[japhyr]

Santa Cruz is certainly an outlier, but we're definitely seeing it all over the country.

I'm in a small town in southeast AK. Most of the buildable land has already been claimed. Tourism is growing faster than local people can support the industry, so there's all kinds of pressures: housing for summer employees, an increased temptation to do short term rentals to tourists instead of long term rentals to locals, and people buying second and third homes that they don't use most of the year.

Many of us watch our young people leave to go find their place in the world, and then find they can't move back even if they wanted to. The ones who do are paid really well, or have their housing largely subsidized by being given property their family bought a long time ago, or some similar assistance that isn't generally available to everyone.

For the past several years, multiple schools in our town have been unable to fill empty teaching positions because the people who are hired spend all spring and half the summer looking for housing, and simply can't find it. They bail and go somewhere that's willing to hire them and has some kind of housing available.

It's really a mess.

[vaidhy]

The most obvious answer seem to be around population density. What is the population density of your small town? Why would the developers not build multi-story apartments/condos?

Why is there no supply of multi-family buildings anywhere outside of cities? If everyone wants a single family home with a yard, you are going to run into space limitations.

[japhyr]

I live in Sitka, AK. I don't know my town's land area, but we're roughly a 14-mile strip of land right between the base of steep mountains and the ocean. Most of town is about a half-mile from coast to mountains, with some stretches much narrower than that. We have about 9,000 people.

> Why would the developers not build multi-story apartments/condos?

Most of the same reasons as many places, with the added issue of not much undeveloped land to build on. Who wants to build a multi-story building when you can build an expensive house and deal with a single buyer? Zoning laws are controlled by people who already have homes, and don't prioritize accessible housing. People don't want to see the value of their home drop. People don't want their views blocked by tall buildings.

[mwattsun]

I feel a certain kind of sadness about it. There's not a word for the loss of your home town in English that I'm aware of, but there's a song that comes close to it.

Pretenders - My City Was Gone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thu8DWsirJo

[fragmede]

"Gentrification-induced displacement" doesn't roll off the tongue very well, unfortunately.