Not to downplay the importance of socially progressive measures, but it's one dimension and they are very conservative on most other dimensions).
  - epistasis 6y ago
    I don't disagree at all, but would like to point out a dark streak of nastiness in some of the older crowd. The funny thing is that there's not much of a good history for racial justice from this style of "environmentalist," quite the opposite in fact. Lots of eugenics and white supremacy in the past [1] which has changed into "population control" (of whom?) these days. A lot of it seems, to me, to center on allowing wealthy white individuals to live in isolation without having to be around other people, and the "environment" becomes about preserving their privilege. [1] https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2020/06/it-s-past-time-dismantle-racism-outdoors https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2020/06/it-s-past-time-d...
- pbourke 6y ago
  > We need to be building massive amounts of housing in city centers to let as many people live in them that would like to. All else being equal, Americans will choose to live in a detached house on a 1/2 acre lot with an SUV or pickup in the driveway.
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    The people advocating dense inner-city housing for everyone don't plan to make it a choice. They know better than the rest of us, you see.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    This is simply untrue. Some people will, but this sort of “everybody who doesn’t want what I want is lying to themselves” is elitism that destroys people’s chances to live th way they prefer. The higher cost of living in cities is pretty strong evidence that city living is under supplied compared to suburban living.
    - Gibbon1 6y ago
      You can argue back and forth whether people in flyover country hate the idea of living in dense housing or not. But if you peruse city and county planning documents you find that most places it's completely illegal to build greenfield projects with urban density. Instead of being able to build 25-35 units an acre you're allowed 3-4. And no mixed use allowed. Seems to me the answer is people don't get a choice a most places. Would people outside of old dense cities want to live in a walkable mixed use development? We have no idea because those have been banned since before WWII.
    - pbourke 6y ago
      How is it untrue? The proportion of Americans living in urban counties (31%) has not changed in 20 years. The proportion living in suburban counties has increased slightly (53% to 55%) [1] The proportion of new vehicle sales that are SUVs or pickups has been steadily climbing for over 30 years [2] > The higher cost of living in cities is pretty strong evidence that city living is under supplied compared to suburban living. Is that true for all cities or just a few large ones? I don’t see how you can conclude that. The narrower conclusion is that demand for city housing exceeds supply in a few key markets. > this sort of “everybody who doesn’t want what I want is lying to themselves” is elitism that destroys people’s chances to live th way they prefer. You have apparently without irony proved my point. My broader point is that rather than force people to do things that they apparently don’t want to do (move to dense housing, ditch or downsize their vehicles) we should seek ways to invest in the efficiency of our existing housing stock, and provide incentives to improve the efficiency of new vehicles. A carbon tax also looks like a promising approach. [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e... [2] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report#Highlight3 https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-...

alex_g 6y ago

"Many Americans — especially 30-somethings who remain employed — are ditching their tiny rental apartments in hip districts of expensive cities and moving to buy houses in more affordable cities or the burbs for a life of shopping at Home Depot and spending their Friday nights eating mozzarella sticks at Applebee's." oof, that's a savage take for NPR.

almost_usual 6y ago
Who cares about NPR elitism. Why shame people for doing what they want. Hell, the Buffalo Wild Wings in Daly City has a more diverse crowd than any bar or restaurant in SF.
- mire_rustling 6y ago
  Too true.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Better mozzarella sticks, too, not that that's a high bar. It's not an accident they called out Applebee's by name. They knew what they were doing.
- katzgrau 6y ago
  Honestly, BWW had the best tap lineup in my area for a long time, which has no shortage of trendy bars.
  - rconti 6y ago
    The first time I walked into a BWW (maybe 10 or 15 years ago) my eyes opened wide when I saw all the taps. My excitement wore off when I realized that it was literally all budweiser products and most of them had the exact same thing.
    - katzgrau 6y ago
      Ah yea. Good beers took a while to come to my area (maybe 5-10 years ago). I'm guessing other parts of the country might have been a little different, especially as Big Beer tried to catch the craft wave and smaller breweries didn't have any distribution yet. Maybe it's different now in most areas (hopefully)

ultimoo 6y ago

Right now, being a landlord in SF is looking pretty grim given that tech workers who used to rent are fleeing in droves and those that are not are negotiating their rents. I wonder whether this trend will reverse in the next 1-3 years or this is the new permanent dynamic of the SF rental market.

nimish 6y ago
Wild that landlords having to deal with their investments losing value and having to negotiate a commercial transaction is "grim" The market dynamics shifted. No big deal.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Yeah, no shit. You were careless with your capital and lost some or all of it? My heart bleeds.
  - nimish 6y ago
    They don't lose any capital until it's re-valued or sold. It's purely a short-term loss in income. Eat the loss, move on -- that's what most landlords would tell their tenants in the opposite situation. I am playing the world's smallest violin for them as a class.
- refurb 6y ago
  You have the same attitude when prices go up? “Wild that tenants having to deal with rent going up and having to negotiate a commercial transaction is “grim””. “The market dynamics shifted. No big deal.”
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    > You have the same attitude when prices go up? No, but the people on the opposite side of the transaction (the landlords) for damn sure do. "Market price has gone up, what can you do" is something I've been told when trying to negotiate lease renewals, and I'm outside the Bay Area. Landlords could, as a group, have pushed to help make pricing stable and make their investment a long-term, very secure asset. Instead, just like virtually every other part of this fire-encrusted economy, they grabbed for the short-term gains at the expense of plodding consistency. Landlord groups are pushing back on the idea that tenants should do anything except blithely pay whatever duly-increased price is passed onto us and we should thank them for the privilege besides. My heart bleeds.

the_cat_kittles 6y ago

in case it is not obvious, the housing market, and real estate in general is the front line of a very real class war. it is very effectively bifurcating the population, as this article describes. i find this really upsetting and immoral, but im sure other people will interpret the same thing differently.

chrisseaton 6y ago

I think a lot of people living in cities think there's only two options - living in an apartment downtown in a megacity, and living in a car-bound wasteland suburb. But there's a third option - towns. I know you have them in the US! I've been to a few of them. Walkable towns with coffee shops, restaurants, bars, culture, dating. You can even find a few in the Bay Area if you don't want to look too far. Isn't the small town an icon of American living? Why are people so incredibly snobby about it?

ssequeira 6y ago
What are some examples of Bay Area towns? It seems like everyone in my friend circle in tech lives in San Francisco and puts up (or used to) with the long commute.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  Alameda comes to mind. Completely walkable, charming, great community feel. It's an island, so going over bridges or through the tube to go anywhere can be a bit of a hassle, but it's well worth it.
  - randycupertino 6y ago
    The pinball museum in Alameda is one of my favorite spots! I hope it survives the shutdown, they always seem to be operating on a shoestring budget. Super cool place if anyone hasn't checked it out before, highly recommend!
    - alex_g 6y ago
      I second this, spent my birthday there last year and it was a blast!
- ghaff 6y ago
  Quite a few of the towns in the South Bay have walkable cores: Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Mateo... You also have smaller cities all over the country. Now, you get into truly small towns in places like New England and there really isn't a lot in the town center and it's unlikely you'll be living walking distance from it.

jamestimmins 6y ago

"Still over 7% of active mortgages are in forbearance," This seems incredibly concerning, and could suggest an especially hard market in the coming months/year.

rhacker 6y ago

So a pandemic hits and everyone screaming NIMBY is suddenly moving out?

iwonderwhy 6y ago

Curious what will happen to prices in these zoom towns once people return to office work? Wouldn't it be more prudent to shop around in areas where we know people will return in a year or two?

asdff 6y ago
Probably depends whether or not there is a ski resort nearby to sustain property values. reasonably convenient lots to the resort would eventually all be infilled, at which point prices would surge exponentially. Otherwise it's an overpriced mountain lodge, and mountain lodge supply increases exponentially.

dontremeber 6y ago

> Many Americans — especially 30-somethings who remain employed — are ditching their tiny rental apartments in hip districts of expensive cities and moving to buy houses in more affordable cities or the burbs... I suppose I fall into this category but even houses in the burbs seem more expensive than they should be. I’m specifically looking at up and coming towns, not any random burb but buying a house that’s literally 2-3X what it sold for 3-5 years ago is hard to justify. I really want to finally purchase something but I’m worried the market will fall out from under itself in a year or two after COVID financial aftermath settles down and I end up way underwater. EDIT: typo

randycupertino 6y ago
I was thinking that the high-end vacation towns of the affluent would be a pretty good investment bet, because even when remote work isn't popular there still is high end demand for vacationers. Think places like Jackson Hole, Aspen, Maui, Nantucket, Newport RI, Hilton Head, Scottsdale, etc... could see places like that retaining their value no matter what happens.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  Some of those places you listed crashed hard after 2008 and others didn’t. I think there are trends in vacation destinations that can cause speculation. Also, many of the the buyers are leveraging wealth from equities that is more variable than the salaries the average homeowner uses. If there’s a prolonged stock market drop during a recession, many may be forced to liquidate when buyers are fewer and poorer (you’d prefer not to sell anything in a downturn, but the vacation home might be the first to go). I saw people take huge losses on vacation properties after 2008.
sudosteph 6y ago
Lots of cities in the southeast are still undervalued IMO. I'm a North Carolinian, and there's been no shortage of northern transplants over the years. Charlotte and Raleigh have grown like crazy, and show no sign of stopping. Tons of young people moving here despite the well-deserved reputation of this area being pretty boring. I guess boring is a plus these days. West coasters largely haven't caught on, but I don't think the migrations will stop, especially with COVID. Charlotte and Raleigh are fairly safe bets, but Winston-Salem seems like it might be on a similar path (but much earlier on in that path if so).

yalogin 6y ago

I wonder how sustainable this is. Part of this is obviously going to remain but I can see a big swing in the other direction saying employees and groups need to be together to generate the feeling of a team and that remote work doesn't give you that.

dcolkitt 6y ago
That’s likely true. But it's probably cheaper to fly the entire company and their families to a ski resort every quarter, then it is to pay for Bay Area cost-of-living and office space.

blueyes 6y ago

Can we please call these bed-Zoom communities? ;)

Merrill 6y ago

The disassociation of how you make your living and where you live will have interesting long-term social consequences. Until recently, most people have had to live where they made their living. Farmers lived on farms. Workers lived near mines, mills, factories and offices in which they worked. Even rich people lived in the cities where their businesses and investments were located, at least until the late 1800s when rail commuting to nearby suburbs allowed them to live in more pleasant surroundings. Even so, the wealthy continued to identify with their cities, participated in civic life, indulged in philanthropy, and were reasonably concerned about their city's quality of life. In the 1960s, jet travel became cheap and frequent for the wealthy. The really rich became detached from the cities and moved to enclaves of wealth in Newport, Carmel, Palm Springs, Palm Beach, etc. from which they could reach cities occasionally, but from which they could safely ignore urban problems. The urban cores declined, in part, because the wealthy no longer cared. Information technology enables a whole new slice of the population to detach where they live from where they make their living. Their political and social interests will shift to where they live, and they will abandon where they make their living.

claydavisss 6y ago
For almost all of human history, people have "worked from home". The workplace as a distinct separate space from the home is only about a couple of centuries old.

zachware 6y ago

This will all depend what % of employers stay with their current remote structure. It’ll be somewhere between 1% of 80/90%. The point is that we’re making long-term decisions based on short-term problems. Specifically this week JP Morgan asked its traders to return to the office. You can counter this with examples like Facebook opening an office in Austin some years ago because that’s where the talent had moved. Similar in Boulder. There will certainly be some % of employers who keep remote-first. And another scenario where they are forced to or the employees decide they love their lifestyle (which is likely). In the latter employers are either forced to adopt it or or the employees just leave or in some concentrations big companies start building offices in a distributed way. We’re severely limiting our job choices if we stay remote but most employers don’t. Before when we go off and buy houses or sign long-term leases we should really just wait this out until the Spring or whenever the virus is neutralized.

nickff 6y ago
I hate to ask for a citation, but where are you getting that 1% number? It seems made-up. I would guess that more than one percent of office workers will be permitted/encouraged to go remote, but I think that few companies will go remote. There is no reason why remote needs to be a company-wide Boolean selection.
- xivzgrev 6y ago
  well what we've heard from remote-first companies is that remote culture is a very deliberate thing. if you have hybrid model and don't actively work to include remote folks, they will naturally become second class citizens - less visibility, less in the loop, and less likely to get promoted. so i think that's in part where the boolean pressure is coming from.
  - alexpetralia 6y ago
    For people who strongly prefer to work remotely, doesn't this seem like a cost they sign up for?

fortran77 6y ago

We're "fantasizing" about relocating from Silicon Valley for our USA home (we spend about 5 months/year overseas) but we've always thought it would be foolish to stay in California because of the tax situation. If you could live anywhere, a more tax friendly / less income-hostile state would be a good idea. (However, if your employer is in CA, good luck not having California try to collect anyway. They even are proposing a "wealth tax" that would apply retroactively to people who left in the past 10 years!)

davidw 6y ago

I am really curious about this trend myself. I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse. I'm also curious about the "non-zoom" towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining/logging/ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a lot of fun stuff to do in the outdoors, but are still relatively cheap because they aren't "on the radar". I facilitate a local YIMBY group here in Bend, but it's an uphill battle. A town of 100K people can enact some good policies (and we have), but if even 1K people from the bay area decided to move here, that would massively change our housing market. Perhaps moving onwards into the 'next hot spots' is what will keep happening? But that still leaves people in service jobs that can't be remote and don't earn as much as all the remote workers in a really bad spot. Who's going to teach their kids? Take care of them in the hospitals? Fight fires? I wrote about it here: https://journal.dedasys.com/2018/07/27/fight-or-flight-yimbys-and-the-exodus-to-smaller-towns/ https://journal.dedasys.com/2018/07/27/fight-or-flight-yimby...

war1025 6y ago
> A town of 100K people I know it doesn't really mean anything, but it always just seems peculiar to me when people refer to places with tens or hundreds of thousands of residents as "towns" I guess mainly because the general consensus is that a "town" is smaller than a "city". The "town" I grew up in had about 3k residents. To us, the place a half hour away with the big box stores where we'd do our shopping was the "city". It had all of 30k people. Then again, that was 10x the size of where we lived.
- stephenhuey 6y ago
  I was born in a town of similar size and have always been fascinated by my friends who grew up their entire lives in Houston who have no relatives in such small places and really have no concept of how different it can feel an hour outside of the city. Recently I was surprised to read that at the time of the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia was the nation’s largest city with only 20,000 residents!
- 6y ago

jdhn 6y ago

Ah, Truckee. Really, NPR should've lumped Western Nevada into the article as well. I left Nevada in the mid 2010's, but housing prices were well above their Recession lows. Now I look at houses in that area on Trulia, and the prices just seem to go forever upwards. Scenic mountain views + no income tax on the Nevada side + remote work + Tesla moving in = housing boom.

jtdev 6y ago

Can we stop referring to anything video conference related as “zoom”?

ponker 6y ago

I think the concept of a “Zoom town” is important vs a “Zoom hamlet.” It’s a lot easier to work with a remote 50 person engineering team than 50 remote engineers, because you can just interface with the head of the group and his/her direct reports. So I think long term 2nd tier cities will get engineering hubs but the fully remote concept will remain niche.

cjonas 6y ago

I live in western Wyoming and the market (which was already pretty bad) has been flooded by people trying to just get away from the city. Winter will certainly spit the "softer" folks out, but it will be interesting to see what sticks. To the point about making less for remote work... You don't need 200k to have a very high QOL in most these places (assuming you value an outdoor lifestyle). I would personally take a 50% pay cut before I'd consider moving to the city for a 50% raise.