The West's quiet mass displacement is here
The people of the West are being economically levered out of their home areas and economies to make way for those who are here to replace them with economic force.
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The American West is currently and actively undergoing a mass displacement of one kind of resident for another. There are many moving parts to this broad scale displacement. As the people rooted here are systematically popped out of their homes and communities, those taking their places have been carefully curated through years of masterfully curated marketing campaigns and social movements lending to a belief that a life in the West is a virtuous life closer to Nature™.
The West’s “Great Displacement” has three core mechanisms that are driving a subversively forced migration from home areas that many of us have held for generations. The first mechanism is the number of people moving here and moving quickly. The second mechanism is where newcomers are moving from and their socioeconomic status. And the third component is the rapid change to our political landscape from the level of our State politicians all the way down to our local governments.
While this displacement doesn’t come with clear imagery like the visibly violent displacements one might see in a dystopian Hollywood movie, it is happening and happening rapidly throughout the areas of the West that have become the object of affection of our new colonists.
Rooted Westerners are being displaced rapidly and subversively
Imagine, for a moment, you’re an 85 year old couple living in Lone Tree, Colorado. You’re both fourth generation Coloradans, and when you were born, there were fewer than 500,000 human beings in your entire State. Your family grew their own food, and you were born into houses without electricity. There were no grocery stores when you were kids, and you were highly dependent on your family’s ability to store food to get through long winters.
Sure, being 85 in 2024 means you were born in 1939, and there were cars, electricity was becoming commonplace, and you weren’t exactly born when the horse was the only way to get around.
Conditions in Colorado for most of your lives were more land centered, and urban environments were not really a thing during your formative years yet. You probably went to a 1st through 12th grade school that covered the whole county and had upwards of 50 kids in it. You both knew everybody.
Upon graduation, you were both likely prepared to work your family farms, maybe work at the local general store, CDOT, a school, or maybe join the military. But college wasn’t really a clear option with a clear benefit since there wasn’t much use for an urban-valued education in lofty, theoretical subjects given you’re from a place with largely agricultural, mining, and resource exploration as the primary industries.
The point of this allegorical1 story is to illustrate that conditions in the West, prior to the John Denver and Social Media marketing of the West to the masses, were extremely different than they are today. Opportunities in the urban job sector where profit-making from seemingly nothing as something to develop expertise in just wasn’t a thing yet.
So you’re 85, you have some money saved from when money wasn’t as relative in value as it is today, and you’re just trying to survive until your time comes.
Meanwhile, property values have doubled in your area in the last five years, and then, so too have property taxes. Transplants from all over the country have decided that they would now rather live in your city and state than the places they’re from due to the outdoor fashion trend luring them to places with an “outdoorsy vibe,” breweries, other Neverland-like2 offerings, and thanks to their cities getting pretty uncomfortable during and after the pandemic.
The small amount left to your name barely covers the cost of medications, groceries, and you had to sell the family farms a long time ago due to a lack of help and a lack of ability to continue working that hard for that little.
Now that property taxes have doubled over five years after the prior doubling ten years ago, and there are twice as many residents in your town as ten years ago, the price of goods has gone up, too, due to increased demand and lagging supply. Adding to the financial injury, sales taxes have gone up a couple percent as well, due to the need for all new services to handle all the new residents. Of course all the new residents voted YES on all those new taxes, too, you know, to do their civic duty to help make this place more like home.
You’ve been priced out of your home area due to the rapid influx of new residents, the lack of resources you had from being truly born and raised from this place without any access to urban greed industries, and the rapidly rising costs of living thanks to demand outstripping both the infrastructure and normal chain of supply to your area.
This story isn’t of one single person, it’s an allegory about rooted Westerners across the interior West right now. Those being displaced in this new found obsession with moving West and abandoning the east is being done on a broad scale and in a subversive way. Some of the impacts are a simple math function, like property tax increases, and others are being swept under the rug by our new colonists as, “just the way it is.” As they say, “It’s inevitable, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it” (their words, verbatim.)
It’s the number of displacers and how fast they’re moving here
Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Montana are the fastest growing states in the USA, despite the people rooted in these places having a deep, generational aversion to the urban environment and big populations of urban-developed spaces. If you meet someone who is rooted in these states, they have multiple people in their heritage who moved away from places with lots of people and resources to go take their chances without any of those people or resources. They’re just not wired to live in conditions like those in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dayton, Ohio, or Buffalo, New York.
In Colorado, we are adding 100,000 people per year, and we received such a large surge of people during the pandemic years, most of our local governments experienced substantial sales and use tax increases … because people were moving here and buying everything needed for their new houses, which also helped to drive prices up thanks to the micro-inflationary effect of sudden jumps in demand.
That number increases every year, and you can still drive Colorado highways and find yourself in packs of cars where Colorado plates are the minority. The plates are always the usual suspects; California, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Ohio - basically everywhere but our neighboring interior Western states.
We’re packing people in faster than farms and land can be scraped, houses built, and the infrastructure laid. We’re packing new people into a state where every single new person coming in represents demand for new housing that did not yet exist, given the population is booming beyond any number we have ever seen in the history of the region.
With all of that demand and ultra rapid growth, new infrastructure is needed for homes, new highway expansions, new roads, new stop lights, schools, and so on.
The rapid growth conditions throughout the West are a leading variable in increased tax rates. Rapid growth is also the leading variable in driving house prices sky high due to the sharp rise in demand vs. supply. Demand goes up, supply doesn’t meet demand, if people are willing to pay more, price goes up … it’s math.
The displacers are moving from wealthier urban areas to Western states
There’s one trend that I hope historians look back on about today, and that is the propensity of the wealthy and urban to want the imagery, aesthetic, and vibe of the lower and middle classes3.
Urban hipster fashion trends is one example of that. The desire of urban, educated, and fashionable individuals to participate in what they find “kitschy” and “outdoorsy.” They want that lumberjack look, that Vanlife insta-glam, or the novel appearance of what they call the “dirt bag” lifestyle4. Let’s add “ski bum” to that list, too, one of the earliest fashions around our winter golf courses (i.e., ski resorts).
For those who don’t speak urban-wannabe-fashion-dandy lingo, a “dirt bag” is now a good thing, and is anyone who spends more time outdoors than on a golf course, and often fashionably drives an old Subaru, Ford Econoline, Mercedes Sprinter van, or some other AWD CUV, mistaking it for a capable off-road vehicle. More urban fashion façades to convey a false identity.
The people flocking to these “new” areas of the country are wanting what’s here, they want to look like what they’ve idolized on social media or in the old folk songs that put the place on the map, but they only want it the same way their parents wanted the nice McMansion, luxury cars, and country club memberships … as a tchotchke (pronounced: choch-key) for their urban identities, where the norm is to simply look the part, set yourself apart as an individual in the herd, be seen, and that’s the way you illustrate your identity. It’s not something that developed organically — it’s an emulation.
And so they want it badly. Those moving West want it so badly, they’re willing to pay … a lot … for it5. We now know they’re able to pay for it, too. A house a few blocks from mine sold last year for $865,000 in cash to some transplant, which is only interesting when you realize that it had sold for $140,000 only 15 years prior. That’s not a little increase - that’s not even an inflationary increase - that’s a vanity-driven, greed-fueled increase, only made possible by outside money.
See, we don’t have jobs here that make that transaction make sense. It’s a modest 1970’s ranch with a surface flip, and average household income here is something like $100,000/year. This house wasn’t worth over 800% of the area’s average income … it was a deeply average starter home, tract-house6.
The impacts here aren’t driven by the locals - they’re entirely driven by rapid and mass migration by wealthier people from wealthier areas of the country. And given that none of the new colonists7 have any skills to navigate our landscape here outside of tourist infrastructure, the reason for arriving here is to look like they’re here and doing the things they saw online. In their minds, they are, but a closer look quickly reveals a farce.
New colonists, new money, and new politics to pop the locals out
It’s interesting to watch our entire political culture in the West morph over a very short period. We’ve gone from being our own island where the government doesn’t matter that much, and when it does, there’s recourse. We’ve quickly morphed into something that doesn’t resemble our historical, local political culture at all8.
Our politicians all now look and sound like our new colonists. They’re carefully voted for based on what words they use, what they support and don’t, and hell, are often selected because they’re not from here. Take a look at Colorado’s State elected officials right now - most of them aren’t from Colorado at all. Some of them have even created fabrications around where they’re from to make it look like they’re from here. There’s zero geographical rootedness at all anymore — there used to be, and it used to be important because it demonstrated that you’re of this place and acculturated to the place and the people9.
When new space is needed to make room for more people, the new colonists have needed the old politicians out of the way. Ours sounded a little too anti-growth, a little too anti-Olympics10, and were not familiar enough to make the new residents entirely comfortable. Ours talked about doing things like limiting the size and power of our State and local governments … what a tyrannical idea! Get these backwards locals out of here …
When it comes time to vote, everybody votes for the people they feel they most relate to. And quite frankly, when most of the people in a state aren’t from that state anymore, the old politicians get voted out and the ones familiar to those with greater numbers get voted in.
This condition is sweeping the West, and any Westerner who doesn’t think this is coming to them has a really nasty reality check coming their way (Ahem, the states need not be named, you know who you are. Fight hard, fight now, do it quietly.)
As the new colonists move in quickly and in huge numbers, they start looking for ways to improve the place, and to participate in their civic duties. They move in and make it a little more familiar. And they vote for new taxes and changes to old laws to make government do more and more for them.
It’s such an interesting mindset to move to a new place that you claim to “love”, then decide you’re going to vote for new taxes, initiatives, laws, and politicians, exactly the same as you did in your home state. Zooming out on that, and it’s actually pretty insane. “I love my new State … now, let me vote to make it more like the one I came from.” It’s like buying a new car and thinking it needs to look more like your old one, so you decide to sideswipe a brick wall … it’s fully ludicrous.
Is the imapct real? Is there a victim here?
It’s hard to say there’s a victim here — This is how the American economy and tax systems are designed, and it is behaving exactly as intended. It’s made for people to develop land, move, make economies, and do conquest with the dollar to broker the bad stuff and ease the pain with a little moolah, all without triggering a war. When it’s time for a place to hit the mainstream, the whole system is built to sweep out the old without a fight and pave new way for the new. Isn’t that exactly where the interior West is, right now?
But our allegory about the 85 year old western couple is an interesting case study. That couple has been through a lot here. They’ve seen a lot here. Every drop of water they’ve ever sipped came from here, the place was probably desirable because of what they did here, and their entire families are buried here. Yet, they’re facing the last years of their lives with the anxiety of what happens as taxes rise, costs of living rise, beyond what they can afford.
Are they being harmed by fashion-driven influxes of people looking to buy a piece of the landscape these rooted locals are made from?
I’ve been watching and listening to the people moving here for decades now. At this point, seven of ten people I know aren’t even from the region, and very few of the remainder have generational roots here. I know the new colonists now, and know some of them deeply. They all have one thing in common — they’re all here in the West, unrooted from their home places, and they’re all driven by the vanity this place seems to bestow upon them to their friends and family back home (Lord knows we’re not impressed by their day hiking abilities on NPS tourist trails…) You can see it in their social media posts and hear it in the way they talk about this place.
Through their self-perception of their conquests on our lands, and their perception of themselves through the false imagery that they are some kind of explorer or pioneer for hiking our tourist-infrastructured 14ers11, they seem entirely unaware and do not care about the quiet and subversive displacement that is sweeping the interior-West. Rooted westerners being displaced from their homes, away from their families, and the graveyards with their ancestors in them, on count of giving exurban migrants a chance to display their new kitschy lifestyle for all their friends back home on social media. The West’s Great Displacement is here.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner with a decades-long ear to the ground, listening and watching our new colonists work to displace every last one of us for their own fashion-driven benefit.
Footnotes and Citations
Allegory - as in, a fabricated story meant to convey meaning or a concept, like a metaphor, parable, or analogy.
Neverland, as in from the story Peter Pan, a nearly perfect allegory for the West’s new colonists and how they’re reshaping the place to serve their impulses and whims.
Yep, so-called “adventure” is the modern fashion accessory:
I write about these archetypes in this story where I call out Colorado’s poser culture:
Check out one of my prior stories about the West’s wildly increasing housing prices:
I’m not kidding, the housing situation here is ludicrous and there’s a clear cause-and-effect. More in my prior post:
New Colonists - another word for transplant, but more accurate as to what they are when accounting for nuance in behavior and attributes of the people in context of area history.
Check out my prior article on the changing elections of the West:
I talk about why recognizing your geographic root is important here (hint… it fundamentally shapes who you are, how you interact with the world, and what you manifest everywhere you go…):
Olympics - Colorado is the first, and perhaps the only, place to turn down the Olympics, due to not wanting the black-hole economics they create, and we didn’t want anymore publicity.
14ers — A tourist word for mountain peaks over 14,000 feet in height at the summit, above sea level, popularized by boosters in the late 1800s and early 1900s to help lure people to the West for recreation
I moved to Florida with my family when I was 18, 49 years ago. 400k people a year move here. Quaint little towns like Fernandina beach are being overrun. Traffic sucks, especially in South Florida where I lived until I could get out of there in 1986 to move to Dunedin, a small town so crowded during season that as Yogi said: "Nobody goes there any more; it's too crowded.". The enshittification of everywhere is occurring (h/t Cory Doctorow). As long as we're a "free country" there's not much that can be done. Where do I get to move to and drive around with my left turn signal on for four months?
Always love reading your work. This lifelong westerner thanks you.