(By the way, the county where I grew up is considered 'progressive' due to its proximity to the NOVA area)

I grew up in the American south, and migrated to California as an adult. As a Black person I can say this doesn’t work as well in practice. It’s better than the old days (when my mom was growing up segregation was still legal and the military warned her parents to be back on base before sunset.) But I’d much rather live in a welcoming area.

There's "be the change you want to see", and then there's "move to a place where you're likely to murdered in the street for pointless, intractable reasons." I can't say I blame you for getting the hell out; I just hope that in our lifetime you feel comfortable going back to where you grew up.

The weather's great (except for the hurricanes) and the barbecue is amazing (except in the Carolinas). Maybe one day you can get back here and we can all work together on fixing whatever the hell is wrong with (some of) the people.

how dare you

Living in a place with no amenities, an extremely regressive/borderline extreme social climate and a lack of economic opportunity for people who don’t have remote tech jobs and it gets depressing really fast. Also when you try to buy healthy food from a dollar general.

Certified brown person here. The only thing I think about in terms of deciding where to stop is how far I can get before needing gas, and what the odds of finding decent food are. I've travelled in rural areas all over the country: midwest (my wife grew up in rural iowa), west coast (wife's family is from the rural oregon coast), and south (worked a summer in southern virginia, my best friend lived in south georgia for a decade). I just got back from a road trip through rural Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming with my white wife, mixed kids, and Latina au pair. In all this time nobody has even looked at me sideways.

Hell, the precinct where I live went for Trump 58-34 in 2016 (the year I moved here). The precinct a few minutes away where my parents live was 57-32. Most of the ones around us were 60-30. Again, no problems.

I have to agree with the sibling comment. I have no idea how these folks would perform on an IAT (and I don't care because they're bad science: https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...). Southerners are nice to visitors and keep their thoughts to themselves for the most part. I'd rather deal with that than west coast frigidity or NYC aggressiveness.

As someone who recently made the jump to a rural area, these problems are almost entirely imaginary. The notion of backwards, ignorant, racist rednecks occupying all the rural lands is nothing but a bigoted stereotype.

Southern hospitality is real; and while rural peoples will be more likely to notice and acknowledge cultural differences, they generally are open minded and just as respectful of nonwhite neighbors as white ones. It's the city folk who don't understand the roles that politeness and respect play in southern living, necessary for the unbelievably high trust society that only really exists outside of cities.

The truth is that urbanites have been hypersensitized to so called racism, and completely mislead as to what rural/conservative culture is actually like. But I don't mind a bit, that means more cheap land for me.

Appalachian culture is extremely insular, even with respect to other white people. I once had a conversation with a (white) guy who had married into a family in Appalachian Kentucky. Folks in town regarded him as an outsider even after a decade of living there.

Culture has changed somewhat since then. I don't presume to speak for anyone's experience but my own, and I go off of the stories that my friends have told me for other things.

That said, Trump flags fly everywhere, and BLM flags get torn down/burned/vandalized. I don't think its really fair to say that its all politeness and mutual respect - in my experience that is how it is until you accidently fall into one of the cultural battlegrounds, and then its more conform or die. Lastly..

> The truth is that urbanites have been hypersensitized to so called racism

I think this can be true while the rest can also be true.

I suppose you could say that ruralites are more tolerant of intolerance in general, even when they individually may be welcoming. No argument about the flags around here...but I get the impression that, at least where I've settled, even if you're a little different, if you stick to your property and don't make waves nobody is likely to mess with you...and to be honest I kind of appreciate that sort of live and let live attitude, even if it requires some degree of conformity.

As far as I can tell, a somewhat rigid common culture is sort of the price of high trust living, where you can leave your doors unlocked and your keys on the porch. That doesn't justify violence against minorities/lgbt of course but... there's always the city for that I suppose. It's definitely a very different non-pc attitude around here. I certainly understand why a guy like Trump is so popular in these parts.

I think there's also an element of cultural mismatch. Trevor Noah has a great passage in his autobiography about how he could cross the intense inter-tribal antipathies in South Africa by speaking another tribe's language: https://www.josephineelia.com/power-of-language. Rural places in America are like places everywhere else in the world--you have to "speak the language" of the people in the place where you are. If you go to rural France and conspicuously don't speak French, you'll face hostility. Obviously in America we speak English everywhere, but if your mannerisms and attitudes give you away as an outsider, you might not get the same warm reaction as someone who knows the cultural cues.

Totally unviable for tech workers to live in most of the solid red areas of the country strictly due internet capabilities, or lack thereof.

This summer the phone company has been pulling fiber all over the place. I was told that it's not going to be put in use until next year, but at least they're planning ahead.

Especially after the last year and a half of distance learning and working from home, there is a big push all over the place to get faster internet connections because the people already living out here are demanding it.

I’m looking at this move myself and the final decision point is state taxes (TN, WA, FL) or fiber/cheap homes (largely Western NC and GA), both paired with some cool nature.

All ears on places with $200k and below homes and fiber, quite candidly.

Also, FWIW, I meant more rural areas than just "red states". Even in solidly republican states there is a fairly prominent urban/rural divide.

As selfish as this may sound, the last thing we need is more foreign competition on the housing market with bigger pockets.

It would be fair that if people from the US want to buy property here with their foreign megabucks, we should also get unrestricted visa-free access to the US labor market. Tit for tat. Otherwise it's just unfair to Europeans to be outspent out of their own housing market.

Just because the country is profiting from your megabucks, doesn't mean the average Joe is.

Look at Austria. The most touristic areas are profiting a lot from all that foreign tourist money, but a lot of the locals can't afford to live there anymore as all that tourist money is only going into a few pockets. Those who don't already own something or have an inheritance have been royaly fucked by that tourist money. It increases inequality between the haves and the have-nots.

If the middle class are the ones buying the properties, then they're the ones selling them. Therefore it actually injects money into the middle class, foreign capital that never existed in that country.

>he most touristic areas are profiting a lot from all that foreign tourist money, but a lot of the locals can't afford to live there anymore as all that tourist money

Those who move to a country to work and live there on anything but a very short term basis on not generally considered tourists. Most of the money flowing into the rich is a function of capitalism, not just tourism. You can examine virtually any industry and make the same statement. Yet, some fraction of money is usually better than nothing for the middle class people benefitting.

The US has your Austrian analogue, it is called Hawaii. In Hawaii most money is made from tourism. The common person there is mostly employed in tourism. Housing prices are high, because lots of people want to live there. The result when it was mostly closed off for coronavirus was that although demand for housing decreased, unemployment skyrocketed without tourism, making the middle class worse off.

Sorry but since you make no distinction between someone owning and selling a house ($500k asset in Austria) and someone who doesn't own a house and call them both middles class is just plain wrong.

The property owner middle classer is significantly better off than than the other and would benefit even more from your intention of buying while the other middle classer is worse off without a property to his name and will suffer more from being in competition with you.

Sure, one guy profits, but you can't possibly tell me with a straight face someone else doesn't get screwed from this wealth driven game of music chairs which is the property market right now.

value of house + value of rest of economy.

Now someone foreign comes into the country to live there and work in tech from abroad. They buy a house. Now the wealth inside the country looks like this:

value of house + foreign money paid for house + value of rest of country.

You can see that the wealth inside the country has increased. If it is the middle class owning those houses, then the wealth of middle class has changed by the difference in value between the value of the house and what it was sold for. The middle class then further benefits from whatever money the foreign worker spends in the country, which is a net gain for the middle class, plus the injection into the economy of the foreign money paid for the house. The only way the middle class end up worse off here is if the foreigner doesn't live and work here, and is just a foreign landlord (siphoning money out of the country) -- which is something I think we can both agree is detrimental.

I will say here in the US people have a lot of problems with foreign landlords and people who buy property here and don't live here. But only the most backwards rednecks have serious issue with an honest foreigner who buys a normal middle class house to live their lives, especially if they are injecting foreign capital into our economy.

>districts of Berlin were like a quarter of Bay Area housing

So what? Nothing touches Bay Area prices, even in the US. And then there's the income difference as well.

Try comparing to something more similar like Texas. Last I checked average dev wages in Austin are easily 2x more than average dev wages in Berlin while buying a house there costs the same. So who's buying power is stronger then?

Buying something decent in Germany now, in the current market is nearly impossible without an inheritance.

See this report for details: https://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/675

It doesn't say that rich young people are replacing old.

It just says that wealthy & older people are leaving in big enough numbers that there's a sizeable ourmigration.

It's important to note that natural born residents have been fleeing California for a long time, and a substantial portion of the young, high paid workers are on H1B - so non-permanent.