or does the gap get wider forever and we are heading toward some kind of real dystopia.
i mean what eventually happens to over-saturated markets, be it housing, jobs or whatever else. when demand vs supply reaches peak disequilibrium (cant think of a better word..)
https://www.keywestislandnews.com/2022/02/can-real-people-li...
Comment from "SixGenFam:"
>As a conch family, with generations buried in the local graveyard and my whole life here, we have to leave kw. There’s no potential for security anymore. The only other average conchs my age I know who are planning to stay have housing assistance. They can only stay because of govt assistance that I’ll never qualify for. And the number of homes available to people with housing assistance is very limited. The only others I know that can stay are inheritors. Kids who’s parents owned nice homes or businesses on Duval etc and they were blessed with the hand me downs.
>Thing is we have way too many tourists on average here now and nobody will be here to serve them. And beyond the frivolous ways of serving them, (drinks, food and clean rooms) what of the safety and community? Nurses, teachers, cops.. None of them qualify for the affordable housing income restrictions. They never fit the bracket, but they barely make enough to pay market rents. Without a properly staffed hospital, how is it safe to host thousands of tourists? We always say “well now who’s going to clean your rooms??” as if only housecleaning are being run out of town. But no, it’s the entire foundation of what makes a city run, and it’s crumbling, rapidly.
Has this ever happened? I have heard this prediction about everything from Toronto to New York to Los Angeles to Hong Kong for years and it has never seemed to come true.
There are people willing to make extreme sacrifices to live in certain places. People will live 5 to a room in cockroach infested 100 year old apartments to stay in certain places.
In Toronto, labour is no more expensive to purchase than the rest of Canada (minimum wage laws aside). Toronto is worth it to enough people to have a bunk in a bunk bed over a room to oneself while working in fast food.
People can also commute. Vancouver is notorious for having teachers commute from Abbotsford. In Toronto, people will commute 2.5 hours each way from Barrie or London.
A lot just may be that the older people get replaced with less resource intensive young people who don't have kids, need less medical care, and are happier in less space.
I expect we’ll see it in a smallish community like key west first where bussing in service people will become impossible. But maybe they’ll start building employee dorms and bus people in for their shifts (x days on, y days off). Who knows.
No one knows where the breaking point is, only that there is one.
If you look at feudal England this is basically what happened - the rich landowner class provided servants' quarters for their employees.
Of course that crushes job mobility, because you can't leave your job without losing your housing...
After college I had a friend working at in the town of Lake Louise Alberta. This is located in a national park and the number of homes are extremely limited and very expensive.
Visiting my friend they game me the tour of the house. It was a three bedroom 2 bath townhouse with 15 people living in it. 4 beds per room upstairs, and 3 people in the basement.
All the people worked at various retail shops in the village. (Not at the chateau) Making minimum wage.
This is a special situation. They are specifically trying to limit the supply of housing in Banff to limit the environmental impact.
I would expect to easily find occupation data at census tract level but no luck. Should help easily verify if this is happening.
My very poorly founded opinion is that Travelvlogs, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and similar attacks on the obscurity of such locations coupled with the permissive treatment of housing as markets for out-of-region investment have erased livability almost everywhere.
8B people on this planet and only so many tropical resorts and beaches, accessible snow capped mountain hikes, and grand waterfalls.
Isn't it is the policies that permit mobility from population-exploding locations into slow-growth locations that cause cultural destruction?
One thing I've been pondering lately is why we had such a spike in tourism. I think the usual economic variables come into play but social media (especially Instagram) takes much of the blame in my mind.
The problem I see is popularity gets clustered into several locations based on what is popular. So a place that looks pretty on Instagram and gets tons of likes and shares gets overrun with tourist, whereas an equally beautiful place gets zero attention because it didn't get massive attention on social media.
I live in Colorado and we have a bunch of "outdoor influencers" here and many of the locations they have recommended have become overrun with tourists and locals alike. It's gotten to the point where I will browse their IG profiles to see where not to go.
A lot of it is likely a spike in tourism in general. There are plenty of affluent young people and air travel is cheaper than ever, so it isn't usual for people in my social circle to take 2 big trips and 4-8 smaller trips a year. To my Dad, the idea of travelling across a continent for a weekend is nuts (and he was also among the affluent young growing up). For me, that's a perfectly normal thing to casually do.
For him, the thing was road trips, so he was limited to a certain geographic area. With air travel, weekends are only limited to North America with a bit of the East off the table because of the messy connections required to get there from Western Canada.
He went camping to the local park and went to museums a few hours away. I visit museums thousands of Km away instead.
You say that like it's impossible, or even cost prohibitive. Maybe for farming, but Las Vegas isn't known for farming.
This is speculation, but here's what I believe: Let's assume wealth follows a Pareto distribution, with the single parameter alpha determining the shape of that curve, and thus the resulting income inequality.
I think that growth of real economic output / GDP probably has a maximum for some alpha, above which, increased inequality slows down growth. I suspect it also declines BELOW a certain alpha since it offers fewer people with extreme capital to the market capable of making moonshots.
However, that doesn't mean growth stops, and I suspect the people high on the curve have little incentive to change. I'm not sure though. Is it better to have ownership of X percent of wealth, and greater relative wealth, or X-e percent of wealth, less relative wealth but more growth?
Now... ostensibly, I don't think there's likely to be a 'peak'. It would defy the assumptions of a market. If housing prices rise so high there aren't enough buyers, prices would fall. However... famously, certain billionaires have been known to buy up all the houses around theirs at exorbitant prices to enhance privacy. So I suppose you could still see vacant housing, but no fall in prices.
That said, in general, quality of life would decline for lots of people. We'd see a lot more roommates and extended family groups living together to make it affordable. People in US cities used to do that a lot actually, and we might see a return to that.
There has historically been a floor though, where below that, things are so bad that people don't have much to lose by taking up arms, dragging rich people into the street and cutting their heads off.
Another angle in modern times is that we are seeing such a precipitous drop in birth rates in the West, that I suspect we'll start to see countries compete for people interested in having children by creating financial incentives and friendlier conditions to do so.
Which means you’ll have a lot of unmotivated money, or money that’s only interested in preserving a relative position on the economic latter - far from the meritocratic capitalist dream.
I don’t really expect the situation to get that bad in this case, however.