The New Super Commute
wsj.com
wsj.com
I guess governments will have to address this somehow.
My grandparents lived a couple of miles from the city where Grandpa worked, but then when he retired they moved maybe 30 miles out where things were cheaper. I knew other folks whose parents or grandparents retired to Florida to take advantage of a lower cost-of-living and no income tax. That's just what people did - why pay a premium to live near the jobs if you aren't working?
More recently I've read complaints about folks from richer areas (often California) moving to cheaper areas, driving up the cost of living, straining local services, etc. Some of them are retirees, although remote work has added to the issue, leading to "go back to California" sentiment in Portland, Boise, etc. I've heard similar stories about expats driving up rents in Mexico City and Portugal, making those areas unaffordable for locals.
So I've got a healthy 401(k) balance and will be retiring one of these days. What are the rules for where I can retire if I want to move somewhere my dollars will go further? Is it still thought of as OK at all to exploit another area's lower cost-of-living in this way? Does it depend on the degree, like it'd be fine if I move to a nearby suburb that is 10% cheaper but not if I move to Thailand? Does it depend on economic conditions in an area, like how many existing residents are being priced out?
I think it is only a few terminally online people that object to this. In real life locals object to people coming in and buying second homes or renting out airbnbs, not new people moving into the area permanently.
The reality of the matter is that the insane population growth of the 20th Century led to some pretty haphazard development (e.g. CDMX’s never ending sprawl).
This has made areas with livability amenities (e.g., walkable safe neighborhoods) relatively rare all things considered.
For various reasons, certain areas with good amenities remained isolated from broader real estate markets (e.g., living in CDMX would seem laughable to an American in the 1980s based on crime statistics alone).
Because of COVID, a lot of those areas are now a part of larger real estate markets.
The people who live there now realize that they can’t afford the prices that the larger market brings, so acting in self interest, they try to remain isolated from the market.
(In the vein if SF experiencing the worlds problems a decade before anywhere else) This is basically the story of SF’s Mission district over the past 20 years and why you’d see ridiculous things like people protesting new development because it had floor to ceiling windows.
It’s a weird phenomenon, but one that most people on this forum can’t really relate to.
Which, to be honest, is not totally unjustified, these places are wonderful and people whose families have lived there for generations are finding themselves pushed out by the rising property values caused by the migration of people out of the rich cities and into their communities.
It's unfortunately a feature of our system- if you don't have money you don't get to live in good places. People are just justifiably unhappy with that particular feature acting on them.
I know a guy who moves from CA to Idaho.
He complains people don't maintain their houses nicely enough.
He complains the dirt roads aren't graded well enough.
He complains that the super market doesn't have what he wants.
He complains that the way they do excavation is wrong (he's a septic guy by trade).
At literally every turn he complains that the locals are doing it wrong.
I've told him that the problem probably isn't the locals. (And I concur with what the other guy said about rising property values destroying communities.)
My parents now live in a red flyover state and complain about foreign Californians making everything too expensive and changing the local culture. To put it in perspective, my parents who are complaining have lived ~3x longer in California than they have in their new red state.
I love them, but not all of the people complaining about Californians are the people it would make much sense to get complaints from.
If your goal isn't to live like a colonial master, make sure your execution doesn't look like an attempt at colonialism. That principle should get you 99% of the way there.
People don't care that you're there. They care that you are making boutique $15 sandwich shop(s) a viable business where they were not previously causing rent to go up driving the burger joint they loved out of business or whatever.
Ideally you've retire to Arizona or Florida or some other traditional retirement or tourism destination with an economy has had an influx of money for a long time and reached equilibrium. In lieu of that the next best thing is assimilating and living like the locals.
This doctor is a great example of it. He makes more than an Austin doctor, he probably is buying or renting at the top end of the market and driving up prices.
I live in Portland, Oregon. Pretty much every who lives here has had a conversation with a Californian transplant who raves about how cheap the housing is, when most people will never dream of owning a home here.
The only thing I've really experienced is the price of real estate/rents causing businesses to charge more, but that's still fundamentally tied to housing/real estate.
In regards to transplants moving to my area
Rich people generally want to pay the least amount of money for lawn service like everyone else. Can you point to actual real life examples where something like lawn care became unaffordable due to rich transplants?
There are 'rich' boutique services everywhere. You haven't established how selling a $15 sandwich somehow makes running a cheap burger joint untenable.
Again, any real examples of this? Lawn care supply is not finite. As demand goes up, more people will enter that profession.
>r the sandwich shop, there's only so much commercial real estate available, so $15 sandwich shops increase demand for real estate in that location, raising rents, and making the cheap burger joints either raise prices to pay rent, or go under to make room for more boutique restaurants.
That's not really true. Cheaper food options are almost always more profitable than high-end places.
The whole argument seems like nonsense that sounds like it might be true if you haven't thought about it very long.
Yes, I am. That's not an excuse for anyone to ignore their effect on it.
>You've provided two hypotheticals that I've never seen borne out in reality.
The second example was taken from what I saw in my youth when an infrastructure project made my region noticeably more suitable as a retirement destination.
>There are 'rich' boutique services everywhere.
No there are not. For example there are three non-chain Mexican restaurants in Bangor Maine and none of them are upscale. I use this example because I was recently in Bangor and reviewed their menus on my phone before choosing which one to eat at.
So your whole understanding of the topic comes from your childlike understanding of something in your youth?
>No there are not. For example there are three non-chain Mexican restaurants in Bangor Maine and none of them are upscale. I use this example because I was recently in Bangor and reviewed their menus on my phone before choosing which one to eat at.
I mean, you have to be just being silly at this point.
Nova Scotia's still welcoming.
The only reason gentrification exists is because local businesses see the influx of rich people as an opportunity to raise prices, not to simply have more customers. A mom and pop kebab place might become fancier to serve the rich guys, even though the owner could have totally kept their original business model without pricing out the locals.
In the end, it's always the same old: "for someone to buy there must be someone to sell, for someone to sell there must be someone to buy". At every step of the gebtrification process there are people who could stop it, but don't
Their costs are increasing like everyone else's, especially if they're leasing the building. They may have no choice but to raise prices, even if they don't make the place fancier.
I know the article isn't about this, but seriously? Move into a place that has a snowpocalypse every year because it won't winterize its grid and almost certainly won't take steps to mitigate any future climate problems? If you're worried about climate change I can't think of a worse place to move to short of a barrier island or on top of a glacier.
[1] https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2022/01/02/texas-winter-storm-f...
In some respects, it was worse locally, as it caused a significantly higher amount of downed trees, and, as a result, much more damaged infrastructure (there were MANY videos posted of transformers exploding thanks to downed lines/downed trees). What it didn't damage/affect (compared to 2021), was the power generation aspect. So, if your lines were fine, you had power, unlike 2021.
There are different ways climate change will fuck this country, and at least Texas is okay on water for now. Still I'd think Michigan would be a safer bet.
Around 2001, the dotcom startup I worked for was bought by a Bay Area company, and I commuted weekly from Portland to San Jose for a year on what we called the 'nerd bird'. There were a lot of us in those days, working for many different companies. I remember I found a way to get cheap first class upgrades, since I hated flying and could get a stiff drink or two before takeoff.
If you can leverage the overpriced west coast but live in low COL area somewhere else, good for you.
I would look at Louisville, Kentucky or Charleston or Baltimore or some other area.
This arrangement doesn't work for every couple. I doubt whether it will ever become common, but who knows whether it will become more so.
> commutes by plane
hmmm
Among the many issues with this statement: It takes food security for granted.
>“By the time I get to bed it’s going to be close to a 24-hour day,” says Frank Croasdale of some of the crazier days he commutes to his physical-therapy practice in Redondo Beach, Calif., from his home in Austin, Texas. Still, the arrangement “is a win-win.”
..."except for the environment of course", I was thinking when reading that.