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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Social mobility without money looks like the dustbowl, or Californian migrant farm workers.

Social mobility with money looks like second homes becoming first, with huge investments and then questions around socialised cost of roads, infrastructure in general.

If you do the local taxes right, it evens out, but the price of land and housing rises for the non-mobile locals and it makes for some awesome "you're not from around here" issues.

The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.

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>If you do the local taxes right, it evens out, but the price of land and housing rises for the non-mobile locals and it makes for some awesome "you're not from around here" issues.

>The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.

You're being far too nice by choosing the example of a digital nomad living in Bali.

A much closer to home and harder to ignore example is what SV money has done to places like Denver, Boulder and is doing to Boise.

I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.

And before any east-coasters or Mid-westerners start laughing, NYC money is doing a very good job destroying upstate, PA and VT. Masshole money is crapping all over NH and ME. Chicago is slowly eating more and more of Wisconsin and Michigan. This is a relatively universal problem at least in the US.

> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.

Can you go into more details? I feel like this is a dangerous kind of statement because it is hard to draw a line for people to say what shouldn't and should be.

Here is why the statement feels dangerous, it doesn't make arguments directly related to the group and can easily be expanded to: "But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when [people of color, poor people, lacking education, etc] move in. It shouldn't be that way."

Perspective is always valuable even applied to what would be the unpopular opinions.

>Here is why the statement feels dangerous, it doesn't make arguments directly related to the group and can easily be expanded to: "But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when [people of color, poor people, lacking education, etc] move in. It shouldn't be that way."

When poor people move in they don't have the resources to tell everyone else what to do and they don't tend to pick fights with whoever is there first. When rich people move in they get the government to cater to them and local laws change, often to the point where what was previously normal behavior (burning brush, discharging guns within city limits) is no longer even legal. They often pick fights with the local businesses ("I don't like how that second generation pig farm I knowingly bought property adjacent to smells" or they complain about the environmental impact of some third generation junkyard not because it's not folowing the law but because they find it unsighl). Furthermore they co-opt locals with their money. People who genuinely hate all the other changes they bring bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending more money at their business (or whatever) until it finally negatively affects them personally.

I would much, much, much rather have poor people move in than the white collar crowd because the former has bigger problems than me and the people around me Doing It Wrong(TM).

The sense of entitlement in statements like 'there first', 'previously normal behavior', 'co-opt locals', and 'bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending' is palpable. Sorry that you assumed everything was always going to stay the way you happened to like it just because people didn't have other options, but not sorry.

There's a very wide gulf between "stay the way you happened to like" and "change in ways that pretty much nobody likes but nobody has any power to do anything about"

> The sense of entitlement in statements like 'there first', 'previously normal behavior', 'co-opt locals', and 'bury their heads in the sand because the newcomers are spending' is palpable. Sorry that you assumed everything was always going to stay the way you happened to like it just because people didn't have other options, but not sorry.

Entitlement is people with money thinking they can and should be able to change existing communities to their liking, just because they have money.

It's weird, but there seems to be a common blind spot about certain kinds of wealth-enabled antisocial behavior.

It doesn't have to be a sense of entitlement. Many human societies around the world and through time give more priority to the idea that people build homes and community across time. The fact that we allow free movement into cities, towns and villages doesn't have to mean that "newcomers get an equal say" (although it certainly could). Why shouldn't a multi-generational community be able to say "we like it the way it is, and don't want random/arbitrary migration here to change that" ?

I can't think of any way to give people more say based on how long they've been invested in a place that couldn't also be trivially used for voter suppression.

I guess you could do preferential tax policy but that almost requires high taxes as a prerequisite which is a non-starter in a lot of places.

> I can't think of any way to give people more say based on how long they've been invested in a place that couldn't also be trivially used for voter suppression.

I don't think something like that necessarily needs to be some kind of constitutional mechanism. It could be a social norm, kinda like the ones that discourage people from casually insulting others and which punish them if they do.

Though I suppose if you're looking for a constitutional mechanism, clearly defined but longish residency requirements for voting probably wouldn't fall under the category of "voter suppression" (which I take to mean policies designed to indirectly disenfranchise certain kinds of voters for partisan political advantage).

> clearly defined but longish residency requirements for voting probably wouldn't fall under the category of "voter suppression" (which I take to mean policies designed to indirectly disenfranchise certain kinds of voters for partisan political advantage).

Until The Great Migration happens (or something like it), and suddenly the long residency requirements look precisely like racism ... unless, of course, you've had the in place for 300 years already.

I think that voting is among the least significant of the acts of "new arrivals", particularly if they have money.

You could add bans on smoking in all public spaces and plastic shopping bags as well

> A much closer to home and harder to ignore example is what SV money has done to places like Denver, Boulder and is doing to Boise.

> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.

Definitely agree. I live in Salt Lake City, and we're seeing the same thing here. A large part of it is failing to adapt to the local culture. I don't think it is just a growth thing, since Utah's population has been growing rapidly for a while due to the high Mormon population and it's only been recently, when the composition of new residents has changed that problems have started to surface.

> A large part of it is failing to adapt to the local culture.[0]

Did you mean to link an example of that with the [0]? I'm curious to read about that.

Oops, meant to add a footnote but then forgot. I don't have anything too specific. I will just add that Utah's culture, and how it functions as a state is shaped by being founded by Mormons and until recently having a very high percentage of Mormons in the total population. Mormonism is a high commitment religion in terms of the behaviors it expects members to follow and that led to a homogenous, high-trust society. As people move here from other places, typically coastal ones with progressive attitudes, they try to bring those values here and find that their policies don't work well in the political/cultural climate here.

As just one example, I'll take homelessness. Utah did so well with solving its homelessness crises until recently that you would find articles in Bloomberg, NYT, etc., asking "will Utah be the first state to solve homelessness?", stuff like that. The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services. When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.

For what it's worth, I'm not from Utah originally, I'm not religious at all, feel no desire to be so, and was never Mormon, though I have gone to a couple of their church services as a guest. So these are just my observations and I'm trying to be as fair as possible in giving them.

>The reason Utah was so good at dealing with homelessness was a strong coupling between the Mormon church providing social services, the police departments being lenient with the homeless, and the local governments helping to redirect the homeless to the church (social) services.

> When a new mayor was elected and a new person became police chief this balance was shaken up and the whole system came apart, so now our homelessness problem is about as bad as everywhere else.

You listed 3 reasons, 2 of which has to do with the church, the third reason changed with new mayor, so now it all fell apart?

What happeneded to the mormon social services? Were they not successful without the local government redirecting people to the church services (which should be illegal?, separation of church and state)

It fell apart because it required cooperation between the church, police, and the local government. Any one of those is potentially disruptive. And two changed. The social services still exist as far as I know but aren't as well utilized.

I don't think it is illegal for the government to redirect people to faith based charities, any more than it would be illegal to redirect them to secular charities, however, I am not a lawyer.

can you elaborate just a bit more? in your original post you made it seem like the church, police, and local government had some kind of stable cooperative dynamic on an institutional level. but then you say it fell apart in the aftermath of a single election without much explanation. are the new mayor and police chief taking things in a radically different direction, or was it just a temporary alignment between the leaders as individuals?

Another non-Mormon, non-religious immigrant to Utah chiming in here:

"which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.

Or more likely, it highlights a failing of the civic institutions' responsibilities to properly address the problem themselves, rather than relying on an external service provider, whatever the source. That is to say, in this day and age, a high-trust society should be unnecessary; these are basic services that state and local government need to be addressing, rather than budgeting only for the police department.

> "which should be illegal" - is exactly an example of the coastal attitudes that are disrupting a very well ordered, high trust society. Consider that this state basically solved the homeless problem by violating a sacred principle which, fully expressed in coastal cities, neither seems to actually help the homeless nor the residents around them. It's possible that the firewall between civic and religious institutions isn't a universal evil.

"Separation of Church and State" being a sacred principle is quite ironic.

I think one of the biggest political problems in the US right now is the fixation on dogma for its own sake. It's happening all over the political spectrum and predictably leads to the dysfunction of polarization (where factional dogmas conflict) or dysfunction of purity (where there's little dogmatic conflict, because the dogmas are always incomplete). We're probably overdue for an era of pragmatic compromise.

It should be illegal for the government to inform people of available services, even if some of them are provided by a church? No, separation of church and state is about each having their own, unique power structure and operating as independent organizations. Independent organizations should be perfectly capable of discussing services given by other organizations, especially if they don't offer any equivalents.

Now if they were busing them over and unloading them directly in the waiting hands of the church, without consent, then that sounds less like independent organizations.

So many car washes being built in Colorado now- why wash something that is going to be 50% hail dings in 2 years? But Californians love their cars, and Texans love their trucks...

> I don't know what it is. I don't know how to fix it. But there's some very, very, very wrong stuff that happens when richer people move in. It shouldn't be that way.

Like what?

The asymmetry of power/influence.

Like what specifically, this is a very abstract idea.

Hey, I live in Golden! What's being done in Denver/Boulder is happening in Golden.

It's not SV money ruining these cities - it's local restrictive zoning laws that limit the construction of new property, while driving up the price of new construction and existing construction.

Denver, Boulder, and Golden ALL have implemented severe growth caps:

From Attempt to emulate Boulder 1% growth limit across Front Range stirs controversy (Denver Post) [0]:

> Since Boulder in 1976 instituted a 2% limit on dwelling unit increases in city limits, the idea has proliferated. The city revised it down to 1% in 1995, the same year Hayes said he pushed a growth limit of the same rate into effect in Golden. This summer, Lakewood voters approved an almost identical municipal law local officials are in the process of implementing.

SV money isn't ruining cities. Their own city councils and legislators are catastrophically mis-managing their cities.

There is plenty of space for everyone who wants to live somewhere, if you let price signals coordinate a desire for various locations with an ability to pay to consume more or less land area.

I'm starting to build momentum for a fix in Golden, CO, but it sure feels like a long slog.

[0]: https://www.denverpost.com/2019/11/16/boulder-1-percent-grow...

Wait, do I read it right? The US cities legally limit the amount of houses that can be built in a year? Like, "this year, the total amount of construction must be no more than 2000 houses"? Seriously?

It's worse than that. US towns can have a patchwork of complex zoning rules where the answer to almost any development is "no", and when you do make it past the planning department, the neighbors are often able to block it. So there's no quota, instead you are trapped in months or years of uncertain red tape.

San Francisco is perhaps the worst, but these problems are widespread.

And all of those convoluted rules are why CA is forcing ADU's. It's the legislature basically telling towns to get it together or zoning goes bye bye.

And San Francisco also legally limits the square footage of office space that can be built. Prop M passed in 1986 by the voters. Thank Sue Hestor for this.

Is that a bad thing? If you're going to restrict residential construction, surely restricting office construction to match is a good thing?

Only the rich ones. You wanna build stuff in Buffalo or Detroit and they'll happily take your money in exchange for permits. (well, maybe not Detroit depending on what you want to build, they had a problem with too much housing not long ago but you get my point).

You do indeed read it almost exactly right. I would propose slight modifications, though. Maybe re-word it into:

> City councils legally prohibit landowners from adding dwelling units to their own property.

Remember - all this "pent up" demand for housing is a result of homeowners being denied permission to modify their own property.

Historically, all cities evolved from fields because landowners incrementally upgraded their own property, when the price of rents justified additional improvements.

In the 1920s, city councils gave themselves permission to prevent property modifications "for planning purposes", and the US Supreme Court never struck it down.

The early goals of zoning were explicitly laid out by the mayor of Atlanta in 1922[0], with gems like:

  Zoning will keep the apartments out of the private house sections. The coming of the apartment drives out the private home.

And:

  The residence districts are further subdivided into three race districts:
  
  R1 or white residence district.
  R2 or colored residence district.
  R3 or undetermined race district.

   The above race zoning is essential in the in interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race. Care has been taken to prevent discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other.

Nearly every US city still has R1, R2, and R3 zoning, though of course no one includes the racial element anymore.

I gave a high-level overview/rant on zoning, racism, and Denver here: https://twitter.com/josh_works/status/1294726871574179840

[0]: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan

I live and own a home in Denver but have been trying to move to Golden for 2 years now to have more room for my family and access to green space. I have bid on more than a dozen houses all over asking, 50%, waiving all kinds of inspection fixes and I have lost every time to all cash offers from out of state. While my experience may not be indicative of the market as a whole it certainly speaks to some sort of migration happening and "Golden" being on the list of these out of state people.

Hey! I just squeaked through a home purchase in Golden. Felt totally lucky.

My next order of business is to help other non-out-of-state-developers start moving to Golden.

Along the way I want to make golden become a more affordable place to live, and also an even more desirable place to live.

(I know - it's a tall order.)

I've been connecting with folks who live (or want to live) in the area.

Feel free to send me a message (email, twitter, whatever) and I'll try to help you in this goal!

I'd much rather you move in than some rich out-of-state-er who's working on their second vacation home.

> The write-ups of westerners working from Bali goes into a bit of this. Yes, it adds to the local economy. No, not always in constructive ways. Feeding young egos desire for european beer and fixing their skateboard falls costs time feeding local kids in schools and providing primary health care in a stretched local economy which is 10x lower down the scale.

Fake news. It pours foreign currency into a local economy that was already 80% based on tourism and which has a depreciating currency. Does selling tourists plastic trinkets and taking them on boat trips cost young local children plastic toys or prevent their fishermen dad from having his own longboat? Ofcourse not. Pre-COVID, money was being shoved as fast as it could possibly be shoved into a tiny island where people have tight-knit yet large family structures. All the locals on Bali are richer and better educated than they otherwise would be.

I think the worst thing about it may be that it's basically a classic case of the Resource Curse, except instead of oil they have beautiful beaches/etc.

Lastly, there isn't really a shortage of land. The island is 5,780 km². I've driven between all 4 coasts and 90% of the time you are seeing nothing but empty nature. https://mapfight.appspot.com/us.ct-vs-bali/connecticut-us-ba...

> All the locals on Bali are richer and better educated than they otherwise would be.

Not necessarily. In the early days, perhaps, when businesses were run by locals and the type of tourist who would go, would use local services.

Now as a place develops, outside money / developers / owners move in, providing higher quality accommodation, fine dining and the once local business owners are employed as cleaners for a pittance.

It is a pattern repeated since the 60s and 70s with the hippy trail when large amounts of people started to visit these places. Once pristine paradise locations are now over developed concrete monstrosities catering to the higher end - out pricing the travellers who first went to the place and the profits all exported to other places

Locals are more than capable of "providing higher quality accommodation."

> once local business owners

so their business didn't succeed. It's not the tourist's responsibility. Nor are the competition wrong to out-compete them.

That’s another way to look at it. Their business didn’t succeed because they could not possibly compete with outside money..

Their businesses failed precisely because they couldn't compete with big outside money and interests.

This kind of thinking is what makes capitalism so gross

this kind of thinking and capitalism is what gave you your comfortable lifestyle today.

>Fake news.

What?

Two words that, when leading off any statement about anything, will immediately disqualify the following statement from being taken seriously.

It's a fnord I wish would disappear completely. It makes me embarrassed as a speaker of the English language, just by proxy! Is this what it means to be getting old...

Yes. Hail Eris.

Seems like a writeup of some digital nomad living there right now, desiring to feel good about helping local economy. Not saying it isn't completely the case but you have some serious pink glasses on.

The money from tourism goes to elite few locals who own most of it, and it eventually slightly trickles down the rest of folks living there, the income disparity is on a level we simply don't see in the west. You won't see those folks since they still live in their tiny hut far from busy tourist centres of the south.

The idea of good western tourist money lifting equally everybody out of poverty is seriously naive, in any undeveloped country. Plus OP mentioned additional load on underfunded medical services.

Have you ever been to the Midwest? They aren’t running out of land. Las Vegas could expand into the desert for an extremely long time. There won’t be the same struggles that you have in coastal cities or exotic expat hot spots.

They are running out of water though.

Plenty of water. The problem is its being used to grow food for export.

I don’t want to starve

Then we should grow food in more places.

Where is there even marginally arable land and not food production? Well, I mean, except when there is suburban sprawl sitting on it, instead, which seems to be what you are proposing, rather ironically?

We should be smarter about what foods we "produce". No more meat subsidies, or better yet no more meat at all.

l> We should be smarter about what foods we "produce". No more meat subsidies, or better yet no more meat at all.

I'm with you on subsidies, but it's worth noting that historically, cattle, sheep, etc. were often raised and grazed on land that wasn't (and mostly still isn't) suitable for growing crops, usually because of some combination of elevation, slope[0], soil, or lack of rainfall. Animals are mobile, so you can move them around on a larger area with relatively sparse vegetation that humans don't consider palatable[1], or even migrate them seasonally on an even larger territory.

So, within some limits, animal husbandry in areas otherwise marginal for agriculture can convert poor ground cover to high quality protein (and other animal products). As long as overgrazing is avoided, this seems to me to be a decent and sustainable arrangement.

[0] Terraces can deal with slopes to an extent and slows erosion, but don't always conveniently lend themselves to large scale mechanized agriculture. Solutions to the other challenges also don't work everywhere.

[1] It's worth noting that the domesticated animal least picky about what plants they'll eat is the goat, many varieties of which, when not moved frequently enough, can completely denude an area by eating plants and bushes down to the ground, climb trees to eat all the leaves they can reach and even stripping the bark, which kills the tree. Which makes goatherding a likely driver of desertification in already stressed ecosystems.

growing food in fertile areas and then exporting it to places that need more food seems like a better use of resources than using it for the English gardens of suburban zoom tech workers

So... it sounds like other places have a fertility problem.

And no, the soil is being depleted of all minerals and life. It’s better to spread farming out.

yes indeed which is why markets have allocated resources in such a way that the regions that are very fertile make a lot of food and then sell it to places that aren't, rather than filling them with more terrible low density housing of which the US has already too much

We could do a lot to make water usage more sustainable.

Most places in the US get at least ten inches of precipitation annually. Very few get less than that.

With that much rainfall, a lot of homes can be self supporting with catchment systems, grey water reuse, etc.

Edit: Anyone interested in some best practices should look at what Fresno County is doing. They get an average of 11 inches of rain annually and they were basically desert before a canal system was built in the late 1800s.

In some years, their ground levels have risen because of their water policies and practices. In contrast, much of the rest of California and the Midwest are experiencing subsidence as water tables permanently and steadily fall.

They self-admittedly have a unique set of resources.

Natural Resources Fresno County is unique among California counties in the range of natural resources (forests, riverways, and wildlife habitats) that encompass its vast terrain.... Two major rivers, the Kings and San Joaquin, flow through this rich landscape, providing the County with its most prized resource, water.[0]

[0] -https://www.co.fresno.ca.us/departments/public-works-plannin...

Water tends to be the real constraint not land in the west. Is there enough water to feed that boom? Does the colorado river flow to the ocean?

Most of that water usage is agricultural though, 68% in Arizona and 86% in Colorado.

Yes, hence it's already in use by Ag

Presumably towns could easily afford to buy those water rights from farmers if needed. Many farmers use inefficient flood irrigation because water rights are so cheap it's not worth them investing in drip irrigation.

Yes. People can pay more for water than cows or corn. If water supply is a problem raise prices. Keep on raising them until it isn’t a problem. If some farmers go out of business that’s capitalism. No one owes farmers a livelihood any more than they owe factory workers one. Selling natural resources at below market prices is just a subsidy to the favored industry at the expense of everyone else.

So LV particularly recycles their water. The dryness is awful and it’s why I moved. But anything that can be reclaimed and reused is. The only waste is the stuff people pour into the yards and thus let evaporate instead of staying in the system. It’s also got the Hoover Dam and Colorado river piped straight to it. (Unfortunately much of that water is sent out to California, but that’s another problem.)

Yes, water’s a huge issue in the southwest. It’s also managed differently in different places. But from what I saw in LV, I think it can be a solved problem. It is not a constraint.

Edit-But let’s assume water is a constraint. Then why don’t we add to the needed infrastructure projects a project to pump water in from the coast? I’m sure there’s a feasible and affordable way to do it since we already have the highway systems. Just run some pipes alongside it - powered by solar? Doesn’t need to be running 24/7.

Water is not a constraint, it follows the same laws of supply and demand as other resources, and even when in demand, remains among the cheapest. It's actually very easy to reduce consumption (0.5 GPM faucets, 1 GPM showers and 0.7 GPF toilets), stretch the supply (grey water systems), reuse it almost indefinitely (teriary treated water), increase real supply (pipelines/aqueducts/water trucks/desalination), etc.

Even if your locality has to foot the bill for some huge, expensive water projects like those, it's still going to cost a tiny fraction of your household expenditures. Whereas scare land in popular cities will cost you the bulk of your income for decades.

Very interesting. I've been thinking for a while about what a /large/ Arcosanti-esque desert oasis planned megacity would look like. This is probably the first question that I run into in my mind. On the plus side, the location means that you've got among the most promising conditions for harnessing solar power in the states.

Good solar conditions in a desert are probably offset by the heating and cooling costs required for wild temperature swings in such an environment.

Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever seen anyone normalize the energy production potential of an area based on the energy needs that are localized for that area.

going to cost a tiny fraction of your house...

Wellington, CO is discussing increasing the tap fee for building a new home to $67k, in a place where homes typically cost $380k.

The infrastructure required to "reuse [water] almost indefinitely" is a major investment for any municipality. Major investments are generally seen as constraints.

I live near Santa Fe, and the mid-to-long term forecast for water supply is pretty dire. Humans have lived in the area for a long time, and it's not likely to become completely dry. But will there be enough to support e.g. a doubling of the county population? This seems unlikely, even with the sorts of changes in use and infrastructure that you mention.

Las Vegas is the desert Southwest, not the Midwest. Water concerns are real, as is the sheer emptiness. I know some people think Ohio is empty (probably the same ones who think Nevada is Midwestern) but rural Nevada is nuclear test range empty. It's an entirely different order of being.

Colorado isn't exactly land starved.

Ask anyone there who isn't making their money directly off of California money how the influx of California money is working out for them and they won't paint a rosy picture.

>If you do the local taxes right

How do you do this?

Good question. Prevent digital nomads opting out of anything (typically they do,except purchase tax which is almost impossible to avoid), require them to fund health cover, increase the cost of the visa? As a resident in the NL I had a day of compliance registration to get a local bank account and be a legal tenant more than 1 month and cover the PREMIS health payment. My landlord was pissed off we registered the tenancy because he was not paying rental income taxes. This is the kind of thing which in the west with higher tax compliance we come to understand how many westerners in Bali aside from traders and bar owners do you think paperwork up?

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