Small cities in America’s Mountain West are booming

That sentiment isn't unique to small towns either.

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 recall with some relish a comment I read on the Seattle subreddit a while back. The commenter was furious at how all of the recent transplants were screwing up their previously wonderful city. Eventually, they happened to mention that they themselves had moved to Seattle from California less than a year prior.

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’ve lived in a small city for the past 20 years that went from being a very sleepy, homogenous, and cheap to crowded, busy, and expensive. Both conditions have their pros and cons. Restaurants and night life used to be dull and limited, office jobs were fairly scarce and there was a culture of aggressive ignorance. Those things have improved but now lower income people can’t afford to live in an apartment without sharing with multiple roommates, crime, drug abuse and homelessness are exploding where they were at practically 0 before, home ownership is out of reach for a lot of people and many of the unique local businesses and institutions have collapsed due to rent increases. As far as I can tell, most people are on average worse off than they were before, there’s less of a sense of community, people are more rushed and have less time to relax and socialize, there isn’t the same level of trust between strangers and a hundred other little things. Maybe people were a bit poorer and more intolerant of outsiders before but a lot has been lost for only a little improvement.

> The one constant is: "Everything was great until shortly after I relocated here and you people moved in." A week doesn't go by here where a long-time resident doesn't write an op-ed for our tiny newspaper with this exact message, and delusional descriptions of how their once-great town is now a hellscape.

Twist of twists: Isn't this almost exactly what people have been saying about the Bay Area?

I don’t think there’s a convincing argument to be made for complaining about new full-time residents. For second homes and Airbnb’s however, I see a lot of potential for degradation that comes from having transient community members of that aren’t fully vested in the well-being of the local social & economic landscape. I think that measures such as additional taxation on secondary homes or blocking municipal voting rights of people who don’t live their for at least half the year, would do a lot to blunt the downsides of outside interest. But afaik I haven’t seen such things being put forward.

It's a recurring theme. People spend decades taming and beautifying a place. Then people with no respect or appreciation come and love all the "nature" and turn the place into exactly what they were trying to leave behind.

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?

Every time I go to Hawaii I try to start a conversation with a “local” and pretend to be a Californian exploring the island looking to move and buy a house. It’s really weird to me how not self aware people are. Last example few years ago was a guy from Kentucky who had moved in 2000s and started bitching about me relocating.

Hah. About forty-five years ago in Denver, I listened to a conversation between two women, natives of Colorado. One thought that all non-natives should be given short notice to vacate or else, the other thought that was impractical. (Hey, she'd lived in Virginia for a while.)

> I continue to be amazed by the overt disdain long-time locals have for second home owners

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.

You're right that a lot of the entitled screaming is ridiculous, but I think you're missing some of the very real problems that come with an influx of new money and (especially) second homes.

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.

Listen, nearly everyone largely agrees that wealth inequality at the current US level is bad.

Wealthy people moving to low-cost areas (and thus raising cost of living) accelerates inequality for a few reasons.

1) Unlike you scenario, many working-class people in places like Sedona can only afford to rent their homes (25% of total, give or take in Sedona). These people incur huge monetary costs in being forced to move / switch jobs / etc.

2) Moving causes people to lose social capital. Laugh all you want, but going from a tight-knit neighborhood of peers to a new town of strangers creates costs, at least in the short term. No one to watch your kids, no one to give you a ride if your car breaks down, etc.

3) Even for those who stay, they lose power, since their new wealthy residents likely have better lobbying sway (e.g., the new bus to the airport causes service to decrease to job centers, etc.)

I don't disagree that certain locals benefit from gentrification (parent comment made the same point), but your capitalism-enabled lack of empathy for those who don't benefit is why people are warming to the ideas of socialism. So if you don't want that, I'd tread carefully & try to be a bit more empathetic.

I couldn't agree more.

I was born in the US to Asian Indian parents. We lived in a small town in the southern US and dealt with a lot of racist crap. I went to college in a big city and while racism still exists the majority do not have racist views and are more accepting of people that do not look like them.

I've travelled to 47 states and I am most scared when I am in a small town in the mountain west. Burns, Oregon. Moscow, Idaho. Everyone was staring at me in the grocery store. I got some intimidating comments like "Are you new in town?" "No, just passing through." "Good."

Not welcoming in the slightest.

I grew up in one of those places. How else would I have developed such disdain for that economic model?

Replacement of whatever (necessarily small, otherwise the big city money wouldn't be a problem) industry there is/was with entertainment and tourism isn't the issue. The reality of an economy that is dependent on a specific image or perception (many would say facade) of quaintness is the problem.

You get all sorts of terrible "crab-bucket-esque" feedback loops that quash people's desire to do anything different, innovative or ambitious for fear of harming the golden goose. A large fraction of the people who actually want to do things (boring old normal business endavours that underpin a sustainable economy) leave because whatever their trade is doing it elsewhere and not putting up with all the extra overhead crap of doing it in a tourism/entertainment economy. The fact that a much larg(er than in a "normal economy) portion of the customers any given business sees will only ever transact with them ones creates a bunch of perverse incentives to do dishonest business.

It's like everything that's wrong with a college town combined with everything that's wrong with a wealthy retirement community.

Edit: strike CT from that list of examples, I was going for a "Cape cod but in the NYC economic region" and that part of CT is more like NYC's wealthy NJ suburbs.

Lived in Vail for 4 years. I wouldn't say that they are exaggerating...

Yeah. Even so, not sure how representative Fairfield County is of CT in general. On the one hand, it's the de facto bedroom for people who work in NYC. On the other, because it's the bedroom, you will see a different spread of economic activity. Go further north and you have manufacturing and pharmaceuticals and engineering as well as insurance. The state probably could do a lot more to promote businesses, but it will need to consider that they're basically sandwiched between Boston and NYC (which they probably have). Also, I read that Covid has actually been good for states like CT because with the exodus from large cities, people have moved or started business in the state. Companies have also canceled their plans to move to places like NYC (GE did move to Boston, but Aetna canceled its plans to move to NYC). I wouldn't be surprised if NJ also benefited similarly (and NJ is also a state sandwiched between two large cities, NYC and Philly).

COVID and the resulting remote work might actually be contributing to a better distribution of wealth in the country in general. It might depress salaries for industries that have concentrated in places like SFV and NYC, and thus create incentives to move out of those areas and create less drastic occupational concentrations in some industries. These changes will create conditions that create secondary benefits.

Hello fellow Fairfield County native, there must be literally dozens of us on HN!

The quality of life is not zero-sum, bot on a local level and a short timeframe, many things are indeed zero sum.

The best example is land & desirable real estate. It only takes a few people with "outside" money to drive up prices in the market or to purchase land and sit on it in perpetuity, driving up prices by taking it out of the local supply.

Governments should definitely think this through. A good example of the tragedy of the commons and QOL is driving/private automobiles. Once you get enough of them around, QOL goes way down. Who wants to live next to a 5 lane road with speeding cars? They are noisy, polluting, and dangerous, but also so exceptionally convenient for the one that is driving.

This is a more complex problem than it is in many other regions of the country.

For the most obvious - Once you're off a municipal water supply (which of course, has to have an adequate source of water in the region), available water resources/aquifers are often very limited and minimum lot sizes have to be large because the land can't support higher density housing.

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If you build anything even approaching "normal" suburban SFH housing, you're just going to have all the wells you'll have to sink run dry in a few months and the properties will be uninhabitable. Seeing a 2 acre minimum lot size isn't necessarily a "keep the poor people out" thing.

To be clear, I am mostly not referring to the cities mentioned in this article, but housing development in smaller mountain towns and the rural/semi-rural areas up in the mountains.

It only takes a handful of non locals to move in and start showing up at council meetings. Don’t of this blame solely on locals.

So the answer to beautiful mountain towns, is to destroy the beauty so we can build on it and remove the reason people come to visit/escape?

mmmkay

Honestly, no. Just because you have a hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.

Complete zoning and policy failure is a uniquely California problem. Nobody has a structural, and likely unconstitutional inequity in taxation that California does. Some rando Bay Area suburb being more expensive than Manhattan is not the same problem.

It has little to do with zoning and everything to do with economic incentives that drive out anyone high achieving or with a conscience and retain/reward swindlers and those who can't escape.

I agree with this sentiment in cities, however, I believe that this approach in the mountains would result in skyscrapers being built in areas of natural beauty, and be harmful to all of the wildlife that live there. The Eagle (Vail) Valley is relatively small to begin with.

But what good does it do a local if the price of their house explodes? Less than none (less because their property tax goes up), until they sell. But once they sell, if they keep the gains, then they can't buy another house locally. So the only way the increase in price helps locals is when they quit being a local.

If this is happening to your town, the town has a choice: The newcomers are coming. Are they going to live alongside the long term locals, or are they going to replace them? Are the locals going to get rich and leave, or are they going to remain poor and stay? "Get rich and stay" is not an option.

Most people who are trying to live somewhere don't want their house price exploding, because then they get forced out by rising taxes and insurance.

Or because they don't want to live in a giant anthill?

They are not obliged give any piece of their land to the people who want to live there. It's in their interest to fight to preserve local communities and local businesses, putting obstacles to the "nomads" and corporations.

I think the whole point is that the locals don't want their town to turn into another urban hellhole.

My late paternal grandmother (1 of 9 from a rare single mother) was from there. Cranberry bogs.

You can increase your "street-smarts" by getting out of your comfort zone, by choice or circumstances, and with life experiences. I locale and talk to the saner homeless people, especially the older who are just there by personal circumstances: I met a former teacher and elevator repairman who makes money today as a tutor; a former hippie, Navy radar and aircraft electronics technician, and Apple II rework technician; and a law school dropout, former hippie, merchant marine, and writer for the Village Voice and the NY Daily News.

Check out this excellent HBO documentary on the topic. https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/heroin-cape-cod-usa

cant upvote this true and tragic comment due to sadness

Tiered property taxation hasn't solved the the problems OP has described for Oahu; or Hawaii as a whole for that matter.

For example, Local NIMBYist restrictions, mostly those individuals that have resided there for a long time (and have the lower property tax rate you describe), have resulted in areas immediately adjacent to 40-story downtown developments being zoned exclusively for single-family homes; see Kaimuki, Upper Tantalus, Manoa, Punchbowl (to an extent), etc. Consequently, even homes built over 80 yrs ago with only ~1,300 sqft sell for about $1.1 million; https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1001-Belser-St-Honolulu-H....

The majority of people employed in hospitality and trades that support the local tourist economy (electricians, masons, carpenters, etc.) are increasingly driven to the west side; where commutes to the city can easily be 1-2 hours normally (pre-COVID). This eventually becomes such a stressor that many of the people working these skilled trades leave for the mainland.

Prices shouldn't rise if you are allowed to build enough supply to meet demand. A lack of property interest isn't necessarily a bad thing for a place. Land isn't for speculation, it's for use.

Do you believe the alternative is the town dying? I come from a place that is the furthest from a tourist destination you can imagine, and it was booming with local businesses in the 70's and 80's and they died all the same, they just weren't replaced by anything.

> towns of that type had to be mostly independent in terms of income for money inflow....small factories, mining, farming and ranching, etc.

> I'd say that this movement of people who can afford it just another side effect of something bigger.

It sort of sounds like you answer your own question (/hypothesis): consolidation of industry. Which also seems to be a pretty big driver in wealth inequality. I've no idea what the correct response is here -- greater regulation to increase competition, so that there are more smaller players across any given industry? Who knows.

>If its ok for a young person to leave their hometown, move to a city and call it home to make a better life without thinking about the locals, then it must be ok for a person with a small family living in a city to move to a smaller town and call it home to make a better life for his/her family.

The reason that theses two scenarios are not equivalent is so obvious I'm wondering whether or not I'm misinterpreting it.

Why is it a fight? Why can't the locals be growing and changing and improving with the outsiders? The outsiders are changing themselves.

Most teenager everywhere across the globe think their hometown sucks, even those living in the biggest cities.

Such is the mind of a teenager.

I agree that kids in an urban environment can be very rewarding. I disagree that the urban environment found in the Bay Area is conducive to kids. Visiting the local park is great. Visiting the local park when the walk is littered with human excrement and discarded needles, not so much. No parent in their right mind would ever go on the BART with a child.

I raised a child in the middle of a city from age 0-8 and it was great. So much to do! Parks, botanical gardens, playgrounds, museums, swimming pools, fun fares, concerts and so on, all within walking distance or at worst a short bus ride.

Or they make friends in the new place.

I think the sentiment is clear. Their question was what would those people holding this sentiment suggest be done? That outsiders go back to where they came from? That because someone makes money they are obligated to stay in a high cost of living area?

And destroys many aspects that made moving appealing in the first place.

Yep.

There's no shortage of small towns in the US. If I threw a dart at a map of the US, I'd probably hit near one. (OK, a lot of the West is federal land but there are a lot of them.) There are a lot fewer that:

- Are in a climate you prefer

- Have recreational options you like

- Are perhaps gentrified to the degree they have food/cultural options you want

- Are perhaps at least reasonably accessible to major city/airport

- Aren't too susceptible to natural disasters

- etc.

Yes, it was. I took a 15% cut. It's still a financial win, given the lower cost of living, lower taxes, and cheaper real estate. I'm finally able to buy a house.

I don't think that the experience in the middle of a global pandemic generalizes.

I would say a lack of buffer capacity from fewer options for a given thing is huge. I've lived in small cities and currently live in a huge one. In a small city, yes, you might have one of most of your hobbies represented. But maybe there is literally only one Indian restaurant, only one golf course, only one movie theater, only one bar, only one car dealership, only one grocery store, etc. If that one thing sucks, you have literally no alternative. You have to deal with it.

Versus in the city I live in now, there are almost a dozen public courses in a reasonable drive. Dozens of car dealerships. Dozens of hiking trails. Dozens of beaches. Dozens and dozens of everything. I can vet options. I can do the same activity in different settings easily. If I am in one area of town, I have flexibility to find options in that area rather than going with my usual option close to me. I have choice. I have agency. I can take my business elsewhere if I need to, and come out better from it thanks to this huge population being able to support a variety of choices for any niche interest I might have.

And of course in the old days the argument was you could just make do with online shopping. But these days the signal to noise ratio on the internet is so pathetically low, I really value actually holding an object I buy in my hand before I get fleeced buying something online once again. Reviews can't be trusted. Images can't be trusted. I trust my eyes and my hands and if the price is fair, taking it home with me is the best deal on shipping there is. Being in a huge city means there are a lot of brick and mortar businesses. Businesses that probably closed years ago with the death of main streets in smaller cities and towns, but thrive here thanks to a huge population being able to sustain more businesses in a given area, even if many people opt to online shop.

It is not fundamental difference between small vs big city. Options, people and culture are different in this city versus different city - no matter which one is larger.

Say you liked boardgames with friends. The new city have different people, the play different games, you dont like either new games or new people. Say you liked swimming and the swimming pools in new city are too full or otherwise dont suit you. You liked going to local beginner art/dance club, but new place dont have equivalent.

Moving to different place, especially when the environment changes comes with changes in lifestyle you may or may not welcome.

How many temporary moves end up permanent because while there they built those systems?

I'm confused, how is owning a bar or cafe in a hot spot an immoral activity?

Great article! I knew that orchards were part of SV's ag history, but I didn't know about Andy's and that'd be fun to visit.

And the orchards of Orange County, California.

The way I look at it is that every popular community does have to make decisions about what is / isn't going to be part of its yard (front or back), but that optimizing for either economic accessibility or quality of life can be hard, and going for both is considerably harder. Good policy is difficult (and rarely aligns with either simple economic ideology or social aesthetics).

That said, I can't help but wonder if it is possible to shape how people buy. For example, with the existing very limited housing stock being exacerbated with large capital chasing it, I'm inclined to think that there should be property taxes that are a function of housing one already owns in a given market and supply on the market. So... want to buy a new house and keep your old one to rent out? Want to buy a third in a market where there isn't two weeks of supply on the market? Maybe you'll pay a bit more, both on the transactions and yearly. Want to buy your twelfth or twentieth unit as part of a fund or trust in a market where there isn't a week of supply on the market? Maybe you're going to get hit hard, and you should try to find some other productive use for your capital.

A lot of these people are really only moving into the interior mountain towns because places like coastal California where the economic activity is that allows them to pile up this kind of wealth has become prohibitively expensive due to their own NIMBY regimes.

They aren't unknown now, they're less expensive because they are less desirable than less humid places with bigger mountains in the west.

YMMV on this one. In my part of the midwest, home and land prices have almost doubled in the last year, and went up about 6x since we built our house (about 8 years ago).

Two reasons:

(What used to be called) Yuppies moving out here and working remotely to 'get more in touch with nature' (read: start a blog or something about sustainable living that is really only possible if one of you has a 100k+ salary) and investors from out of the area are purchasing land as an investment. Both of these things drive the cost WAY out of the range of what is (a) reasonable, or (b) attainable.

I'm over the whole thing. In an area where the median family income is around 55k/year, anyone that makes double that as a single individual can live like a king. Consequence: none of us that live here can afford the increase in taxes, home values, or property values anymore.

Quality of Life is in the eye of the beholder. A fair number of people do prefer cities.

But to my own example. I live an hour drive out from a major city so, in normal times, within fairly easy range of going in for a night of theater or whatever. But between myself and a couple of neighbors where I live, while not really rural, we're on about 100 acres between us.

Where I live now, I'm 1-6 hours by train from Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and a bunch of other cool cities. Not having to drive to "go out" is awesome.

Giving up cars usually means getting good public transport. That's a trade I happily made.

I'm aware. I was using it as an expression for how binary a lot of people assume urban vs. rural is.

Especially with the fear of inflation, you are 100% correct. I think this bubble has been created by interests being too low for too long. Keeping your money in the bank is barely better than putting it under the matters. So where does it go? Stock market, real estate and crypto. What else could anyone do? It seems like more and more people are becoming angel investors too, but that's not any better and certainly not an option for most people

80 year cycle won’t last much longer.

Bend has 100k people, and the Bend metro area has 200k people. If it used to be considered quiet, it most certainly isn’t now.

He's not complaining lol just stating a fact. If the fact is that it takes 7 hours to drive into the mountains... that's important to know, if you're thinking of moving there.

All the OutdoorsBro(tm) that I know are moving to Denver, so idk if I would even like it.

I'm not sure how you determined I was complaining from a comment that is simply pointing out a fact. The individual I replied to asked if bad traffic was true or not, and I indicated it is.