A man moves family from Los Angeles to avoid high cost of living & homeless folk. The problem seemed to follow him. High rents is a problem throughout the USA. Thus homeless is a problem throughout the entire USA.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/The-Next-Affordable-…
Eastern Washington was of course much colder. Until this winter, MacDonald, a native Southern Californian, had never shoveled snow. But their new house is twice as big as their Los Angeles home, cost less than half as much and is a five-minute commute from City Hall, where MacDonald works as Spokane’s director of community and economic development.
“I’m realizing more and more how important the future prosperity of this city is about getting housing right,” he said. “If we don’t, it’s going to track more closely with what happened in Los Angeles.”
The story plays out locally but is national in scope. It is the story of people leaving high-cost cities because they’ve been priced out or become fed up with how impossible the housing problem seems. Then it becomes the story of a city trying to tame prices by building more housing, followed by the story of neighbors fighting to prevent it, followed by the story of less expensive cities being deluged with buyers from more expensive cities, followed by the less expensive cities descending into the same problems and struggling with the same solutions.
It’s easier to change where we live than it is to change how we live.
Whether it’s Boise, Idaho, or Reno, Nevada, or Portland, Oregon, or Austin, Texas, the American housing market is caught in a vicious cycle of broken expectations that operates like a food chain: The sharks flee New York and Los Angeles and gobble up the housing in Austin and Portland, whose priced-out homebuyers swim to the cheaper feeding grounds of places like Spokane. The cycle brings bitterness and “Don’t Move Here” bumper stickers — and in Spokane it has been supercharged during the pandemic and companies’ shift to remote work.
Spokane real estate has risen 60% over the pst 2 years.
Now many workers are wondering what the point of growth is if it only makes it harder to keep a roof over their head.
Fortune of cities are constantly changing. My burg of Las Cruces NM constantly made the top 10 cities to retire in Money magazine throughout the 1990’s. The city’s population grew from 60,000 to 100,000. The city now has high unemployment, a homeless problem, high housing cost but still lower than other states, and a stagnant population. I am hoping folks will move from the city so it can return to the city I moved to 40 years ago. Not likely though.LOL
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/12/07/29-american-…
18. Las Cruces, NM
> 5 yr. employment change: -11.4% (-9,993 jobs)
> August 2020 unemployment rate: 11.3%
> Median household income: $43,038
> Poverty rate: 25.9%
> 2019 population (pct. change from 2015): 218,195 (1.9%)
Las Cruces is one of three major New Mexico cities that have lost the most jobs in the past five years. From August 2015 to August 2020, the city lost nearly 10,000 jobs, or 11.4% of total employment. The metro area’s August 2020 unemployment rate of 11.3% was well beyond the 8.4% national rate. Though it lost thousands of jobs across the leisure and hospitality, retail trade, and government sectors, Las Cruces actually added some jobs in manufacturing and wholesale trade.