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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

This is becoming a problem in many areas, and I can't imagine that the push for remote work is going to help the situation any.

Unless you are living with parents, or with multiple roommates, the housing market in these cities will price you out.

We have this same scenario taking place in the area I live, and NIMBY/zoning laws prevent affordable housing from being developed. I've been to town hall meetings where people decry "affordable housing" as bringing Section 8 and "undesirables" to the area. You mention that even the local school teachers have to commute in from over an hour away due to afford a place to live, but it falls on deaf ears.

If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc.

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> NIMBY/zoning laws prevent affordable housing from being developed

Jackson Hole reserves some housing for those who work full time for an employer in Teton County [1]. This strikes me as a reasonable balance between wanting to control housing stock and maintaining access to cheap labour.

[1] https://www.tetoncountywy.gov/720/Workforce-Homes

I sold my soul to the company store.

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

There was good reason to do away with such concepts.

> the company store

Night and day. Company doesn’t own the home. Company doesn’t own the stores you shop at.

Not entirely different. Any non-dollar payment takes they employee's purchasing power out of the free market. Tying one's housing options to one's employment opens the door to similar abuses as company stores. Does a fired employee loose thier housing?

> Any non-dollar payment takes they employee's purchasing power out of the free market

Where is the non-dollar payment?

The law says landlords must rent certain units to people who work locally. The company is never involved except in verifying employment. If the employee wants, they can commute through the pass to Victor, Idaho and earn exactly what they were earning before.

In California we have a notoriously evil company called Derrel's Mini Storage. They have some of the highest employee churn, such that they have permanent now hiring signs at all locations - which are explodingat the moment due to the many people moving out of California - almost all are completely full and we have I believe more than 10 just here.

They hire teams of two and force the men to do the manual labor and the women to do the deskwork.

They force the team to work and live on site. As in, to work there yoy must reside there. They make this sound like a bonus - it's not.

Now, when you inevitably decide to leave you must first find alternative living situation, and another job to pay for it while working extremely long hours at this place (sometimes 7 days a week open to close if they cant hire a relief team- and they only hire teams).

This is beyond evil.

When I was about 19 I worked on a rock quarry in Comstock, Texas. We had to live on-site at the 'wetback shack' (owner's words, and most of the employees were indeed illegals driven over from Acuna, Mexico). This was because he wanted to start work at 4am and this ensured everyone would show up- not his only reason however.

We made minimum wage busting and palletizing rock, even if we operated heavy machinery wage didnt change. They charged us $3 per soda or water at the swear to God it literally was Company Store. We also, we found out when we got our 1st check, were charged rent to stay in the shack. I think at what 3.30/hr (one water per hour!) damn near nothing was left. We, my friends and I who had family in Del Rio, Tx, could leave, and we did. The poor bastards who worked harder than anyone and were generally shit on (the illegals) they couldn't leave. The people who were from Comstock outskirts where there were no other jobs or places to rent? They stayed.

This was in 1999.

Tying living in any way with work is disgusting and not in any way shape or form altruistic.

The payment is the cheaper housing options due to employeers needing to fill units with local workers. The evil is that, once so housed, the employee is no longer free to take non-local work. Are these people free to quit and start a remote-work job?

> Are these people free to quit and start a remote-work job?

Got it. I see what you mean. No, they are not. Practically speaking, these jobs are not ones that can be done remotely. (But maybe another could.) More practically, absent these measures, those workers are commuting in.

Directly from the article, some business owners are doing better than others because they house [some to a majority of] their workforce.

Sure, you're missing the company owning the church, but fewer Americans are religious now. The employer also doesn't own all the local stores, but "It's not a company town because the stores are owned by people that all know each other (due to it being a small town), instead of one individual" is a little too close to be comfortable to me.

The company is the “stock market” class.

And then you are stuck at the will of that one company. My first roommate in a mountain town was not like by his manager, got fired and kicked out of company housing. Many people will take shelter in their cars in the national forrest for the summer. These mountain town workforces are essentially homeless, (well in many ways by choice) but these towns keep leveraging US public property for supplying land for camping, keeping wages lower than the housing and utility prices demand. Furthermore, how fun can a town full of transient vacationers really be if all the youths cant manage to go out or have a place to party.

No, tying any essential good to employment is not reasonable. See: health insurance.

> tying any essential good to employment is not reasonable

If you buy a workforce house, there is obviously no obligation to maintain employment. I’m not sure how it works for rentals.

The alternatives are flying people into company-owned housing, the way they did in Fargo during the oil boom. That seems far less savoury.

So people can get a sham job to get cheap housing?

> people can get a sham job to get cheap housing?

Yes. And then be charged with fraud.

I meant sham job in the sense of "legit job offer you don't plan to keep for a while just to qualify", not "false documents for non-existent job".

> sham job in the sense of "legit job offer you don't plan to keep for a while just to qualify"

Fair enough. I don’t know the text of the law.

Also, the entire county has a population just over 20,000; the city of Jackson, less than half that. This would cause problems for the employer who let it happen as well as the new resident.

It "causes problems" when you "let" an employee quit a job too soon?

Edit: I know HN hates tedious back-and-forths, so let me just jump to the substantive point: any time you have a situation where you have special carve-outs for an essential good, you're not really solving the problem, you're just encouraging people to game it. See the past thread about enrolling in college part time to get health insurance.

> It "causes problems" when you "let" an employee quit a job too soon?

The law isn’t code; mental state matters. If you got a job to buy a subsidised house with a plan to quit, in a small town, that will cause you problems. If you provided that sham job, it will cause you problems.

Maybe they hired a great lawyer and never sent any text messages about their brilliant plan to defraud their neighbours. But most probably they didn’t, and that fact pattern would certainly be enough to warrant scrutiny.

It sounds like a guest worker program.

“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” — Science Fiction.

Or the one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27764905

NIMBYS are the most short-sighted people ever. And somehow every boomer I know became a NIMBY in the last decade. At least in France they don’t listen to them, unlike in the Bay Area.

Can’t wait until this explodes and we can have sane housing policies again.

It won’t explode, though. It won’t explode so hard that we couldn’t even pass prop 15 back in November to close some of the loophole that the biggest would-be business taxpayers in CA currently abuse https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/15/ // https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_15

The fear-mongering is always about “first they’re coming for companies, then they’re coming for your home property tax!” and people believe it. With that said, I really hope they DO come for home property taxes, as right now it’s a big part of what encourages the wealthy and previous generations to stay put and never sell (or become landlords and move elsewhere) while pricing new homeowners out of the market, as now in addition to the mortgage on that seven-figure starter home they’re saddled with a few-grand-per-month tax bill.

https://www.taxfairnessproject.org/ has more info.

> I really hope they DO come for home property taxes

Seems like the fears are valid, no?

The 'problem' (for California) is that the fast growing companies will have already moved elsewhere. (Problem in quotes because it is an implied goal for NIMBYs) Perhaps even to other countries with sane housing policy. So this should be something on the federal governments radar.

You sound like a big city person (i used to be one - 5 years ago before moving here). I live in Truckee. town of 16,000 people.

> If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc

I love your definition of "essential services" are bartenders and wait staff. You sound like a real great person to be planning for critical events, such as wildfires which occur in our area.

Also "If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area" - lol, do you realize in our Town of 16,000 people, there are more than 50% of our houses that are NOT locals. On a busy weekend we expand to about 55,000 people. The problem is not the full time locals, but the temporary residents who exacerbate this problem. Their houses remain off the market for local residents to rent because they want to (rightfully so) njoy their second home for a few weeks a year - which precludes a long-term leaser. It doesn't matter how much wages rise, locally - there are CFO's of local businesses who have had to move because they cannot find housing.

Yes, we live in a national forest, so simply building more housing is slowed down by natural beauty and environmental assessments, and the usual NIMBYism too. But the town is quite aligned behind trying to solve this problem somehow.

You sound exactly like the people who moved up to Lake Arrowhead and ruined it, I ended up leaving when I got told by a flatlander to leave “their” mountain, where they’d lived for a lot shorter time than I had. I realized then it was losing its appeal and wouldn’t be a place I’d continue to enjoy with those sorts increasingly moving up there. For a resort area the people who work the service jobs are essential. Those businesses are the backbone of the community most of the time. Without them it would lose the traits that make it desirable to live.

> For a resort area the people who work the service jobs are essential.

I am the OP the commenter was referring to. I wasn't going to bother responding to a nitpick on my use of the word "essential" but you summed up my meaning perfectly.

If all the bars, restaurants, cafes, dry cleaners, etc. go unstaffed (as they are right now), headlines start being made. We don't need to lump people into brush-fire fighters and bartenders in terms of who is essential.

To top it off I'm not a city person and I used to live in Truckee, CA, where this poster is living.

If it's the vacationers causing problems, isn't it quite easy to enact local laws to deal with those problems? Those vacationers aren't there to oppose the solutions.

These towns are owned in many ways by Vail resorts. Economically and politically.

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