I thought mean is the same as average? Do you mean median income?
I figured it would get rolled into Castle Rock soon if it wasn’t already so it may not count as rural enough.
This is wrong. California has been building homes at a lower rate than population increased for decades, largely because of fairly onerous building regulation (zoning and land use). The median household income in CA is about 20% above the national average. The median home costs more than double the national average.
The reason that the cost of housing is so much higher in CA (while the costs of most other things are only moderately higher) is primarily due to historical policy choices that limited the construction of housing, not a general increase in wealth in the state.
Which is another confounding factor in this discussion.
I have family who live in Parker – one of the towns that @Oredigger77 mentions. It’s really a de facto Denver suburb already. Even the town of Castle Rock is home to a lot of people who commute to Denver for work. Ditto Elizabeth and Kiowa.
Mean travel time to work (commute):
- Parker: 24.3 minutes (Denver is 25mi by car)
- Elizabeth: 34.4 minutes (Denver is 42.3mi by car)
- Kiowa: 37.9 minutes (Denver is 52.7mi)
- Castle Rock: 28.5 minutes (Denver is 28.5 mi by car. Colorado Springs is 41mi by car)
Source: City-Data.com
So … when some of these ‘rural’ areas are really suburban or exurban to a major metropolitan area, I think the situation may be different.
Staying with the ‘rural’ portion of the OP seems complicated to me, even though I think it’s a really interesting topic.
I’m trying not to be nitpicky, but Elizabeth fails every one of my criteria. It’s a small town, true, but it’s in Ebert County, which is part of the Denver Metropolitan area. 80% of the population commutes to urban work, making it a part of suburbia, which has been encroaching into former rural areas and requiring ever-longer commutes for many decades. Nor does that article give any support at all that Elizabeth has been gentrified, since that requires displacement. The article does not say where the new inhabitants came from or what their social status had been or what the town’s long-time inhabitants were like.
Greater Denver has been a growth area for decades (it’s grown 40% in the time that Elizabeth grew 30%) and metropolitan prosperity is to be expected. That was in fact the point I had already made. That a commuter town around Denver is growing and incomes are increasing may possibly be a case of rural gentrification, but the chances are that it’s not, any more than the hundreds of other small towns being affected by nearby big cities all over the south and west. Suburbanization is already a term and has long been studied. Elizabeth is an example of it, IMO, and would need a large amount of further evidence to prove differently.
Actually you clearly are. You linked to this census page as your definition. Which clearly shows
and then goes on to say
So now that I found a place that exactly matches your definition you’re changing the rules. But since as the census bureau says
I think the only thing we can conclude is you need a unicorn and therefore we can say that rural gentrification cannot happen.
Yes. Sorry, I messed up the terminology; I’ve got a tendency for some reason to confuse those two words in particular.
Except that they had to pack up and move when they didn’t want to, and had all their social networks disrupted. I wouldn’t call that “holding steady”, let alone an improvement; and I suspect many of them wouldn’t, either.
And all that, of course, is presuming that they did move to Kiowa. As you say, the figures you found don’t provide that information. The increase in population in Kiowa may have come from other places entirely. The people in Elizabeth who couldn’t hang on to their houses may be jammed in with their cousins in a different house in Elizabeth, for all we know.
Well, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of people per household in Elizabeth so that’s unlikely. In fact the people per household has decreased from 2.89 in 2000 to 2.56 today. So it’s probably safe to say people are at least pushed out of town.
The people who owned homes in 2000 and were pushed out likely made a lot of money on their homes. If they bought an average home in 2000 for $145k and sold it this year for $634k. They could have taken their $489k profit and bought a home in kiowa and only had a mortgage of $104K so their mortgage payments would have decreased which would help to offset the commute and its not like moving 15 minutes away is going to destroy their social network.
Nothing you said disagrees with anything I said. Part of areas being populated by wealthy people is, in fact, restrictive zoning regulations. Who do you think controls the zoning boards? Aliens?
I have friends who used to live about five minutes’ drive away and on my way into town. I saw them every week or two, and could reasonably consider them backup to care for my cats even if the weather was bad, and they on me to pick up something for them at the store when it was occasionally awkward for them to get there. Now they live about 25 minutes’ drive away and on my way to nowhere else I’m going (nor am I on their way to anywhere they’re routinely going). I see them (pre-Covid) about three or four times a year and in the winter or in lambing season, and often at other times due to their other responsibilities, it would often be entirely impractical for them to stop in and take care of the cats; nor does it work for me to casually and easily pick up their groceries along with my own; they’d now only ask me in an emergency.
The effects on people living in a village are likely to be more drastic than that, as the change is likely to be from being within walking distance for anyone old enough and strong enough to walk or bicycle or electric-wheelchair a block or six on their own, to requiring a car in working order and somebody licensed to drive it.
I think you’re just describing America. You can’t even buy groceries in Kiowa without a car in working order and someone to drive it. In fact the closest grocery store is in Elizabeth. I can’t think of a single home visible from the main grocery store in Elizabeth let alone walkable. The WalMart just had a thousand homes built on the field across from it but walking that stretch would probably be suicidal. We’ve set up as a car focus culture for the last 100 years and despite the dreams of the urban folks that is just life in rural America.
I would assume the people that got pushed out of Elizabeth still work in Elizabeth since it pays a higher wage than Kiowa so they are likely in Elizabeth 6 days a week between work and shopping.
Even if I concede everything you say (which I don’t), you haven’t given a single word on how Elizabeth is an example of gentrification.
What’s happening is Elizabeth is neither new nor unusual. On the contrary, it’s exactly what one would expect and exactly what has happened thousands of time before. You’re continuing to slap a new term on an old phenomenon and make new claims that there is no justification for.
Surburanization is interesting in and of itself. It does brings changes, both good and bad, to previously rural areas. But it is not the same as gentrification, a wholly distinct process. I don’t get why you want to conflate them. That just muddles understanding of something important.
I already agreed with you on this. By your definition gentrification of rural communities has never and will never happen.
Eh, I’m not doing another go-round on this. People can read what we’ve posted and decide for themselves.
Or provide evidence of their own. I look forward to that.
More than that. I live in a reasonably suburban area, and there is a push to allow buildings within a certain distance from transit stations (like our BART stop) to build up beyond what current zoning allows. The people dead set against this aren’t techies but single family homeowners petrified at increasing density. The Democratic state government is pushing for more density, but it is tough. Being from New York I’m all for this but a lot of my neighbors aren’t.
The place I lived in NJ 30 years ago used to be a chicken farm. (Great soil.) And my daughter on a visit discovered that Ulan Bator, Mongolia, has traffic jams, and the area around it is being gentrified also.
You can’t escape.
I mean, if you define “zoning” as just a natural offshoot of wealth and not “regulation”, then sure. That’s… not an obvious definition to me. “Zoning” is literally “regulations governing what you can build”.
There are many wealthy places in the world in which it is significantly easier to build housing than in California, so I also dispute the general claim that wealth necessarily results in extensive building regulations.
Significant amounts of California’s difficult regulatory regime stem from the 1970s-80s environmental movement, which has very little to do with high-wealth people.
If you had said “The high taxes and high regulatory burden of CA are just a side effect of the increased wealth”, that would be (1) different than what you said above and (2) also, in my opinion, wrong.
Connecticut, for example, has a higher median household income than CA and significantly lower median home prices. Burdensome housing regulation leading to higher cost housing is affected by increased wealth, but it is not simply a mechanical side effect of increased wealth. It is a specific policy choice that CA has doubled down on for decades.
Looking back at your original statement I’d also say you were just plain wrong that wealth had nothing to do with the Californian affordability crisis. California has had a tremendous increase in wealth and high concentration of wealthy people in its cities. If you don’t actually think basic economics means that those areas will see rising property values, I dunno, I’d suggest you stay out of the real estate business.
There’s a difference between zoning laws being a contributor, and the “main cause” which appears to be your incorrect assertion. Look at Hong Kong or Singapore–very little limits in those highly dense cities to building high-occupancy multi-family dwellings, and both have very expensive real estate. It’s obvious less restrictions around multi-family development in California would alleviate some of the problems with affordability, but it wouldn’t make California Ohio or West Virginia, it would still almost certainly be among the most expensive states to live in for simple economic reasons.
Note that there are actually parts of California that aren’t that expensive to live in, for example Bakersfield has lower median home prices than Austin, TX; Baltimore, MD; Durham, NC etc etc. There’s a reason some California cities aren’t nearly as expensive, and it directly relates to how many rich people they live there.
It is also exaggerated how much of a difference zoning laws can make in the most high-cost areas. The highest cost areas are almost always central city districts where lots of people with money really want to live. While you could get those areas higher density, sure, the central downtown areas of cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are fairly fucking dense. They aren’t NYC dense, but they are still quite dense. SF proper has 18,000 people / sq. mi., I’m not sure how much denser an area should be expected to be, one nice thing about America is we aren’t a small island like Hong Kong or a small microstate like Singapore, we can actually not concentrate everyone in a few cities and make use of all that land.
Well, that and the fact that they are hellholes that no sane person would want to live. Looking at you, Bakersfield.
Right, and people do actually make fun of Bakersfield, but it’s kind of a core truth. Wealthy people do not want to live there, and real estate is consequently cheaper, which also means the tax base is lower, schools are worse, city services are worse etc etc.
I don’t believe I did say that. But I agree with you. Wealth does have something to do with it. It’s simply not the primary problem.
Hong Kong and Singapore are both significantly geographically constrained, and build lots of high rise buildings (which are inherently expensive for basic physical constraint reasons) to house their population. They are very poor comparisons for California as a whole.
Sure, housing in SF costs quite a lot for many of the reasons you mentioned. But it would cost less if most of it weren’t zoned for detached single family homes. But California is not San Francisco. The median home price for the state is a good measure to use here, and it’s very high compared to the median household income, compared to similar geographic areas.