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It's not about how much money you have, it's about what you do with it. Do you match your standard of living to those around you, or do you distort the environment to provide you with what you desire regardless of what those around you have? Do you isolate yourself except for your spending, or do you participate in the community in the ways expected of a local? Are you living there to live there, or are you living there for financial reasons?

If your goal isn't to live like a colonial master, make sure your execution doesn't look like an attempt at colonialism. That principle should get you 99% of the way there.

This.

People don't care that you're there. They care that you are making boutique $15 sandwich shop(s) a viable business where they were not previously causing rent to go up driving the burger joint they loved out of business or whatever.

Ideally you've retire to Arizona or Florida or some other traditional retirement or tourism destination with an economy has had an influx of money for a long time and reached equilibrium. In lieu of that the next best thing is assimilating and living like the locals.

That's not really the problem. The big problem is that people who move from a HCOL to a less or low cost of living place are able to pay more for housing than people who live in the local economy.

This doctor is a great example of it. He makes more than an Austin doctor, he probably is buying or renting at the top end of the market and driving up prices.

I live in Portland, Oregon. Pretty much every who lives here has had a conversation with a Californian transplant who raves about how cheap the housing is, when most people will never dream of owning a home here.

The housing is just one aspect. They do this the same thing to the entire economy.

Can you give an example of this? I haven't personally experienced my everyday cost of living of going up due to other factors.
The only thing I've really experienced is the price of real estate/rents causing businesses to charge more, but that's still fundamentally tied to housing/real estate.

In regards to transplants moving to my area

Say a bunch of rich people move in and want their lawns to be perfect and are willing to pay for the service. Your landscaper is going to up his rates for his normal services to reflect the fact that time spent doing those is time spent not mowing some rich guy's lawn.

You're just describing supply and demand. You've provided two hypotheticals that I've never seen borne out in reality.

Rich people generally want to pay the least amount of money for lawn service like everyone else. Can you point to actual real life examples where something like lawn care became unaffordable due to rich transplants?

There are 'rich' boutique services everywhere. You haven't established how selling a $15 sandwich somehow makes running a cheap burger joint untenable.

There's only so much supply for lawn care, so some rich people moving in increases demand, raising prices. For the sandwich shop, there's only so much commercial real estate available, so $15 sandwich shops increase demand for real estate in that location, raising rents, and making the cheap burger joints either raise prices to pay rent, or go under to make room for more boutique restaurants.

>There's only so much supply for lawn care, so some rich people moving in increases demand, raising prices.

Again, any real examples of this? Lawn care supply is not finite. As demand goes up, more people will enter that profession.

>r the sandwich shop, there's only so much commercial real estate available, so $15 sandwich shops increase demand for real estate in that location, raising rents, and making the cheap burger joints either raise prices to pay rent, or go under to make room for more boutique restaurants.

That's not really true. Cheaper food options are almost always more profitable than high-end places.

The whole argument seems like nonsense that sounds like it might be true if you haven't thought about it very long.

>You're just describing supply and demand.

Yes, I am. That's not an excuse for anyone to ignore their effect on it.

>You've provided two hypotheticals that I've never seen borne out in reality.

The second example was taken from what I saw in my youth when an infrastructure project made my region noticeably more suitable as a retirement destination.

>There are 'rich' boutique services everywhere.

No there are not. For example there are three non-chain Mexican restaurants in Bangor Maine and none of them are upscale. I use this example because I was recently in Bangor and reviewed their menus on my phone before choosing which one to eat at.

>The second example was taken from what I saw in my youth when an infrastructure project made my region noticeably more suitable as a retirement destination

So your whole understanding of the topic comes from your childlike understanding of something in your youth?

>No there are not. For example there are three non-chain Mexican restaurants in Bangor Maine and none of them are upscale. I use this example because I was recently in Bangor and reviewed their menus on my phone before choosing which one to eat at.

I mean, you have to be just being silly at this point.

> Is it still thought of as OK at all to exploit another area's lower cost-of-living in this way

I think it is only a few terminally online people that object to this. In real life locals object to people coming in and buying second homes or renting out airbnbs, not new people moving into the area permanently.

I think the word Gentrification comes from real life.

> I think it is only a few terminally online people that object to this.

The reality of the matter is that the insane population growth of the 20th Century led to some pretty haphazard development (e.g. CDMX’s never ending sprawl).

This has made areas with livability amenities (e.g., walkable safe neighborhoods) relatively rare all things considered.

For various reasons, certain areas with good amenities remained isolated from broader real estate markets (e.g., living in CDMX would seem laughable to an American in the 1980s based on crime statistics alone).

Because of COVID, a lot of those areas are now a part of larger real estate markets.

The people who live there now realize that they can’t afford the prices that the larger market brings, so acting in self interest, they try to remain isolated from the market.

(In the vein if SF experiencing the worlds problems a decade before anywhere else) This is basically the story of SF’s Mission district over the past 20 years and why you’d see ridiculous things like people protesting new development because it had floor to ceiling windows.

It’s a weird phenomenon, but one that most people on this forum can’t really relate to.

Trust me, there are plenty of places where people object to new people moving into the area permanently. If you haven't seen this you've never lived in Montana, Northern Idaho, etc. Xenophobia against out-of-staters is practically the regional religion.

Which, to be honest, is not totally unjustified, these places are wonderful and people whose families have lived there for generations are finding themselves pushed out by the rising property values caused by the migration of people out of the rich cities and into their communities.

It's unfortunately a feature of our system- if you don't have money you don't get to live in good places. People are just justifiably unhappy with that particular feature acting on them.

Property values is just one part of the problem. A lot of the xenophobia is also due these migrants bringing their political opinions (and votes) with them.

I disagree, at least anecdotally. I spent most of my life in that region and after moving out of the area I can see it from both sides. The political thing is only marginally an issue. Yes, people in small (relative to the west coast) towns in Montana do think Californians are somewhat more left-leaning, but that's not ultimately an issue. This area of the country has a very 'rugged individualist' live-and-let-live attitude in that domain. It's much more an issue of rising property values literally destroying the communities that they once knew and turning them into mini-californias where they are no longer welcome. It's quite literally a case of not being able to afford to live where your family has lived for hundreds of years.

Literally no one west of the Mississippi has had their family live anywhere for "hundreds of years". I can see the case being made in Europe, but ultimately this in the US it's just transplants upset at other transplants. aka "I got mine, and therefore I want to close the door behind me".

You don't even need to bring your political opinions to f things up.

I know a guy who moves from CA to Idaho.

He complains people don't maintain their houses nicely enough.

He complains the dirt roads aren't graded well enough.

He complains that the super market doesn't have what he wants.

He complains that the way they do excavation is wrong (he's a septic guy by trade).

At literally every turn he complains that the locals are doing it wrong.

I've told him that the problem probably isn't the locals. (And I concur with what the other guy said about rising property values destroying communities.)

I agree with all of the above, but just to add a bonus bit of anecdata:

My parents now live in a red flyover state and complain about foreign Californians making everything too expensive and changing the local culture. To put it in perspective, my parents who are complaining have lived ~3x longer in California than they have in their new red state.

I love them, but not all of the people complaining about Californians are the people it would make much sense to get complaints from.

I think people will complain about newcomers of any type. That's just how it goes, all the way back the stone age. My opinion is that it does not matter. People will migrate, communities will change no matter who grumbles about it. It's a delusion — very likely a harmful one — to think they ever static in the first place, or should be prevented from changing.

Why would a rich guy moving someplace raise the prices for everyone else? Simple, because the people working there will charge the rich guy more!

The only reason gentrification exists is because local businesses see the influx of rich people as an opportunity to raise prices, not to simply have more customers. A mom and pop kebab place might become fancier to serve the rich guys, even though the owner could have totally kept their original business model without pricing out the locals.

In the end, it's always the same old: "for someone to buy there must be someone to sell, for someone to sell there must be someone to buy". At every step of the gebtrification process there are people who could stop it, but don't

> the owner could have totally kept their original business model without pricing out the locals

Their costs are increasing like everyone else's, especially if they're leasing the building. They may have no choice but to raise prices, even if they don't make the place fancier.

I would rent a house for a month in the area you're considering and ask the local people what they think. Some economies (particularly tourism-heavy ones) are better set up for integrating new rich neighbors than others.

Nova Scotia's still welcoming.

I like your point. I guess we can solve this with taxation. Maybe we want to tax frequent flights but not retirees. Depends on the goal people want to achieve. Every community has its own problems and ways to solve them.

Move wherever you want lol