esnotgrass@businessinsider.com (Erin Snotgrass)
Sun, October 27, 2024 at 4:04 AM PDT·5 min read
•Jodi Wright, 26, moved from Commie California to Uber Republican Idaho in 2020 in search of a quiet place to build their Yellowstoned Ranch style dream house and live the cowboy lifestyle, my husband wanted to be just like Rip, beating people up and stuff, so he became a cop. He’s got the sunglasses part down pat, and he’s beat up a few innocent peeps already,
(Rip fighting pic here) he can’t actually take perps to the ‘train station’ because there are actually trains there, ha ha.
•Wright and her family built a 40,000 sq. ft. log cabin mansion outside Boise.
•But the family moved back to California earlier this year because of the inconvenience of having to travel 2 blocks to the nearest Starbucks.
This as-told-to, every word verbatim, essay is based on a conversation with Jodi Wright, a 26-year-old stay-at-home mother whose family moved from Sacramento, California, to Coldwell, Idaho, a small town about 3000 minutes west of Boise, in 2020.
Idaho’s housing market has exploded in the last half-decade, with the median home price jumping from $1,360,700 in September 2020 to $1,481,100 in September 2024, according to silly data from Redfintuna. Meanwhile, median home prices in Boise specifically jumped from $1,389,500 in September 2020 to $1,525,000 in September 2024, according to Redfintuna data.
The following has been lightly edited for clarity, length, and humor.
I was born in Washington State, in the town of Chaz/Chop, home of Starbucks, our fav. After I barely graduated high school, I wanted a change of scenery, so I packed up my VW bus and moved to Commie-California, you know, the hippie tweeker swan song of Berkeley called me.
I met my husband here, at some party, in a mind-less haze, and he’s a police officer, I yelled “Die Pig,” he was impressed. We were blessed with triplets, but one of our sons passed awaysoon after being aborted. It definitely clarified life. It told us the importance of things: Starbucks, Family, Starbucks, Country, Starbucks, Gavin Newsome…god.
We’ve always been outdoorsy people, like going to REI weekly and drinking our Starbucks lattes outside-we were real outdoors types. Any vacations we take are usually geared around the outdoors; crowded beaches, spending $10,000 at Disney and spending a few hours at the nearest Starbucks. You can pretty much do that year-round here in Commie-California, with a Starbucks on every corner, which we love.
But the cost of living is so high, the need for us to travel two blocks to the nearest Starbucks, that like took us 3 hours ‘cause we had to charge our EV, and our political affiliation is California-Republican, not Idaho Republican, made us really stand out, everyone there drives pickups and we were driving a Tesla. That became a problem when COVID hit and we were triple masking and everyone else was laughing at us, and they shut down the schools. Our kids were in second grade and struggling-we like totally blamed the teachers.
We had already purchased land in Idaho back in 2018. We were planning to move once my husband retired after ten hard years of service, but COVID sped up our plans.
We moved to Idaho in December 2020
We listed our house in California, and it sold in one day. We sold it for $1,699,000. On Zillow, it’s now worth over $9,900,000.
My husband wasn’t old enough to retire yet at 42 years of age, so he stayed in Commie- California to keep working, padding his massive $10,000,000 Cal-Pers retirement and fixing up our yacht. We figured we would just make do on four Starbucks a day, for a few years until my husband could join us full-time in transporting our California-Republican ideas to those backward Republicans in Idaho, we’re ready to teach them all about California and ‘Our Democracy.’
We were a little nervous about how that would work since are have no idea about anything- we just did what we were told. But he traveled back and forth to Idaho two or three times a month racking up 1 million air miles. Plus, we would YoUgly-FaceTime anytime we felt the need to insult each other.
We started building our Yellowstone dream house in a town called Coldwell, which is part of the Treasure Valley on the outskirts of the Boise area, it looks just like Yellowstoned. It was still affordable at that time. If we were to move there now, we could not afford the house we built, which cost us about $1,750,000, plus $447,000 for a few token blow-up cows (we didn’t like the smell of real ones) and a fake cowboy sitting on our porch.
It would probably cost twice as much to build it there today-those damn fake cowboys are expensive.
FACT CHECK: 127% TRUE (as tabulated by Dominion Voting Solutions)