Ask HN: Who is coordinating a plan to make small towns hipster?
Doesn't it seem fairly possible for a large company, or a DAO for that matter, to establish a foothold in a small town somewhere in a small state and create massive incentives for hipster coastals to move there?
Think of Marfa, TX, or Los Alamos, CA, or to take an older one, Yountville, CA.
It seems both potentially HUGELY profitable and politically meaningful to make it palatable for young coastal workers to congregate in a small town and revitalize it with urban tastes.
Things going for this strategy:
1. Work from anywhere policies not likely going anywhere.
2. Young families likely want more space, and many of these rural states have it in spades. What's lacking is schooling, housing and entertainment, and much of this could likely be developed.
3. Small, rural towns have cheap real estate because of lack of opportunity. AL and WV are dirt cheap compared to the coasts, but if you’re honest with yourself, you probably haven’t bought there because there’s nothing enticing about it. No jobs, nowhere great to eat, nothing really to do. The land itself could be gorgeous, magestic even -- there's very little difference between the landscape in Hudson Valley and the landscape in Appalachia. You just don't want to be the first or only coastal elite to settle there (neither do I, and I grew up in rural GA).
4. Creatives love to congregate. If you could seed the town with hipster chefs, maybe a graphic designer-focused coworking facility, etc, then you'd have a good start. I’m thinking of how Richard Branson had that mansion in the English countryside where musicians preferred to record because they could spread out. Or how Francis Mallman has his isolated island where young, ambitious chefs apprentice under him to learn hyper-local cooking. If you had that initial draw, you could entice more builders who create restaurants, coffee houses, galleries and music venues. Money follows hipsters. Folks from places like LA, SF, NYC would LOVE the idea of spreading out. My guess is they'd swarm the open houses if you show them modern pre-fabs on 1+ acres with total privacy and a Blue Bottle and 10/10 preschool down the street for under $1000/sf.
5. First movers would stand to profit the most here. But you'd need a lot of capital and sufficient influence to bring a lot of people with you. If you had those, you could literally buy a few hundred acres around a town and then start to parcel it out to folks as they arrive. Massive profit incentive. I’m oversimplifying just about everything here, but this does seem like a good fit for a DAO…
My personal read, as an LA resident, is that a lot of young families would LOVE for this to happen. Leaving politics aside, what keeps most people I know from moving to, say, Montana is "what kind of schools are there" and “won’t we get bored after a few months?”
People live in cities for other people, for the entertainment, the restaurants, the vibe. But a lot of that can be developed. And some small towns have it despite not being big. Austin in the 90s, for example.
And, again, leaving the politics aside, this seems like a win-win — small towns don’t want to be left behind, but there also don’t seem to be a lot of developers stepping in and trying to give them a shot at the modern economy.
I would love to know who is doing this in small town America. Not just rebuilding or developing a slightly-less-shitty strip mall, but doing it with a deliberate strategy of making the town the next “it” destination for young families in America. > What's lacking is schooling, housing and entertainment, and much of this could likely be developed. Also missing: friends, family, and diversity. As a non-white person in the US, most small towns are a non-starter for me because it's uncomfortable being the only non-white person in every room. I don't ascribe that to any malice on their part -- it's just an unfortunate reality. I think most people feel this way, regardless of their race. > And, again, leaving the politics aside, this seems like a win-win That's like saying "leaving safety aside" or "leaving authoritarianism aside"... you just can't. It might be the determining factor about whether a place is appealing. We now have to contend with the fact that most of the inexpensive states will criminalize many aspects of family planning, the way they are criminalizing abortion. When my girlfriend gets pregnant, we will spend the pregnancy in a blue state for that reason (despite living in a red one now). > small towns don’t want to be left behind Why do you think this? It sounds like your definition of "left behind" is that they're not going to grow or be filled with young creatives. By that definition, a lot of small towns absolutely do want to be left behind. Most of them seem to be filled with people who want their children to have more or less the same childhood that they had: similar vibe, quality of life, etc. I can't speak for all small towns, but most small towns would probably not appreciate the developments you're describing. They might as well be started on a relatively uninhabited piece of land, like Serenbe and similar places were[1]. Serenbe is a very cool example, thank you. Do you know of any others? I definitely think local political pushback is one of the potential challenges. But I will also admit that part of the plan would be to move in enough people to gain political control. It's a very viable, legal political strategy to ship 60k families into a new urban enclave in Wyoming or Montana and thereby turn it blue. 120k blue votes would do it. I honestly thought that was Amazon's plan with HQ2, which is what made me think of it. A company the size of Amazon could create that many great jobs in one of these states in a single election year. If they paired it with tasteful property development, I would be shocked if a good chunk of their Seattle employees didn't swarm the new town. But let's assume that: 1 - no existing large company will do this. Patagonia or similar could, but most don't wade this deeply into politics. 2 - locals would dislike it but would also get rich selling their land. So this is not hostile to them, and we don't need to obsess over their feelings too much. It's just capitalism. Seems to me a better mechanism would be to assemble the interest, then collect the money, and then buy the plot of land. You wouldn't want to project too much ahead of time for fear of scaring or intimidating. But once you secured the land, assuming you could still subdivide it and develop it (ie, assuming local politicians didn't stop you first), you could sell it off, get the new residents registered and you're done. You just took over. This could sound too premeditated, but developers wielding local laws in unexpected ways to their economic advantage is nothing new. See Robert Moses. I think a DAO should be the next Robert Moses, only not racist and focused on making all of the gorgeous land in this country habitable for young people. This is a massive country. The only reason we all huddle in cities is because the rest of it is so left behind that we don't want to help it anymore. BTW, I don't think there's much difference between taking over a town and starting a new one. You start a new one and the neighboring towns plus the county will still freak out. It's in your best interest to control local politics, ideally all the way to the governor, either way. > Serenbe is a very cool example, thank you. Do you know of any others? Not off the top of my head, but there were a lot of attempts at something like that in the 20th century. Most of them were associated with escaping social norms (e.g. communes, cults, etc.) and ultimately failed. > 120k blue votes would do it You're missing a few factors: 1. Land votes, not people. One of the reasons Republicans are a minority party and control the country, even at most state levels, is because of gerrymandering. You need far more than 50% of the state to take it back over, especially if the Supreme Court is tolerant of extreme gerrymandering (as it has been for years now). 2. A large percentage of people don't vote. If you want 120k votes, you need probably 200k+ potential voters. 3. There is an explicit strategy by the GOP to make purple states (like Texas) scary or unpleasant to live in for Democrats. > The only reason we all huddle in cities is because the rest of it is so left behind that we don't want to help it anymore. I'm not sure this is true. I think the #1 reason for living in a city has been the job opportunities, and the #2 reason was the social connections. Maybe it's close to friends, family, or a like-minded community. You don't have those things in a random spit of land in the middle of nowhere. You won't have an airport, convenient highways, easy weekend getaways, nearby beaches, etc. Serenbe is cool, but it took decades to develop it into a real competitor to a city, and it was also consciously built close to the busiest airport in the world. You can't replicate those conditions quickly or easily. I think if you had $30B to spend, you could either build a town or boost the endowment for youth voter turnout, and I think the latter would give you better social returns on your investment. I hear on you social connections, which is why this must be a coordinated effort. Moving slowly in will not be that appealing, but having everything set up ahead of time and then moving en masse would work. RE: politics, the governorship isn't elected by land. Take out the governor and you can fix political gerrymandering (or wield it to your benefit). End of the day, the vision as I see it isn't to build a new city or to make a small town feel like a city. It's to enjoy the benefits of large plots of land and large houses, but to do so with a modern, youthful population and great restaurants and entertainment. I'm envisioning Bend, OR but all across the country. Or Los Alamos, etc, the examples above. These towns didn't happen by accident. Someone had a plan, and then a tipping point was reached that cemented the place as a modern small town. That can be reverse engineered and purposefully carried out. Not saying it's easy, but it's 100% doable. And I want to know who's trying, because I want to help. This is what I'm talking about, today in the WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rural-counties-are-booming-pand... All the existing residents of these towns would hate everything about this. Also, once you bring in things to do so people aren't "bored", and fill it with hipsters... you just have the city again. The small town vibe is lost. The lower prices are gone, because high income earners have moved in, and the locals are priced out of the town they grew up in. This is a horrible idea. If a company wants to buy an empty plot of land and try to make their own city, ok, let's see what that's like... but don't destroy good small towns by turning them into some weird hybrid. The "small town vibe" is what holds back the value. It's undesirable to modern young people to not have a vibrant creative atmosphere. Obviously this is a generalization but it's clearly true on average. That's bad for the town no matter which way you look at it -- top young talent leaves at first opportunity, so no companies invest because no ambitious talent pool, so no dollars flow through local economy, and it becomes a death spiral. Don't pretend like locals want this. If the town has great real estate, someone should help it find its maximum value. Sure some locals will claim to dislike the change, sort of like those old SFers that complain about the good ol days of Haight Ashbury. But they did OK if they owned. And this is what capitalism is all about -- if it's empirically good, it gets bid up with higher prices. To pretend like small towns have precious virtue on their own or want to shun value appreciation is naive. Small town home owners should love to find out young people moved in and made their home worth millions. They can cash out and go hide somewhere forgotten if they really want. Either way, if they pretend they have some right to not have their land value improved, they misunderstand how capitalism in America works. Your whole argument seems to be based on turning a small town into a big town... doesn't that defeat the whole purpose? Sure, the early adopters will make a profit on their property values, but then what? Do companies just keep hopping from town to town to keep this going, and what happens when they leave for the next hip place? It is possible for small towns to grow an evolve while maintaining their culture. A small town doesn't need to become a tech hub full of hipsters to grow. Slow sustainable growth is what most of these towns want, not a massive boom and culture shock. I grew up in a small town. Yes, I left right after high school and so did my sister, but she moved back once she had a family. A lot of people move to the city to start their career, make some money, and meet someone, then transition to a smaller town (or at least a suburb) once they have kids. This is an intentional choice. If the small town turned into a big one, they would likely look to leave and go somewhere else. The place I grew up voted down a freeway proposed near town when I was in high school. They didn't even want faster access to a bigger city, because they were afraid of people working in those cities living in town and the impact that would have. I didn't agree with it, as I wanted a fast way out of there, but that's democracy. If a city, and it's people, want this to happen... ok. But a company deciding on its own that their way is the best way and changing the entire culture of a city by force is no better than one country invading another to try and impose their political structures as "best". I moved to an area that was near freeways, but I still understand why some people don't like it. I kind of like the pace of small town life, but I want more job options, so I chose a larger area. Transforming a small town doesn't seem like it will solve anything. If I want the pace of a small town and that pace changes to bring in more job options, then it would no longer have that small town pace. The last place I lived had a lot of rules in place to keep it from feeling too "big". They had max building heights, didn't allow chains downtown, etc. I left for a few years and when I went back, a lot of that seemed to have changed. They are building giant condo complexes downtown, there are chains going in left and right, traffic is a mess. The place is worse and it lost the essence that made people want to be there in the first place. Who would want to live near a bunch of hipsters? Sounds horrible. LOL nearly everyone. The term has negative connotations but technically it refers to "a person who follows the latest trends and fashions." Traditionalists, people with bad taste, or generally uncurious folks don't motivate large amounts of people to change behavior. But large groups of young people trying new things and inventing new experiences do. SF, NYC, LA, even Miami real estate booms are all because of hipsters. Young creative people make the place interesting, then richer but more boring people crash the party and bid up prices. It gets too expensive for young creatives eventually so they leave, and then the cycle repeats. Geography on its own isn't enough. NYC was a disaster in the 70s; only when the young people started moving back did it become desirable, hence valuable. So you need hipsters. Without them, the place you live is just a boring bedroom community. Could be anywhere, likely not valuable. >"a person who follows the latest trends and fashions." In other words, a person who doesn't think for him/herself. We have plenty of those. They are welcome to stay where they are. What would you dislike about it? It's not like they're actively irritating to other people. In fact, they're largely responsible for the great restaurants, coffee shops, music venues, and street art in cities that people value when they're looking for somewhere to live. Only a very narrow segment of the population values those things when looking for somewhere to live. Expand your perspective. > Only a very narrow segment of the population values [great restaurants, coffee shops, music venues, and street art] when looking for somewhere to live. Are you kidding? Why have people been urbanizing for the last few decades? Why do people value walkability? Why are small towns and rural communities losing population, even when people are able to work remotely? Why is all the most expensive real estate close to these things? If you look at literally any research on the topic, the exact opposite is true. Only a small segment of people don't care about those factors[1]. Do you have any data to back up your assertion, or is it just your enlightened perspective that you're basing this on? > Expand your perspective. Expand your ability to make an argument other than implying that someone else is ignorant. That's a childish way to avoid actually supporting your argument. You have no idea where I grew up, where I live now, or what my perspective is. People aren't automatically ignorant because they disagree with what your gut says or your own personal preferences. 1. https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2020-t... Hipsters get a bad rap but basically everything that's culturally interesting is 'hipster'.