Loading…
26
Hot take: I watched a whole town get priced out in 14 months and nobody wants to say the obvious thing
I lived in a small city in Idaho from 2019 to 2023 and I swear the place flipped in about 14 months. In early 2021 you could rent a two bedroom near downtown for $850, and by spring 2022 that same unit was listed at $1,650 with new paint and nothing else changed. What caused it? Remote work money pouring in from California and Washington, plus a city council that kept approving short term rental permits like candy. The people who lived there their whole lives, the ones working at the grocery store and the mechanic shop, got pushed out to towns 40 minutes away. I get the other side of it too. Homeowners saw their values double and finally had a nest egg, and nobody wants to be the guy telling a family they can't move somewhere nice. But there is a real difference between a free market and a feeding frenzy, and I think the rental permit thing is the part nobody on either side wants to touch. So my question is this: is capping short term rentals in small towns a fair fix, or just a band aid that makes the shortage worse? I honestly don't know and I want to hear from people who lived through it somewhere else.
0 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In0 Comments
No comments yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.