Quote:
Originally Posted by LordSquidworth
There’s literally nothing they can do to stop people from moving in and buying. Change sucks, and this is one they have no say it. Guess they shouldn’t sell their homes, but obviously enough are for enough to be moving there.
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That's it exactly.
No one who wants to sell a house is complaining in Boise. No businesses are complaining about all that extra money coming in either.
I'm a lifelong Idahoan, and I've watched this this impulse to move west come and go all my life.
It's not isolated to Idaho; Idaho is only the latest Glamor Girl of the western states.
There is always one Glamor Girl state that's the place to move to when this impulse arises. 20 years ago, Oregon was the Glamor Girl. 30 years ago, it was Montana. 40 years ago, Colorado was the Glamor Girl.
In all of them there is always one city that's the most golden of all, but the glamor tarnishes more quickly for the cities than for the state.
30 years ago, Boise wasn't the golden city here. Coeur d'Alene was. 70 years ago, Pocatello was the golden city in the state.
And 60 years ago, California was the biggest Glamor Girl of them all by far.
A lot of the kids who were just older than me, and a lot of those my age I grew up with, wanted to move to California with the same intensity the Californians now want to move here. A lot of them did leave Idaho and became permanent Californians.
Every single one of these sudden growth spurts always brings the same complaints, but the complaints never stop the growth or kill the desire to move to the Glamor Girl.
What happens next is always the same too. The reasons why people want to move west are not, and are never, strictly economic.
Economics is always a part, but so are the romantic notions of striking out to the Golden West to stake your claim, or the current notion of living off the grid, or getting away from the press of humanity, or even the desire to hunt elk instead of moose. There are a hundred different reasons, some desperate, some logical, some necessary, and some completely ridiculous.
What always happens in these surges that's always under-considered is how many folks who move away end up going back to where they came from. Once the romance wears off, a lot of folks find they miss their old homes, families and friends, and their new place ain't as nifty as they thought it would be.
What happens after they show up and stay is always the same too. The golden city changes, but the state doesn't change very much. It takes a lot to make the state change. But in time, the new place becomes pretty similar to the place those newcomers left.
Why? Because no one ever brings anything more than what they have when they packed up.
When they arrive, all they have are the same ways of living they had in the other state, and they all have the same expectations of life they had living where they lived. They come expecting to find what they already know, and that's what they will want.
So ultimately, those expectations are either met or not. When their numbers are large enough in a short time frame, I've watched cities radically change in just a few years. Sometimes to the good, sometimes to the bad.
But all the states out here are large. Most often, the changes that come to a single city don't ever change all the other cities very much. It takes a lot of immigration and time to change an entire state.
That never means things like the minimum wage will suddenly go up, or housing will suddenly become any more affordable for the poor man.
In the most beautiful places, life is often the hardest because no one can eat the scenery, and the rugged beauty out here always makes for more difficult living.
What it can mean is a man who has always been poor all his life, struggling on, trying to keep what little he got from his Daddy, who was always poor too, is suddenly wealthy selling off the old farmstead that never amounted to much in the first place.
That guy is going to either spend all that money right there and stay put. It's all he knows, and now, he can live in comfort for the first time.
Or he will move away to his own Glamor Girl state instead and spend it there. It's the place he always wanted to live.
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The Spokane Valley 
