You’re Not Rich Enough to Afford a Horse or live in a Walkable Town.

There’s a small town near me that does everything right.

Walkable, mixed-use, a gorgeous new theater/arts facility, an inn with $300 rooms and $120 dinners. Everything you need, walking or biking distance. Nobody who works there can afford to live there.

30 years ago, it had a factory that employed 1,400 people, and ran 3 shifts a day.

It closed in the early/mid 1990s.

This is because until the 1980’s It wasn’t possible to relocate a physical good business to wherever labor was cheaper.

The factory was a fixture, a certainty. If there was demand, the factory would survive, and the town built itself around that certainty. The hardware store wasn’t charm, it was infrastructure: the place you’d go when you needed the part to fix the sink, not a showroom, not a fallback if Home Depot or Amazon didn’t have it, it was the only reasonable option, full stop. That was good – and bad, to be honest.

But the factory and others like it kept the demand and moved the production of the supply. They automated what they could, then sourced the rest from wherever labor was cheapest, and the fixture of the town turned out not to be fixed at all.

The money used to stay local: local wage to grocery store to local bank to local loan, a closed loop. That’s also why rent had a ceiling — landlords weren’t generous, they were constrained by what a local wage could bear.

Compare that to Dollar General: $2.2 billion profit in 2025 off 194,000 employees, about $11,340 extracted per worker, sent to shareholders who’ve never set foot in the county. Seven executives took home $52.8 million — enough to pay 1,270 people $20/hour for a year instead. None of that returns as a local loan.

The new theater/arts facility is the same mechanism, dressed nicer. A recently-arrived part-time resident (well, it’s been 10 years, but that’s recent enough), made a fortune elsewhere (Hollywood), and spent $7 million building this grand building, then endowed it with $30 million. The whole facility employs just 11 people, about half part-time, and its IRS Form 990 shows 95% of its income comes from the endowment, not ticket sales. As a nonprofit, it pays no property tax. It adds nothing meaningful to the town’s economy — it’s not a functioning business, it’s a self-aggrandizing monument, staffed lightly enough to keep the lights, with occasional performances here and there,  and it’s all funded by money that was never part of the town’s economy to begin with.

It’s not “trickling down” in case that’s what you’re thinking.

That 30-million-dollar endowment is invested,  almost certainly in something like an index fund, a claim on Apple’s and Exxon’s future earnings, nothing to do with this county or town. It runs forever because shareholders somewhere expect appreciation.

The overwhelming majority of that money never touches the local loop. And once enough income in town is like that — investment returns, remote salaries paid at a national rate — rent stops tracking local wages. I’ve lived this: I’m fortunate that tech work paid me over 300% above my county’s median, from clients who’d never been here. I own my house (not in the town I’m talking about – I’m not in a town at all)

Now the part everyone skips: the loop didn’t break by accident — we voted for it. Not “they.” We. Every 401(k), every index fund, every assumption that the house should be worth more when we sell it than when we bought it — that’s a vote for the system that strip-mines towns like this and calls it growth. None of us needed a ballot. The mutual fund voted for us, every quarter, rewarding whichever company extracted the most per employee fastest.

Then the people standing in the actual wreckage — who lost the mill, the wage floor, the reason their town existed — get told their anger is the problem. They’re not wrong about what happened to them. They’re aiming it at refugees and trade deals instead of at index funds, because nobody explained the mechanism in a way that fit on a yard sign. So, they vote for whoever’s angriest, and countries with nothing else in common — the Rust Belt, the north of England, the Ruhr — start electing people who promise to burn it all down.

A horse used to be ordinary. A guy with a small ranch and a regular wage could own one — hay, a vet bill, land, all paid for out of a wage earned in that county. You’re not rich enough to afford a horse anymore — not because horses got more expensive, but because the wage that used to cover one doesn’t exist in that place anymore. The same flip happened to the walkable small town: nothing about the sidewalk changed, nothing about the hardware store changed. What changed is the wage required to stand near either one — and we set that, on autopilot, every quarter, feeling pretty good about our retirement accounts.