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Comment by chris_f | Hacker News Reader

Would have liked to seen the article list more of the specific towns. Just searched around and found this article [0], but only a few western towns were mentioned and most of the places listed are quite expensive.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/irenelevine/2020/09/15/zoom-tow...

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They can't mention any specific towns because doing so would easily falsify their narrative. There's no evidence that moving from a major city to a smaller city of this type has accelerated due to COVID, and there's plenty of objective evidence that the rate of change of address in the US has actually slowed slightly due to COVID. The paper this article mentions deals entirely with issues prior to 2020. The article itself is merely the latest symptom of a memetic disease among journalists.

I find this interesting as someone who has been talking to real estate agents and property managers for several weeks now, albeit in a likely biased urban area. What I am hearing and seeing is an immense difficulty of leasing agents and private lessors finding tenants (far more move outs and record vacancy), which is leading to a persistent decline in lease rates and increase of ancillary financial benefits (e.g., free parking) … in the urban areas, while the farther away and cheaper less urban areas are seeing a slight uptick. I am also hearing real estate agents describe how people are taking up the opportunity of the low mortgage rates, but also that the distribution seems to be away from cities or urban populations.

If you start looking, you will find places like high end apartment complexes with many amenities that are close to public transportation offering deals and discounts with inventory that would have never existed in the past. You will also start noticing that the lease lengths are also clearly formed to align with some kind of forecasting or predictions being made in hopes that the next moving season will normalize thing; well beyond what is normally expected.

I'm definitely seeing a lot of anecdotes of people letting leases in eastern SF high rises expire, and moving to other accommodations nearby. I think this is a product of the fact that those SF buildings and those SF neighborhoods were always fundamentally undesirable and those people were only kept in place because they needed access to their jobs and our terrible transportation system was failing them. But these anecdotes involve people moving to Berkeley, not Moab.

For the Bay Area specifically there are also tens of thousands of apartments being completed right now, including about 10k in SF and several 1000s in downtown Oakland. This will naturally reduce rents.

The Bay Area has consistently increases the amount of commercial space much faster than residential space. This has prevented new development from actually lowering rental prices for decades. Thus looking only at the amount of new apartments on it’s own is a completely meaningless statistic.

Indeed, but marginal production will still tend to lower prices.

The thing is that Bay Area real estate price pressure is supported by the arrival of people from abroad, and this process has come to an abrupt halt. Prices will go down. This does not provide evidence of an accelerating process of people moving to Moab, Utah.

As a recent South Bay emigrant, I'm sympathetic to your point of view, but the current listings make it hard for me to completely buy it. Rents for low end 1 bedroom apartments in Mountain View seem to be down about 20% from a year ago. The apartment I left is still vacant a month on despite being listed much lower than what I was paying. I don't think a mere tens of thousands of new units accounts for a drop in rents that seems to be nearly unprecedented in both magnitude and geographic scope.

It's not just the new units, it's also that the overseas arrival process has halted while the domestic departure process is ongoing. But this is not evidence of an accelerating migration from large to small cities.

>there's plenty of objective evidence that the rate of change of address in the US has actually slowed

Is there evidence that migration in and out of cities/states has slowed, or just that rate of address change has slowed. Both can be true at the same time. You can have fewer people switching apartments in city, while also having more move out of state or county.

Sheesh, some of the towns/areas listed are really expensive under normal conditions!

Yeah, I agree. I'm not an academic, but I could not find the data on which towns were surveyed in 5 minutes looking at the source paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2020.1...

The "supplemental material" link on that page provides a technical appendix which lists their criteria for determining these communities.[0] They list the subset of communities where they actually interviewed a representative. It includes such unknown places as South Lake Tahoe, Aspen, Telluride, Park City, and Jackson.

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/suppl/10.1080/01944363.2020....

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