How much longer can Kevin McCarthy appease House members and is a government shutdown inevitable? Jonathan Bernstein joins to discuss the latest in DC. Bloomberg's Sarah Green Carmichael joins to talk about Shopify's approach to meetings and whether other corporations should consider how often, and how long, they meet. Opinion's Justin Fox discusses the similarities and differences between Detroit and San Francisco, and Conor Sen talks about northern migration during the summer months. Amy Morris hosts.
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Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion I Amy Morris. Meetings take up a lot of time, maybe more than you'd like. In a Microsoft report from earlier this year, workers said inefficient meetings were the primary barrier to getting stuff done, and now there's one company that is resorting to putting a price on those meetings. Then we'll be taking you to San Francisco, which is having a rough go of it as its population shrinks, its real estate values are dropping, and downtown activity has fallen off a cliff. Can San Francisco avoid the fate that has befallen Detroit? And then we'll look at the weather and climate and the heat and how Maine, Minnesota, and Michigan are replacing Florida and Arizona as retirement destinations. But we begin with a partisan fight on Capitol Hill in the House of Representatives over a bill that normally would be an easy vote. Far right Republicans loaded up the National Defense Authorization Act with dozens of amendments on issues like abortion, book banning, renaming military bases, and more. Some of those amendments pushed by GOP Senator Tommy Tubberville of Alabama. White House Press Secretary Caree Jean Pierre responded.
Senator Tubberville is hijacking what has traditionally been a bipartisan process, the National Defense Authorization Act. He's also delaying the confirmation of hundreds of qualified and capable military nominees, depriving our armed forces of leadership it needs.
Okay, let's get a closer look.
Now.
Blueberg opinion columnist Jonathan Bernstein covers politics and policy, and he joins me. Now and Jonathan, the odds that those provisions that were tacked on to the Defense bill are going to be stripped off anyway. And if that's the case, what's the big deal. Why are we worried about this thing?
It's not clear when we're going to actually get a Defense Authorization Bill, which is needed for various policies to take effect. It needs to pass every year because policies change and have to be updated. So that's one piece of it. It's also telling us a lot about what's going on in the House generally, and what is going to happen with appropriations bills is the basic spending bills that fund the rest of the government, which are due at the end of September, and which we very well may not get until after a government shutdown.
In your call on you say that this could foreshadow a potential government shutdown, and I thought, wait, what, But this the National Defense Authorization Act that's supposed to be the easy one, and it doesn't seem to be working that way with the easy one. So I'm worried about the hard ones now too.
And this is again the dynamic within the House of Representatives is that Republicans have a very narrow majority. They can only afford to lose four or five votes if they want to pass something by a party line vote. And because of the rules about speaker elections, the House Freedom Caucus and other radical Republicans are constantly threatening to revolt against Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and they can force a vote to kick him out basically at any point. And he's reacted to this by appeasing them constantly, by trying to stay on their good side. The result is what they're trying to do is they keep trying to pass these things by a party line vote. And the problem with that is that the House is not the entire government. We have divided government with a Democratic majority in the Senate and with the Democratic president. So if you pass something by a party line vote in the House with no Democrats, well you're going to get no Democrats in the Senate. You're not going to get a presidential signature. So you're gonna get you know, the bill's going to go nowhere. And the House is repeatedly, you know, taking these votes on things which can't get anywhere, and because this radical group is insisting on it, and because McCarthy is a piece of them.
Let's look a little bit at the House Speaker McCarthy then, because it sounds like all of this goes back to that speaker position. And let's remember when he ran to become House Speaker, there were a lot of votes that were taken before he actually was able to land the position. Did that maybe paint the picture? Did that sort of set the table for what we are seeing now where he has to keep everybody happy, which is impossible to do. I don't care who you are or where you work, You're not going to keep everybody happy. But that's the position he may be in now, to be.
Fear of McCarthy. This is something that goes back well before him, and the last two were public speakers before this. Paul Ryan and John Bayner both basically threw up their hands and left cause they had to deal with they, you know, because there's this group of by now it's thirty forty fifty Republicans whose whole sort of goal in life is to prove that they're the true conservatives as opposed to the rest of the party. And by now we've got some some of them who are particularly sort of off the wall, you know, and and and that group seems to get larger every year. There's no way to appease them. They're not going to Eventually, you have to pass these bills. You have to pass the defense aviization bill, you have to pass spending bills, you have to pass, as we saw back in the spring, the debt limit. And so eventually you're gonna have to make a compromise with the Democrats, and this whole group they exist to denounce compromise, you know, the compromise, feeling the compromise you know is there is there number one principle and you can't you know, there's no solution for the speaker to get over this. Now McCarthy is particularly bad at it because what he's his tactic seems to be get through today, don't worry about tomorrow. What that winds up doing is at the end he has to cut a deal because the bills have to eventually pass. They may pass after a debt Liamic crisis, as we saw the first time. They may pass after a government shutdown, but no matter. You know, the government can shut down for a week, for six weeks, for ten weeks. Eventually they're going to have to cut a deal on spending bills. That bill, that compromise is going to be denounced by the House Freedom Caucus as the Delimit deal was denounced by them, because that's their whole point. That's you know, we know they're going to denounce whatever deal is reached, and they're going to say that McCarthy sold them out. But McCarthy sort of figures, well, i'll put I'll deal with that later instead of you know, what he could have done is he could have said, look, we'll pass this thing. It'll pass with a bipartisan majority. The bill, the Defense Authorization Bill, passed out of the MIDI with a fifty four to one vote bipartisan almost unanimous vote. They could have passed that same bill, you know, with minor, non controversial amendments. They could have passed that bill on the House floor. But you know, with four hundred votes losing thirty votes or maybe three hundred and eighty votes something like that. There's four hundred and thirty five in the House. They could have passed it with an overwhelming bipartisan majority. That would have, you know, given them negotiating position against the Senate. They might have passed a bill that was more in tune with some Republican priorities than the Senate bill. They would have kind of deal, they would have gone halfway. You know, things would have worked out. Okay. As it is, they've got all these off the wall amendments. Senate it's not interested in any of that. Senate's going to pass the Senate version of a bipartisan bill. It's probably going to pass with ninety votes maybe more, out of the one hundred votes in the Senate, and they're going to tell the House take it or leave it. And the same thing is going to happen with spending bills.
Okay, we are talking with Bloomberg opinion column is Jonathan Bernstein on the future of the upcoming congressional agenda. Jonathan, I want to look farther into the future now. You say in your column, and you just said in that answer that they're more concerned about proving that they're the true conservatives rather than nudging the public policy in their direction. Is the GOP fundamentally changing, is it turning away from its traditional conservative roots? And if so, what is a true conservative?
You know, a true conservative seems to be what anybody who claims to be conservative and is taken seriously within the party and especially within the most important people in the party, which is the Republican Onliine media, Fox News, the talk shows, the podcasts. You know, if you can, if they certify you as conservative, then your conservative. It has nothing to do with public policy. Sometimes it has to do with how much you support Donald Trump these days. Sometimes it has to do with whether you're in favor of a government default back in the spring, or how much you were in favor of a shutdown, a government shutdown and against the eventual compromise. So yeah, I mean, it's not values about size of government or particular programs, although you know there's still conservatives who have preferences about those things. It's about these ideas of never compromising, going hard after Democrats, going hard after liberals, supporting Donald Trump, supporting other controversial Republicans, and it's not about policy, and therefore when they lose over policy, which they're going to do as a result of all this, that deadly count for them.
So you do see the GOP changing in the Republican Party, turning away from what we would consider the traditional sort of Reaganesque Republican reagan Esque conservativism. Is there any way the pendulum is going to swing back.
That's the million dollar question about US politics. In a lot of ways, political scientists tend to think that parties will care about elections enough that if they lose a bunch of elections they moderate. We'll see Republicans certainly have not moderated after the twenty twenty election. Part of the problem for the Republican Party is that because Republican aligned media is so central within the party, and because Fox News isn't damaged when Republicans lose elections, they in fact probably do better. Republican books sell better for the Democrat in the White House, you know. So there's a real breakdown where it's not entirely clear that the electoral incentive, which is the big thing that causes parties to try to reach to the center, to reach to as many people as they can, whether that's still working for Republicans. And that's scary stuff.
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Jonathan Bernstein also covers politics in policy. Now, coming up, we're going to take a look at what one company is doing to discourage meetings. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion.
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You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. Have you ever been to a meeting? Could have actually been an email? Evidently the folks that shopify have, and the company is putting a price on meeting creep. The way meetings tend to take up so much time you can't get any work done. Bloomberg Opinion editor Sarah Green Carmichael looked at this and joins us now with some insights, what is the new Shopify practice when it comes to meetings.
So, the new Shopify practice is that when you go into your calendar, they have now added a calendar add on that when you schedule the meetings the average salaries of the people that you've invited and the length of the meeting, and it gives you a little red price tag saying, hey, this meeting is costing US seven hundred dollars or seventeen hundred dollars, or even if you've invited a senior executive, probably over two thousand dollars for a thirty minute meeting. So they are hoping that this will work with the other meeting practices they've already implemented, like banning meetings, standing meetings with more than three people, can't have a regular meeting with that many people, and trying to keep Wednesday's meeting free. So they're hoping that together this will all help cut down on meeting creep.
So that the motivation of this meeting creep were they discovering that the productivity was dropping, or were they hearing complaints from employees or even middle managers or managers saying all these meetings are keeping me from actually doing my real job.
Shopify seems to have really diagnosed too many meetings as a serious problem for them. I think what's unusual about them is that, you know, such complaints are very common at companies, you know, and if you look at employee surveys, you know, microsofted one earlier this year. They across companies and found that meetings excessive meetings with a number one productivity killer identified by employees. A lot of companies say, you know, we have too many meetings. They're scattered throughout the day. I can't get anything done that's meeting. Good of been an email. But Shopify actually seems to be taking some serious measures publicly to try and really curtail that problem. So that's really what's unusual. It's not that Shopify has some crazy meeting problem, it's that they're actually trying to solve it.
Is there a chance or risk that this could somehow backfire?
Oh definitely.
So.
I think a couple of things about that. One is that when you convince people that time is money, they actually become less helpful there's some really interesting research on this out of Harvard Business School where they you know, prime subjects to think of money and time as sort of fungible, and when people think that way, they become more stressed, they become less likely to help one another. So if what you're trying to do is kind of promote collaboration, this could actually backfire by making people less likely to collaborate. There could also be you know, challenges, uh with how this interacts with other aspects of their culture. You know, at companies that have very consensus driven leadership styles, often you need to have a meeting to make a decision because you know, otherwise how do you get all the stakeholders to send off on it. So if you just ban meetings but you don't address something like, oh, you know, we have an overly consensus driven culture, then you've sort of set yourself up for a conflict.
We've sort of established in this interview that useless meetings maybe just this universal issue a problem for companies all over the world. So could other places adopt this? Is that likely or is this too radical?
I don't think it's too radical. In fact, you know, I'm kind of surprised that There isn't already an app that any of us could install, you know, in Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar, whatever we're using that says, hey, you know, this meeting probably costs about you know, xyz amount based on the people you've invited. I think this is something that companies have sort of talked about for a long time. There have been some apps that you could get if you went out of your way to download it on your phone, but you have to be really motivated ort to do that. So I'm a little surprised that this is only just coming up now. I think we've also seen other companies experiment with things like meeting free days or Zoom free days. It's obviously been difficult to implement, given that we are still talking about it, but you know, even something like a half day free of meetings can have real productivity benefits.
Where do all these meetings come from? Sarah, Oh, good question.
I think one reason we seem to have so many meetings now is actually that we don't have offices anymore. You know, back in the days, people had private offices. If you needed to have a quick word, you just pull someone into your office. And now everything has to be a meeting because you probably have to reserve a conference room, and that's what sort of makes something feel like a meeting instead of a quick chat. So the loss of privacy and offices has actually increased the sense where we need to have designated times and spaces known as meetings to talk to each other. And then there's also sort of a shift in cultural norms. People don't generally pick up the phone anymore and just call people out of the blue. Usually you send an email or a text saying, hey, is this a good time to chat for whatever reason? And I think a meeting is kind of the same thing. You're kind of saying, Hey, could we all meet at this time? Maybe that's because we just feel so busy these days, but so there's definitely some other broader shifts that are helping to propel meetings to become more common.
You know, I was going to ask if the pandemic and working from home had an impact on this, and it sounds like it did. But what you just said was something had not occurred to me, which was like the open office space that really could have had more of an impact than I even realized as we are living through it.
Yeah, I think that the meeting problems long predate the pandemic and are much more driven by things like office design. But definitely the pandemic has had a compounding effect. You know, when people are in different locations, whether that's because some are working from home or because you just are in a company where employees are scattered among different offices, different cities, that does mean that it takes more effort to collaborate. You can't just sort of quickly have a spontaneous conversation. It has to take some planning, and that makes it a meeting. And the other issue here is that I think so much meeting scheduling software defaults to an hour or even half an hour, when you probably just need ten minutes.
I was working literally decades ago at a different company where the employees would tend to take matters into their own hands. I worked with one gentleman who, when he knew a meeting was coming, and he knew that this was one of those meetings where you could have just had it done an email, it does and have to be a meeting. He would have the secretary at the front desk, let's say, wait ten minutes and call my cell phone, and then she'd call him and oh, I'll be right there. I'm sorry, I have to leave the meeting. To your point of this has been going on for a long time and finally now people are starting to pick up on it.
Yes, you know, And to your point about people taking matters into their own hands, I was known also at a previous company to put fake meetings on my calendar just to get some breaks in the day from the back to back meetings so that I could do other works, so I could actually get my heads down work done. And I learned that you can't block out like three hours because everyone looks at your calendar and realizes that's a fake meeting. But if you put in that sort of three back to back hour long blocks, then you could get yourself some thinking time, some worktime without really people realizing that you're actually not in meetings all that time. But yeah, at companies where there's meeting creep is real, employees have to resort to these sort of almost comical or cough can ask kind of ways to fight back because otherwise there's no time to do any of your other work.
And to be fair, meetings are not inherently evil or wasteful. It's just they're just so dug on many of them. What's the best use of meetings?
The best use of meetings is really for conversations that would be difficult to have in other formats, so to talk about with it, to talk with employees, not at employees, you know, to talk about, Hey, how's this project going, What are the obstacles in your way? Do we need to reassign this work? Is there something going off the rails that we need to course correct? Those kinds of conversations are really the highest and best use of meetings, And to your point, those meetings are really valuable. One of the researchers I talked to for this column was a gentleman named Ben Laker who's a professor in the UK, and he had actually done a survey of companies that tried to ban meetings, and companies without meetings really saw productivity decline, engagement decline. It's not you need some meetings, you can't go entirely without. So well, I guess we can just make sure that we're not throwing a baby out with the bathwater.
Everything in moderation. Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time with us.
Thanks for having me.
Bloomberg Opinion editor Sarah Green Carmichael with insight into the useless meeting phenomenon, and don't forget We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Coming up. San Francisco not necessarily destined to be the next Detroit, but how will it break out of its downward spiral? This is Bloomberg.
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You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. San Francisco has been having a rough year, well a rough decade really. Last year's Census Bureau numbers show the estimated population of San Francisco is down seven and a half percent from twenty twenty. That's a lot. Downtown activity is dipped to sixty eight percent below pre pandemic levels. Commercial real estate values have fallen as much as eighty percent. Conventional wisdom says San Francisco may be on the fast track to be the next Detroit, But not so fast, says Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox. Justin covers economics and business and he joins us now. Justin tell us the similarities between San Francisco and Detroit.
Superficially, it's two things. One is the population drop in San Francisco. Detroit, I mean, obviously has been doing it for a lot longer. It has lost population every decade since nineteen fifty. And San Francisco had lost population in the sixties and seventies, like a lot of cities, but then started growing again and has dropped now and then. The other is just that clearly there are parts of San Francisco, mostly not too far from downtown, and I think a lot of this is on cable TV news a lot that are just have some real issues with mainly drug addicted people on the streets, and there's crime related to that, although it's kind of when you look at like murders and stuff. San Francisco is not a particularly dangerous city, at least not by American standards. So that's the comparison. It's like, Detroit is this city where everything went wrong. San Francisco is a city that's on top of the heap, has been on top of the heap which actually Detroit was back in the late forties. It was the most affluent large city in the country, as San Francisco has been over the past decade, and so hey could be could be the beginning of something terrible.
Okay, On that note, San Francisco is a tech heavy region, though I would have thought that that would have given them some sort of advantage.
Well, I mean, part of the issue is, I mean, the auto industry was a tech industry when it began in the early days in Detroit. It was full of startups and that era's form of venture capital and lots and lots of competition, and around in the fifties that it started consolidating. I mean, it probably started long before them, but it really consolidated into the Big three or even really two and a half. Even Chrysler couldn't really keep up with the others, and that job started moving out of the city proper, and then eventually the whole Detroit region. I guess the issue is could tech be something like that? So far, there have been individual tech industries like semiconductors that have started up in the San Francisco area. Really San Jose area consolidated, moved most of the jobs and then new ones have come along, But I guess that can't go on forever. And there's certainly been this sort of There are now these giants Apple, Google, Alphabet, and Meta that are just these really big dominant companies, and so I think there's been some concern there are some things about what's going on with tech that are a little bit similar to what happened with the maturing of the auto industry.
You mentioned both Detroit and San Francisco in their heyday. Does that seem more like a dramatic fall because they are or were on top of the heap. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
I don't know, because I mean San Francisco has been among the more affluent, definitely metropolitan areas pretty much all along. I mean, Detroit had this moment in mid century, and you know New York has never New York area has never fallen all that far. The city did for a while. So I don't think there's this inevitable thing that the mighty must fall. And I guess so one of the things I did I started thinking it's basically an editor here asked, Hey, could you do a column on this? And I thought, well, I guess I should learn more about Detroit. And there's this classic history written in the nineties by Thomas Sugru I hope I'm pronouncing that right, A professor history professor at NYU A out The Fall of Detroit. It's really interesting because I think most people it's called the Origins of the Urban Crisis, race and inequality, and post war Detroit. Most narratives of Detroit kind of start with the riots of nineteen sixty eight and how it went downhill from there. Suh's book stops right before them, and he just sort of paints this picture of how everything was already unraveling before that. It was really it was two things. One was sort of the consolidation and change in the auto industry, and one is just the incredible racial polarization in Detroit, where black workers had started coming up before World War two, and basically Ford had been pretty welcoming to black workers, but none of the other automakers during the war things really opened up because there was such labor shortages. They were still all forced to live in a couple of really tiny, decrepit old neighborhoods in the city, and basically Detroit's mayors for about twenty years there. Their main calling card was keeping black people from moving into white neighborhoods. That finally broke through and it became Detroit was this mostly black city and all the suburbs were trying to keep the black people out. It was just this long history of just total sort of metropolitan area dysfunction and conflict. That's just not the vibe in the Bay Area at all. And so that I guess to me, it's like that's that second part of the Detroit story that caused things to go so badly there that I just it's hard to see any parallel to that in the San Francisco area.
And just to clarify, I wasn't trying to imply that a fall is inevitable because of the city's success, right, I was mainly wondering about the perception of the fall being more dramatic because it's such a long way down when you're on the top.
Yeah, that's true. I mean, the city of San Francisco median household income is about a h twenty thousand dollars and the national is around seventy and so that's a lot higher. And even you know, if it just became a normal place, there's a lot of you know, houses, housing prices would have to fall a lot and a lot of other things would have to change. And I mean, what's happening in San Francisco now, most of all is simply that people stop going into the office. And I mean we've got versions of that everywhere. I mean, DC, I think is one of the other places where it's been most extreme. But DC's sort of different because it's all these federal agencies that people aren't coming into and that just hasn't had the same real estate ramifications.
Yet how did they get here? You mentioned the pandemic, you mentioned the shutdown, You mentioned people not going into work, and the decline of the of the real estate. They can't be all of it, though.
You could see starting about six or seven years ago some signs that things had peaked in San Francisco real estate values flat doubt it looked like pulp population might be starting to flatten out or drop a little bit. And it's two things. It's one is it's just so expensive. If you're making one hundred and eighteen thousand, five hundred and forty seven dollars a year, the median income in San Francisco. You can't really afford to buy a house there, or probably not an apartment either. Problem two is that San Francisco has just had this issue and it's not unrelated to the housing problem, but it's it's to some extent separate. San Francisco has had this very tolerant attitude towards sort of street behavior, from sleeping on the street to also just acting out using drugs other things on the street. It's been an issue in the city since the eighties. I mean the Tenderline district and sort of the areas towards City Hall have been troubled for decades. But it felt like, and I think in various statistics it showed up that things were sort of getting worse in towards the in the years before the pandemic.
What is the lesson from Detroit and now from San Francisco that other American cities probably should take to heart.
One of it is just if things don't seem to be working, you should try to change them, and that's sort of San Francisco's need right now. I guess the other one is just that what happened to the Detroit area, I mean in the Detroit area is still reasonably prosperous. It's sort of middle of the road among big metro areas. The city is much poorer, although it's kind of the decline. It's still losing a little population, but it's doing it seems to have been doing better the last few years. And part of it is that there's no longer this huge sort of hostility between the city and the suburbs that there used to be. There's still a lot of distrust, but the politics are no longer as polarized. One of the big ones is there's this long history in this country of being very suspicious of cities and this whole mythology of how the countryside is more decent and whatever. And that's fine, but at the same time, when you let cities totally disintegrate, it's not really great for the suburbs either, And I think there's a pretty widespread understanding of that in California. I mean, I guess the issue California just has a bunch of statewide issues, from water to climate to its tax structure that make it hard to fix things. But at least they're not kind of at odds with each other in the same way that I think Detroit and its suburbs were for decades.
Bloomberg Opinion colonist Justin Fox. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. The world is hot. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAH has recorded June as the hottest on record, and at least ten days in July as even hotter than that. So after years of millions of Americans moving to the southeast, transforming real estate markets, there's this reverse snowbird migration happening now, and it makes sense that more people are migrating back north to beat the heat. Joining us not to talk about this. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Connor Sen, founder of Peach Tree Creek Investments. Connor, We're thinking about some of those northern states, like Maine. Is Maine the new retirement destination?
I believe so. And I had some anecdotal evidence here, as a friend of ours who lives in Orlando bought a summer home in Maine. So we got to go up there and see it. And they're in a new subdivision. They say a lot of southern home buyers are moving in. And you know, to your point, it's really hot down here. In the South. I'm in Atlanta, and people are looking for a way to get away, but there's not that same history of sort of people going up there, so people have to figure out what communities they like and kind of build that pipeline to migrate during the summer.
What sort of migration patterns for lack of a better term, are we seeing now.
So it's hard to see it in the data, but school gets out very early here in Atlanta. School gets out right before Memorial Day, So for us, it would be a sort of go up in June and July to get back here for August school year. That would sort of be the framework, And so that might be a little different for people in the North who are used to going back to school around Labor Day. So there is a bit of a seasonal difference there, But it's really a June and July story.
I would say, are we talking about retirees specifically, or like you just said, we were talking also about families with kids, So this must cross demographics.
My guess is there's probably more of an impulse for families just because you want to be active with your kids during the summer and when it's ninety five and humid or one hundred and fifteen and dry, You can't really do that very well. Maybe it's people who are sort of more used to new behavior patterns and looking to do something like that. So I think families will be the key demographic for this, and it's about will these communities welcome people like that and can you kind of create that amenity and pipeline to make it happen.
Now, historically it's been Florida and Arizona, the Carolina's welcoming winter travel from Northerners. They've built entire industries and economies around it. Are we bound to see something like that from Maine and Michigan and Minnesota states like that?
The question that I have that is less clear to me is whether these states would want that. I could imagine people in Maine who like it a certain way, who have been doing it for decades, not being super psyched if sort of wealthy Southerners are coming up and taking their great restaurants and their housing and driving at costs, and people in Minnesota, in Michigan and Wisconsin maybe the same thing. So I'm less sure that there'll be the embrace of this kind of migration. But again, the demand is there from people who want to do it, So there's going to be something that happens here.
How can this trend expand where could we be going from here? Are families liable to say buy second homes in these cooler climates? Is this just vacation land? What are you seeing down the road?
I think the demand is going to keep growing because there's a lot of wealth that's moved down here and people who want to get away for the summer. Going north is sort of climate wise the place to be. And the question is just which communities will embrace this and kind of build out to meet that demand. And maybe there are struggling parts of of some communities that we'll see this as a lifeline and that could be an opportunity for them. And so it's really about, well communities in the north welcome this and build to it or will they kind of fight it? And that it's sort of a high cost thing but less opportunity, less capacity.
Is there any way to tell who would.
Be more welcoming Anecdotally, I don't know. There's not like a trend that people are saying, oh, we're all going to Grand Rapids in Michigan to do this with summer, sir, But it's kind of like a lot of things where once there's a bit of a trickle of a trend, there's a word of mouth boom, and then people all kind of flock the same places. And so that's what I'm interested in over the next five or ten years, to see which places capitalize in the opportunity.
We're going to continue to watch it with you. It's really interesting to see how this is developing. Connor, thank you so much for taking the time with us. Connorson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and a founder of Peachtree Creek Investments. And that does it for this week's Bloomberg Opinion. We're produced by Eric Molop and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg terminal. We're also available as a poddcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Now, stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up. I'm Amy Morris, and this is Bloomberg