Housing units
OK Edge, I've considered it and done some research, and the effects of the 2018 eruption, at this point,
should be zero or very close to it. Please see the attached screenshot from reventure.app. If the data is to be trusted, then in 96778 there were 7018 housing units in 2017. As of 2022, there were already 6870 housing units, meaning the lost 700 houses were being replaced, on average, at a rate of 110.4 houses per year. If that trend continued during 2023 and the first 8 months of 2024, then we can extrapolate that about 735 houses should have been built between 2017 and August 2024.
Please see the second screenshot, below, from reventure.app, which shows population figures for 2017 and 2022. In 2017, those housing units, plus a pile of jungalows, huts, hooches, tree houses, yurts, vans, school buses, tents, Quonset huts, air-crete temples, you-name-it, plus plus, etc., supported a population of 15,081 in 96778. By 2022, that number had already recovered to 14,310. It is reasonable to surmise that we are, roughly, back to our pre-eruption population of Punatics as well.
It may be that the owners' pro forma projected a population increase. An even greater distortion may have been the effects of COVID with its PPP, Restaurant Revitalization Fund Grants, and other helicopter money flying around. Certainly the change in interest rates has an outsized effect on businesses that rely on lines of credit. Insurance costs have also increased for businesses. Inflation has been brutal for everyone. People's habits have changed. Popeye's finally opened. We went from only having Luquin's as a Mexican food competitor to suddenly having numerous options along the highway and at farmers markets.
The good news is that we have very likely, very recently, achieved full replacement of the housing stock lost in the 2018 eruption. The bad news is that whoever moved into those houses did not visit The Coconut Cantina enough.
Without publicity, a terrible thing happens: nothing
- P. T. Barnum
Population
