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Comment by pcan77 | Hacker News Reader

Why not just move to Idaho then? Or some other red state?

They are. Coeur d'Alene, ID is at the top of the US for hottest real estate markets. Average housing cost increase of over 40% in the last year. [1]

Boise and Eastern Idaho are seeing similar growth.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/lakeside-idaho-city-is-americas...

But is that being driven by people moving from rural Oregon? I am skeptical.

Your right to be skeptical as it's not the case. It's being driven by individuals within Idaho moving to more urban parts of Idaho.

Locals say it's all "Californians," but that is just short hand for folks out of state but surveys and data from ITD (Idaho Transportation Department, i.e. DMV) show it's urbanization at work.

Granted there are folks moving to Idaho from outside of the state but they are the minority causing the influx to CDA and Boise.

Source: Local news, resident of Boise, and someone who is dismayed at the lack of housing in the area.

In our case (Cd'A) the majority coming in are not from Idaho moving to more urban areas...they are from out of state.

Not sure I would trust the DMV stats during the covid times too since I see a lot of unregistered/expired tags right now.

Most people from the rural areas here cannot afford a house in Coeur d'Alene...it is primarily people coming from other markets where a $600k house is considered a steal.

edit: I have lived in Cd'A for over 40 years...and this year is a very new thing.

For the record, there are now huge sections of Boise now where 600k is considered a steal. Boiseans are among those other markets and they moving to other parts of the state as part of this housing shortage.

Anecdotally, just as you've seen unregistered/expired tags, I've had two coworkers use the new remote work freedom to move to CdA/Sandpoint area.

Which leads to another issue which isn't brought up enough.

What is going to happen to all the remote high paid workers when it becomes the common trend to scale pay to the area?

Currently...you need to make 3x the average pay to be eligible for a house. Anyone who loses their job that has moved to the area is going to find that there is little to no high paying jobs for quite some distance.

It has already happened to more than one person I know locally. Not saying they will have any issue selling their house.

Totally legit question. I know for Boise "scale pay for the area" already has a wildly different meaning depending on the employer.

I've had employers who hired in Boise for cheaper talent than in SoCal (50-80% the pay,) I've had others who pay the same as Salt Lake City -- closest metro area with data, and another who took the Seattle office averages -40-75k and called it fair. Tech wages here are extremely variable and have little to do with local cost of living.

You don't just move a farm. And there isn't a lot of extra farm land available in Idaho anymore.

I've been assured that moving a farm is very easy. That way, if the climate heats up part of the country, you just pack up and move the farm further north.

I suspect that if you asked in Malheur, Sherman, Grant, Baker, Lake, Jefferson and Union counties, they'd agree that we can afford to ignore carbon dioxide production.

Bill Gates doesn't seem to think climate change is a problem either https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/bill-and-melinda-...

Guessing they like some combination of geography, neighborhood, house, job where they live?

Most are farmers who have been working the same land for generations. They know it inside and out under all sorts of conditions. It's kind of trivial to move a household vs an entire farm system. It can take several years to get it all up and running again, depending on your crop/animals of course.

There is no political back and forth like there used to be where you'd have republicans controlling things for a time and then democrats. It's been mostly Portland democrats controlling the state for over 20 years now. The needs of most of the state, by geography but which has a lower population, are not the same as those in the 1 big city the state has, so a lot of people are interested in changing that with democratic votes.

Since Portland pays the lionshare of taxes for the state, you'd think they'd be happy getting rid of the poorer parts of the states that they have to currently subsidize. Seems like it would be a win-win for everybody involved. What are the downsides?

If you look at the state senate map, there is a lot more red land mass than blue. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oregon_Senate_map.pn...

> Most are farmers

A few are farmers. Looking back a generation or two most of the people in southern Oregon were employed by the timber industry - that number has shrunk considerably over the last generation. There are Eastern Oregon ranches but they tend to be pretty large so not a whole lot of actual farmers/ranchers in total. Yes, they employ people to work on those farms/ranches. And yes, the counties involved in these votes are pretty sparsely populated, but I'd be surprised if even as many as 20% are employed in agriculture at this point. Here's some data from the ODA:

"Oregon’s principal operators of farms and ranchesmake up less than one percent of the total population of Oregon. However, when paid and unpaid on-farm workers are included the total number of workers on the farms and ranchesincreases to approximately four percent of Oregon’s population." [1]

> There is no political back and forth like there used to be where you'd have republicans controlling things for a time and then democrats.

I'm old enough to remember when Oregon Republicans were by and large quite liberal - at least the ones who actually won statewide elections (Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, Packwood - all Republicans, all would be considered quite liberal today). Both parties tended to have liberal and conservative wings back then, but the conservatives didn't win many elections.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/ODA/shared/Documents/Publications/Adm...

>If you look at the state senate map, there is a lot more red land mass than blue.

I have yet to come across a land mass that has a political leaning.

Land mass is a dog whistle for agriculture, which has a disproportion amount of political power because of the necessity of keeping grocery stores stocked.

I've talked to a lot of these people in passing and they honestly believe Oregon is a red state but is being cheated by Portland. They always point to land area thats red as proof.

and your counter argument is?

I have none because you can't argue with them.

Idk, why not just break up Oregon a little bit?

I don't have a dog in this fight, but... why are we so adamant about clinging to certain structures even if they don't work for people?

You might say "but not everybody agrees with this move..." well sure but at what point do we say the will of the general population matters more without appealing to some higher authority like the U.S. to implement rules that you agree with even if the local population doesn't?

Some reasonable lines can be drawn. For example, obviously you can't let a group of people just murder other people or something. But what about letting them teach the Bible or Islam in their schools? I mean, it's their schools right? Don't their property taxes pay for them? It's a complicated subject, IMO.

And if you want less clear examples it would be easy to find.

The truth of the matter as I see it is that this "problem" is not going away. Nation states are an historical anomaly, and now that there's no war and need to organize for something meaningful, and the world has gotten much smaller, we're seeing fractures come into being. This could be (and I'm not comparing any of these) Basque rebels, Ireland, China geocoding Uighur Muslims to make room for Han Chinese, Quebec, etc. and you can also look at general wealth and outperformance of smaller countries that trend toward being city states as they can and tend to more freely compete without risk of violence on the international stage.

IMO cryptocurrency, fracturing and bankrupt nation states, and other things will largely destroy the nation states as we know them today, barring anything unforeseen. It'll take a while though, we're just living through history.

And FWIW I am a U.S. Army veteran - so I'm pretty 'Murica, but as much as I don't want to admit it, it seems to me that just having such a large country with a population that is increasingly divided, is just going to lead toward separatists movements.

And just to get a cheap-shot at Texas. Sure is a whole lot of boot and no spur there when you want to deny federal aid to other states, but then have your own problems and come begging hat in hand from the feds. Where's your seccession now?

Anyway.

Because America is balanced on a knife's edge, and the Senate and Electoral college basically runs the show.

If you introduce a new state that leans blue, that's two more blue senators and N more electoral college votes for a blue president. Republicans will staunchly oppose this. And vice versa.

If the senate were proportional to population, and if the electoral college were likewise apportioned via popular vote, then maybe you could be more flexible with state boundaries.

It shouldn't be hard to divy up states (granted you might have to cut a state into more than two parts in some cases) in a way that results in no net gain for either party. It's a simple math problem.

But that doesn't solve the problem. If the problem is, "East Oregonians feel disconnected from West Oregonians", I don't think there's a way to split Oregon that results in a net equal number of new representatives and simultaneously addresses the "we're too politically divided" concern.

Yes, you could slice Oregon in half horizontally and maintain the same number of reps, but then you'd have two new states with the East feeling divided. If you split it vertically, then you have the problem of uneven representation.

You're in the wrong frame of reference here and trying to balance out some sort of America that I think is likely to not exist all that long.

The senate thing though wouldn't be relevant based on what this article is saying. Oregon would have 2 senators as it does now, Idaho would have 2 as well. Potentially could have an effect on the house though but that depends on the population demographics.

> If the senate were proportional to population, and if the electoral college were likewise apportioned via popular vote, then maybe you could be more flexible with state boundaries.

Well no I don't think that would change much. But I also view the senate as it currently exists as good. Frankly, legislation was intended to be difficult to pass - it should be even more difficult to pass. If something doesn't have broad consensus then getting a slight majority and ramming it down the other side's throat (why are there only two sides anyway) is a lightning rod for partisanship.

But also, why would there be states in a hundred or two hundred years? Maybe nuclear weapons will keep the nation state together like it has Russia. Idk.

In order to create 2 new Senate seats.

Changing the border wouldn't change senate seats. Oregon would still get 2 senators, and Idaho will still have 2 just like all other states. A new 51st state isn't being created. Representatives would change a bit though since they are population based.

They would be abandoning some incredible watersheds[1] if they did. That's probably the point of this whole project, to put a huge chunk of western water resources under the control of a single state amenable to white supremacists[2].

1. https://geology.com/lakes-rivers-water/oregon.shtml

2. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924461164/are-paramilitary-ex...

I mean, not wrong, but Oregon was founded as an explicit white ethnostate. The state constitution language barring "negroes, mulattos and Chinamen" was not even removed until 2002.

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