I was walking my dog past the little 1920s bungalow that sits on the corner of my block yesterday. It is a sturdy house, painted a sensible shade of cream, and I have always felt it looked like a nice place to raise a family. I bought my own home in 2006 for what I consider a perfectly normal amount of money—a price that felt like a fair trade for the keys and a front porch. I like to think about that price often, usually while I am counting the spare change in my cup holder.

The bungalow was gone. In its place, a construction crew was installing what appeared to be a glass elevator shaft rising four stories into the air. It looked like a skyscraper had accidentally landed in the middle of a neighborhood that was designed for bicycles and porch swings. The foreman, a fellow named Gary who was wearing a very clean neon vest, told me it was a “Vertical Living Concept.” I didn’t realize we were running out of horizontal space, but Gary seemed very proud of the glass.

It is strange to see these things pop up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. Last week, I tried to explain to my neighbor, Martha, that a four-story building in a town where the tallest thing used to be the grain elevator feels a bit like wearing a tuxedo to a barn dance. Martha, who moved here from Connecticut in 2018 and tells everyone she is a “local” because she knows how to find the Co-op parking lot, told me it was just “urban density.”

I am not sure what density has to do with the fact that I can now see into the bathroom of the third floor from my living room window. I suppose I should be grateful for the view of the mountains, which are still back there, somewhere behind the new structural steel and the imported Italian stone facade.

People keep telling me that this is just the way things go in a “vibrant mountain hub.” I have lived here long enough to remember when a vibrant hub meant you went to the hardware store and someone asked you if you’d finished putting up your hay. Now, a vibrant hub apparently means you need a concierge service to manage your package deliveries and a private elevator to transport your groceries from your hybrid SUV to your terrace.

The math is the part that bothers me the most. I look at these buildings and I try to calculate how many shifts at the local coffee shop one would have to work to pay for a bedroom in one of these glass towers. My pocket calculator usually runs out of digits before I reach the closing costs. I recall, with a great deal of fondness, that in 2006, my mortgage payment was less than the cost of a single dinner for two at some of the new places downtown. That felt like a normal amount of money.

I asked Gary the foreman if they were going to put a porch on the front of the building so the people who live in the glass tower could talk to their neighbors. Gary looked at me like I had asked him to explain quantum physics using only a pinecone. He told me the building had “secure access points” and “a curated community atmosphere.” I think that means they don’t want to talk to me, which is fine, because I’m not sure I have much to say to someone who lives in a glass elevator.

We have a lot of new people in town, and I’m sure they are very nice. They have very expensive boots and they seem to be very worried about the wind, even though the wind has been blowing here for as long as I can remember. They want the charm of 1975, but they want the convenience of a hotel in Manhattan. I think we are currently in the middle of a grand experiment to see if you can fit an entire metropolis into a valley that is primarily used for grazing cattle and complaining about the snow.

Maybe the glass elevators are a good thing. They certainly are shiny. When the sun hits them at just the right angle, they reflect the mountains back at the mountains, which seems like a very efficient use of light. I suppose I will get used to it, just like I got used to the roundabout that replaced the perfectly functional four-way stop.

I’ll keep walking my dog past the building. I’ll keep checking the price of houses in the classifieds just to remind myself of what a normal amount of money looks like. And if I happen to see a neighbor in the glass elevator, I’ll give them a friendly wave, even if I can’t quite hear them through the soundproof glass.

It is a very tall building for a street that doesn’t have a single sidewalk that isn’t cracked.

Howard Benchpress owns a home he bought in 2006 for what he describes as ‘a normal amount of money.’ He brings this up frequently.