Asheville, NC is coming up after Colorado - I've got one friends-couple that's actively moving there this summer, and a couple others that are thinking seriously about it.

> I wonder what this all will look like when we look back 20 years hence

There was an interesting throwaway comment in Carlota Perez's Technical Revolutions and Financial Capital (written in 2002). She's famous for her observation that each technological revolution tends to lead to a financial crisis that separates the "Installation" phase (governed by financial capital, and marked by successive asset bubbles & widening wealth inequality) from the "Deployment" phase (governed by production capital, and marked by a widespread dissemination of best practices and corresponding productivity gains throughout the economy).

Less famously, the book also mentions that towards the end of the "frenzy" period (the latter half of the Installation phase), you get a phenomena of "two monies". Any prices connected to the new means of production - stock values, salaries, real estate in key cities, etc. - grow exponentially, while the old economy remains stagnant. Eventually, the divide leads to war, with regions that have adopted the new production techniques battling rump states of the old declining empires. That's as far as the book goes, but the historical implication - based on the early 20th century examples of the Ottoman Turks, Czarist Russia, Imperial China & feudal Japan - is that societies that cling to the old ways collapse, and their leadership is exterminated. Those who aren't killed and who are adaptable enough to adopt new techniques find places within the victorious societies, which then start focusing their efforts on spreading the new production techniques widely within the society to equalize social divisions and cement the new order. Think of the GI Bill after WW2, the widespread suburbanization, mass production of the automobile, consumer goods, department stores, the Civil Rights Act, and so on.