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Comment by throwaway6734 | Hacker News Reader

Locals wouldn't get screwed if they advocated for better zoning policy and allowed more housing to be built.

This doesn't happen because those same locals that are homeowners love the value of their house exploding upwards

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.

This is a great point.

This kind of thing is solvable. When I built my house in Park City, Utah, I discovered that the growth in the area is projected to overwhelm the municipal sewer system in the coming decade. So I had to pay an impact fee of $3,000 per bathroom in order to get my building permit. I happily paid $15K, knowing that the money will go to the budget of a new treatment plant. There are very few places where there's actually no water. It's mostly a question of the infrastructure being available (enough storage, for example).

The Western US population / urban centre geographical distribution far more resembles an archipeligo than a continental population distribution. Part of this is due to transportation and historical settlement and development. Much though is due to water, or its lack.

This becomes especially clear when you realise that Los Angeles's watershed extends 1,500 miles eastward (about 2,400 km), to the Colorado River and the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains. Los Angeles has (under western-US water law) senior rights to water, over those of users far upstream of it.

Water supplies, and the rights to them, are based in large part on the economic (and hence legal and legislative/political power) of metropolitan areas. Since a large city with large rights effectively sucks dry land from 100s or 1,000s of miles away, population concentrates into a few centres, rather than being distributed across the land.

This contrast shows up most especially in the "Earthlights" images of the US mainland at night, where east of the Mississippi river settlements are dotted evenly through the landscape, but thin rapidly as one heads further west, dissolving into a few mega-concentrations: the Colorado front, Salt Lake - Provo, Albequerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, LA-San Dieto, the Bay Area, Portland, Seattle. A few more-populated regions exist (the Sacramento-San Joaquine valley, the Willammette valley), but these are sparse compared with the Eastern US.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Earthlights_d...

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.

That's a fair point

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

This argument has always bothered me too. I'd rather a place be relatively inaccessible but great, rather than accessible but shitty.

after i wrote it, it occurred to me that the problem is we should build more cities/towns that allow people to live HAPPY lives - so that traveling isn't an escape from reality - but a recognition of the charm/character as something to experience for what it is. I hope we don't lose those mountain town charms to sky scrapers and apartment complexes...

I think if we can address what makes cities livable for EVERYONE who lives in them, then travel is for experiencing foreign ideas, concepts and cultures and not "escaping the reality of cities and using my wealth to get what i want" kinda thing

How do you decide who gets to live in the great places?

Unfortunately I don't have a good answer, but no matter the answer I believe strongly that if it's good for some but not for others, it's still better than "bad for all." This extends beyond housing.

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.

The issue is that red states don't tax enough.

Zoning failures are widespread throughout the country. If more people want to live somewhere, those regions should make it as easy as possible to develop housing and incentivize it

And then what happens when the reason to live there is now gone?

You seem to frame it as an exclusivity problem - they're trying to exclude people from affordable housing...

while the people who live there look at it as preserving what makes it livable

neither are right or wrong on their own, but surely build at all cost isn't a solution to mountain town charm

It will reach an equilibrium

>while the people who live there look at it as preserving what makes it livable

And they're free to buy up all the land and choose what they want to do with it

Or, as a democratic form of government allows, they petition for laws that protect their interests from their representatives.

Single family homes is exclusive. You’re choosing to build a mega mansion on a big plot of land vs letting 100 people enjoy that land. The latter will be more affordable.

There is way more than enough land for everyone to live the lifestyle they want. This isn't about land, this is about people with money and an obsession with density falling in love with the decades of hard work that locals put into making a place a home, and then destroying what they fell in love with.

>There is way more than enough land for everyone to live the lifestyle they want.

This is objectively not true in urban areas like San Francisco or New York City

Zoning in most of the US is pretty much the same. California just got bad before other places did.

It’s a United States problem.

Not really. I live in a nice 4BR urban house that’s about $100-150/sqft, that isn’t in the Montana wildnerness or something.

I used to commute to Manhattan a few times a month.

Even in a modern sprawl shitshow like the DC or Boston Metro area, it’s way cheaper and easier to get housing than many California locales.

End of the day, there’s just a shit ton of money combined with insane policy decisions in California. It’s a inspiring, puzzling and disturbing place, all at the same time.

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.

Based.

Not sure what you mean.

Skyscrapers in the mountains are fantastic. Density is beautiful

No, it might look something like Innsbruck, Austria, which is a beautiful city.

It may come as a shock to Americans raised in suburbia, but there are housing types between single family units and skyscrapers that are very human-scale and attractive. Look at pretty much any mountain town in Europe.

As an American with an EU passport, thanks for the idea. I had been leaning towards moving/retiring to Grenoble, France for the engineering university nestled in the Alps, but I will look further afield.

Trento and Bolzano in Italy are nice too. Probably depends on what languages you speak and what mix of amenities you care most about.

Vail, and most Colorado ski resorts, are already full of 10+ story hotels. I’m not sure how building a residential or office tower would be any more impactful.

It's weird with mountain towns and these ski resorts because the bulk of the land in these areas is federal lands with long term leases...

we're trying to preserve these national treasures, but at the same time, choose winners as to who gets to build there...

I'd hate to see towers pop up in Vail and Breck to be honest.. the charm is what it is - the log cabins and resorts that disappear in the mountains.

Sorry but that is false. Please name even 1 hotel in Vail that is 10+ stories. The tallest that I can think of is 5, maybe 6 stories.

edit: having been a ski bum in Vail, I can't say that I've visited every resort in CO. But across Vail, Breck, Keystone, A Basin, Loveland, Monarch, Cooper, Copper, Beaver Creek, Steamboat, Wolf Creek, Crested Butte, all 5 mountains of Aspen, there are no 10+ story towers. I'm trying to take back some of the pedantic tone of my original comment.

Fine. 10+ was my memory failing me. But the Four Seasons and whatever houses Matsuihisa sushi are 9 (when viewed from the mountain, not the highway).

Overall point here is that Vail and other ski resort towns happily build very large buildings for vacationers and second home owners. I just don’t buy that having very large office and residential buildings would have that much greater of an environmental, or even quality of life, impact.

How are skyscrapers harmful to wildlife? Density is much better for wildlife than sprawl.

Good point. I guess you could say that its the contents of skyscrapers that are harmful to wildlife: humans. Lots of traffic (whether car, bicycle, foot, alpine touring skiing, etc) causes the wildlife herds to be pushed further away from where they originally may have inhabited.

With density you can afford transit which would reduce traffic. See Japan for an example. Most people take the train or bus to the ski area. There’s barely anyone in the parking lot.

Interesting. Meanwhile, some ski areas in the US have transit to take people across the parking lots to the resort entrance.

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.

The opinions here are probably influenced by Prop 13 in California and by the fact that many younger people in the tech field capable of buying property probably assume that they'll be selling and moving somewhere else sooner rather than later.

But, as you say, someone who plans to remain in their house indefinitely would probably just as soon not have their property taxes double (and may not even be able to afford them in they're retired on a fixed income).

This is absurd. You could just as easily refinance or take out a heloc to take advantage of the rise in price that would greatly offset the rise in tax/insurance

If your income hasn't increased, that HELOC is just another mechanism that will force you out of your property if you spend it and can't repay it.

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 agree if they own the land. Telling other people they can't build duplexes/apartments on their own land is illiberal and authoritarian

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

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