That sentiment isn't unique to small towns either.
Residents of Austin, TX have been complaining that the city changed or got too crowded shortly after they moved in, whether that was a year ago or decades ago. People who moved to SF in 2010 complained about the people moving there in 2015.
Same thing happens at a neighborhood or district level too. Everybody feels like they were the last person to move in while it was still good and everything after them is unwelcome.
>Residents of Austin, TX have been complaining that the city changed or got too crowded shortly after they moved in
I've been told Austin's city council mulishly refused to see the growth trend and didn't annex the hills around the city when they had the chance. Austin waterways like Bull Creek went from summertime swimming holes to unsafe to enter due to septic tank runoff and high levels of coliform bacteria because city services - sewerage in particular - weren't extended to those areas.
People who lived there really hoped the usual waxing and waning of population in cadence with student university attendance would go on forever. But according to an aunt who lived there from the 1960s until property taxes priced her out a few years ago, too many people loved it and moved back after school or just never left and it sort of snowballed from there. Her anecdotal evidence was the cashiers at her Half Price Books stores she managed often had Masters degrees but chose to work there rather than move and find a better job elsewhere.
These days people running a cash register while holding an advanced degree is more of a cliche than remarkable evidence that some place is so special you'd rather be underpaid there than be paid better somewhere else.
But yeah to hear her tell it, in her forty years there every decade that passed brought some unwelcome change to Austin.
There's this song I like called "Austin, TX Blues" by Netherfriends and judging by the lyrics I'm guessing this is a common sentiment.
I mean is anybody from here?
Have you ever met anybody from here?
Have you ever seen so many condos in your whole damn life
That were built here in one year?
Everyone I know that was born here is dope as fuck
And everybody else sucks
I'm pretty sure the song is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but still.
The very, very easy way to fix that is to build enough housing. Places don't suck because a lot of people live there, they suck for lots of reasons that are orthogonal to the population.
Rapid change is disruptive. No remedy will please locals who don't welcome those changes. Folks who lived in Austin 30 years ago (before the growth in Round Rock, Georgetown, and the Hill Country, and the invasion of high tech) chose to live there because it was affordable and offered a fun weird mix of music & academics unique for hundreds of miles (perhaps similar to Santa Fe's acculturation 40 years ago). That precious mix has diminished to make their home less weird, more commercial, and damned expensive.
There's no easy fix for this, especially in a place as extremely laissez-faire as Texas, where urban planning and zoning are seen as mortal sins.
Canada's really getting hit. Market looks like a gaming table. Housing drastically needs protection from speculators.
Take Vancouver - even though they passed residency laws, with penalties. Average price in 1977: $90k. 2017:$1.05M. Average price dropped to $900k in Dec 2020 ... now $1.4M.
I don't think it's subjective at all. There are cities that are clean and safe and well run, and you might not want to live there because they have a lot of people, but that doesn't make the city bad. I think your preference to live away from people is subjective, and that's fine, but the rule can't be that you get to live right where you want and no one else can move. Either people can move or they can't. I presume you don't live in the neighborhood you grew up in?
I’m not saying the solution is for people to not move, I’m in favour of people living where they want. I don’t have the solution to the problems caused by rapid growth, it’s probably some combination of allowing mixed zoning so that there is enough housing and supporting businesses for the new residents along with better planning of or restrictions on municipal expansion to avoid sprawl and encourage better use of the land within the existing municipality. There’s probably a bunch of other reforms necessary to prevent the bad parts of gentrification and provide more of a safety net for people who get displaced. It’sa big hairy problem for sure.
Reminds me of the George Carlin joke. "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
This claim, often repeated, is misleading to the point of dishonesty.
Corn isn't really subsidized, and iowa corn farmers are not the benefactors of the agricultural bills. Cattle producers and chemical corporations are subsidized, and the way they're subsidized is by a myriad set of policies which encourage grain prices to stay very low. This makes cattle feed cheap and corn and soy inputs to chemical plants cheap.
If the price of corn doubled, farmers could afford to pay their mortgage and taxes without trying to extract every bit of possible yield. But then the price of beef would go up and the profits of 3M and Dupont would go down, and that's a far more powerful force than farmers in Iowa.
I'm kind of puzzled by this. Your post defies conventional wisdom (which you say is misleading). I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt because conventional wisdom is often misleading. But these links seem to indicate that in fact corn farmers ARE directly subsidized, both in terms of crop insurance (cheaper than market insurance is clearly a subsidy), as well as price protection. See that second link, especially ARC and PLC, which compensates farmers if their prices fall below benchmark rates set by Congress.
Is that not a direct subsidy? Are they wrong? (genuinely curious - your post is interesting enough that I felt I had to do some research to clarify my own thinking)
Subsidies have transitioned away from direct payments to subsidized insurance. The insurance isn’t just about natural disasters or crop loss, it guarantees minimum revenue based on farmed area, basically resulting in direct payments whenever prices are low. That has been successfully rebranded as “not a subsidy”.
The second link here is a deeply biased political position advocacy opinion piece, so it's a little bit onerous to 'refute' because every section is sort of a misleading half-truth. (I'm not sure what the best example would be, but I'm sure you've read something before where an author was cherry-picking statistics or casting factual elements in dishonest light so that they could support their stance, whether that was about vaccines or immigration or encryption or guns or whatever).
One thing that it does get right, is the section "they induce overproduction, inflate land prices, and harm the environment" which is absolutely true. My point in my previous post was that this systemic overproduction is to the benefit of corn buyers (cattle production, food processors, etc) and the detriment of corn producers.
In essence, the aggregate result of the myriad laws and programs impacting agricultural production is that grain producing farmers are left sitting helpless on a knife's edge. The only way to avoid bankruptcy is to pump your land full of petrochemicals to maximize yield. ARC is based on revenue, not profitability- it's encouraging high-cost, high-yield farming practices to guarantee plentiful grain supply to buyers. PLC is even more brazen- after completely distorting the true market price for animal feed by forcing grain growers to overproduce, we let them buy corn for less than it costs to grow and then force the farmers to rely on an insurance payment that's just enough to cover their debt & tax payments.
Basically, the grain producers are pawns in the ag subsidy game and the grain buyers are the kings.
I don't know much about direct corn subsidies, but we could talk about sugar tariffs -- which you could interpret as a subsidy to any substitute product producer -- like maybe corn syrup producers.
Residents of Austin, TX have been complaining that the city changed or got too crowded shortly after they moved in, whether that was a year ago or decades ago. People who moved to SF in 2010 complained about the people moving there in 2015.
Same thing happens at a neighborhood or district level too. Everybody feels like they were the last person to move in while it was still good and everything after them is unwelcome.