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Yeah. Like the folks from CA that moved/discovered ID, bought up the land around the lake, built their multi-million $ mansions, and started telling locals (whose families have lived there for generations) how they are going to live their lives.
In FL, you often hear that "native floridians are leaving the state because of all the yankees moving in".
It's getting bad down here on the coast in South Carolina.
you're telling me. I went to visit Waccamaw Neck the other day, and I'll be damned if they didn't rename it "Myrtle Beach." A whole town had sprung up, but it looks like it was built by vinyl siding salesmen.
This has been happening in New Hampshire, Vermont, Coastal Maine and upstate New York since they invented the railroad. It started with resort hotels like the Mt. Washington for wealthy urban refugees and eventually morphed into "Gentleman Farmers" that didn't realize the major product of cows. Now we have transplanted almost wealthy, like my in-laws, which have taken a rapidly dilapidating rural farm house and turned it into a mini McMansion. At least we get to visit.
The famed “Lakes Region” of New Hampshire has always been infested with the really wealthy building real mansions in, on and around Lake Winnipesauke. These “summer folks” create a huge retail demand for goods and services during the summer. When they move back to where ever they came from the place looks like a ghost town. The locals have to make whatever they can in the summer and live on it and meager welfare during the winters. The same situation with a complementary time frame is true wherever the snowbirds go in the winter. This situation is great for the ‘birders but uneconomic for everyone else.
The real problem is the consolidation of agriculture from small to medium family farms with almost sustainable economics to centralized and sometimes foreign located, agricultural mega businesses. The same applies to industry. All the textile mills and their supporting industries that abandoned the small northern cities for lower costs in the south have now, along with much else, moved offshore for lower costs. The result has been catastrophic collapse of property values, wages and tax revenues in the abandoned small and medium sized cities. The infusion of hyper wealthy squatters has not helped the economic recovery in the affected small town and rural America.
The North could not, under our national Constitution, charge import tariffs on textiles from the south but we, as a Nation, can damn well put tariffs on goods made with almost or actually enslaved workers in other places. The term “Chinese Junk” has an entirely new meaning.
What we can do about the wealthy that turn our hometowns into “quaint small towns” that we can no longer afford is still up for debate. They help some of our businesses but hurt many in doing so.
Rural land outside the big cities here in Texas have become "gentrified".
Farm land turned into manicured acres with nice Kentucky type horse fencing perfectly installed and a nice McMansion plopped in the middle.
Looks very out of place when either side has native pasture/corn and a 1940's renovated home or double wide and gravel drive.
Rural land outside the big cities here in Texas have become "gentrified".
Farm land turned into manicured acres with nice Kentucky type horse fencing perfectly installed and a nice McMansion plopped in the middle.
Looks very out of place when either side has native pasture/corn and a 1940's renovated home or double wide and gravel drive.
And that my friends is how we separate the rich from the poor. Just like in the cities where the poor are sequestered in pockets and downtowns to be "contained" by the police - same is happening to the countryside. Some towns get "gentrified" and some don't. The ones that don't will have a bunch of dilapidated double-wides with 15+ junk cars and tires on the roof and the others will have 4000+ sq ft mansions with manicured lawns. The middle (whatever is left of it) will stay in the cities since the middle has real mortgages to pay and needs 9-5+ jobs to stay afloat. Just like we have a two-party system to provide for either "left" or "right", that's how our country will look like too.
I walk or jog around my neighborhood every night, it is unincorporated and all the lots are 1.5-2 acres in size. Almost nobody grows their own food and almost nobody wants to use the Sun to generate electricity (I am in South Florida). Most of the lawns are either artificially green or unkept. It's like people don't have a third choice for anything, it's like it does not even cross their mind to stop spending $3.99 on a pound of tomatoes and start growing their own at a fraction of the cost...
Try San Diego...."affluent retirees". There's nothing left there.
San Diego is a beautiful city. We lived there for 24 years, but when we retired we had to leave. We are just average retirees, and we did not want to spend every penny on taxes.
We live now in a small town in OK in a nice house which we could have never afford in San Diego.
LOL We sold out and moved from the bustling East to the outskirts of a town of 149 people. We didn't move to change anything... we bought an old farm house and restored it. The kids of the folks who built it, themelves in their 70's, come by to tell us how much they love that we have returned it to its unadorned and now-un-siding'ed beauty. We came to do what the locals did, to raise our horses and cows and chickens and gardens unmolested and un-ordinanced. We don't want big box stores, we shop locally and enjoy the local friendships we have made. We're not here to impress anyone, but to enjoy our lives and have a place for the kids (all grown) to come. We're not 'rich retirees' (the rumor was at first that we were Witness Protection hideouts!! LOL) but we do love the country and don't want or need the McMansion types around us. This isn't our first home (we sold it!), but it isn't a 'vacation home' - and it is our last one.
This has been happening for many decades. In the 70's people were leaving California and moving to Oregon. In the 80's they moved into Colorado. In the 90's they moved into Wyoming. Resettled Californians have taken over the town of Dubois WY and now run it. (Natives of Wyoming call them "Californicators".) I, myself, left California late 1990's and moved to Cody WY. Met many non-Wyoming natives who had learned to keep quiet about having come from California. Many Coloradans have moved into rural areas of Nebraska and they meet with suspicion and resistance from the old-timers here. People eventually flee the urban areas and move into the more rural areas and I have met countless such people over the past 15 years.
The rural place where DH and I lived 30 years ago (when we were first married) is now totally suburban yuppie - McMansions on manicured 2 acre spreads. The horse farm across the road is gone, the sheep farm down the road is gone, as is the Christmas tree orchard that used to be next to our property. My woodland retreat (part of our four acres) is also gone. They ripped up all my Jack-in-the-pulpits. I went back there once, five years ago, and I refuse to go back there again - it makes me ill.
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