Bozeman has 50,000 inhabitants and median home price is 700k.
a town that small would normally have home prices closer to $60-100 a square foot.
how is that sustainable?
By and large these are good things, they move investment dollars, educated people, and disposable income off the over-saturated coasts to inner country rural areas that benefit from their presence.
The disruptive effect on locals is real, but will often accompany with it significantly more money for those locals.
until the locals are so priced out that they cannot live there. then all the workers needed to keep society running start to disappear.
That process can happen but would be pretty rare. San Francisco, Seattle and New York city are all still chock-full of service-oriented businesses catering to wealthier people.
Bozeman is kind of an aberrant situation; it has been so rapidly taken over by the rich that the development of additional middle-income housing has not occurred organically. Like for all the talk about how terrible say, San Francisco is, I have relatively low-income friends who still get by in the Bay Area, they live in one of the neighborhoods of Oakland that are still affordable, use the BART to get everywhere etc. NYC is similar, it’s been hard for middle- and lower-class people to get by in large swathes of the city for years, but there’s a massive number of places you can still find housing in the greater NYC metro and commute in using public transit. Certain idealized housing situations may not be on offer, though.
True resort cities (which Bozeman isn’t quite that), likely will have to take the step of the resort operators developing out employee housing and etc or they will have trouble operating long term. I think some of the Colorado ski resorts have employee on-site housing already for this reason.
Or if they’re living on fixed incomes, like retirees. Property taxes and living costs are a thing.
Las Vegas had a population of like 29,000 in the 1950 census. Almost certainly its explosive growth from that to its modern day 600,000+ population saw some of those original residents hit with these same issues. Now the property owners would benefit from the economic gain of selling their residence, but renters would not have. That’s just a natural part of growth and expansion, it is still almost certainly a net benefit to see capital and population flow to areas that aren’t the coasts–the extreme concentration of wealth, education, white collar jobs, and investment dollars in the narrow coastal bands of the country has lead to many national-tier systemic problems. It’s difficult to really call any process working to counter that a bad one.
People get screwed by vagaries of economic change all the time. That doesn’t mean the economic change is bad. It does mean there may be areas of urban planning and etc that localities should work to change, promote more multi-tenant dwellings, things of that nature.
Really? That isn’t how it looks to me right now. And I’ve been here for more than sixty ears.
You talk about “idealized” housing situations, which kind of sounds like a snarky way of dismissing those who would love to find a safe neighborhood with good public schools and easy access to good, reliable public transportation, and actually be able to afford to live there. That’s not “idealized,” that’s not, or shouldn’t be, a mythical unicorn, it should be the norm. And yet it’s not.
There are literally millions of middle-income people who live in the greater NYC area. Obviously, they are not all homeless. I think most areas in the greater NYC area have better than average schools by national standards and lower than average crime, too.
No kidding. I’m one of them.
And they/we are getting pushed out.
I don’t think the data supports that claim. I think the data does support the idea that region is significantly saturated with population, which is fine. It’s a big country. Not everyone should live in one metro. Most of the reported “outflows” of population from NYC always seem pretty small versus the hype surrounding them.
And laws could be written to lighten the property taxes for long-time residents, or at least the elderly.
There are probably intangible problems like losing the “feel of the neighborhood” which are impossible to solve and just have to be accepted as part of progress. It’s not as if the “feel” you grew up with has been around for eternity.
Much of the costs of gentrification are these side issues. For example, those doing the gentrifying care about property values, so suddenly there are ordinances to ensure everyone maintains their property to new standards, which usually costs more.
Your point about the ‘feel’ is spot on. My area isn’t being gentrified by outsiders, but a younger generation has very different views about old outbuildings, overgrown yards, and livestock. Not the tolerant view of us old-timers.
Well, sure. But that’s different from saying that those who do live in a particular metro area, who may be part of multi-generational kinship networks that provide for child care and stability and, when needed, financial support, should just up and leave because now Wall Street people want to live in, of all places, Bushwick (which would have been inconceivable when I was younger). That children should be uprooted from friends in school and the neighborhood because their parents can no longer afford to raise them in the very neighborhood in which those parents grew up.
And this is happening. It is. Every day. See my post above about what my family is looking at right now.
One of the outsized problems with the ‘creative destruction’ approach is that – as always – it means we privatize profit and socialize loss.
It’s the same victims. Only the game ever changes.
I don’t understand this. Who was “pushed out”? They sold voluntarily and took the money and ran. Or were they renters? What happens in cities is that prices go up, justifying rent increases and the poorer inhabitants really do get pushed out.
Doesn’t it?
It’s bad, certainly, for the people who get screwed. Why should this be less important than the advantage to others?
A particular change may be an overall benefit even though a few people get screwed, yes: especially if care is taken to provide those people with support, including support that’s actually useful to them. But that doesn’t mean that damage should be written off as inevitable and not worth consideration; or that “the vagaries of economic change” are always good. The damage is bad in itself, and it shouldn’t be just assumed that benefits will overwhelm damage.
If more people are getting screwed than are benefitting, and/or if those benefitting are those who already have most of the benefits and those getting screwed are those least able to deal with it, and/or if community structures are being damaged or destroyed and being replaced with nothing or with versions that are worse: then yes, particular economic changes can be bad.
Bozeman, Montana is a pretty good example. A few years back some wealthy people starting buying property there and now most of the locals can’t afford to buy a home there. There are places where the median household income is below average but the cost of homes is well above the average. So if you’ve been renting for years and suddenly those places you could have bought for $300,000 are going for $500,000 you’ve been priced out the community you called home.
I’m not arguing against gentrification here, it’s the same problem people had in the cities, but I won’t say I’m not sympathetic towards those who are getting the short end of the stick. Any time there’s a big change someone is going to be left out in the cold even if it’s a net positive for all.
This, exactly.
In any state with significant property taxes, they may not be able to continue to keep even a house that they already own; because those taxes will be increased, not only because the value of the house has gone up, but also because people with money generally demand more services from the municipality, which have to be paid for.
And sometimes it’s not a net positive for all; or even for most.
Ah yes, the old “let the free market work” argument.
The Industrial Revolution was founded on the notion that property rights were supreme and untouchable. Factory owners had total control over their employees, and the “left” at the time continually compared the plight of workers - before 1835 in England - to literal chattel slavery. This was long before Marx and Engels. This kept happening again and again, in a multitude of ways.
The “free market” in history is a market in which government comprised of, by, and for the rich create the boundaries and rules of the market, until they are so greatly abused that some new rules must mitigate those abuses.
The market always works to make the wealthy wealthier. In some eras that means that enough money is slopping around to make the lives of the poor better as well, but the bias is always toward the wealthy.
That said, I’m not in principle against the idea of people buying into neighborhoods, cities, and areas which suddenly seem to be desirable. The effects of gentrification are, like everything else, a spectrum. It took decades for people moving into certain neighborhoods in New York and Washington to see a return for their efforts. That type of slow evolution is inevitable. The situations that are talked about and condemned tend to be ones of faster turnaround in smaller areas. Bozeman is like Aspen and other western enclaves that have little incentive for expansion or displacement.
The “free market” may simply not enough have time to “sort things out” in some areas. Having a market crash is not sorting things out, even though some free marketeers claim that. It’s a failure of the market, instead.
No, it is often better if they are reasonably stable.