A claim, put forward by Yahoo Finance in April and further analyzed on AL.com last month, suggested that the average price of a home in Huntsville could reach a million dollars by 2030.

Seems a bit steep, doesn’t it?

And yet, this future may not be as outlandish as it appears at first glance. Gabrielle Athanasia of the Center for Strategic and International Studies penned a brief history of Silicon Valley, titled “The Lessons of Silicon Valley: A Well-Renowned Technology Hub.”

In it, Athanasia details the story of an otherwise unremarkable town, with an engineering college, hitting a breakthrough in a revolutionary post-war technology, landing lucrative contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense, then seeing a proliferation of startups, research laboratories, and venture capital, all concentrating into a hub, with a corresponding boom in housing prices as the town attracts many of the brightest minds in the world.

Sound familiar?

But all is not well with Silicon Valley, which is a victim of its own success. The cost of living in the Bay Area, especially housing, is unaffordable to the point of parody. A Palo Alto startup, Brownstone Shared Housing, is market testing module “sleeping pods” that are designed to enable up to 14 adults to share one single-family home.

The rent for a pod in a single home, in which one can expect to share a house, with only two bathrooms, with over a dozen other adults? $800 a month, which is half the price of a studio apartment in Palo Alto. The average cost of a single-family home in Palo Alto, California is a heart-stopping $3.5 million.

Suddenly, the $1.5 million price tag of the average single-family home in San Jose doesn’t seem quite so terrible.

Actually, yes, yes it does, how do we prevent that from happening here?

The first step is adjusting expectations for what Huntsville is, and will become in the future. The Huntsville Business Journal spoke with Katye Coats, of consulting firm Warren Averett, about Huntsville’s future development.

“In our area, based on our history and culture (60 years ago it was more heavily agricultural), we have an expectation as to how much we should have to spend on housing compared to our income, etc,” wrote Coats. “We don’t think of ourselves as a “booming metropolis” or an urban area – but we are. We want the infusion of industry from SpaceEx, Missile Defense, FBI, Facebook, etc., but that comes with these growing pains of increased housing prices, infrastructure (will 565 ever be done?), and the like.”

Coats sees a future Huntsville that is more analogous to other Southern metropoles.

“Did anyone think twenty years ago that Nashville would be the metropolis it is today? How much has Atlanta grown in that same time frame? Charlotte? Asheville? That’s where we’re headed. What successes did they implement? What failures did they experience? What can we stand to learn from their leaders?”

That’s the second step in preventing runaway pricing issues: infrastructure and planned development. Silicon Valley is located in California’s Bay Area, where post-war urbanization sprung up and boomed around it; there just wasn’t much room for it to expand with the other urban pushes.

Huntsville, in contrast, is largely unpressured by neighboring cities. (Sorry Decatur, but you’re no San Francisco when it comes to sprawl.) Investment in highway infrastructure has increased the commutability to and from nearby suburban areas of Madison County, such as Hazel Green, Harvest, and Madison itself. While prices in these suburbs have also risen, they still remain below the national average, and form a sort of release valve for urban density.

At the very least, it seems unlikely that Huntsville will wind up emulating the resort town of Ketchum, Idaho, where last year, the crisis in housing prices pushed the vital working-class people critical for the functioning of the city out into further and further communities, with some reporting commutes of four to six hours daily. It reached the point where the Mayor of Ketchum proposed erecting a tent city in the town’s park for nurses, teachers, and service workers to stay.

The Mayor pretty quickly backed down from that suggestion, but it was proposed.

Another factor that differentiates Huntsville from its Californian counterpart is the nature of the industries around which each town was built. The transistors and semiconductors that gave Silicon Valley its name have a wide array of commercial, industrial, and consumer applications across the entire population. This enabled the tech startups to commercialize the technologies of Silicon Valley for a wide array of clientele.

In contrast, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a booming market for hypersonic missiles marketed to the individual consumer anytime soon.

Huntsville’s most lucrative client remains the US Federal Government. The technologies developed and deployed here are of critical importance to the future of American defense doctrine.

Space represents the ultimate high ground, the position from which an enemy might rain down death with impunity. It is of vital importance that the United States achieve total air-space supremacy. Failing that, the next best option is denying total air-space supremacy to the nation’s enemies. The aerospace and cyberwarfare technologies developed in Huntsville are crucial to that mission.

Even American defense spending is not unlimited; however, with the sheer significance of the technologies developed and deployed in Huntsville, the spending of the US government here will continue to remain strong, irrespective of private sector fluctuations. This does not make Huntsville “recession-proof” by any means. What it does mean is that there is a strong and resilient core of high-earning technical workers that will have needs that will need to be met by private businesses, and that core is what the rest of Huntsville’s economy is built around.

Then there is the privatization of space exploration to consider. There are physical factors to the aerospace industry that just are not present in Silicon Valley’s tech base. A spaceport in Huntsville is a spaceport in Huntsville and nowhere else, and presents one of no-doubt few locations equipped to handle spacecraft. Who knows how many decades it will be before numerous real challengers will emerge to threaten that sort of structural advantage? The Orbital Assembly Corporation moved its center of operations from California to Huntsville, and if their impressive robotic assembly tech can live up to the promises that the company makes, then they will be a key player in the first privately-owned, operating, and visited space habitats.

In short, while transistors and semiconductors can be researched, developed, and shipped off to anywhere, there are certain advantages that Huntsville can offer that are, at the very least, difficult to find elsewhere. This incentivizes keeping the price hike of housing to a dull roar in Madison County; the technicians need to be present to do much of the work, and while those jobs pay well, they don’t pay “$1.5 million average for a basic house” well.

Prognostication, of course, is tricky business, but while it appears that housing prices in Madison County will continue to rise, it appears unlikely that they will spiral out of all control.

Cover image provided by Downtown Huntsville Inc.