Zoom towns and the new housing market for the two Americas
I am really curious about this trend myself.<p>I live in a town - Bend, Oregon - that already had a lot of remote workers. It also has a housing affordability problem that is getting rapidly worse.<p>I&#x27;m also curious about the &quot;non-zoom&quot; towns and what the dynamics might look like there. Bend was already fairly well-known, but there are tons of former mining&#x2F;logging&#x2F;ranch towns throughout the west that have access to a lot of fun stuff to do in the outdoors, but are still relatively cheap because they aren&#x27;t &quot;on the radar&quot;.<p>I facilitate a local YIMBY group here in Bend, but it&#x27;s an uphill battle. A town of 100K people can enact some good policies (and we have), but if even 1K people from the bay area decided to move here, that would massively change our housing market.<p>Perhaps moving onwards into the &#x27;next hot spots&#x27; is what will keep happening? But that still leaves people in service jobs that can&#x27;t be remote and don&#x27;t earn as much as all the remote workers in a really bad spot. Who&#x27;s going to teach their kids? Take care of them in the hospitals? Fight fires?<p>I wrote about it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journal.dedasys.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;fight-or-flight-yimbys-and-the-exodus-to-smaller-towns&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journal.dedasys.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;fight-or-flight-yimby...</a>