Residents of Austin, TX have been complaining that the city changed or got too crowded shortly after they moved in, whether that was a year ago or decades ago. People who moved to SF in 2010 complained about the people moving there in 2015.
Same thing happens at a neighborhood or district level too. Everybody feels like they were the last person to move in while it was still good and everything after them is unwelcome.
I've been told Austin's city council mulishly refused to see the growth trend and didn't annex the hills around the city when they had the chance. Austin waterways like Bull Creek went from summertime swimming holes to unsafe to enter due to septic tank runoff and high levels of coliform bacteria because city services - sewerage in particular - weren't extended to those areas.
People who lived there really hoped the usual waxing and waning of population in cadence with student university attendance would go on forever. But according to an aunt who lived there from the 1960s until property taxes priced her out a few years ago, too many people loved it and moved back after school or just never left and it sort of snowballed from there. Her anecdotal evidence was the cashiers at her Half Price Books stores she managed often had Masters degrees but chose to work there rather than move and find a better job elsewhere.
These days people running a cash register while holding an advanced degree is more of a cliche than remarkable evidence that some place is so special you'd rather be underpaid there than be paid better somewhere else.
But yeah to hear her tell it, in her forty years there every decade that passed brought some unwelcome change to Austin.
I mean is anybody from here?
Have you ever met anybody from here?
Have you ever seen so many condos in your whole damn life
That were built here in one year?
Everyone I know that was born here is dope as fuck
And everybody else sucks
There's no easy fix for this, especially in a place as extremely laissez-faire as Texas, where urban planning and zoning are seen as mortal sins.
Take Vancouver - even though they passed residency laws, with penalties. Average price in 1977: $90k. 2017:$1.05M. Average price dropped to $900k in Dec 2020 ... now $1.4M.
- Yogi Berra
There is a real thing going on in the US today, a sort of inchoate rage felt at all of the poorly defined "others". My hunch is that much of it stems from the rising anxieties of climate change, economic inequality, corporate political control, and even more recently the pandemic. Everyone needs to feel they have a certain level of agency and control in the world. It's hard to sleep at night if you don't even feel certain that your bed will still be there when you wake up.
The world today often feels like we are ants surrounded by lumbering billionaire and corporate giants, hoping not to get stepped on while we watch climate change slowly dissolve the ground beneath us. People naturally cling to any remaining pieces of agency they can find, and lash out when even that tiny inch is taken from them. So when I see people screaming at a waitress for insisting they put on a mask, or sneering at someone visiting their beloved hiking trail, I wonder if it's only because there is no convenient face they can yell at for all of the larger forces that have actually marginalized them.
I have this feeling from time to time. I find that it magically disappears when I stop consuming media. I'm not saying "it goes away when I ignore it", either. I do not get the same sense of an "angry society" when I interact with other human beings, and rarely hear anyone express any kind of urgent anxiety about climate change or economic inequality.
We face serious issues, sure, but none are the urgent societal threats they're made out to be. The real danger are the anxiety peddlers and the fear-amplifiers among us, who want to influence and then monetize your emotional state, or to transmute it into political capital.
This is why all solutions to climate change also have to address shorter term worries if the political tide has any chance of getting buy-in from those with global AND those with local concerns. Problem is, both the voters and our political leaders have ignored BOTH kinds of problems (and at least one perspective) for far too long. Now both interests have become entrenched into dissonant encampments that, stupidly, are unwilling to talk about how we could take steps to address both purposes at the same time.
This sounds a lot like the US's recent social war over unshared political priorities, and I think it is. The 1%, the middle class, and the dispossessed all have different needs and interests that can't be met if we all feel free to overlook the perspective of those who don't share our priorities. Those experiencing local displacement due to the arrival of well-heeled haves aren't wrong. Nor will today's haves be wrong one day should they find their world turned upside down and then express their unhappiness when others show them no pity, which is likely if they live long enough.
The solution, I think, is to not dismiss dispossession. It's to acknowledge it and start an earnest discussion about what can be done about it.
Twist of twists: Isn't this almost exactly what people have been saying about the Bay Area?
It's incredibly narcissistic and selfish to believe that "the locals" are only there as a hindrance to you. Would you roll up to a random village in Thailand and just start changing things, and expect the people who live there to worship and serve you?
1980 census shows just over 40M in the west:
https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1981-02.pdf
page 6
2019 figures show nearly 80M in the west:
https://www.census.gov/popclock/data_tables.php?component=gr...
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...
The new construction methods, building types, and communal land management strategies that are preferred by implants have an outsized effect on the environment. Compare the new construction in Vail to the older buildings, which can still be seen in smaller towns.
I would prefer building preferences to become more harmonious with the natural environment instead of less.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure there is a politically tenable solution since everyone likes their own personal vehicles, and for that you need a driveway or garage, and for that you need space and roads, and that does not scale well with population increase.
What you call development in step 1...
> narcissist and selfish
What you call development in step 2. They're both development and urbanization.
> only there as a hindrance to you.
This seems like a projection. You don't seem to consider "them" as having any right to even exist. Indeed, in the next sentence you compare migrating within the US to migrating outside of it, making the xenophobia even more clear.
No, turning a wilderness into viable farmland is not urbanization. There's putting in the time and work to make what you want from scratch, and then there's seeing something nice that someone else made and screaming "mine!"
compare migrating within the US to migrating outside of it, making the xenophobia even more clear.
Putting a false label on something doesn't make the thing become what you label it. The US is not meant to be an open season playground for the rich and the careless.
You don't seem to consider "them" as having any right to even exist.
This sentence seems to perfectly describe the perspective of those who see a small town and want to appropriate it and make it theirs. As someone who has lived in everything from a hometown of a few thousand up to San Francisco, and a variety of suburbs and mid-tier cities in between, it's pretty tiring to see people treating the world like their own giant Disneyland, and all the people who live in it like Castmembers on display for their amusement.
Striving to minimize disruption and maximize cohesion when moving into a new town or building a new development would make for a much better world than the conquistador-style takeover that actually happens in a lot of places.
I'm 90% with you, but we need to be clear that this is not true for the way in which much of the West was settled. It was often not wilderness, but instead land watched over by Native American communities who practiced varying forms of regenerative agriculture, who had only recently been wiped out by disease or war, if they weren't still there. It was settled not by experts looking to "tame the wilderness", but largely by immigrants who were hurried, by job scarcity and discrimination, out of the East Coast and into the interior. They were extremely lucky that the land had essentially been prepared for their monocultures by generations of NA stewardship - people the government was more than happy to enable the displacement and genocide of. (And the Dust Bowl STILL happened.)
That said, after several generations of like stewardship and occupation, I favor those residents and their right to remain over new residents looking to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities. What we absolutely need is more respect for the positive aspects of long-lived communities so that we don't trample and dismantle them so casually. It may not be wholly just that the world isn't one's oyster, but as a black person who has to deal with unfortunate and continued existence of sundown towns, the reality that some places are off-limits until the locals have fixed their own issues is one that should be respected. If the lock isn't level you're just going to open the floodgates of trouble.
Housing can not be both affordable and a good investment.
Given second homes are an investment, by definition having one means you're helping make homes unaffordable.
I say that as a Software Engineer who is 39 and has never been remotely close to affording even a first home.
You may say that it could have increased someone else's stock of housing. And that's true. But if I built it as a vacation home, then if it wasn't going to be used as my vacation home, I wouldn't have built it, so it wouldn't have increased anyone else's supply of housing anyway.
The same is happening even in small town now - a friend bought a place just before Covid for $480k, now it's worth $740k. This is a town of 10k people, in the middle of nowhere. Tiny lot, house is almost 100 years old.
Of course they pocketed a seven figure profit, because of the lakefront property, and the 100 year old wood cabin was bulldozed.
And then the transient occupants party their asses off. And then the Karens pass local ordinances. And then nobody can have any fun.
This is a collective action problem. If one person decides to not move to Undiscovered Gem, Wild West then there is a large number of others that will.
I grew up in a tourist area, and though I'm one of the ones who left for the Big City I keep in touch. I'll give you a few examples that I think are illustrative.
Immediately after college, a buddy and I shared an apartment in a nice building on a nice street. We both made decent money working in touristy restaurants, as did the three girls our age who lived next door (and, I think, the inhabitants of the other two units in the building, though we didn't have much to do with them: they were older, and had kids, so not much in common with us at the time). During the two years that we lived there, the family home directly next door sold. It was kind of sad, because a nice older couple lived there -- we watered their plants for them once, and the wife baked us an ENORMOUS batch of cookies to say thanks -- but the husband died, and the old lady moved away to live with one of her daughters somewhere else. Anyway, the house was bought by someone as a second home / investment property; during the next year it was used for exactly three days (for a really loud and obnoxious party, but whatever). We snuck in through the backyard to use the Jacuzzi a few times, but even then I can remember thinking that this place turning into an effectively vacant property was a bad sign.
Fast forward twenty-something years, and even more of the "family" homes on that street have become second home / investment properties. The four-unit apartment that we lived in is now exclusively rented out on AirBnB, displacing the service-industry families and twenty-somethings that lived there before.
Just about everyone who actually works in that town now commutes from miles and miles away, and rush-hour traffic -- on rural roads -- is terrible.
The displacement goes much further up the income scale that you'd think, too. I've kept my dentist there, partly out of sentiment: the dentist who previously owned the practice had looked after my teeth since I was, like, eight years old; my regular hygienist has been cleaning my teeth since I was about fifteen. I cleaned their office for them when I was in high school, and they still give me an "employee discount" on fluoride treatments or whatever, so going there gives me all kinds of good small-town feelings. A decade or so ago someone I went to school with partnered with the original dentist, and then bought out the practice when the old dentist retired. We've talked a few times, and I don't think it's gone quite as well as she hoped. For one thing, she has to pay her hygienists and dental assistants a premium, to keep them willing to make the fifty+ mile commutes most of them have to make, since local housing is out of reach. She expected that, though. What I think she didn't quite expect is that she'd have so many fewer patients than the practice used to have. Partly that may be churn that comes with the old dentist retiring and someone new taking over, but also it's because the year-round population has declined, and second-homers and AirBnB-ers aren't looking for dentists in their vacation town. My friend had expected to pay off the loan for the practice and then buy a home in town before her kids got to school age. It's now 8-ish years since we talked about that, and she's still making a ~70 mile commute each way.
Build more homes? Yeah: that does need to happen (I vote the straight YIMBY ticket in the city I live in, so I totally get that argument), but ... rural small-town charm drives the tourist industry around there. Build too much and you kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
It's a really multi-layered problem, that I don't think has a simple solution. That said, there are a few relatively easy things that I think would help a great deal:
1) Raise property taxes (how much? I don't know: double, triple, quintuple, octuple? What's a bigger adjective than that? It should be by whatever multiple it takes) on any property that's not a primary residence for someone. At some level it becomes worth it to rent out your investment or AirBnB property to someone who'll actually live in it.
2) Restore the train line into town (and probably electrify it, too), then run regular commuter trains throughout the day. The right-of-way still exists, and is currently used for touristy sight-seeing and dining trains. Those can still run, but they're terribly inefficient as the only users of the rails. The goal should be to get workers cheaply to work, and tourists off the roads.
3) Charge a congestion fee to anyone who still chooses to drive. I'd make it $300 for a permit that's good for a year: that hits the tourists really hard (and helps subsidize the train), but should be relatively affordable for anyone who works or lives in town.
I dunno. I'm not really arguing with you, but I do want to make the point that the economics of tourist towns are weird, and at least some of the locals' resentment is driven less by entitlement than by economic forces, and enforced changes, that really are hurting them.