Boom Towns

You may have heard of a hippie festival in August called Burning Man. It is held at Black Rock Lake in Northwest Nevada, Northeast of Pyramid Lake, North of Reno. It's the bed of former Lake Lahontan, a really huge dry lake 100 miles across but cut by mountain ranges as islands, and went to 600 feet deep that existed during the last ice age and will refill again someday from the runoff out of Lake Tahoe, once the ice comes back. The lake beds from the Big Dry are spread all over, and being salty, aren't worth much to the local ranchers. Renting them out is dirt cheap.

The festival forms by cars loaded with tents and tables, RVs, trailers towed behind various vehicles, and even old VW Camper (Westphalia) vans. Pop-top campers, they're called. They trickle in from all over the world for this festival of art on a lakebed. It's a boom town, and in a few days it cleans up, everybody leaves and goes home again. This is proof that the ability to throw together a town, for a reason, remains possible.

Snow Birds, a type of retired RVer and Trailer-dweller that still have the money for fuel, form an annual town in Yuma Arizona, near the Mexican and California border close to where the Colorado reaches the Sea of Cortez. It is warm there in the winter, and approximately 1 million RVers gather there annually to wait out the winter in a warm place. RVs have minimal insulation so "If its warm outside, its warm inside. If its cold outside, its cold inside." In Spring, the Snowbirds pack up again and leave for the warming mountain meadows which offer low priced parking, excellent trout fishing, fantastic views and wildflowers for the amateur photographer, bicycling, rafting, and hiking. All the stuff they swore they would do while toiling in crappy jobs where they earned the money for this.

Snow Birds create villages of each other in campgrounds around the west, gathering, making friends, going to the local sights together or politely waving to each other. Some tow a cheap bubble car or a jeep, others carry a Vespa on the reinforced bike rack and leave the RV parked in a central location, then use the Vespa to go out to dinner or park at a trailhead. Thankfully, people don't seem to steal them, and Snow Birds pay their bills, unlike the hippies from Burning Man, so they're welcome in towns and restaurants.

With RVs and trailers, you can tow or drive a surprising number of like minded people to a location and create an economy like a flash mob. A surprising number of craftsmen follow festival events for every conceivable hobby or trade show. They live in RVs too. Some build their hardware on the road, others build in the offseason in a workshop with a foundation, store it for sale during the year. These vendors and craftsmen can be a festival draw all their own.

At present, brick and mortar cities are coasting on inertia and reputation that they offer the best workers or the most high paying jobs at a particular location. The Bay Area around San Francisco Bay is a prime example of this con. The workers aren't any smarter. The jobs don't pay enough to make up for the higher costs for everything, including rent, so you largely end up just as poor and unhappy as you would anywhere else. The only real advantage of the place is space to anchor ships and natural summer air conditioning from the sea, though that's not as good as you'd expect it to be, and fog for A/C is available on the entire coast, and the Bay is either too shallow to anchor ships or moving too fast thanks to the river to anchor there. The big and important downside of the SF Bay is there's no drinking water supply for the 10 million people living there. Its pumped over mountains, and the pumps aren't free. They are subsidized by state taxes. This has become a substantial cost, and one that displaces benefits of operating there. A rational business leaves the Bay Area. The voters, slowly being dominated by communists, keep voting themselves raises. You can't be profitable in that situation.

So if you're a business looking for a place to be, you can be anywhere the critical elements are and the essential geography favors your operations. The workers will follow. If they don't, they'll starve. And you can train new people, if you are a competent business anyway. In the post-oil economy, which we're inevitably drifting towards, transportation costs are relevant to your calculations. Maybe not so much this year, with oil falling temporarily, but in the next decade and those after certainly. In the future, efficient movement of goods is understood to be done with electric powered freight trains. You can supply the electric grid with hydroelectric power or nuclear power or wind power if it works for long enough, or solar panel farms. This isn't free, but it is sustainable in the long term, with effort and maintenance. There will be jobs for people looking after it.

There are a lot of places in the Western states which have water, which allows life, but lack conventional geographic advantages other than NOT being in the expensive and overpriced Bay Area. I believe that the Bay Area is going to empty, eventually. It doesn't make sense if you aren't requiring the Bay itself. And most of the port activities are currently done in Stockton to avoid all the costs of the Longshoreman's Union in Alameda. Since we're all getting poorer, there's decreasing need for gigantic container ships from China and Japan anyway. Which is ironic because ships are fuel efficient ways to move cargo, like trains. We still need ships. We don't need them that big, however.

When I was in High School, I used to hear the Pacific Coastal Railroad horn blow when the lumber express zoomed through town. My town, Santa Rosa, was still industrial back then. The train wound down from the north coast, and the tracks were usually open more than the highway, which often washes out in storms. This being earthquake country, the roads built through brittle canyons prone to landslide and wildfire and fallen trees and even flash floods. They'd shut the thing, leaving a 300 mile detour through a different road which also would wash out, sometimes in the same storm, and the North Coast got rain year round, unlike the Bay Area and Central and South Coast, which only got rain in winter. There's a crucial ocean temperature difference which seems to gain the jet stream's passage and funnel storms up there just like Portland and Seattle.

Being a few hundred miles south of Portland, yet getting a Portland level of rain, you would think this would be an ideal place for people, provided they build their homes to resist/survive earthquakes. This is less difficult than you might think. Wood frame houses with anchor bolts on their foundations do pretty well in quakes. If the town in question is started by a population that arrives with critical craft skills in RVs and Trailers to construct the critical infrastructure (public utilities and streets), creating the temporary boomtown which turns into the real thing as people work to more permanent construction. Ordinary people and ordinary businesses just can't make the math work in overpriced areas like the Bay Area. Relocate to the North Coast, northern Sacramento Valley, Eastern Oregon, Nebraska, and it works again. And since we as a nation desperately need lots of jobs to employ our youth to avoid a civil war over the poverty caused by unemployment, we need places to do it in. Right now, many future companies are simmering in garages and hobby shops and kitchens, waiting for the time to be right. Namely, for the economics to work. Right now, with communists running the govt and preventing business, this is the wrong time. But in time, the hobbyists who want business profits and employees are shifting into a sense of mobility. Staying in stupid places, like the Bay Area, is becoming painfully obvious a way to lose. Moving to the next business boomtown, that has more of a future. Whichever opens up first is likely to gain the next big business. Right now, Reno is trying by removing obstacles and they're employing people, at minimum wage, at Amazon. That's not good enough, but it is the right direction. Tesla is building, or will be building, a battery pack factory. They won't make cars there. They're likely going to ship the batteries they make to China, via the railroad to a port that's cheap, probably Stockton or Sacramento, which also has a containership port. You need a big crane for that, and a deep water channel so a fully loaded ship won't get stuck getting to and from the Bay.

Between railroads and containerships you can get your raw materials and ship your finished products to market. Provided you've got access to one or the other, you're in business. Just so long as the idiots paying too much, in the wrong places, don't bribe the officials to shut you down because you make them look stupid to their stockholders, and they like their lives of privilege and golf course country club memberships. Moving them away from that makes them feel poorer. Another Baby Boomer problem fixed by retirement. Its going to feel really painful for homeowners to abandon their homes, or sell at market rate, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and relocate, build a new home, construct a new building for their business, and train new employees at the new location far away, where water is both available and cheap, unlike the Bay Area and LA. This is a big step, but its one that will happen because desalinating sea water is very expensive, very energy intensive, and costs even more than pumping. Those who get there first gain the benefits. But they also take the risks. But when the first arrivals have wheels, they can also leave pretty easily too.

Realistically speaking, this is the future. San Francisco is a Bay that's shrinking from alluvial infill. There is no port of San Jose anymore. Alameda must be dredged just to stay open, and cheaping out on port dredging has gotten ships stuck, which results in big lawsuits by captains against the pilots steering the boat, and increased costs, making the point of the port moot. Eventually, San Francisco Bay will be a delta with a fast moving river in it and a smallish area for port business. It doesn't have enough local drinking water. It can be emptied by the pumps shutting down, or salt water reaching the pump entry point. That event, such as would occur with the flooding and collapse during an Ebb tide of the local levees, would doom both San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles, all at once. Too much rides on that. No sane business would allow itself to experience panic over one reasonably high chance of failure thanks to Baby Boomers declining to do maintenance AGAIN. The existing neighborhoods will get a lot of foreclosure signs, and shortly after that, be red-tagged as condemned for health violations. Most have black toxic mold in the walls, and most of the owners don't do maintenance, being Baby Boomers. See the pattern there? The city doesn't make sense. It is time for it to suffer the consequences of its laziness and for the dirt already present to be its primary reputation, rather than claiming itself to be the "Paris of the West", which is famous for dog muck and dirt and crowds. And now, Muslim terrorists. I suppose San Francisco can stay a tourist destination if the surrounding areas empty due to lack of water and lack of jobs. Its going that way, anyhow. Already, it has moved California colleges to the "Avoid" list thanks to the new Cat Lady Law just enacted with the new year.

I'd like to see boom towns start up for new businesses. I think its got a better future than the communists have in mind. Ironic that the pot growers are forced into Capitalism because the Communists are doing their very best to prevent their success. Funny how that is. Leftists are always Splitters. This is a big part of why, along with basic human nature, Communism can't work.