My personal opinion?

There are crappy people everywhere and nice people everywhere.

I learned in school about what is bad about stereotyping.

That’s a pretty specific Venn diagram

Seems like OP needs to vent and seeks comrades.

Can't vouch for the driving one,but the housing one is true.

I live in Monroe County and I read somewhere that approximately 45% of all the housing units in the county are owned by out-of-staters typically as vacation homes.

In the last few years more out-of-state investors are also coming in to buy and eventually flip while running crappy absentee landlord party house Airbnb's in the meantime that make life noisier and more trashy for their full-time resident neighbors with long commutes who just want to get some sleep.

Plus the traffic. Every third or fourth car I pass is a front-plater and it gets old fast dealing with rude ignorant tourists on the road when we already have enough locals like that.

The Poconos Mountains Visitors Bureau keeps promoting the area in more and more places to jam even more tourists in but the service sector tourism jobs are crap and the infrastructure here can't handle any more resorts and now we're getting warehousing too.

I'd like to get out of the Poconos and eastern PA in general after living here for 50+ years but everywhere else seems to be having problems too. There's no 'there' there to escape to anymore.

Try Mexico.

I’m in NEPA and since 2020 it’s absolutely INSANE. They came up here to escape NY/NJ and just are out of control.

They never escape ,they just bring it with them

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This has been going since I was born in the Poconos. I was in High School before the dress codes.

As a native American who's lived in the NE US, I notice a lot of people coming in from Europe who live recklessly and become landlords, then drive us onto crappy land and do not care about the land or the natives at all. Have you had a similar experience? Discuss.

Greed Over People

An area marketed as a vacation destination contains vacation housing? This is my shocked face.

Turns out that landlords are shitty people - who could've known!?

There's not enough supply for housing in New York compared to demand, so people are moving to PA and essentially the same thing is happening all over again. Zoning laws artificially restrict the supply of housing and drive prices upward. People who want housing to be affordable but aren't willing to ever see their property values go down are holding a fundamentally impossible position.

You entirely missed my point.

It's not that there's vacation housing. Duh, I know that. It's the sheer amount of it bought by relatively high-income out-of-staters as a percentage of all housing stock that doesn't leave much for lower-paid locals, especially those in the service sector jobs that support the tourism.

Housing insecurity represents a real issue here and in tourist areas throughout the country.

I've been happy with landlords. But was always the kind of tenant that tries to leave my environment better than I found it. Useful in repairing minor issues.

But what is the solution? Forbid people from buying houses? It wasn’t so long ago that people were complaining that the area was disinvested and nobody could sell or leave. Now industry is being added and there’s interest in housing and that’s a problem too. It just reads to me as bitter nimbyism.

I'm glad you've been so lucky. I'd call us model tenants, and yet time and time again landlords screw us over by shirking their duties and cutting corners to try and save costs. 3 of our past 4 breached the lease.

A severe distortion of the local housing market for low and middle-income Pennsylvanians by wealthy out-of-staters for vacation homes and investment Airbnb's represents a serious problem for local working class folks.

It's not the "bitter nimbyism" you're trying to make it out to be.

Oh I agree about Airbnb. It’s a scourge. But what I’m seeing in this thread is that anyone not from here is the enemy. New Yorkers daring to relocate to NEPA and so on.

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considering 400k people have moved here from NJ/NY during COVID-19 alone. We should just change everything east of the Susquehanna River, West Jersey.