Federal Land Sales for Affordable Housing?

[SAJ-99]

I can't go quite as far as @SAJ-99's "suck it up buttercup" position, but do wonder where the balance is.

You going for my title of HT Bleeding-heart Liberal?

 

[Nameless Range]

Better to flip a mountain upside down, strip mine it to the point that it is a perpetual lake of toxic waste, and then turn it into a tourist attraction. Best of all worlds.

Jokes aside, tourism is truly a double-edged sword. It can give an economically depressed community a much needed boost (think hunting, which is a big seasonal economic boon to so many rural communities), and it also relies upon the maintenance of the thing people are there to see: preserving the natural wonders/opportunity are necessary to drive the tourism. And if a state is smart enough to implement a sales tax, tourism really helps the residents.

On the flip side, when people decide they no longer want to be tourists, but instead move to the place they went to to "get away from it all," they seem to bring "it all" with them. Along with preconceived and inaccurate expectations about the place they are moving to (Yellowstone effect). They displace the locals and change the culture to their taste, often driving out multiple generations of good stewards, institutional memory, and all sense of community. Insidious is the perfect word for it @Nameless Range.

I can't go quite as far as @SAJ-99's "suck it up buttercup" position, but do wonder where the balance is. Historically, too, western states have always been a story of tourism, extraction, and displacement, so is this really anything new?

Don't wanna derail things,but I definitely write what I write from the perspective of a local who views a large piece of geography as "Home".

I live adjacent to a giant abandoned pit - one of the largest in Montana. The owner gone bankrupt and left a few hundred acre hole in the ground that in all likelihood the taxpayers of Montana will deal with for decades to come. My kids attend one of the nicest schools in Montana, the same as I did, and my friend parents had good jobs that paid well - all on the backs of the mine. That said, one of the few extractive industries that doesn't seem to have a cycle of boom and bust, existence and wane, is tourism.

My observation is that tourism, unlike mines/timber/oil, only grows, and where those other things can certainly raze the lovely and cause acute losses to a Home, none cause such a widespread dissolution of that which locals love and live for, like Tourism. Over time, it erases the local - their interests in government, their experiences in the world, and their economic well-being.

All a balance of course, but I never see the advocates for that industry pumping the brakes.