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The new labor crisis is fairly wild. All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive that there is no local labor pool. Many of the wonderful mount
by rektide 3y ago
The new labor crisis is fairly wild. All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive that there is no local labor pool. Many of the wonderful mountain towns of Colorado for example are also suffering this fate.
- mistrial9 3y agothis is after abusing illegal immigrant labor relentlessly for 25 years, kicking the can down the road; truly reprobate
- willcipriano 3y agoI've noticed the fast food places around me are back to hiring teenagers. It has been mostly people from South America in the past decade or so.
- whitemary 3y agobecause less immigrants are coming to the US now, because our labor situation is worse than many 3rd world countries for low wage workers
- prpl 3y agoRecently visited friends near Park City, UT - whose house has seen a double of real estate value and it looks to be headed towards a Jackson Hole situation where people live in trailers or down in Provo, which has had many avalanches this year on the highway. I’ve also seen the same in towns like you’ve mentioned in Colorado - one example I know being Silverton, which I think has doubled or more than doubled since 2019 (also famously the site of the mining tailings pond release) Lots of people are quick to blame Californians but it actually seems a small percentage overall, but it’s a convenient bogeyman.
- j_heffe 3y agoIt's insane that our mountain towns are essentially playgrounds for the rich while European mountain towns still have a fair amount of housing supply.
- rjsw 3y agoHow many European mountain towns have you visited? All the ones that I know have a shortage of housing for service workers.
- jimbob45 3y agoAll the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive Doesn't need to be this way either. We've come up with a number of ways to lower real estate prices on this very board that simply aren't being implemented by local communities. I have to believe that 2024 is going to be a massive turning point for a lot of US cities.
- nikanj 3y agoThe people who already own in the community vote against lowering real estate prices. The prospective future residents don't get a vote, so they lose every time.
- jimbob45 3y agoWe've had countless discussions about this on HN. There are solutions that don't require outright lowering real estate prices. There's simply no motivation from local governments to acquire any momentum toward changing things. The "luxury high class" renters are seen as more desirable than anything else to boost local economies and everyone else is seen as disposable.
- chimeracoder 3y ago> There are solutions that don't require outright lowering real estate prices. There really aren't. The upward pressure caused by the need to keep property values increasing will always, in the long run, outweigh any other policy that you can use to attempt to reign in cost-of-living. You can play tricks to delay the effects or slow them down, but adding drag resistance doesn't stop a falling leaf from trending downwards. Mathematically, you cannot lower cost-of-living while also insisting that the price of the single largest living cost (housing) keep increasing. The only alternative is to lower the price of housing, but you can't do that without lowering real estate values for existing landed property owners, so they fight that tooth and nail, in nearly every locality across the board.
- nikanj 3y agoYou can't eat your cake and have it too. You can't have cheaper homes and simultaneously not lower real estate prices.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI believe the idea is to automate all that labor away so that rich people won't even have to think about breathing the same air as regulars, let alone ever see them.