Quote:
Originally Posted by xzmattzx
Why can't the market take care of this? Rents are too high > fewer workers are willing to put up with living there > fewer workers to serve high-end clientele > fewer businesses to serve clientele > local economy begins to shrink > land value begins to come down. The remedy is to pay these workers a lot more to prevent the local economy from shrinking; it needs to be worth the effort to live in Aspen.
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Asheville is about to find out how well your formula works, if Facebook is to be believed. Online Asheville is abuzz by how high and how fast housing prices have risen during the pandemic, as people from big cities and expensive states have snapped up houses. A crummy, rundown bungalow in West Asheville, for example, is currently commanding a price of $525,000, and that is definitely not going unnoticed. Meanwhile, employers are having to beg people to work, and at the wages offered, are being told to go fuck themselves in return.
It really just seems, again, going from what the city's Facebook groups are saying, that people are waking up and are ready to demand more than just enough to afford an apartment with three or four roommates. They're also getting tired of hearing from employers that the nature and the weather and the beer make up for the low pay. They're getting tired enough in fact, to go elsewhere. The cheaper outlying rural counties are seeing a wave of Ashevillians driven out by high prices, and so are the nearest cities like the one I ended up in.
Between the people appalled by the housing prices, the people more appalled by the offered wages, and the people ready to leave, you really get the impression the wheels are about to come off of a place like Asheville that is rapidly becoming a place like Aspen.