Hacker News Reader

Comment by thebradbain | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k before news got out that it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million (even more eye popping when the median single family home price in the most expensive metro areas of the state, Austin and Dallas, are around $500k). Outside the town is farmland and oil fields. Inside the town is a collection of bars, restaurants, hotels, museums, and high art, all from a once-dying/repurposed small town on a defunct train line.

"A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida.

https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/

https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unli...

View on HN

Marfa is in the middle of nowhere, the jobs seem to be of the landscaper/service industry type unless you are arriving with money from somewhere else.

Sounds more like a touristy set of rich estates at this point, I expect the laborers live in the surrounding area and drive into town just like a large city. I did some labor during HS and in the summer it was driving 20-40 miles from our small town in nowhere Texas for the jobs we did.

During the early 80's oil boom there were several small towns in Texas that kinda looked like OP's model, but once the boom went to bust they started dying and never recovered. Probably around the Austin area in the 60's a lot of places looked more idyllic (there were no stoplights between downtown Austin and I think Lampasas at that point), but it's all sprawled out and become a Metropolis at this point.

Not clear that any sufficiently attractive area would not end up being encompassed in suburbia or a high-end enclave (Westlake by Austin comes to mind).

Eh, I don't know about that re: Marfa demographics. There's certainly been tension about property values forcing some out of town -- but the town is still majority Hispanic (67%) and the median household income is $39k. It's got attractiveness to tourists driving up property values, but it is very much still a real town with real people.

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/marfa-tx/

I mean the people paying $150,000 for a lot in Marfa (looking at listing on Zillow) are probably not locals from those $39k income households. Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property.

It's a real town, but the service folks are largely priced out at this point (although I'd expect this real estate bubble might not last as there might not be that many people willing to buy at Austin prices in Marfa).

> Perversely, the way property taxes in Texas work, this likely means that anyone under 65 is watching the property taxes climb faster than their income, increasing pressure to sell and move to a cheaper property.

What's perverse about that? When there's suddenly high demand for a limited housing supply, we should encourage those who happened to randomly live in a particular place to consider selling to those who especially want to live in that place.

If you look a the overhead map of Marfa, you'll see it isn't particularly land constrained. However, people living in trailer houses on small lots in town are seeing their taxes go up, so they eventually have to move. Also perversely, the land around there you see with cows or crops on it is almost assuredly in an agricultural tax exemption status, so the excess land has little pressure to be sold for new housing.

It's perverse because it effectively forces poorer people to sell to rich people.

I will also note Texas has a homestead exemption, originating in 1876, so this is a well-known issue. It does not appear to be inflation or value indexed, and does not provide relief to low-income people when their house suddenly appreciates. There is a limit on how much the appraisal goes up every year, but it's certainly more than wage growth.

Regardless, the point is OP's ideal town this is not, the people moving there are not moving for the local jobs and economy in a nice little town. The incomes certainly don't support the high house prices.

If you own a house that's become so valuable, you're already above the median. Exempting rich people from taxes so that they don't have to sell to even richer people doesn't seem like a good policy to me. Any kind of tax makes it easier to be richer than poorer, that's just life.

I'd agree that the agricultural exemption is perverse (as is the whole notion of taxing property value rather than unimproved land value - but ad-hoc exemptions aren't the way to fix that).

I'm finding it remarkable that people getting chased out of houses they've lived for years - maybe all their lives - by property taxes is "non perverse".

Bonus points for using the phrase "happened to randomly live". I mean, the whole sentimentalism about people's hometowns can be taken a bit far, but seriously?

HN comments like this put me in mind of that great quote:

"All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld

I've been forced out of homes I loved multiple times, because I can't afford to buy even though I'm working my ass off[1] at a job that pays far above average, and a big part of that is people who bought when it was cheap but won't sell at any price. So yeah, when the idle rich complain that they need a tax break so that they don't have to go through the same thing that I do and can keep piling it all on me instead, cry me a river.

[1] I'm quite conscious that I'm lucky to have the skills I do, and I'm sure I have better working conditions than many people, but I do work hard

You should never be taxed out of a paid off house. I’m in Texas and our property tax system was built for 2-3% annual appreciation. It’s been running 3x that or more in many places, for many years now.

Also, people living in their home for years, being a part of the community, raising families, etc is not random at all. What’s random is the guy who just shows up one day from another state and decides houses are cheaper here so he can pay $100K over ask.

There's a certain irony that the urbanists who advocate high density big city living are also the kind of people who escape at the first sign of trouble or rising cost, which they themselves contributed to, and run off to suburbs, small towns, and country sides and drive up property costs and price the much poorer locals out. Living in a suburb in NJ I can't help but notice increased traffic in the direction of NYC, even compared to prelockdown, coinciding with the rapid rise in housing costs

I doubt most people making 38k would be that annoyed if their house gained 700+k in value and property taxes forced them to move somewhere else. The elderly can even do a reverse mortgage and stay in their homes while receiving extra income.

This is a generalized assertion about a large number of people, made without any evidence. Even if it is true for some subset of "urbanists" (which could be true, but it isn't incredibly obvious that it is), it isn't likely to be true for the entire set of people who advocate for high density big city living.

Judd made Marfa and died before it ever became what it was today. Secretive group of artists and the like came later and in the end, all good towns need an industry and Marfa’s real industry is tourism of people coming to see the art and related art that has sprung up.

Even terralingua has a restaurant with a two hour wait now. Tourism is the only real driver of a small town booming imo.

Marfa also does not have a lot of services that are needed for anyone older than 50, like a hospital.

a friend from the area insists that judd was involved in drug trafficking and that the (frankly mundane) art was a pretense or money laundering mechanism. i've spent time in the region and it is not difficult to spot people who are obviously involved.

the same friend's relative was recently interviewed for a soon-to-be-released podcast about the former sheriff of presidio, who was recently released from a multi-decade bid for bringing heroin over the border in his official trailer and putting it on trains hauling cattle feed to houston: https://www.presidiosheriff.com/

So... a secretive group of artists could build a town, live there 'til the word gets out, sell at 10x the price, and move on to the next secret location? This sounds like a fun way to live.

Marfa isn't valuable because of a secretive bunch of artists, it is valuable because it has been exporting real estate appreciation from Manhattan for over fifty years. Judd, the artist who brought all the wealth to Marfa, bought the building at 101 Spring Street for nothing and throughout his life borrowed against its value to acquire property in Texas. Today the building is worth at least $100 million.

Substitute "move into a dead urban neighborhood" for "build a town" and you have the gentrification cycle everyone's been talking about for decades.

Right. If you build a new art-town, it's not gentrification.

Marfa is hilarious to me. I'm from west Texas and I've driven highway 90 dozens of times, there is literally nothing out there. A complete wasteland. It's painfully boring. I don't believe anyone buying these properties are living there year round.

Alpine is a much more scenic town and it's just up the road. I'd probably buy a house there instead.

Yeah, just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about. Made the drive from El Paso to Austin a few times, can't imagine regularly visiting that area for pleasure or wanting to live there.

> ...just the idea of getting to Marfa hurts me to think about.

I suspect there are quite a few owners of that Marfa property are flying and not driving in. Marfa Municipal airport as about 20+ airplanes per day [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_Municipal_Airport

There are plenty of small towns that can be managed and organized according to the principles of the article, and personally I think it's a great idea. I'm referring more to the idea of building a small town, presumably starting from scratch, as if you were playing Sim City or Cities: Skylines.

I've never heard of Marfa but wikipedia suggests it was originally built around the 1880s as a Railroad Water Stop. The analogue today would be a "town" around a highway rest stop, which is generally not going to be built at human scale or with pre-war zoning and architecture.

> "A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine

Absolutely. The major issue here is that if you're building a small town from scratch, it's not a desirable place to live / visit until it is built. And it's not "built" until you have several hundred people, at least, living there. But those people aren't going to want to build houses and live there if it's not a desirable place to live. It's a chicken-and-egg problem.

The whole point of deliberately starting a new town with human-scale architecture etc. is to get around that chicken-and-egg problem, precisely because moving to a highway rest stop town would have all the problems you mention.

I decided to browse available properties and it’s ridiculous: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/307-S-Dean...

0.5 baths???

You clean your top half, then flip around and clean your bottom half.

Meaning no shower or bathtub. Just a sink a toilet.

Clearly that is for the half-acre lot, but still, I bet those bricks are probably worth more than the house. Reclaimed clay bricks are a thing:

https://www.reclaimedbrick.com/

Lot size is funny in Texas -- not even 2 miles away from that listing you can get 5 acres for less. Of course, then you're not "in the town"

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Antelope-Hills-Rd-40-Marf...

I wasn’t aware of the reclaimed brick market. Thanks for posting. Seems rather strange but there’s probably some good reason to use the older bricks.

Marfa is a really weird and unique place. It was originally famous for UFO sightings and then somehow became that artists enclave and achieved some sort of cult status to the point that it was a prevalent pre-tinder dating app meme for women to have pictures in front of the fake Prada storefront art installation there. That made it a really hip place for anyone who knew it, and yeah, eventually word got out and now it's super expensive.

But I don't see how that is repeatable. Trying to build a new town from scratch can't realistically have the plan of UFO sightings and cult-status house-size art installations to get people to want to live there.

Not UFO sightings, the main tourist trap was the Marfa lights. That was the primary draw in the 80s/90s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfa_lights

Marfa is the same population as advised in this article but it's ten times larger.

There are plenty of recent examples of development on the scale that this article suggests. The area just to the west of Warm Springs BART station in Fremont, California is 90 acres. The New Urbanist polestar of Hercules, California is about 150 acres.

It's true that it's legal geographic size is ~1.5 square miles. However if you look at Google Maps a good 30% of it is just empty/undeveloped land previously (still?) owned by the military.

So yes, it's still bigger geographically, but it still only takes 15-20 minutes to walk from one end to the other; I've visited a few times. I'm not very familiar with either location you mentioned, but I would say for Marfa to be 3 hours away from the next-largest town (El Paso), have no commercial airport or passenger train line, and still be a self-sustaining walkable town is impressive.

I'm possibly mistaken, but the first example you pointed out looks to be an apartment complex next to a train station within a larger city and Hercules, CA is a 20 square mile (maybe I'm looking at the wrong city?) suburb of SF; I don't think those are examples of what this article is saying?

The New Urbanist part of Hercules is very small and easy to overlook. It does not hit every point that the article mentions, but it is an example of some of them.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.0160237,-122.2779782,3a,75y,...

Marfa started as railroad infrastructure and grew around the Army airfield (and chemical mortar firing range per Wikipedia) south of town.

There’s room in West Texas for one of them. Nobody’s gonna build a second Dairy Queen on US 90 in Marathon or Valentine. But even with a DQ, living there is only practical because there’s a Walmart in Van Horne. Dallas and El Paso are too far for underwear.

And of course Marfa is full of air conditioners. As is all of Texas…a place I suspect the article’s author has not spent much time…football ain’t played on pitches in Texas.

The only reason the houses could possibly cost that much is if the town is restricting new construction. I.e. the old guard is making real estate there expensive.

I got married in Marathon and my wife and I spend a lot of time in and around Marta. That part of West Texas is pretty unique/strange for a number of reasons. I would hesitate before drawing any parallel between the area and anything else. Terelinqua is even worse/better, the population consists of corporate burnouts and bandits pretty much.

Laughed at the bandit part. I grew up mule deer hunting in Terlingua and I recall nearly every person I met gave off that "fugitive from the law hiding out in the desert" vibe.

There's a few places like this popping up in Western and Northwestern Arkansas. There are enclaves of artistic and queer-friendly spaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com