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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1260 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 5, 2026

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What's the deal with new housing going up like crazy in places that have few jobs and negative population growth?

I asked an AI about this, and it said something about how even though people are leaving the region, there's still a backlog of housing supply, especially for smaller units such as apartments and starter homes. I do in fact see a lot of apartments going up, and I suppose "starter homes," though the kind that costs more than the median home price for the area (which is not especially high). And then the expectation is that when Xers and Millenials get older, they'll buy the sprawling houses that are currently occupied by boomers? These houses seem very large, and I don't really understand them.

I sort of get what's happening in places like Arizona and Florida, where a larger than usual retiree cohort wants to live somewhere warm in a nice new easy to maintain house. I guess Phoenix is still adding subdivisions by sheer force of cheapness?

What's the deal with new housing going up like crazy in places that have few jobs and negative population growth?

High-paying remote work allows people to live almost anywhere.

There's no way there's this many people with remote high-paying jobs.

COVID changed things quite a bit for a lot of people. I’ve had my questions marks with some of the people I’ve met, but usually there’s other things going on in the background. I’ve seen some surprising familial organizing of finances, deals cut, and a couple of creative financing loans made out in the Menlo Park area as well as Fresno.

During a family gathering around the holidays last year, a couple relatives of mine made some home purchases out in Utah and a couple places elsewhere that they had plans for as it relates to business developments they wanted to expand. Which is interesting because some years back my landlord who I’d known for years did something remarkably similar. None of it made much sense to me at a first pass but there’s a conflux of interesting undercurrents driving this behavior I think.

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