I own a number of pieces of property in Whitefish Montana, where I decamped to the second my children were released from school for COVID reasons in March (we split time between TX and MT). Given what I felt were going to be significant economic disruptions due to unemployment and drops in income, I prepared myself with the understanding that our little resort town was going to be facing some hard times. Usually, small resort towns tend to take it on the chin when the economy turns.
Boy was I wrong.
Once the initial shock of lifestyle changes happened due to COVID, people FLOODED the area and any piece of real estate not bolted down was flying off the shelves and bought for cash unseen. I sold a small lot in the Whitefish City limits for a significant capital gain, after buying it for what I thought then was at the top of the market in 2019. I've been offered cash for home-run-knock-it-out-of-the-park prices for my retirement home property that are simply unfathomable. The only reason why I don't sell is because I treat this property like I do my two labrador retrievers - everything has a price, but I'm not interested in selling. :)
There is a lot of angst in Whitefish over the changes - all the building and influx of money really helps the local economy, but the quality of life (traffic, etc) is suffering. It's the age old dichotomy for a small Montana popular town.
I loved Whitefish when I was there, and would have considered it for the long term but was concerned about reports of a growing alt-right contingent in town. Have you encountered that?
i just bought 18 acres on the direct border of the Ouachita National Forest in SE Oklahoma for reasons outside the pandemic (i live in Dallas, about 4hrs away). The real estate person said all land is gone within days of listing. They're selling at $7-8k/acre what was $1-2k/acre just a couple years ago. People are flocking to the country side.
Your experience could partly be explained by selection bias (e.g. sister comment “it's such a cool town!“). I am presuming you didn’t choose Whitefish randomly, and obviously you must have been an early adopter.
However, the flight to other locations does seem like a general trend. Anecdotally it appears to be happening to my neighbourhood...
Lovely dogs! And yes, everything has a price, but of course you might decide something is not worth being sold (I am referring to the house, not the dogs of course!)
People have been talking about this on HN for a few months now, and I never took it seriously since these threads are always filled with people quoting numbers saying it's not happening.
That was until last month, when two tech workers from San Francisco moved into the neighborhood.
Both have the same story: Their company went work-from-home when the pandemic started, then made it permanent, so the company employees are fanning out all over the country to make better lives for themselves.
Now I look at all of the new California license plates I see around town and wonder.
I never thought of my little corner of nowhere as a better place to live. I only moved here because it's cheap and as far away from as many other human beings as I can get while still being near an international airport. But maybe it will work out for them.
Good luck to the new generation of digital nomads.
That's what makes it appealing to a lot of people who have been living around millions of other people. Soon many of these places will no longer be cheap and far away from other people. It'll be interesting to see how today's cultural conflicts play out when the more left-leaning, urban remote workers move en masse to smaller, more right-leaning, less urban places.
Another thing I'm curious about is what the distribution will be like. Smooth, across a wide range of places - anywhere with a decent internet connection - or will people follow previously trodden paths to places like Boulder or where I am in Bend, Oregon? There are plenty of towns with lots of outdoor access in Oregon that are cheap because the mill closed. But they are not 'hot' destinations.
I saw a great quote recently that said something like “Everyone loves work from home until you lose a deal to the competition that turned up to your customer in person.” There’s an element of truth to this.
Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.
I wonder when the reverse will happen. As rents in SF dive, will people that were force to outlying parts of the Bay Area return? Will younger LGBT folk be able to afford to live in/near the Castro? Will more people _not_ in tech be able to live here?
SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps more broadly valuable?).
If some tech workers are happier in the mountains, that's great that they can now live that life and keep their jobs. But I hope that in their places, we see a new diversity of people of range of jobs who can choose to live in a city that was previously out of reach.
I think the burst of tech workers moving out of Silicon Valley/SF into surrounding suburbs + other areas is driven mostly by people who were already on the cusp of leaving the city.
I've been thinking about leaving SF to move to the East Bay for the last couple years, and COVID-19 has provided a very strong impetus to expedite that move.
Obviously this is anecdotal, and everyone has their own motives, but I haven't heard of many 20-27 years BUYING property outside of their home cities (SF, NYC, etc).
Are companies going to start adjusting salaries for people who move (this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)?
That’s where this gets weird... people move to these better-to-live places and then all the employers decides to pay them less because of location.
Then you just push up housing prices with salaries that slowly reset over time to be cost of living adjusted to the area.
>(this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live)?
Price is the intersection of supply and demand. A buyer will ask a seller to accept a lower price if they think the seller is willing to accept a lower price. A seller might accept a lower price if they don't think they can get a higher price.
You are paid $X because the buyer couldn't find someone willing to accept $X-1, and you accepted $X because you couldn't find someone to give you $X+1.
I worked for a valley company that changed people's salary if they moved to a new office. Work in the valley, make more, if you moved they'd lower your pay.
Midwest salaries were notably lower.
Oddly enough it was more of a issue brought up by folks at HQ as they knew they were more expensive and a particular group was really paranoid about it... like constantly. It was a bad scene.
Salaries have very little to do with how much value one adds. If anything, it's more about how much value can be extracted. If companies can pay less and get the same value, they totally will.
This "your salary = your value add" meme has never made any sense to me. In a fair world that should be the case, but it never has been and never will be. Proof: offshore outsourcing.
But, if it ultimately turns out on-site employees provide no real advantages over remote employees, the end result is going to be a grand leveling more weighted toward a downward adjustment in Bay Area wages than an upward adjustment in within-the-US wages.
Personally, I've never had an issue negotiating around this.
Companies will certainly try to pay you less for any number of reasons. But there's no reason you as the employee (with nearly all the leverage in this market) need to let that happen.
I mean sure, it's clear that there's a cost difference between my house here in rural France and its equivalent in the Bay Area. But personally I'd prefer that difference be captured by me rather than my employer, so I don't tend to budge from my "Bay Area" rate.
Here's hoping the rest of us fleeing the bay right now choose to stand up for themselves too.
This is exactly correct. If you pay for a product you are not entitled to force a price reduction if the efficiencies of the producer improve. In most cases purchasers are not even entitled to know about production costs. It's just that with in person labor purchasers have gotten used to having access to this privileged information and abuse it.
No, the real economic force at work for here is the halo effect. If you're in SV you must be good! You went to Stanford and worked at Google? You must be good! Then competition for that group takes over driving up prices. Housing costs are just an excuse people give themselves / investors.
>> this makes zero sense to me, the value you add most likely doesn’t change because of where you live
Salaries were/are so high because of the limited supply of qualified labour. If they now accept workers from everywhere the supply side constraint just got blown wide open.
Salary isn't all about "the value you add" and at the end of the day it's supply and demand.
However, regardless of if the worker is taking a lower salary they should be maximizing purchasing power in whatever location they're working. If you can move somewhere rural, have a better quality of life, and have a higher savings rate while taking a pay cut you're still better off than your counterparts in [HCOL area] making double your salary.
Your salary only matters when compared to your peers in similar living situations.
Pay for software engineering will contract because it turns out programming is not that difficult and there was nothing special about the sf set except their need to cover stupid high rents.
Technically while you are correct that it should make no salary difference where workers choose to base themselves, unfortunately corporations and HR will use this as a sorting metric to pay qualified workers less because it's only to their advantage to do so.
While you'd think the worker would benefit from being more globally employable the companies conversely have a larger pool of candidates now to choose from, which means they can afford to pay less for talent.
I don't think it is 1-1 perfectly like that. In silicon Valley, a person with x skills is worth y dollars. If going remote, there will still be people with hard to find skills, probably because all the people with those skills were already in silicon valley. I don't see these jobs getting salary decreases.
however, standard crud jobs that most programmers can do, yeah that will go down as rural employees are willing to work for less out of Utah or something.
Until the fires it was hard to imagine giving up the weather and outdoors here in the Bay Area. Now we have COVID which means you want to be outside, but fire smoke that you shouldn't breath, so you want to be inside. I have a lot of HEPA filters running inside, and if I exercise outside, I wear a P100 even at VO2max. But if my daughter weren't keeping us here for her friends, I'd consider moving away now.
One thing we really like about where we’re living now (peninsula) is there are a lot of mixed race couples with kids and our kids feel this is totally normal.
We’re considering moving but worried that our kids will have a tough time fitting in, especially given how divided our country is.
For other mixed race parents looking to move, do you have similar concerns?
I can't read the article, but this appears to be hitting us hard here in Bend, Oregon. House prices were already high and only appear to be going higher. I think more people could be a great thing if we get them involved locally, and if we add enough housing to accommodate them, which is tricky right now. As someone involved with a local YIMBY group, it's tough to see the prices - it felt like we were making some progress in several fronts and then BOOM.
In 1978 California passed the ill-conceived Proposition 13 which encourages people to keep houses rather than sell them through lower tax rates for longer ownership.
California has almost 40M residents and Oregon has a bit over 4M, even a fraction of those 40M going north to Oregon is going to overload the housing market there.
Just out of curiosity, how long have you been in Bend? My wife was born and raised in Bend and left in her mid 20s. Due to our out of state license plates and IDs she gets a fair amount of "please don't move here you out-of-stater" gruff, and it always feels silly coming from folks that themselves moved here for exact same reasons that the newcomers are flocking now.
I'm in a part of New England I won't name where this is also happening. Here, it's a convergence of families from both coasts who are now supported by remote work and various wealthy families able to simply buy up real estate that suddenly looks rather underpriced compared to the Bay Area or NYC/Boston. (I say families b/c this rural area is not much of a draw for singles.)
In September I called an agent the day a property hit Zillow and made an appt to look at 1pm the next day. At 10am the property had 7 offers.
I looked a bit at moving to Bend a couple years ago, and already at that point it was getting a little rich for me (also wanting to be close in town). Can't imagine what it's like now.
Yup. Couldn't read much of the article, but this is me.
I was in SF because employers demanded it, because investors demanded it. Now my company is not only allowing Bay Area employees to leave the state, but hiring remotely. Hell yeah, I'm gone.
It's a two way street. If SV companies drop salaries, other companies will have an easier time attracting away talent. SV will have to increase salaries again to compete.
I actually thought about getting a place in Tahoe for 6 months, but turns out it is completely not workable for me
- I don't know anyone in Tahoe
- My 5 year old will have no friends
- Schools will soon start in person schooling
- I would like to be back in office
- Will miss the diversity of restaurants / groceries / wineries etc.
- Ethnic food or ethnic groceries are non existent
Turns out, you can buy a giant home in the Bay Area, in East Bay and get the exact same things
People LIKE to live on the edge. It is an unfortunate fact ... especially given their are 9B of us. Super bad for the ecology, the encountering of new diseases etc. Suburbs Exurbs, retreats... never ends. If we had a Home (like most animals) we would have to worry much less about despoliation and ravages like fires. Why not have a home to live in and allow ourselves rest, relaxation and recovery in an unspoiled wilderness??
[+] [-] blantonl|5 years ago|reply
Boy was I wrong.
Once the initial shock of lifestyle changes happened due to COVID, people FLOODED the area and any piece of real estate not bolted down was flying off the shelves and bought for cash unseen. I sold a small lot in the Whitefish City limits for a significant capital gain, after buying it for what I thought then was at the top of the market in 2019. I've been offered cash for home-run-knock-it-out-of-the-park prices for my retirement home property that are simply unfathomable. The only reason why I don't sell is because I treat this property like I do my two labrador retrievers - everything has a price, but I'm not interested in selling. :)
There is a lot of angst in Whitefish over the changes - all the building and influx of money really helps the local economy, but the quality of life (traffic, etc) is suffering. It's the age old dichotomy for a small Montana popular town.
[+] [-] andrewacove|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robocat|5 years ago|reply
However, the flight to other locations does seem like a general trend. Anecdotally it appears to be happening to my neighbourhood...
[+] [-] stevenj|5 years ago|reply
What do you think about Bigfork as a place for future investment/growth?
[+] [-] simonebrunozzi|5 years ago|reply
Lovely dogs! And yes, everything has a price, but of course you might decide something is not worth being sold (I am referring to the house, not the dogs of course!)
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
That was until last month, when two tech workers from San Francisco moved into the neighborhood.
Both have the same story: Their company went work-from-home when the pandemic started, then made it permanent, so the company employees are fanning out all over the country to make better lives for themselves.
Now I look at all of the new California license plates I see around town and wonder.
I never thought of my little corner of nowhere as a better place to live. I only moved here because it's cheap and as far away from as many other human beings as I can get while still being near an international airport. But maybe it will work out for them.
Good luck to the new generation of digital nomads.
[+] [-] silicon2401|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluekite2000|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fblp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beamatronic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code4tee|5 years ago|reply
Best advice I’ve heard is to say the draw for living in a city may go away but you need to be close. Living in the middle of nowhere isn’t going to look like such a great idea when people start gathering together again. Maybe not as much as before, but it will still happen. For these reasons I see why the suburbs are seeing a real estate boom in many areas. I’m much less sure about the long term move to places much further away from the cities.
[+] [-] abeppu|5 years ago|reply
SF has felt like such a one-industry town for quite a while, and that can mute some of the richness and diversity that normally makes cities interesting (and perhaps more broadly valuable?). If some tech workers are happier in the mountains, that's great that they can now live that life and keep their jobs. But I hope that in their places, we see a new diversity of people of range of jobs who can choose to live in a city that was previously out of reach.
[+] [-] sna1l|5 years ago|reply
I've been thinking about leaving SF to move to the East Bay for the last couple years, and COVID-19 has provided a very strong impetus to expedite that move.
Obviously this is anecdotal, and everyone has their own motives, but I haven't heard of many 20-27 years BUYING property outside of their home cities (SF, NYC, etc).
[+] [-] hourislate|5 years ago|reply
Some of the most beautiful sunsets and surroundings you can imagine.
Awesome Channel.
Ghost Town Living
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEjBDKfrqQI4TgzT9YLNT8g
[+] [-] stanrivers|5 years ago|reply
That’s where this gets weird... people move to these better-to-live places and then all the employers decides to pay them less because of location.
Then you just push up housing prices with salaries that slowly reset over time to be cost of living adjusted to the area.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|5 years ago|reply
Price is the intersection of supply and demand. A buyer will ask a seller to accept a lower price if they think the seller is willing to accept a lower price. A seller might accept a lower price if they don't think they can get a higher price.
You are paid $X because the buyer couldn't find someone willing to accept $X-1, and you accepted $X because you couldn't find someone to give you $X+1.
[+] [-] duxup|5 years ago|reply
Midwest salaries were notably lower.
Oddly enough it was more of a issue brought up by folks at HQ as they knew they were more expensive and a particular group was really paranoid about it... like constantly. It was a bad scene.
[+] [-] WaxProlix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] triceratops|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hello_moto|5 years ago|reply
Just like buying a house: there are 2 variables that contributes to the total value, the land (location) and the building.
[+] [-] scarmig|5 years ago|reply
But, if it ultimately turns out on-site employees provide no real advantages over remote employees, the end result is going to be a grand leveling more weighted toward a downward adjustment in Bay Area wages than an upward adjustment in within-the-US wages.
[+] [-] jasonkester|5 years ago|reply
Companies will certainly try to pay you less for any number of reasons. But there's no reason you as the employee (with nearly all the leverage in this market) need to let that happen.
I mean sure, it's clear that there's a cost difference between my house here in rural France and its equivalent in the Bay Area. But personally I'd prefer that difference be captured by me rather than my employer, so I don't tend to budge from my "Bay Area" rate.
Here's hoping the rest of us fleeing the bay right now choose to stand up for themselves too.
[+] [-] iandanforth|5 years ago|reply
No, the real economic force at work for here is the halo effect. If you're in SV you must be good! You went to Stanford and worked at Google? You must be good! Then competition for that group takes over driving up prices. Housing costs are just an excuse people give themselves / investors.
[+] [-] ticmasta|5 years ago|reply
Salaries were/are so high because of the limited supply of qualified labour. If they now accept workers from everywhere the supply side constraint just got blown wide open.
[+] [-] NDizzle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bighitbiker3|5 years ago|reply
However, regardless of if the worker is taking a lower salary they should be maximizing purchasing power in whatever location they're working. If you can move somewhere rural, have a better quality of life, and have a higher savings rate while taking a pay cut you're still better off than your counterparts in [HCOL area] making double your salary.
Your salary only matters when compared to your peers in similar living situations.
[+] [-] throwawaygh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_woozy|5 years ago|reply
While you'd think the worker would benefit from being more globally employable the companies conversely have a larger pool of candidates now to choose from, which means they can afford to pay less for talent.
[+] [-] gmadsen|5 years ago|reply
however, standard crud jobs that most programmers can do, yeah that will go down as rural employees are willing to work for less out of Utah or something.
[+] [-] 762236|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cusp|5 years ago|reply
We’re considering moving but worried that our kids will have a tough time fitting in, especially given how divided our country is.
For other mixed race parents looking to move, do you have similar concerns?
[+] [-] davidw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iaw|5 years ago|reply
California has almost 40M residents and Oregon has a bit over 4M, even a fraction of those 40M going north to Oregon is going to overload the housing market there.
[+] [-] gregkerzhner|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] subpixel|5 years ago|reply
In September I called an agent the day a property hit Zillow and made an appt to look at 1pm the next day. At 10am the property had 7 offers.
[+] [-] notJim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwp|5 years ago|reply
I was in SF because employers demanded it, because investors demanded it. Now my company is not only allowing Bay Area employees to leave the state, but hiring remotely. Hell yeah, I'm gone.
[+] [-] newusr1233|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlphaWeaver|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadykiller|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neonate|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngokevin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmode|5 years ago|reply
Turns out, you can buy a giant home in the Bay Area, in East Bay and get the exact same things
[+] [-] emanuensis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] x87678r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mythrwy|5 years ago|reply
We aren't talking about a population altering number of people.