35 ms·

Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

229 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Ericson2314 6y ago
It's pretty funny to see the economist, founded in economic liberalism and against a rural idle aristocracy, semi-chearing-on more government-subsidized shit suburbanization.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  The economist has railed against suburbs before, and yes, overreaching suburbs built on massive sparse infrastructure is a huge problem, but this needs to be weighed against other huge problems that have developed in american economic geography, like how the economic gains of technology have accrued almost entirely to a handful of cities with sky high rents.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    The solution is to build more city. Denser areas will always be wealthier, just denser chips will always be faster.
iJohnDoe 6y ago
Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. People that wanted to retire to rural or remote areas where pricing is traditionally cheaper are now fucked over. Sure, the owner didn’t need to price their home higher. Sure, whatever the market will bear. It still doesn’t mean it sucks less for the couple with a baby on the way hoping to buy a home in their home town that is now double and triple the cost. No, I haven’t been personally affected by this. I’m just worried what is happening and will happen around the US in the coming years.
- Swizec 6y ago
  1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. 2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. 3. Housing can’t be both a right and subject to free-ish market mechanisms.
  - adventured 6y ago
    > 1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. One is technically wrong. It can't be both a good investment and remain affordable. It can be both affordable and a good investment in the present, with prices rising over time generating a good return and making it increasingly unaffordable.
    - Swizec 6y ago
      Sure. But that was 70 years ago in USA. The affordable housing ship has all but sailed for our generation. Except apparently in tiny towns where we’re now ruining it for the locals.
      - Ericson2314 6y ago
        In fairness, These aren't really tiny towns and haven't been for a generation. It's classic sunbelt boom-sprawl-puke. (Never mind Colorado isn't actually sunny at all.)
        Jtsummers 6y ago
        Colorado is reasonably sunny, just not in the winter when the sun sets before you've finished your first cup of coffee (I kid, it's at 4:30-5pm in the winter). At least here in Colorado Springs the sun set at 7:40pm today with our latest sunset being around 8:30pm in a couple months.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      "... Over time" is usually implied in most policy proposals.
adventured 6y ago
I can't imagine what people in America are fleeing from. The US is a paradise of tranquility. Utopia from sea to shining sea.
isaacimagine 6y ago
As someone who lived in a small city in the American Mountain West, the boom does have consequences. Sleepy farming towns are becoming endless suburbia, hiking up prices as developers spill over from the Lehi 'Silicon Slopes' area. Midway, for instance, a town on the Wasatch back situated in a location that feels similar to Switzerland, has gone from about 150 diaries to 2, as expanding housing developments buy out the high-valued farmland. You'd think with the influx of money, and reduction in competition, it'd be easier for the remaining diaries to compete. Not so: the price of milk has remained basically unchanged since the 70s, but the cost required to run a farm has kept increasing. So why not cash out? (A few farmers in the area have actually cashed out and moved to Idaho, and they're pretty much set for life.) Long story short, Midway is a beautiful place to live, and the remaining diaries form a pillar of the community - it's just not something the remaining diary owners, who have been farming the land for generations, want to do. To stay in business, the remaining diaries have pivoted to artisan cheese production, with plans to produce other high-valued products, like ice-cream. Tours and locally-sourced farm stores are an additional source of income. Of course, these are just my own two cents. I don't mean to come off overly negative about the situation. As much as I'd love to work for a FAANG, retire early, and buy a large house in an idyllic mountain town, I'd hate for that same town to loose its historical roots and what makes it that special idyllic mountain town in the first place. Source: I'm a software engineer who lived/worked as a cheese-maker for a dairy there.
- big_youth 6y ago
  Great post but one point, Whole foods sells 1/2 gallons for $6! I don't drink much milk but would gladly pay a premium for high quality, local, organic milk.
  - isaacimagine 6y ago
    Thanks for raising that point! The dairy I worked at does sell high quality local raw milk; they have a pasteurizer to produce cheese, but they can't use the same one to produce pasteurized milk. Additionally, the cows usually produce an excess volume of milk, which is sold so it doesn't go to waste: it's important to remember that even if the milk is sold for, say, $6 at Whole Foods, not all of the markup goes to the farmer.
client4 6y ago
I can't wait until people are required to move back to cities for in office work. Small towns are becoming faceless neighborhoods of urban areas with a SouthWest or JetBlue commute. New residents want to ignore their neighbors and put up gates to their home. Small towns have heart because people interact with each other and work to make the community better.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  This is a romantic view that ignores that many, if not most, small towns in the rural US are dying. I'm from Missouri and I can tell you that most of the small towns are not idyllic rural paradises. They are farming towns which now have no purpose, no young people, and serious drug and suicide problems. These are not all friendly places. They would all KILL to have an influx of young energetic people move in. They want to see the town survive.
- lizknope 6y ago
  I grew up in a small town in the south. We were the first Asian family in the town and dealt with a lot of racism in the 1980's. When I went to college in a big city the weekly racist comments were basically gone. I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist in larger cities but it is far better than small towns. We had two KKK rallies through the town square in my town in the 80's. We have so many right wing racists in positions of power now that I have no interest in living in a small town again.
eysquared 6y ago
There seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments so far. Is this not the dream that is often touted on hacker news? Work at a FAANG and "retire" somewhere more affordable? I'm personally doing just this. I was lucky enough to land a good job out of college, buy a house in a desired area, and see it appreciate in the last 10 years. This increase plus the birth of my kids left me wondering if there wasn't a better 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.
- hoka-one-one 6y ago
  Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities. You can decide you don't care about any of that, but understand that type of that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated. The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. Will the cycle repeat itself?
  - Cookingboy 6y ago
    >Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities But it won't "all else equal", there are so many variables at play here that it's meaningless to talk about a hypothetical "all else equal" scenario. Also there have been so many successful people who were born and raised in what you'd call "less competitive" areas. >The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. What's ironic about people going to places chasing things they desire? Big cities and small towns offer different things, and those things value differently to different people. The people who are leaving small towns chasing after opportunities and the people who want to move back to small towns from big cities are obviously at different stages in their lives and value different things. >Will the cycle repeat itself? Probably? But why is that an issue?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
01100011 6y ago
I envy the folks who are able to do this. If I had the means, I'd probably have already fled back to the country. I can't help but think that it is unsustainable though. Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs. Global warming, increasing global competition... I can't help but think the people fleeing the cities will be forced back by incentives and economics in a decade.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
  I really hope the switch to electric transportation and to biking (whenever/wherever possible) will make big cities better to live. And that remote work in suburbs will incentive communities to re-create many smaller and more human-like down-towns.
- codingdave 6y ago
  > Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs. Whenever I see statement like this, it makes me wonder if you know where your food comes from. Because for the most part, the rural populations are supporting the cities. If the supply chains in this country were to fail, it is not the rural communities who would be scrounging for food and water. We'd be just fine.
  - xenocratus 6y ago
    But... the comment isn't about where the food comes from or who would suffer from a supply chain collapse, it's about efficiency. I think the point was that cities are efficient because gestures vaguely towards economies of scale. It's easier to distribute goods (or services) to a highly-concentrated mass of people than to multiple disjoint locations.
    - ramraj07 6y ago
      I’m very confident I had a significantly smaller carbon footprint when I was in New York than compared to my time in Dallas. Even though I lived a much more vibrant life.
gregimba 6y ago
As someone who recently spent a couple days in Kanab, UT the collision course of rural natives with Californian expats has made me accelerate my plans to buy enough land to escape the cities and further enforced my feeling about the cultural divide in America. EDIT: I was born in a small western town and find myself missing certain aspects living in a larger city working in Tech.
- sfeng 6y ago
  What was it like in Kanab?
  - gregimba 6y ago
    Talking with the person checking me into the hotel he mentioned he had heard to food was good at a restaurant across the street but mentioned he couldn't afford to eat there. There was a lovely older couple who were running the tourism center and provided a bunch of great information. The person in front of me repeatedly interrupted this nice old woman and talked over her, after she got the info she needed she got into a 4 runner with California plates. The surrounding OHV and hiking trails are phenomenal but the town is going to be very boring once the locals are forced out.
davidw 6y ago
> but in doing so they may jeopardise the very things people move there for: space, quality of life and proximity to wilderness This makes me roll me eyes a bit. The Economist is generally pretty YIMBY, but this sounds like the "character of the neighborhood" nonsense I hear from local wealthy people who are doing their damndest to pull up the drawbridge behind them. * There is so much space in the American west. * Quality of life depends on a lot of things. The 'quiet mountain town' where I live in Oregon has benefited greatly from having some more things going on locally. There's even a fantastic Italian restaurant run by a guy from Tuscany. You wouldn't get that in a true small town of which there are still so very many all over the west. For every 'hot' market like Bend, there are various depressed former resource towns like Burns or Lakeview. * Proximity to wilderness basically means being near public lands like BLM and Forest Service. Those are generally pretty hard boundaries: just because your city is growing doesn't mean the Forest Service will cede land to it.
- ejfkcisodk 6y ago
  I don’t want to ask you to reveal your hometown to a stranger but am curious to learn more, especially after spending a year living in the French alps (Isère). Is there a list of quiet mountain towns in Oregon/CA/etc that would include yours?
  - solipsism 6y ago
    Gonna guess... Bend, OR?
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Bend has 100k people, and the Bend metro area has 200k people. If it used to be considered quiet, it most certainly isn’t now.
      - davidw 6y ago
        The legitimately difficult thing that Bend has gone through is very rapid growth/change. It had like 20K people 30 years ago. That's not easy, and I do feel for people who miss the smaller size. That said, there are tons of small towns that are not growing - indeed, they're kind of stagnant, population-wise . Lakeview, Oregon had its heyday in the 1960ies in terms of the population.
nelsonmandela 6y ago
Is that house in the first image made of plywood?
- sneak 6y ago
  Yes. That's called sheeting, and it's a type of thin plywood that's used over the (solid wood) framing of the house to support the housewrap (which functions as a vapor barrier) and whatever type of exterior siding goes on it. Between the framing studs would be insulation, and on the inside of that goes drywall.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Edit: sibling comment is right, I am wrong: it is called sheathing
- imtringued 6y ago
  It looks like conventional OSB sheathing, the surprising part is that it doesn't have an integrated coating to repel water. This means that housewrap will have to be applied to protect the sheathing from water damage, this is both labor intensive and the potential for misapplication increases the risk of water damage.
  - panzagl 6y ago
    Colorado Springs is in a desert, if that changes things.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I think that's just how they build houses there.
celim307 6y ago
We are already projected to have a water shortage this summer in the Rockies and it’s only going to get worse. Every state along the Colorado river is gearing up for water right battles and I dread to think what’s going to happen once the snow pack in the Rockies gets less and less every year
- garren 6y ago
  And that doesn’t even touch on the new year-round fire season normal we have to contend with. Last year was crazy and this year is supposed to be as bad or worse. Every 3rd or 4th pine tree in the hills is beetle kill. A lot of people are looking to move into mountain communities that are largely water stressed already. Adding more people, with less water, and higher fire danger and it’s going to get ugly.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    Where can one find areas that are most water-abundant and don't run into the water scarcity issues?
    - cowsandmilk 6y ago
      Appalachia
    - NortySpock 6y ago
      I also assume any decent sized river is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future, and with some industrial grade treatment you can get potable water out of it. Case in point I live near a river that eventually drains to the Mississippi.
    - rm_-rf_slash 6y ago
      Upstate New York. Plenty of water, decent farmland (with more farm shares than you can count), and it’s one of the safest places in the U.S. in terms of proximity to natural hazards.
    - ghaff 6y ago
pyinstallwoes 6y ago
I actually really want to move to a mountain area that is secluded and has nature with snow. The problem is, it's very hard to figure out where to go when all you've lived is in a city or one state. I've researched a lot of properties on zillow but I have no idea how to investigate the proper area. Maybe someone can give me a tip. I like snow, and I like people, I just want enough space to experiment with my own land and not have to deal with neighbors or HOA crap.
- nyokodo 6y ago
  > I just want enough space to experiment with my own land and not have to deal with neighbors or HOA crap. What kinds of experiments? Depending on that answer you may want to investigate States, Counties, and Cities by their regulatory regimes vis a vis what you want to do. Make a short list of likely places and go visit them. Get a feel for these places. Does the altitude suit you? Humidity or lack thereof cause you any issues? What is the fire danger, or risk of other natural disasters? Are there sufficient ways close by to supply your lifestyle? What are the school choices if you have kids? Are there enough pursuits in the area to sufficiently entertain you? Can you adequately practice your religion in these places or withstand those that do? Are there good places to make friends? Finally, how easy will it be to recover from a mistake moving there? Answer these kinds of questions and you’ll know better what you’re getting into and you’ll know whether you really want what you think you want and you’ll know where to go.
  - pyinstallwoes 6y ago
    Those are amazing questions to consider. Thank you!
- arminiusreturns 6y ago
  The HOA part really is the hard part, and even beyond that, the local zoning regulations can be arbitrarily infuriating, especially in certain states, and the ones with larger swaths without HOA and crazy regs have many negatives making it very hard to find what you speak of. I've been looking for years. I think a good bet is to find an heirloom house and property and bid on it.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/Ey55B https://archive.is/Ey55B
tylerjl 6y ago
For those outside of these bubbles, it’s almost unbelievable how much the housing market has completely exploded the last two years. My family is squarely in this situation - bought our home a few years ago in an extremely fast - growing area, and watched prices climb to levels that we didn’t believe at first. Imagine purchasing a home in 2019 for $500k and selling it today for $1.2M. That’s the reality in some of these cities.
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  The bubble is back. Look at the housing market and the valuations of do-nothing bullshit companies. People don't learn.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    In my experience everyone knows it is all a bubble. Nobody knows what to do about it, though. So they just continue living.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      Especially with the fear of inflation, you are 100% correct. I think this bubble has been created by interests being too low for too long. Keeping your money in the bank is barely better than putting it under the matters. So where does it go? Stock market, real estate and crypto. What else could anyone do? It seems like more and more people are becoming angel investors too, but that's not any better and certainly not an option for most people
  - francisofascii 6y ago
    Right. This bubble seems to have elements of both the dot-com crash (overvalued tech) and the financial crisis (overvalued housing).
    - DaniloDias 6y ago
      80 year cycle won’t last much longer.
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
PAYWALL BULLSHIT, DO NOT POST
rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate crisis is a problem and a big one, then you could be for a rude awakening as most experts now consider the collapse in biodiversity to have far bigger impacts on human lives and living conditions than climate change[0]. The only reason why there are fewer headlines about that on on climate change is that the IPBES was founded decades after the IPCC. I'm afraid that many will finally take a few steps to reduce their carbon footprint and use this to justify expanding their footprint on ecosystems ("clean" but larger houses, "organic" but wider lawn areas, "clean" but more frequent transportation that break natural habitats, etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Biodiversity_and_Ecosystem_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Bi...
- AlanSE 6y ago
  I'm extremely sympathetic to this view. Habitat destruction is the #1 or #2 way we're screwing over the planet. However, this looks like an area where environmentalists risk getting themselves into trouble. Global warming is a defined and solvable task, but the messaging keeps changing to something more like an open-ended commitment. That has huge risks for the public to tune it out, and perhaps further procrastinate on the carbon emissions problem. Average people do not have the emotional energy for a perpetual guilt machine. > We must increase the density of our cities. I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. I'm also skeptical that the arguments apply to THIS migration. People are not moving into the rain forest, and the American mountain west, in particular, is fairly arid. The wildlife density of some places is orders of magnitude greater than other places. Preservation is a battle that you never win, you just delay. If we can't have our big houses, wide lawns, and transportation work with some ecosystems, maybe it's all doomed either way.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
dnndev 6y ago
With and without kids makes a huge difference. Without kids and if your an introvert- it’s a no brained. Buy you that 15 acre ranch (just for looks, we know your a programmer) If you have kids stay close to a larger city. Your kids will have more opportunity. For anyone else looking. We took a two month road trip during the worst time of year (climate wise) and took a road trip to see where liked it best. We chose North Carolina and love it.
- dagw 6y ago
  Without kids and if your an introvert- it’s a no brained. Buy you that 15 acre ranch Back when I was a childless introvert, living on a 15 acre ranch by myself would have been living hell, and would no doubt have done terrible things to my mental health. I might not like being social, but I still went out to concerts, movies, restaurants and similar (often by myself) and doing so was always mentally invigorating. Plus going to the pub with that one friend I did have was very necessary for my mental health. Being an introvert doesn't mean you don't want to be around civilization. As a childless introvert having a small apartment in the middle of town where I could walk everywhere was the obvious no brainier, and worth every penny.
  - sneak 6y ago
    > Being an introvert doesn't mean you don't want to be around civilization. As someone who lived in Manhattan, I used to believe this. Then the pandemic happened, and I watched how our so-called "civilization" handled it. I could not really imagine a worse outcome: it was mismanaged and terrible from the highest levels of authority down to the most insignificant end-user. Now this introvert very much wants the option of being not around civilization at times. I don't trust civilization to remain civilized, in even a minor pinch. I will likely build a house 100km from anything, and spend 25-50% of each year there.
- wjamesg 6y ago
  RTP?
  - dnndev 6y ago
whalesalad 6y ago
Some of those states are on a crusade to ensure cannabis and other drugs are never legalized. That’s gonna be a no from me dog. Colorado being the exception of course, but Idaho and Wyoming come to mind.
- calvano915 6y ago
  The Treasure Valley is awful close to OR which has plentiful options. WY proximity to CO mostly the same. Most probably are not swayed either way on this issue when moving to these states but when all the neighbors are offering options and are disadvantageous to live in, people will make ID or WY work to get the best of both. See living/working in WA and shopping in OR for tax advantages as a similar analogy.
  - whalesalad 6y ago
    I am thinking from the cultivation aspect. I love that here in Michigan I can grow my own cannabis 100% legally. I also love that we are starting to decriminalize active/psych mushrooms (Ann Arbor so far) for the same reason (home cultivation).
    - calvano915 6y ago
      True. Growing your own is definitely location specific. Much more risky than buying and transporting small amounts to a not friendly state.
blunte 6y ago
My last home in the US was near a ski resort in Colorado, and it was a fantastic life - incredible mountain biking in the summer, and of course snow skiing in the winter. It was truly heaven. That was before remote work was as common as it is now. If I had to go back to the US, that would be the place. Sure, you miss out on the cool things the city offers; but a couple hours drive and you're in a big city. I found the need to go only about once a month; the rest of my time was just too happy in nature to feel much need for what the city offered. If you haven't tried mountain life - and I mean mountain life, not big city near mountains - you should. Rent a condo for the summer and temporarily relocate there. Chances are, you'll decide you don't want to leave when the summer is over.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I think a lot of people assume you're either 200 miles from the nearest Walmart or you're in downtown Manhattan/a dense close-in suburb. Go 1-2 hours from pretty much every large city and you can be in pretty rural areas--although not necessarily a mountain town of course. I do like going into cities now and then but I really don't need or particularly want one on a day-to-day basis.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    If you own a car it is hard to get 200 miles from a Walmart in the US. Not impossible, but very hard.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I'm aware. I was using it as an expression for how binary a lot of people assume urban vs. rural is.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >people assume you're either 200 miles from the nearest Walmart or you're in downtown Manhattan/a dense close-in suburb. Go 1-2 hours from pretty much every large city and you can be in pretty rural areas This must be why "ban cars!" is so prominent on HN. Apparently people here have a hard time imagining a location where they can provide quality-of-life improving utility.
paul_f 6y ago
Frustrating to see an interesting HN headline, only to be presented with a paywalled article. Such as this. I wish there was a way to avoid even seeing them. In addition to the dashed expectations, half the comments will be from people who could not read the article (like this one)
- heliodor 6y ago
  And yet it's still a very interesting conversation. I find it very educational to read what people have to say about living in the various parts of the country.
Gustomaximus 6y ago
This is happening around Australia too. People are heading for coastal regions with their 'city' money and its creating some housing issues and generally booming prices. I think with things like starlink and solar/batteries this will only continue to more remote areas. Before water/server were the well covered utilities. Now with internet/power we can cost effectively move further afield while staying connected and sacrificing less modern convenience better than ever.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Are they booming because of some underlying industry or are they just high af off the California money (which could evaporate at a moment's notice)?
- jdhn 6y ago
  For these cities, I'd say it's mostly California money, but there's a fair amount of people moving away from the East Coast as well.
williesleg 6y ago
I love seeing those bun based soy boys looking for latte in the middle of podunk, they are so cucked. And those agressive chicks, so pissed off all the time. The world owes them.
kbos87 6y ago
Leaving college a little more than 10 years ago, my ideal at the time would have been to move to one of these towns and start a small business, and I have friends who went a similar route. Having grown up with parents who relied on a small business in a seasonal town, I think I also had a reasonably good sense of what that life would look like. I instead opted to move to a major city and invest in building a career. Looking back, personally I don’t regret my choice. The direction remote work is taking us in is one where there is more pressure coming from high earners in what used to be low cost markets. Right now, this is painful if you live in one of these places. What could have been the first homes for a lot of folks living in these areas are second/weekend homes of folks who live in major cities within driving distance. It pains me to say this, but I think putting the time into a high-earning career up front has left me in a better position to live the life I want to live in one of those towns vs. my friends who have been there all along and are starting to struggle. On the flip side, a shift toward remote work will hopefully open the playing field somewhat for them to find their way into higher earning roles. The unfortunate side effect is that there’s more pressure to embrace the change and get into the rat race for the highest possible income you can find.
throwastrike 6y ago
This is mostly applicable to white people. I would not move to some of these places as a person of color.
selimthegrim 6y ago
Having just been to Santa Fe, I am wondering if only poor education and water shortages keep it from being a remote work magnet.
- ghaff 6y ago
  If I were to move somewhere in the Mountain West to work remotely, Santa Fe would be fairly high on my list. One downside is that, while Santa Fe (and Los Alamos) are pretty great, the nearest relatively big city of any size (Albuquerque) is less so.
airhead969 6y ago
I went through many of them moving from Chico CA area in a grand US west/southwest roadtrip moving to Austin TX to escape climate change fires/power outages (ironically), increasing taxes and housing prices, and a decline in general happiness. I didn't see any obvious signs of this. I can recommend not moving anywhere near Greely CO where cattle are slaughtered by the thousands. It smells very bad. Also, driving in Wyoming there is effectively no speed limit between the highway patrol is very sparse.. and there isn't much there. 50%+ WfH OTG homesteads in the middle of nowhere but with access to fresh water and sunlight are a very good idea long-term, especially for raising a family, growing crops, mental health, well-being, and peace-of-mind. Big cities are (and were pre-pandemic) only useful for conducting high-level economic activity due to the density of connectedness and potential for rapid wealth accumulation, but in general, they often tend to be terrible places overall for the most part, and people should escape to more tranquil and mentally-healthy places.
- nickelcitymario 6y ago
  While I share your sentiments, I don't think it's fair to deride cities as "terrible places overall". Many of us prefer the quiet of rural life, but many others find that quiet to be stifling and want the busy hustle-bustle of a big city. To each their own.
  - airhead969 6y ago
    Big cities are "terrible" long-term, especially as viewed by most average people who lack the skills, connections, and abilities to utilize them and as they get older and less able to capitalize on them. Younger, smarter people tend to gravitate towards them as they are able to make more effective use of cities with better goals, tactics, self-discipline, sociopolitical navigation, and relationships. YMMV.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  "Big cities are (and were pre-pandemic) only useful for conducting high-level economic activity due to the density of connectedness and potential for rapid wealth accumulation, but in general, they often tend to be terrible places overall" yeah, seriously "citation needed" here. Cities offer a LOT of things not usually found in rural areas. Try explaining to my trans sister about how cities are bad, and that she should live in a rural area, for example.
throwaway823882 6y ago
I want to do this. But I don't want anyone else to do this, or it'll spoil the dream.
almost_usual 6y ago
People like to live in pretty places, who knew..
almost_usual 6y ago
What were once “hidden gems” are now no longer hidden and you can work a remote tech job and live there. Has nothing to do with rural towns. There are plenty of rural towns in the Midwest that are still cheap, I grew up there.
gtmitchell 6y ago
This is my reality. I've lived here since right after the real estate crash and have seen house prices triple in a decade. I don't work in tech, and I don't have the flexibility to move because of family commitments. My rent keeps going up and I've watched my dreams of home ownership evaporate before my eyes. I can't say for sure whether this boom has been good or bad on the whole, but I can say there are lots of people like myself who are excluded and are left wondering where we went wrong or what we could have done differently.
yepthatsreality 6y ago
More urban sprawl and Starbucks for those who lack culture.
- panzagl 6y ago
  Colorado is also getting In n Out and Whataburger. Most of my favorite local restaurants have slowly closed over the last 10 years. Which I guess is ok, since all my favorite businesses are gone too because of the rising rents caused by legalization. Instead I can sit in my house and Doordash Chipotle while I order stuff on Amazon, just like those culturally sophisticated urbanites who are doing us such a favor by bringing their civilization to us.
  - yepthatsreality 6y ago
    I wouldn’t mind if people moved and visited places while expecting something local and new, but instead they just look at a town and wonder “why doesn’t this place have an X?” Well they do it’s just not called X and they don’t need X because who cares about brand recognition?
blueyes 6y ago
I recently returned from a mid-sized town in the Mountain West, and I can confirm that the headline is true. It's a particular kind of boom. A lot of out-of-state money and migrants have poured in to buy houses in places with fewer COVID restrictions and lower prices. That is fundamentally changing the character and politics of those cities. People are buying houses after nothing more than a Zoom tour. The car dealerships have run out of four-wheel drives (even though the winter was dry). Traffic is up. A couple of those states have turned more blue, and a couple have turned more red. It might all be a symptom of the Big Sort. Construction materials have increased in price by several times, and building improbably continues, especially in places like Bozeman (mentioned in the piece). In some Mountain states, a lot of people never took masks seriously. You could say that people are moving down the COVID policy gradient.
- InTheArena 6y ago
  This is also true in Boulder, which has plenty of COVID restrictions. The supply of housing is completely insufficient.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    But if someone builds a 5 story apartment building anywhere, including on the eastern edge of town, it would completely ruin my view of the Flatirons!
mark_l_watson 6y ago
My wife and I traded living near a beach and lagoon in San Diego country for a small but nice house in a mountain tourist town (Sedona Arizona). That was back in 1998. Except for some time working as a contractor at Google in Mountain View and managing a deep learning team for Capital One in Urbana/Champaign IL, we have lived a quiet life in the mountains since 1998. One reason for my success in being happy here is that I accept the 1 1/2 million tourists who flood through our town every year. I view them as good for our economy and go out of my way to offer advice on the hiking trails to people who are obviously visitors, easy to do since I like talking with people. A few of my friends are miserable because of the tourists, but they are just a fact of life.
- gdubs 6y ago
  I’ve been one of those tourists — Sedona is a magical place. Also, the alpine stretch as you drive out towards the north has always stuck with me as one of the most incredible areas of the planet I’ve been to.
- nerdkid93 6y ago
  > deep learning team for Capital One What!? Capital One has a deep learning team? As a long-time customer of theirs, I can't even begin to guess what that team might do for their set of products, except maybe to optimize their credit card offerings.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Fraud, bankruptcy risk prediction, product marketing, possibly phone tree / voice response / customer service, would be my general suspicions based on some previous industry contacts, though no current insights.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Fraud detection?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
api 6y ago
It's not just small cities in the west. My wife and I recently returned to Cincinnati where we grew up, trading a vanilla apartment in Southern California for a very nice and much larger house. Since we came back here toward the end of summer 2020, house prices have increased considerably. Houses in this neighborhood are now selling within 24 hours at typically 5-15% over asking, which is not typical at all for Cincinnati. This area isn't as depressed as some areas of the so-called "rust belt" but it hasn't been a "hot" real estate market for some time. The demand is being driven largely by people moving here from much higher priced areas of the country. Lately investors have started entering the market here, plopping down cash for houses sight unseen at 10% over asking in "up and coming" neighborhoods. That's something this city has almost never seen except for maybe around downtown and the university. It's good for local homeowners to a point, but people are already talking about how this could ruin neighborhoods and drive up rents. My realtor joked with us that "we don't count" as carpetbaggers because we grew up here.
fullshark 6y ago
San Francisco house prices rose 25% as well https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA#0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA#0 I'm unconvinced this spells the beginning of a long term trend re: remote work. It's more a sign house prices are going up everywhere. Remote workforce will grow from this no doubt but the smart money remains on work looking very similar to how it looked pre pandemic IMO.
randomopining 6y ago
I heard all these places, especially Denver and the area around it, are swarmed with "outdoors bros" etc from Cali and the east coast. Overcrowded. Traffic jams to go out to the mountains every weekend. Cultural homogenization. Is that true, or overblown?
- Helloworldboy 6y ago
  It’s true
- elthyrior 6y ago
  Pretty much true. I-70 into the mountains is a parking lot on Friday and Saturday, and basically the same leaving the mountains on Sunday. Turns what should be a three to four drive to get to the western slope into six to seven some days.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    You're complaining that too many people are making a Fri-Sun trip into the mountains, and it is making your Fri-Sun trip into the mountains take too long?
    - randomopining 6y ago
      He's not complaining lol just stating a fact. If the fact is that it takes 7 hours to drive into the mountains... that's important to know, if you're thinking of moving there. All the OutdoorsBro(tm) that I know are moving to Denver, so idk if I would even like it.
      - googlryas 6y ago
        Labeling people OutdoorBro just seems like gatekeeping your hobby for people who aren't "true believers".
    - elthyrior 6y ago
      I'm not sure how you determined I was complaining from a comment that is simply pointing out a fact. The individual I replied to asked if bad traffic was true or not, and I indicated it is.
ttul 6y ago
I moved to a small island community that is near a cosmopolitan metro area of 3 million or so people - just a short ferry ride away. Before the pandemic, commuting to work from the island would eat 3-4 hours a day of your life, so it was not a feasible option for most people. When work-from-home started last March, a steady flow of city folk started migrating, paying top dollar for the very limited stock of homes available here. Prices surged 40%. Locals who rent have been leaving just as quickly, priced right out of the market. When the pandemic is over and WFH policies are tightened, I'm sure some people will migrate back after they discover how horrid it is to commute for hours a day. But I sense that WFH is the new normal and so this transformation is likely long term.
Diederich 6y ago
This is basically us. My wife, son and I lived in the Midwest where I worked in tech from the mid 1990s until 2009, when we moved to the SF Bay Area. While we could technically afford to buy a small place in California at the time, the difficulty we experienced selling our home and land in Missouri soured us on buying, so we rented in Mountain View until 2020. In our early 50s, and rent for a descent 1000 ft^2 two bedroom apartment approaching $4800/month, and the pandemic raging, I transitioned to a full time remote position and we bought an enormous property about 10 miles outside of Olympia, Washington. Our total cost of living, including food, rent/mortgage, utilities went down by not quite 50%, but I was still getting paid "Silicon Valley" rates and benefits, and I still am....and I will likely continue to be. My wife's various businesses have long been fully online, and her income has gone up tremendously during the pandemic, with no sign of that changing. One thing that facilitated this move for us was our son attending High School from home via https://cava.k12.com/ https://cava.k12.com/ in California, and we were able to transition to the Washington State version of k12.com for his senior year, which is finishing up shortly. To the article at hand: while we don't have any solid data, anecdotally we understand that there's a skyrocketing housing crunch in the making in and around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia,_Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia,_Washington and our property has appreciated about 17% in less than a year. More to the point, from the perspective of our read on NextDoor (which so far has been a LOT more healthy than the NextDoor in and around Mountain View), https://old.reddit.com/r/olympia https://old.reddit.com/r/olympia (and /r/seattle) and various personal conversations, there is a huge influx of 'money', and the long-time folks are pretty unhappy about it. My wife and I are pretty chill and we get along with people, so it hasn't been directed at us. Yes, we definitely feel bad that we've done a small part to negatively impact the life of our new neighbors. Our plan is that this is our 'forever home'...I don't know if that 'offsets' things or not, but we're certainly not looking for a quick flip. I don't know where/how this ends, but in my high level estimation, there's far more possibility of building new housing in Olympia + Colorado Springs + many other places than there is in just the SF Bay Area.
thorwasdfasdf 6y ago
As I read all the comments on this page, I notice a recurring theme. All the problems pointed out and all the complaints are all symptoms of over population. Simply put, we have too many people and not enough viable places for them to live.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sirtimbly 6y ago
Optimizing for distance from a national forest seemed like a good idea when purchasing a home 5 years ago. Still seems like a solid plan. Home price rises are great, but sorta irrelevant when you're happy with where you live already, and it's likely that you can keep working remotely as long as you like.
ericmay 6y ago
Turns out everybody wants to live in Galt's Gulch
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

229 points by prostoalex 6y ago

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

deleted 6y ago
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Hammershaft 6y ago
The economist has railed against suburbs before, and yes, overreaching suburbs built on massive sparse infrastructure is a huge problem, but this needs to be weighed against other huge problems that have developed in american economic geography, like how the economic gains of technology have accrued almost entirely to a handful of cities with sky high rents.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  The solution is to build more city. Denser areas will always be wealthier, just denser chips will always be faster.

iJohnDoe 6y ago

Great, you can work from. So you take your California money to middle of nowhere and buy a home for cheap. Renovate it and now it’s awesome. However, that local, who isn’t making California money, that is working a local job and making local money and is hoping to move up in housing for their family is priced out because housing pricing has doubled or even tripled. People that wanted to retire to rural or remote areas where pricing is traditionally cheaper are now fucked over. Sure, the owner didn’t need to price their home higher. Sure, whatever the market will bear. It still doesn’t mean it sucks less for the couple with a baby on the way hoping to buy a home in their home town that is now double and triple the cost. No, I haven’t been personally affected by this. I’m just worried what is happening and will happen around the US in the coming years.

Swizec 6y ago
1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. 2. This is how gentrification works. Many of these folks are coming because they’ve been priced out of wherever they’re coming from. 3. Housing can’t be both a right and subject to free-ish market mechanisms.
- adventured 6y ago
  > 1. Housing cannot be both affordable and a good investment. One is technically wrong. It can't be both a good investment and remain affordable. It can be both affordable and a good investment in the present, with prices rising over time generating a good return and making it increasingly unaffordable.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Sure. But that was 70 years ago in USA. The affordable housing ship has all but sailed for our generation. Except apparently in tiny towns where we’re now ruining it for the locals.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      In fairness, These aren't really tiny towns and haven't been for a generation. It's classic sunbelt boom-sprawl-puke. (Never mind Colorado isn't actually sunny at all.)
      - Jtsummers 6y ago
        Colorado is reasonably sunny, just not in the winter when the sun sets before you've finished your first cup of coffee (I kid, it's at 4:30-5pm in the winter). At least here in Colorado Springs the sun set at 7:40pm today with our latest sunset being around 8:30pm in a couple months.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    "... Over time" is usually implied in most policy proposals.

adventured 6y ago

I can't imagine what people in America are fleeing from. The US is a paradise of tranquility. Utopia from sea to shining sea.

isaacimagine 6y ago

As someone who lived in a small city in the American Mountain West, the boom does have consequences. Sleepy farming towns are becoming endless suburbia, hiking up prices as developers spill over from the Lehi 'Silicon Slopes' area. Midway, for instance, a town on the Wasatch back situated in a location that feels similar to Switzerland, has gone from about 150 diaries to 2, as expanding housing developments buy out the high-valued farmland. You'd think with the influx of money, and reduction in competition, it'd be easier for the remaining diaries to compete. Not so: the price of milk has remained basically unchanged since the 70s, but the cost required to run a farm has kept increasing. So why not cash out? (A few farmers in the area have actually cashed out and moved to Idaho, and they're pretty much set for life.) Long story short, Midway is a beautiful place to live, and the remaining diaries form a pillar of the community - it's just not something the remaining diary owners, who have been farming the land for generations, want to do. To stay in business, the remaining diaries have pivoted to artisan cheese production, with plans to produce other high-valued products, like ice-cream. Tours and locally-sourced farm stores are an additional source of income. Of course, these are just my own two cents. I don't mean to come off overly negative about the situation. As much as I'd love to work for a FAANG, retire early, and buy a large house in an idyllic mountain town, I'd hate for that same town to loose its historical roots and what makes it that special idyllic mountain town in the first place. Source: I'm a software engineer who lived/worked as a cheese-maker for a dairy there.

big_youth 6y ago
Great post but one point, Whole foods sells 1/2 gallons for $6! I don't drink much milk but would gladly pay a premium for high quality, local, organic milk.
- isaacimagine 6y ago
  Thanks for raising that point! The dairy I worked at does sell high quality local raw milk; they have a pasteurizer to produce cheese, but they can't use the same one to produce pasteurized milk. Additionally, the cows usually produce an excess volume of milk, which is sold so it doesn't go to waste: it's important to remember that even if the milk is sold for, say, $6 at Whole Foods, not all of the markup goes to the farmer.

client4 6y ago

I can't wait until people are required to move back to cities for in office work. Small towns are becoming faceless neighborhoods of urban areas with a SouthWest or JetBlue commute. New residents want to ignore their neighbors and put up gates to their home. Small towns have heart because people interact with each other and work to make the community better.

bpodgursky 6y ago
This is a romantic view that ignores that many, if not most, small towns in the rural US are dying. I'm from Missouri and I can tell you that most of the small towns are not idyllic rural paradises. They are farming towns which now have no purpose, no young people, and serious drug and suicide problems. These are not all friendly places. They would all KILL to have an influx of young energetic people move in. They want to see the town survive.
lizknope 6y ago
I grew up in a small town in the south. We were the first Asian family in the town and dealt with a lot of racism in the 1980's. When I went to college in a big city the weekly racist comments were basically gone. I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist in larger cities but it is far better than small towns. We had two KKK rallies through the town square in my town in the 80's. We have so many right wing racists in positions of power now that I have no interest in living in a small town again.

eysquared 6y ago

There seems to be a lot of negativity in the comments so far. Is this not the dream that is often touted on hacker news? Work at a FAANG and "retire" somewhere more affordable? I'm personally doing just this. I was lucky enough to land a good job out of college, buy a house in a desired area, and see it appreciate in the last 10 years. This increase plus the birth of my kids left me wondering if there wasn't a better 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.

hoka-one-one 6y ago
Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities. You can decide you don't care about any of that, but understand that type of that decision will ripple through to future generations, e.g. your grandkids will be less educated. The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. Will the cycle repeat itself?
- Cookingboy 6y ago
  >Your kids all else equal will be outsprinted by kids who live in more competitive cities But it won't "all else equal", there are so many variables at play here that it's meaningless to talk about a hypothetical "all else equal" scenario. Also there have been so many successful people who were born and raised in what you'd call "less competitive" areas. >The irony is that most educated people living in small towns want to get out, and a generation or two after they do they want to go back. What's ironic about people going to places chasing things they desire? Big cities and small towns offer different things, and those things value differently to different people. The people who are leaving small towns chasing after opportunities and the people who want to move back to small towns from big cities are obviously at different stages in their lives and value different things. >Will the cycle repeat itself? Probably? But why is that an issue?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

01100011 6y ago

I envy the folks who are able to do this. If I had the means, I'd probably have already fled back to the country. I can't help but think that it is unsustainable though. Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs. Global warming, increasing global competition... I can't help but think the people fleeing the cities will be forced back by incentives and economics in a decade.

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
I really hope the switch to electric transportation and to biking (whenever/wherever possible) will make big cities better to live. And that remote work in suburbs will incentive communities to re-create many smaller and more human-like down-towns.
codingdave 6y ago
> Supporting a large, rural population is less efficient than urbs or even suburbs. Whenever I see statement like this, it makes me wonder if you know where your food comes from. Because for the most part, the rural populations are supporting the cities. If the supply chains in this country were to fail, it is not the rural communities who would be scrounging for food and water. We'd be just fine.
- xenocratus 6y ago
  But... the comment isn't about where the food comes from or who would suffer from a supply chain collapse, it's about efficiency. I think the point was that cities are efficient because gestures vaguely towards economies of scale. It's easier to distribute goods (or services) to a highly-concentrated mass of people than to multiple disjoint locations.
  - ramraj07 6y ago
    I’m very confident I had a significantly smaller carbon footprint when I was in New York than compared to my time in Dallas. Even though I lived a much more vibrant life.

gregimba 6y ago

As someone who recently spent a couple days in Kanab, UT the collision course of rural natives with Californian expats has made me accelerate my plans to buy enough land to escape the cities and further enforced my feeling about the cultural divide in America. EDIT: I was born in a small western town and find myself missing certain aspects living in a larger city working in Tech.

sfeng 6y ago
What was it like in Kanab?
- gregimba 6y ago
  Talking with the person checking me into the hotel he mentioned he had heard to food was good at a restaurant across the street but mentioned he couldn't afford to eat there. There was a lovely older couple who were running the tourism center and provided a bunch of great information. The person in front of me repeatedly interrupted this nice old woman and talked over her, after she got the info she needed she got into a 4 runner with California plates. The surrounding OHV and hiking trails are phenomenal but the town is going to be very boring once the locals are forced out.

davidw 6y ago

> but in doing so they may jeopardise the very things people move there for: space, quality of life and proximity to wilderness This makes me roll me eyes a bit. The Economist is generally pretty YIMBY, but this sounds like the "character of the neighborhood" nonsense I hear from local wealthy people who are doing their damndest to pull up the drawbridge behind them. * There is so much space in the American west. * Quality of life depends on a lot of things. The 'quiet mountain town' where I live in Oregon has benefited greatly from having some more things going on locally. There's even a fantastic Italian restaurant run by a guy from Tuscany. You wouldn't get that in a true small town of which there are still so very many all over the west. For every 'hot' market like Bend, there are various depressed former resource towns like Burns or Lakeview. * Proximity to wilderness basically means being near public lands like BLM and Forest Service. Those are generally pretty hard boundaries: just because your city is growing doesn't mean the Forest Service will cede land to it.

ejfkcisodk 6y ago
I don’t want to ask you to reveal your hometown to a stranger but am curious to learn more, especially after spending a year living in the French alps (Isère). Is there a list of quiet mountain towns in Oregon/CA/etc that would include yours?
- solipsism 6y ago
  Gonna guess... Bend, OR?
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Bend has 100k people, and the Bend metro area has 200k people. If it used to be considered quiet, it most certainly isn’t now.
    - davidw 6y ago
      The legitimately difficult thing that Bend has gone through is very rapid growth/change. It had like 20K people 30 years ago. That's not easy, and I do feel for people who miss the smaller size. That said, there are tons of small towns that are not growing - indeed, they're kind of stagnant, population-wise . Lakeview, Oregon had its heyday in the 1960ies in terms of the population.

nelsonmandela 6y ago

Is that house in the first image made of plywood?

sneak 6y ago
Yes. That's called sheeting, and it's a type of thin plywood that's used over the (solid wood) framing of the house to support the housewrap (which functions as a vapor barrier) and whatever type of exterior siding goes on it. Between the framing studs would be insulation, and on the inside of that goes drywall.
- sneak 6y ago
  Edit: sibling comment is right, I am wrong: it is called sheathing
imtringued 6y ago
It looks like conventional OSB sheathing, the surprising part is that it doesn't have an integrated coating to repel water. This means that housewrap will have to be applied to protect the sheathing from water damage, this is both labor intensive and the potential for misapplication increases the risk of water damage.
- panzagl 6y ago
  Colorado Springs is in a desert, if that changes things.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I think that's just how they build houses there.

celim307 6y ago

We are already projected to have a water shortage this summer in the Rockies and it’s only going to get worse. Every state along the Colorado river is gearing up for water right battles and I dread to think what’s going to happen once the snow pack in the Rockies gets less and less every year

garren 6y ago
And that doesn’t even touch on the new year-round fire season normal we have to contend with. Last year was crazy and this year is supposed to be as bad or worse. Every 3rd or 4th pine tree in the hills is beetle kill. A lot of people are looking to move into mountain communities that are largely water stressed already. Adding more people, with less water, and higher fire danger and it’s going to get ugly.
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  Where can one find areas that are most water-abundant and don't run into the water scarcity issues?
  - cowsandmilk 6y ago
    Appalachia
  - NortySpock 6y ago
    I also assume any decent sized river is going to stay that way for the foreseeable future, and with some industrial grade treatment you can get potable water out of it. Case in point I live near a river that eventually drains to the Mississippi.
  - rm_-rf_slash 6y ago
    Upstate New York. Plenty of water, decent farmland (with more farm shares than you can count), and it’s one of the safest places in the U.S. in terms of proximity to natural hazards.
  - ghaff 6y ago

pyinstallwoes 6y ago

I actually really want to move to a mountain area that is secluded and has nature with snow. The problem is, it's very hard to figure out where to go when all you've lived is in a city or one state. I've researched a lot of properties on zillow but I have no idea how to investigate the proper area. Maybe someone can give me a tip. I like snow, and I like people, I just want enough space to experiment with my own land and not have to deal with neighbors or HOA crap.

nyokodo 6y ago
> I just want enough space to experiment with my own land and not have to deal with neighbors or HOA crap. What kinds of experiments? Depending on that answer you may want to investigate States, Counties, and Cities by their regulatory regimes vis a vis what you want to do. Make a short list of likely places and go visit them. Get a feel for these places. Does the altitude suit you? Humidity or lack thereof cause you any issues? What is the fire danger, or risk of other natural disasters? Are there sufficient ways close by to supply your lifestyle? What are the school choices if you have kids? Are there enough pursuits in the area to sufficiently entertain you? Can you adequately practice your religion in these places or withstand those that do? Are there good places to make friends? Finally, how easy will it be to recover from a mistake moving there? Answer these kinds of questions and you’ll know better what you’re getting into and you’ll know whether you really want what you think you want and you’ll know where to go.
- pyinstallwoes 6y ago
  Those are amazing questions to consider. Thank you!
arminiusreturns 6y ago
The HOA part really is the hard part, and even beyond that, the local zoning regulations can be arbitrarily infuriating, especially in certain states, and the ones with larger swaths without HOA and crazy regs have many negatives making it very hard to find what you speak of. I've been looking for years. I think a good bet is to find an heirloom house and property and bid on it.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/Ey55B https://archive.is/Ey55B

tylerjl 6y ago

For those outside of these bubbles, it’s almost unbelievable how much the housing market has completely exploded the last two years. My family is squarely in this situation - bought our home a few years ago in an extremely fast - growing area, and watched prices climb to levels that we didn’t believe at first. Imagine purchasing a home in 2019 for $500k and selling it today for $1.2M. That’s the reality in some of these cities.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago
The bubble is back. Look at the housing market and the valuations of do-nothing bullshit companies. People don't learn.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  In my experience everyone knows it is all a bubble. Nobody knows what to do about it, though. So they just continue living.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    Especially with the fear of inflation, you are 100% correct. I think this bubble has been created by interests being too low for too long. Keeping your money in the bank is barely better than putting it under the matters. So where does it go? Stock market, real estate and crypto. What else could anyone do? It seems like more and more people are becoming angel investors too, but that's not any better and certainly not an option for most people
- francisofascii 6y ago
  Right. This bubble seems to have elements of both the dot-com crash (overvalued tech) and the financial crisis (overvalued housing).
  - DaniloDias 6y ago
    80 year cycle won’t last much longer.

PostThisTooFast 6y ago

PAYWALL BULLSHIT, DO NOT POST

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago

Are we still ignoring the ecological collapse that is caused by urban sprawl? We *must* increase the density of our cities. If you believe that the climate crisis is a problem and a big one, then you could be for a rude awakening as most experts now consider the collapse in biodiversity to have far bigger impacts on human lives and living conditions than climate change[0]. The only reason why there are fewer headlines about that on on climate change is that the IPBES was founded decades after the IPCC. I'm afraid that many will finally take a few steps to reduce their carbon footprint and use this to justify expanding their footprint on ecosystems ("clean" but larger houses, "organic" but wider lawn areas, "clean" but more frequent transportation that break natural habitats, etc). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Biodiversity_and_Ecosystem_Services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Assessment_Report_on_Bi...

AlanSE 6y ago
I'm extremely sympathetic to this view. Habitat destruction is the #1 or #2 way we're screwing over the planet. However, this looks like an area where environmentalists risk getting themselves into trouble. Global warming is a defined and solvable task, but the messaging keeps changing to something more like an open-ended commitment. That has huge risks for the public to tune it out, and perhaps further procrastinate on the carbon emissions problem. Average people do not have the emotional energy for a perpetual guilt machine. > We must increase the density of our cities. I kind of don't feel like we can afford to. The housing price increases since 2020 have an atrocious human cost. These rising costs of living are not sustainable. There are some good (tech) jobs that compensate sufficiently for this type of development to work... but no where near enough. On a macroeconomics sense, I'm inclined to think it just doesn't work at all. I'm also skeptical that the arguments apply to THIS migration. People are not moving into the rain forest, and the American mountain west, in particular, is fairly arid. The wildlife density of some places is orders of magnitude greater than other places. Preservation is a battle that you never win, you just delay. If we can't have our big houses, wide lawns, and transportation work with some ecosystems, maybe it's all doomed either way.
- ajmurmann 6y ago

dnndev 6y ago

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

dagw 6y ago
Without kids and if your an introvert- it’s a no brained. Buy you that 15 acre ranch Back when I was a childless introvert, living on a 15 acre ranch by myself would have been living hell, and would no doubt have done terrible things to my mental health. I might not like being social, but I still went out to concerts, movies, restaurants and similar (often by myself) and doing so was always mentally invigorating. Plus going to the pub with that one friend I did have was very necessary for my mental health. Being an introvert doesn't mean you don't want to be around civilization. As a childless introvert having a small apartment in the middle of town where I could walk everywhere was the obvious no brainier, and worth every penny.
- sneak 6y ago
  > Being an introvert doesn't mean you don't want to be around civilization. As someone who lived in Manhattan, I used to believe this. Then the pandemic happened, and I watched how our so-called "civilization" handled it. I could not really imagine a worse outcome: it was mismanaged and terrible from the highest levels of authority down to the most insignificant end-user. Now this introvert very much wants the option of being not around civilization at times. I don't trust civilization to remain civilized, in even a minor pinch. I will likely build a house 100km from anything, and spend 25-50% of each year there.
wjamesg 6y ago
RTP?
- dnndev 6y ago

whalesalad 6y ago

Some of those states are on a crusade to ensure cannabis and other drugs are never legalized. That’s gonna be a no from me dog. Colorado being the exception of course, but Idaho and Wyoming come to mind.

calvano915 6y ago
The Treasure Valley is awful close to OR which has plentiful options. WY proximity to CO mostly the same. Most probably are not swayed either way on this issue when moving to these states but when all the neighbors are offering options and are disadvantageous to live in, people will make ID or WY work to get the best of both. See living/working in WA and shopping in OR for tax advantages as a similar analogy.
- whalesalad 6y ago
  I am thinking from the cultivation aspect. I love that here in Michigan I can grow my own cannabis 100% legally. I also love that we are starting to decriminalize active/psych mushrooms (Ann Arbor so far) for the same reason (home cultivation).
  - calvano915 6y ago
    True. Growing your own is definitely location specific. Much more risky than buying and transporting small amounts to a not friendly state.

blunte 6y ago

My last home in the US was near a ski resort in Colorado, and it was a fantastic life - incredible mountain biking in the summer, and of course snow skiing in the winter. It was truly heaven. That was before remote work was as common as it is now. If I had to go back to the US, that would be the place. Sure, you miss out on the cool things the city offers; but a couple hours drive and you're in a big city. I found the need to go only about once a month; the rest of my time was just too happy in nature to feel much need for what the city offered. If you haven't tried mountain life - and I mean mountain life, not big city near mountains - you should. Rent a condo for the summer and temporarily relocate there. Chances are, you'll decide you don't want to leave when the summer is over.

ghaff 6y ago
I think a lot of people assume you're either 200 miles from the nearest Walmart or you're in downtown Manhattan/a dense close-in suburb. Go 1-2 hours from pretty much every large city and you can be in pretty rural areas--although not necessarily a mountain town of course. I do like going into cities now and then but I really don't need or particularly want one on a day-to-day basis.
- bluGill 6y ago
  If you own a car it is hard to get 200 miles from a Walmart in the US. Not impossible, but very hard.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm aware. I was using it as an expression for how binary a lot of people assume urban vs. rural is.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >people assume you're either 200 miles from the nearest Walmart or you're in downtown Manhattan/a dense close-in suburb. Go 1-2 hours from pretty much every large city and you can be in pretty rural areas This must be why "ban cars!" is so prominent on HN. Apparently people here have a hard time imagining a location where they can provide quality-of-life improving utility.

paul_f 6y ago

Frustrating to see an interesting HN headline, only to be presented with a paywalled article. Such as this. I wish there was a way to avoid even seeing them. In addition to the dashed expectations, half the comments will be from people who could not read the article (like this one)

heliodor 6y ago
And yet it's still a very interesting conversation. I find it very educational to read what people have to say about living in the various parts of the country.

Gustomaximus 6y ago

This is happening around Australia too. People are heading for coastal regions with their 'city' money and its creating some housing issues and generally booming prices. I think with things like starlink and solar/batteries this will only continue to more remote areas. Before water/server were the well covered utilities. Now with internet/power we can cost effectively move further afield while staying connected and sacrificing less modern convenience better than ever.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

Are they booming because of some underlying industry or are they just high af off the California money (which could evaporate at a moment's notice)?

jdhn 6y ago
For these cities, I'd say it's mostly California money, but there's a fair amount of people moving away from the East Coast as well.

williesleg 6y ago

I love seeing those bun based soy boys looking for latte in the middle of podunk, they are so cucked. And those agressive chicks, so pissed off all the time. The world owes them.

kbos87 6y ago

Leaving college a little more than 10 years ago, my ideal at the time would have been to move to one of these towns and start a small business, and I have friends who went a similar route. Having grown up with parents who relied on a small business in a seasonal town, I think I also had a reasonably good sense of what that life would look like. I instead opted to move to a major city and invest in building a career. Looking back, personally I don’t regret my choice. The direction remote work is taking us in is one where there is more pressure coming from high earners in what used to be low cost markets. Right now, this is painful if you live in one of these places. What could have been the first homes for a lot of folks living in these areas are second/weekend homes of folks who live in major cities within driving distance. It pains me to say this, but I think putting the time into a high-earning career up front has left me in a better position to live the life I want to live in one of those towns vs. my friends who have been there all along and are starting to struggle. On the flip side, a shift toward remote work will hopefully open the playing field somewhat for them to find their way into higher earning roles. The unfortunate side effect is that there’s more pressure to embrace the change and get into the rat race for the highest possible income you can find.

throwastrike 6y ago

This is mostly applicable to white people. I would not move to some of these places as a person of color.

selimthegrim 6y ago

Having just been to Santa Fe, I am wondering if only poor education and water shortages keep it from being a remote work magnet.

ghaff 6y ago
If I were to move somewhere in the Mountain West to work remotely, Santa Fe would be fairly high on my list. One downside is that, while Santa Fe (and Los Alamos) are pretty great, the nearest relatively big city of any size (Albuquerque) is less so.

airhead969 6y ago

I went through many of them moving from Chico CA area in a grand US west/southwest roadtrip moving to Austin TX to escape climate change fires/power outages (ironically), increasing taxes and housing prices, and a decline in general happiness. I didn't see any obvious signs of this. I can recommend not moving anywhere near Greely CO where cattle are slaughtered by the thousands. It smells very bad. Also, driving in Wyoming there is effectively no speed limit between the highway patrol is very sparse.. and there isn't much there. 50%+ WfH OTG homesteads in the middle of nowhere but with access to fresh water and sunlight are a very good idea long-term, especially for raising a family, growing crops, mental health, well-being, and peace-of-mind. Big cities are (and were pre-pandemic) only useful for conducting high-level economic activity due to the density of connectedness and potential for rapid wealth accumulation, but in general, they often tend to be terrible places overall for the most part, and people should escape to more tranquil and mentally-healthy places.

nickelcitymario 6y ago
While I share your sentiments, I don't think it's fair to deride cities as "terrible places overall". Many of us prefer the quiet of rural life, but many others find that quiet to be stifling and want the busy hustle-bustle of a big city. To each their own.
- airhead969 6y ago
  Big cities are "terrible" long-term, especially as viewed by most average people who lack the skills, connections, and abilities to utilize them and as they get older and less able to capitalize on them. Younger, smarter people tend to gravitate towards them as they are able to make more effective use of cities with better goals, tactics, self-discipline, sociopolitical navigation, and relationships. YMMV.
ubermonkey 6y ago
"Big cities are (and were pre-pandemic) only useful for conducting high-level economic activity due to the density of connectedness and potential for rapid wealth accumulation, but in general, they often tend to be terrible places overall" yeah, seriously "citation needed" here. Cities offer a LOT of things not usually found in rural areas. Try explaining to my trans sister about how cities are bad, and that she should live in a rural area, for example.

throwaway823882 6y ago

I want to do this. But I don't want anyone else to do this, or it'll spoil the dream.

almost_usual 6y ago

People like to live in pretty places, who knew..

almost_usual 6y ago

What were once “hidden gems” are now no longer hidden and you can work a remote tech job and live there. Has nothing to do with rural towns. There are plenty of rural towns in the Midwest that are still cheap, I grew up there.

gtmitchell 6y ago

This is my reality. I've lived here since right after the real estate crash and have seen house prices triple in a decade. I don't work in tech, and I don't have the flexibility to move because of family commitments. My rent keeps going up and I've watched my dreams of home ownership evaporate before my eyes. I can't say for sure whether this boom has been good or bad on the whole, but I can say there are lots of people like myself who are excluded and are left wondering where we went wrong or what we could have done differently.

yepthatsreality 6y ago

More urban sprawl and Starbucks for those who lack culture.

panzagl 6y ago
Colorado is also getting In n Out and Whataburger. Most of my favorite local restaurants have slowly closed over the last 10 years. Which I guess is ok, since all my favorite businesses are gone too because of the rising rents caused by legalization. Instead I can sit in my house and Doordash Chipotle while I order stuff on Amazon, just like those culturally sophisticated urbanites who are doing us such a favor by bringing their civilization to us.
- yepthatsreality 6y ago
  I wouldn’t mind if people moved and visited places while expecting something local and new, but instead they just look at a town and wonder “why doesn’t this place have an X?” Well they do it’s just not called X and they don’t need X because who cares about brand recognition?

blueyes 6y ago

I recently returned from a mid-sized town in the Mountain West, and I can confirm that the headline is true. It's a particular kind of boom. A lot of out-of-state money and migrants have poured in to buy houses in places with fewer COVID restrictions and lower prices. That is fundamentally changing the character and politics of those cities. People are buying houses after nothing more than a Zoom tour. The car dealerships have run out of four-wheel drives (even though the winter was dry). Traffic is up. A couple of those states have turned more blue, and a couple have turned more red. It might all be a symptom of the Big Sort. Construction materials have increased in price by several times, and building improbably continues, especially in places like Bozeman (mentioned in the piece). In some Mountain states, a lot of people never took masks seriously. You could say that people are moving down the COVID policy gradient.

InTheArena 6y ago
This is also true in Boulder, which has plenty of COVID restrictions. The supply of housing is completely insufficient.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  But if someone builds a 5 story apartment building anywhere, including on the eastern edge of town, it would completely ruin my view of the Flatirons!

mark_l_watson 6y ago

My wife and I traded living near a beach and lagoon in San Diego country for a small but nice house in a mountain tourist town (Sedona Arizona). That was back in 1998. Except for some time working as a contractor at Google in Mountain View and managing a deep learning team for Capital One in Urbana/Champaign IL, we have lived a quiet life in the mountains since 1998. One reason for my success in being happy here is that I accept the 1 1/2 million tourists who flood through our town every year. I view them as good for our economy and go out of my way to offer advice on the hiking trails to people who are obviously visitors, easy to do since I like talking with people. A few of my friends are miserable because of the tourists, but they are just a fact of life.

gdubs 6y ago
I’ve been one of those tourists — Sedona is a magical place. Also, the alpine stretch as you drive out towards the north has always stuck with me as one of the most incredible areas of the planet I’ve been to.
nerdkid93 6y ago
> deep learning team for Capital One What!? Capital One has a deep learning team? As a long-time customer of theirs, I can't even begin to guess what that team might do for their set of products, except maybe to optimize their credit card offerings.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Fraud, bankruptcy risk prediction, product marketing, possibly phone tree / voice response / customer service, would be my general suspicions based on some previous industry contacts, though no current insights.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Fraud detection?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

api 6y ago

It's not just small cities in the west. My wife and I recently returned to Cincinnati where we grew up, trading a vanilla apartment in Southern California for a very nice and much larger house. Since we came back here toward the end of summer 2020, house prices have increased considerably. Houses in this neighborhood are now selling within 24 hours at typically 5-15% over asking, which is not typical at all for Cincinnati. This area isn't as depressed as some areas of the so-called "rust belt" but it hasn't been a "hot" real estate market for some time. The demand is being driven largely by people moving here from much higher priced areas of the country. Lately investors have started entering the market here, plopping down cash for houses sight unseen at 10% over asking in "up and coming" neighborhoods. That's something this city has almost never seen except for maybe around downtown and the university. It's good for local homeowners to a point, but people are already talking about how this could ruin neighborhoods and drive up rents. My realtor joked with us that "we don't count" as carpetbaggers because we grew up here.

fullshark 6y ago

San Francisco house prices rose 25% as well https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA#0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SFXRSA#0 I'm unconvinced this spells the beginning of a long term trend re: remote work. It's more a sign house prices are going up everywhere. Remote workforce will grow from this no doubt but the smart money remains on work looking very similar to how it looked pre pandemic IMO.

randomopining 6y ago

I heard all these places, especially Denver and the area around it, are swarmed with "outdoors bros" etc from Cali and the east coast. Overcrowded. Traffic jams to go out to the mountains every weekend. Cultural homogenization. Is that true, or overblown?

Helloworldboy 6y ago
It’s true
elthyrior 6y ago
Pretty much true. I-70 into the mountains is a parking lot on Friday and Saturday, and basically the same leaving the mountains on Sunday. Turns what should be a three to four drive to get to the western slope into six to seven some days.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  You're complaining that too many people are making a Fri-Sun trip into the mountains, and it is making your Fri-Sun trip into the mountains take too long?
  - randomopining 6y ago
    He's not complaining lol just stating a fact. If the fact is that it takes 7 hours to drive into the mountains... that's important to know, if you're thinking of moving there. All the OutdoorsBro(tm) that I know are moving to Denver, so idk if I would even like it.
    - googlryas 6y ago
      Labeling people OutdoorBro just seems like gatekeeping your hobby for people who aren't "true believers".
  - elthyrior 6y ago
    I'm not sure how you determined I was complaining from a comment that is simply pointing out a fact. The individual I replied to asked if bad traffic was true or not, and I indicated it is.

ttul 6y ago

I moved to a small island community that is near a cosmopolitan metro area of 3 million or so people - just a short ferry ride away. Before the pandemic, commuting to work from the island would eat 3-4 hours a day of your life, so it was not a feasible option for most people. When work-from-home started last March, a steady flow of city folk started migrating, paying top dollar for the very limited stock of homes available here. Prices surged 40%. Locals who rent have been leaving just as quickly, priced right out of the market. When the pandemic is over and WFH policies are tightened, I'm sure some people will migrate back after they discover how horrid it is to commute for hours a day. But I sense that WFH is the new normal and so this transformation is likely long term.

Diederich 6y ago

This is basically us. My wife, son and I lived in the Midwest where I worked in tech from the mid 1990s until 2009, when we moved to the SF Bay Area. While we could technically afford to buy a small place in California at the time, the difficulty we experienced selling our home and land in Missouri soured us on buying, so we rented in Mountain View until 2020. In our early 50s, and rent for a descent 1000 ft^2 two bedroom apartment approaching $4800/month, and the pandemic raging, I transitioned to a full time remote position and we bought an enormous property about 10 miles outside of Olympia, Washington. Our total cost of living, including food, rent/mortgage, utilities went down by not quite 50%, but I was still getting paid "Silicon Valley" rates and benefits, and I still am....and I will likely continue to be. My wife's various businesses have long been fully online, and her income has gone up tremendously during the pandemic, with no sign of that changing. One thing that facilitated this move for us was our son attending High School from home via https://cava.k12.com/ https://cava.k12.com/ in California, and we were able to transition to the Washington State version of k12.com for his senior year, which is finishing up shortly. To the article at hand: while we don't have any solid data, anecdotally we understand that there's a skyrocketing housing crunch in the making in and around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia,_Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia,_Washington and our property has appreciated about 17% in less than a year. More to the point, from the perspective of our read on NextDoor (which so far has been a LOT more healthy than the NextDoor in and around Mountain View), https://old.reddit.com/r/olympia https://old.reddit.com/r/olympia (and /r/seattle) and various personal conversations, there is a huge influx of 'money', and the long-time folks are pretty unhappy about it. My wife and I are pretty chill and we get along with people, so it hasn't been directed at us. Yes, we definitely feel bad that we've done a small part to negatively impact the life of our new neighbors. Our plan is that this is our 'forever home'...I don't know if that 'offsets' things or not, but we're certainly not looking for a quick flip. I don't know where/how this ends, but in my high level estimation, there's far more possibility of building new housing in Olympia + Colorado Springs + many other places than there is in just the SF Bay Area.

thorwasdfasdf 6y ago

As I read all the comments on this page, I notice a recurring theme. All the problems pointed out and all the complaints are all symptoms of over population. Simply put, we have too many people and not enough viable places for them to live.

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sirtimbly 6y ago

Optimizing for distance from a national forest seemed like a good idea when purchasing a home 5 years ago. Still seems like a solid plan. Home price rises are great, but sorta irrelevant when you're happy with where you live already, and it's likely that you can keep working remotely as long as you like.

ericmay 6y ago

Turns out everybody wants to live in Galt's Gulch

deleted 6y ago

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