Moab has the world's largest uranium tailings pile. The rich weasels are trying to buy out the town, but they are mainly building starter castles out in Spanish Valley and we have the Cloudrock destination resort going in on top of Johnson's Up-On-Top mesa southeast of Spanish Valley a polite distance from Moab. Moab is still an old uranium-mining town filled with various colorful characters who can be classified in a mind-boggling number of ways, who are resisting yuppification by the rich weasels while laboring away vigorously on building a post-carbon, "green" civilization. Moab has the highest proportion of housing in the form of old mobile homes of any community in Utah. Moab is the only town in the southwest where the Mormon mission sent in the 1850's failed and the Mormons left, run out by renegade Ute Indians in cahoots with French-Canadian traders and Spanish horse thieves. It has continued in that honorable tradition since: a refuge for the deviantly diverse in the middle of a "stinking desert" of slickrock and canyons. I choose to live here because I love wandering around in the countryside, and I like the amenities of the town better than anywhere else I know of. Real estate is bid up by the rich weasels buying into the place with outside capital, so that nobody who makes a living in Grand County can qualify to buy any home built here in the 21st century. If you need to make a living on a local economy, this in not a place you want to come.
Sedona has a huge four-star resort right in the center of town and has yuppified from the center outwards. Sedona has innumerable new age flakes who will take you out to spiritual places and adjust your aura. Sedona has a factory outlet mall on the south side of town. My impression is that the population of Sedona consists entirely of rich weasels with pretentions to spiritual sensitivity and the new age parasites feeding upon them. I would not live there on a bet, even if I could afford it. It makes Moab look like a cheap place to live. Sedona is much closer to nodes of so-called civilization such as Phoenix and Flagstaff, if you like that sort of thing. There is a limited amount of red rock country nearby in Oak Creek Canyon, and quite a lot of national forest trail access during the warm part of the year.
(see earthrestoration.net for more, much more, about and from Lance)