The competition is fierce - look at OF payout distribution - and your income tends to fall off the cliff in a few years’ time when the audience grows tired of you or someone younger/hotter corners your niche market. But if “influencer with paid bot followers” is an euphemism for escorts, then it way work for a little bit longer.
The best way to make homes more affordable beside remote work (and changes of zoning laws in the US) is an efficient public transit system. Trains, trains and more fucking trains. Then the commute times drop down and more homes further away from work become viable options.
They’ll jump faster than you think. I’m watching it happen as California migrates to my state. New builds in extrajudicial areas start off incredibly cheap and double in cost within 3 years as more neighborhoods build up around them and they become the “close-in” option. Still more affordable than the much older, settled neighborhoods that aged well but they’re a temporary and waning resource if cost control is the game. If you managed to close a commute gap with a train system I think you’d be shocked by how quickly those inexpensive homes skyrocket, and you’re looking at doing it again, but from Nevada.
I’m not opposed to mixed use developments contained inside of urban zones. I think they’re great options to keep populations geographically tight for people who like that. And it would spare the elm street towns beyond the suburban sprawl from the locust horde discussed above.
There is no shortage of places to build in the overwhelming majority of the United States. Texas alone has plenty of room for the entire population not just of the USA, but the world. Our high home prices are the result of a number of different phenomena, but most of it is man-made through government policies that lead to scarcity.
Like most things in the USA, passenger rail springs up where there is demand for it, which there isn’t much of in general. Large and even medium sized cities typically have public transit that functions well enough, even if we aren’t giving 1930’s Germany a run for their money.
If it was a case of “If you build it, they will come”, then Amtrak would have been a massive, self-sustaining success. I grew up very close to an Amtrak station and my parents never once opted to use it to take us anywhere, just as I have never opted to use it when traveling with mine in New England.
Why do that when we could hop in the conversion van and us kids could watch My Cousin Vinny on VHS through the CRT TV in between the front seats? My dad was a carpenter and mom was a nurse, affording us the luxury of traveling in a giant box on wheels with a sofa in the back to get from state-to-state with $0.79 per gallon gasoline for most of my childhood.
Amtrak required 6.8 billion in public funding last year to operate.
Njord the state of Iowa would appreciate if you stopped reminding everyone what a great place to live this is. The people in LAX should continue to transplant to Texas so they can continue with 3hr commutes and 100+ degree weather.
As I pointed out above, Texas has plenty of room and people from not Texas should absolutely continue to move there, declaring themselves Texans within the first few months ideally.
I would add a caveat that other resources come in to play. Roughly half of Texas is an arid desert (Chihuahuan Desert) and water is increasingly scarce through our central region (the hill country, housing Austin and San Antonio with lots of desirable real estate between and around, which has now been broadly discovered).
A town to the north of me, and just south of Austin so becoming an outer ‘burb, recently had to buy water from another town 3 hours and a different aquifer system away. My town saw a large master planned community put the brakes on development due to water concerns and there is a big fight over water rights in general right now, with oil in the mix trying to run pipelines from west Texas through delicate and limited watersheds to refineries on the gulf coast. Meanwhile, lakes and rivers are at record low levels, growth isn’t slowing in general and land mass won’t matter in the grand scheme as population is planned around water.
Only the part of me that derives perverse satisfaction from the idea of my childhood friend from Indiana moving to Austin, adopting a drawl, wearing cowboy boots and hat, and immediately engaging in far-left political activism at the local level.
Lol. Those gay cowboys never wear their jeans right anyways. You can tell they’re Indiana native liberals when their pants stop at their ankles and then rise half way up the boot shaft every time they cross their legs to sit.
I have yet to meet any Texans in Maine. I believe the mortality rate for Texas drivers is near 100 percent in winter conditions, so they tend to simply perish up here.
We get some drug addicts from down south who prefer being able to shoot up wherever they like and not be hassled. I try to be sensitive to their cultural distinctiveness and let them know where you can get the good sausage gravy served as a beverage in pint glasses.
That’s because for the vast majority of us (excepting the panhandle and our northern edge) peak winter is about 60 degrees with a few cold dips here and there and it’s cold as fuck up there. We have three brutally hot months of summer but the rest of our year is like spring/early summer for the majority of the country and we like it that way.
Biscuits and gravy are pretty popular though. Texas cuisine is sort of a mesh of the southern comfort stuff meeting Mexico with our own version of Gulf Coast seafood and of course Texas style bbq in the mix. And in the southeastern portion Cajun makes a prominent showing. I think they do the New Mexico chili thing out west. But everybody likes biscuits and gravy. And chicken fried steak and gravy. With jalapeños.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to like about Texas. Shiner Bock, Biscuits and Gravy, Buc-ees, and Texas Brisket Breakfast Burritos are all excellent additions to American life.
Between Longhorn Steakhouse and Texas Roundhouse we can experience authentic Texas cuisine year-round here in Maine. I used to wonder if any other states had some Maine themed restaurants and then I discovered Twin Peaks across from my hotel when I was consulting in Brentwood, TN.
They really nailed many aspects of the north woods lifestyle but their representations of the kind of gals you run into in logging country aren’t exactly accurate. I became that guy for the bartender for a few weeks because the food was actually better than her rack and I could walk back to my hotel. They had stuff like grilled freshwater fish, meatloaf, chicken and steaks, but sadly no red hot dogs like we’re blessed with in Maine.
I’m 99 percent sure she totally wanted me because she was really nice to me the whole time. I think she could tell I wasn’t like those other business travelers.