I have traveled to most US states and about a dozen countries, and wouldn't trade my home for any of them. The structural advantages (family, friends, regional knowledge, activities) are tremendous. If you are planning to have children, having parents/relatives around to share in the childcare is an enormous financial advantage.
For 80% of the world, travel is something that 'other people' do.
According to the study, you would likely have not stayed:
"By linking young adults to their parents, we can see that this migration is primarily driven by individuals who grew up in affluent families."
A low-income family is less likely to send their kid to school to be a doctor or hotelier.
I would say this:
- Moving around isn't for everyone.
- There is a tinge of oikophobia that's common in much of the West today that makes the thought of caring for and willing the genuine good of your own people frightening to many, inconvenient, and for some reason synonymous with chauvinism or some weird exclusivity that construes benevolence as "either/or" instead of in subsidiarian terms. Soon, the mere general prioritization of the good of one's own family members (a duty) will come off as "not inclusive" and "inequitable".
- Statistically, there is a certain healthy amount of average migration of certain kinds (the specifics will vary). Some spice enhances the flavor of a soup, but too little leaves it bland, and too much overpowers it.
- Travel and living elsewhere can help deprovincialize the mind, but do not guarantee it.
- Social networks and social order are important. Note the principle of subsidiary. A human being typically grows up in a family that is itself nwsted within an extended family and a community and so on, like layers of an onion. People typically become alienated when removed from them.
- As people get older, it becomes more common to settle down and commit oneself to the good of some particular community (original or adopted) instead of spending one's life drifting anonymously.
- One of the big incentives behind traveling or living in different places is to learn about other cultures. But if everyone were moving around, no local culture would ever have the chance to develop because locality requires continuity and a stable, sustaining local population, i.e., a true society. Places with very high rates of inward and outward migration tend to be less distinctive and tend to resemble other hubs of the same kind with which they likely swap inhabitants. If that's what attracts you, then your travelling or moving around isn't motived by a desire to learn about other cultures so much as a desire for a change of scenery while maintaining a more or less consistent, homogenous cultural "experience" globally. It's like being an American who goes on vacation and never talks to the locals, only other Americans in the hotel, or one who wants the "locals" to be like Americans.
- There is, of course, a difference between frequent moving and living more than 10 miles away from where you grew up.
I attach moral judgement to neither "remaining in the area" nor "living far away" nor even "moving frequently". These are quite personal matters per se.
Moving thousands of miles has changed my life in ways I’d never dream of, staying still was not on the cards: it would have been lethal. I had to upend to get the education I needed, find my person and the tech job I love.
I grew up 30 minutes from a respected state college, about 15 miles, and about an hour away from both Philly and NYC, almost exactly 50 miles to each. The ongoing joke in my high school is at least 50% of each graduating classes ended up at the same state college. I'm not sure the real statistic, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
10 miles sounds far enough away from parents to be able to feel independent but also not far away enough to feel any kind of culture shock. Not everyone will have this privilege, but I just want to share another perspective.
And where you grew up. I grew up somewhere that aspirants move to. So I never left because why would I bother? As the US becomes more urbanized, people are going to have less of a reason to move to places with more opportunity because they're already in places that have opportunity.
Highly dependent on where you grew up.
My parents grew up in a farming town in Scotland. Moving out was the best way to solid careers.
I grew up in DC. I stayed because when I finished college, there were ample jobs here and that hasn't changed. Sometimes I wish I had moved, but at the same time, when I look elsewhere, the grass isn't any greener.
Imagine if you started small businesses and hired/trained the locals.
Maybe everyone left behind wouldn't have to work at a big box store or just die to reduce the societal burden.
Edit: Not blaming, just food for thought.
...which I guess is just a long-winded way of saying that you should stay near home if it's good, and stay away if it's bad (for whatever values of good and bad).
Of course if I had a bad relationship with my family, or had wildly different interests/beliefs I would likely want to move away.
The less fortunate places of today weren't built for no reason, back when they were new there was money to be made to support them. Then economics shifted and there's less money that can be made in that location, so people/businesses move away. Expecting capable people to intentionally stunt their achievements to try and do the equivalent of growing wheat in the desert is just mythologizing places that once served an important economic purpose but no longer do. This notion that you'll never need to adapt to changing circumstances, that there's some sort of societal guarantee of growing old in the same community you grew up in, is incredibly entitled and fundamentally anti-American.
What we need is federally funded moving expenses for lower income earners, that way no one's stuck in a modern-day ghost town.
> Imagine if you started small businesses and hired/trained the locals.
If I had stayed in my hometown I wouldn't have had the resources to even think about doing those things. The town is in the poor half of a county in a poor state. The best most can hope for out there are part time jobs at grocery stores and fast food restaurants, both paying almost nothing.
I probably could've gotten hired on as a county public school tech which pays decently for the area, but it still would've taken decades to bootstrap the kind of resources required to start a business, because I'd be starting out with almost nothing.
If my parents have not moved to the US. I would've not had good access to a computer as we were relatively poor on the global scale. The stars aligned and I attended a university in the US, where I met influential people who later offered me a job.
I am now in a place where my income allows me to think about paying back.
I am definitely sure I would not have the common sense, the business sense, understanding of self, and the capitol to do anything of value if I have stayed.
In my experience this is a recipe for burnout, depression, social ostracization, and the like. Some places are not fixable, many are actively hostile to the idea of change.
A lot of these places were abandoned for a reason, not just because people felt like it one day.
The opioid thing is relevant because lots of people I grew up with in my home city fucked up their lives, and I’d have done the same had I stayed because social networks, living in poverty, decay and hopelessness etc.
Leaving broke me out of that and gave me access to better social capital which was (perhaps an exaggeration) a difference between life and death.
YMMV but if you’ve grown up in a decaying urban area, you know what I’m talking about.
But yeah. As an LA native, I don’t have much reason to leave. But it’s not like I’m some kind of sheltered, naive farmboy.
Are houses cheap in LA? Aren’t a bunch of people leaving California for cheaper property inland?
If you’re a multigenerational Native and have some form of lockin that offsets the crazy housing price pressures, leaving becomes suboptimal. It’s not exactly fair but it would be foolish not to take what advantages you can get.
I don't believe it's possible to integrate with modern society successfully without having to go through some kind of culture shock. It's not limited to culture defined by regions, older generations feel culture shock constantly when trying to stay integrated or understand the culture of new generations. But things like YouTube have allowed me to experience culture in a way that wasn't possible 20+ years ago.
I have been loving the relatively recent trend of older people, parents and grandparents making cooking videos. I recently found De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina, a channel where Doña Ángela, a 72 year old grandma teaches Mexican recipes. The channel has 4.2 million subscribers and the first video was uploaded in August 2019 and hit 2M subscribers by December 2019. Very simple production value, except the wood fire cooking which is probably out of necessity as she lives on a ranch. A similar channel with more production value, but still very homey is Cowboy Kent Rollins, 2.32M subs, who is verified on YouTube and has built a brand and a merch shop related to outdoor cooking. I grew up in the suburbs in the tristate area, but love making myself traditional style Mexican and TexMex food, homemade refried beans is a favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/@DemiRanchoaTuCocina
Best Authentic Refried Bean Recipe - Cowboy Kent Rollins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC5mR5s70bE
I am not disagreeing with you though, just two sides of the issue re resources.
Doing one will help you prepare to get the most out of the other. Living somewhere and doing immersive language learning would help you understand and enjoy media and food specific to that region. And watching shows and making dishes would help you connect with people from there and feel less like a tourist if you were to visit. It's depends on the individual whether the big things or the small things will push them to grow the most.
* The "stay behind" terminology is both evocative and biased. I didn't "stay behind". I moved away several times, thousands of miles, and lived in other places that ambitious people live, and then moved back to within 10 miles of where I grew up because the quality of life is better here. I can afford more, I have cultural amenities like world-class music and art, I'm near family and old friends as well as new friends, and people aren't all totally consumed by their work. The "upwardly mobile ambitious" set can frankly get stultifyingly boring and disconnected. I like having friends in construction, non-profits, pet services, etc.
* Like many Americans who really do "stay behind", I contribute to elder care in my family. A lot of people stay put because they need to care for someone, and America does not make it easy to get vulnerable or ill people services. This is part of what contributes to what you call the "bitterness" -- lack of support for child care, elder care, care for the mentally ill or those struggling with addiction, and in many cases it's a vicious circle: gotta stay in Podunkville to take care of grandma and your cousin 'cause you can't afford to get grandma other help and your cousin doesn't qualify for anything but SSI so he can't afford to move either, but staying in Podunkville you tank your own educational and job prospects, therefore keeping you in Podunkville forever. Sometimes it seems you can only truly be upwardly mobile if you can avoid caregiving responsibilities.
This resonates strongly with me, I can't imagine being able to move around like I do when my parents become too old
Not even remotely true. And yes, as de-facto "management", most of the blame is on these "institutions".
If the suburbs aren't sustainable, then what about rural? What about seaside? Where everything is super spread. It sounds to me that the "because roads" is an argument constantly made by those who levy taxes and by those who wants ever more taxes to be levied on others.
I live in a super-spread out rural/seaside area where I drive across vineyards to drive my kid to school. Businesses here aren't making a lot of money and yet there are roads. I somehow don't buy that very hard that sell that the suburbs aren't sustainable "because roads".
Do I really need to pay huge income taxes (France BTW) then 21% value added tax on everything I buy then 30% on any profit I'd make in the stock market, placing there money that's already been taxed? And paying four different (yup, four) taxes on real estate (land tax, "living tax", yearly tax on real estate wealth and now, the new, to me, one: "real estate tax for micro entrepreneurs")?
The tax never stops. And then, in addition to that, I've got to listen telling me that my area is too spread out "because roads and sewers" and I should pack my stuff and go live in a city?
Just FUCK THAT.
Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don't cite a source.
Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.
Can't be crushing that too after what we did to our beleaguered housing industry.
There are a lot of perks of having that stable community feeling around you.
The system uses concepts like "Social mobility" etc, but these are just terms pushed forward to avoid calling it what it is - the system forcing people to do this in order to maximize its profit by not investing where there is no immediate and maximal return, and instead milking economic centers and urban centers that are already highly profitable. For the same reason the US rural areas lack broadband - there isnt immediate, maximal profit for private companies in bringing broadband to those regions, and they also prevent municipalities from starting their own broadband service for their people with the excuse of 'free market'.
This of course affects the downstream, more industrial elements concentrated in cities as well, which process the ore and lumber and make engines and furniture.
(incidentally, our farming policy here is diametrically opposed to both "get big or get out" and "plant fencerow to fencerow", and we still have major political centre parties, as well as left and right wing parties. But that correlation may have no relation to causation...)
If the US government hadn't just completed a program of left-wing eradication in the early part of the 20c, the pressure probably would have turned rural people towards the populism that they had turned to throughout the 19c and very early 20c; the kind of populism that culminated in the 4-term FDR presidency and the New Deal.
"Populism" as you use it here (to refer to right-wing antisemitic groups), was intentionally turned into a slur that was used to attack the working-class left-wing:
> Most of the Progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, were bitter enemies of the Populists. In American political rhetoric, "populist" was originally associated with the Populist Party and related left-wing movements, but beginning in the 1950s it began to take on a more generic meaning, describing any anti-establishment movement regardless of its position on the left–right political spectrum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins
-----
edit: as far as I can tell, the only two things that are characteristic across all European cultures are drinking cow's milk and conspiracist antisemitism. Although America further developed it and fed it back to Europe (note Ford's influence on Hitler), the framework is definitely European. And of course, a lot of fascism in Europe was financed by the US post-WWII.
Why do they think their little corner in the world is special? I think it is mix of fear and complacency because when it gets bad, it doesn't get bad enough.
As an adult you are responsible for taking care of yourself and those you love above any other obligation. Not just moving towand and states but people move to different countries and continents primarily out of their obligation and desire to fulfi that duty and lead a better life.
>fear and complacency
Not everyone wants to live in a big city, or away from people they know.
I grew up in a shitty place. I knew from early childhood I would leave, and I knew this even though I was living a very privileged existence in that place. My parents were upper-middle class; we had new cars and a country club membership and all that shit. And I knew this despite being low-key discouraged from wanting to leave because Family.
It was (and remains) a racist, sexist, homophobic state, and nothing is likely to change that.
Sometimes I get a little jealous because I don't have any heart-connection to any place. Most of the friends I regularly talk to are people I've met within the last 5 years, and I still don't have any still-standing friendships from the time before my dad retired.
But also, I cannot imagine that life, nor do I know if I really want to. Moving around so much gave me such a wide array of interests and cultural knowledge about places in and outside of the US. I think the benefits of that well-rounded background outweigh whatever pangs of sadness I get occasionally about not really feeling like I have a homeland.
The flip side is that being able to have family help out easily when our kid is sick. Also I have friends who stayed back home (the ratio matching this article title pretty closely) and they have barbecues together, can hang out on a random night around a fire pit, watch movies in their backyard, and other fun things. About planting roots and settling down.
I'm really torn about these two ways of going about it. There's something very comforting about setting down roots and having a solid network of friends and family. The flip side is that you're probably leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. The history of success in America seems to lean towards being nomadic.
I moved to the other side of the world from where I grew up in my early 30s, and I grew up at the other end of the country from where I was born and lived my early years.
I have a great group of mates I met in my early twenties and still speak with daily on WhatsApp.
As you say they meet up regularly, know each others families well, and they have not left their home area and have been friends since primary school.
They’re all jealous that I have lived an “adventurous and exciting” life and I’m jealous that they have amazingly solid roots.
Though, I remember that one of my brothers once lived in Pennsylvania and he met 2 women who had never left their county and were amazed that he lived in so many other places and wondered out loud if he had been scared to live in places other than where he lived right then in PA. The mind set that other places are scary to live in is so foreign to me.
Sometimes I feel like an enlightened citizen moving about. Sometimes I feel like I'm perpetually living in an airport. To quote fight-club, single serving friends and nothing ever stays.
Which is to say, i did me, but i don't see anything wrong at all with staying put.
Each and everyone of us has 150 people in their circle of acquaintances . And 90% of our happiness depends on the quality of our relationship with the top 10 people in such list.
Similarly with the external enviornment. 90% of our happiness depends on the conditions of the external enviornment in a radius of 300 yds.
It's very easy to be blinded by the lights of NYC or Hollywood, but those megalopolis are incredibly big and again humans are so small.
A good setup in Albuquerque or Salt Lake City beats a mediocre setup in NYC or LA every day of the week.
Sure the Empire State Building is nice to look at,but it gets old fast, especially while you see it in passing while on your way to be screamed at by your boss at your second job that you had to take because you can't make the rent.
Given how small humans are, the ideal setup can be everywhere except for maybe Somalia or Congo. But even then if you are the undisputed king of Somalia, that's much better than being an Investment Banker in NYC. Despite the fact that a block in NYC generates more GDP than the entire country of Somalia,the claim of the king on such small GDP is almost total, whereas an investment banker has zero claim on the GDP being produced in a block in NYC, he has zero claim on anything period.
I think it was Julius Caesar who said: "I would rather be first in a little village than second in Rome".
There's a countervailing factor which is that more earnings and economic output arise from jobs in urban areas, which historically can only happen if some members relocate.
Hopefully the trend towards remote work helps alleviate this conflict.
That's not surprising, especially with how many college graduates move home now.
I wouldn't be surprised if a substantial amount of the remainder stay near where they colleged.
Living 10 miles away from where you grew up around Chicago can put you in a total different socioeconomic level of suburb.
My great-grandfather (who died long before I was born) was a fairly extreme example of this. Shortly before WWI he decided to jump on a boat in Germany and immigrate to Australia (coming originally from the Baltic states). It seems like a fortuitous time to leave Europe.
I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. His brother did basically the same thing (although in his case he was partly motivated by escaping getting conscripted into the Army). His story is fascinating too. A book was even written about it. He actually found an abandoned boat, fixed it up, made his own instruments and sailed to America in the 1930s across the Pacific Ocean because he always wanted to visit America.
I think about that and wonder what is it about some people who seem to be constantly restless while others seem content to staying pretty much exactly where they were born. I don't really understand that mindset but in some ways I envy it.
One of the most culturally identifiable songs to Australians is a song from the 1970s called Khe Sanh by a band named Cold Chisel. It's quite literally about a Vietnam vet with PTSD. it has a verse that goes like this:
And I've traveled 'round the world from year to year
And each one found me aimless, one more year the worse for wear
And I've been back to Southeast Asia, and the answer sure ain't there
But I'm drifting north, to check things out again, yes, I am
I purposefully graduated early from highschool (1 semester less and it only worked because of where my birthday was) to move 853 miles from where I grew up to where I currently live. My partner did a similar move (before we met).
When I talk to most of my friends it is a similar story.
I just can't imagine not wanting to explore a new area and have distance from your parents. I love my parents, we talk a couple times a week, but I don't need them physically close to me. (last couple years being the exception for obvious reasons).
Maybe this is because I am gay and I needed out of the south (as are many of my friends), I also wanted to move to an urban city like so many in my generation.
This just seems insane for me to think about.
Does anybody who is further along on the journey have any advice? How did you make this decision?
Like, maybe we just shouldn't have crappy places that people need to flee, by putting roots in the community and making it a place to be.
The article doesn't support your bias. It's mostly those from affluent families that move farther from home, not people looking for work.
"By linking young adults to their parents, we can see that this migration is primarily driven by individuals who grew up in affluent families."
"Childhood locations are measured at age 16 and locations in young adulthood are measured at age 26."
"By linking young adults to their parents, we can see that this migration is primarily driven by individuals who grew up in affluent families."
It's not all young adults, just a specific demographic we would expect to move away farther from home.
Many people in this thread are using this to confirm their bias that it says something about the young adults. The title is doing more harm than good.
People don't move. We like to talk about FOMO, but fear of making major changes is much bigger.
Most people in America are born and live in metro areas and I wonder if the same kind of mentality is taught to those people?
It’s possible that they just gave up earlier than you did. Many people where I grew up never put any effort into anything because they had resolved themselves to being helpless.
I'd like to make bold, sweeping claims about which is better, but I don't have any. I've moved the most, and because of that make the highest salary of any of my siblings. (The other sibling who moved is likely second, but possibly not due to being younger in their career.) Because of my location it's going to be hard to be a good uncle to my first niece, due in January. There are definite trade-offs involved in moving.
I moved back in with my parents during the pandemic to provide support for some health issues, since I had the ability work remote easily during that time. It was great to be back local for that time, though there were obviously some confounding factors due to the personal and societal health issues in 2020.
Of course, this is because housing is more expensive than it has ever been. It costs too much damn money to move, even if economic opportunity is better than it used to be.
A lot of ink being spilled in this thread about non-mobile people being bitter about the lack of opportunity in their hometown. That may be part of it, but I think the far larger and more important part is that it is too fucking expensive for them to move! In large part because of all of the people who did move away and got their fancy degrees and then financialized the whole economy so badly.
All of us has been to at least 7 different states/countries, me almost 12! Even "towed" our elders with us, and they love it too.
Cannot imagine being in a one-town ... forever.
Always seeking different cultures.
We must be explorers!
With remote work being more common now I could probably move back, but that would carry some amount of risk as long as I'm working for another company rather than running a business of my own. Where I live now has a decent balance between locally available jobs and cost of living which is a bit scary to give up.
A few years ago I started thinking of myself as a "third culture" person. Characteristics like having an expanded worldview and ability to quickly read new cultures are some of the upsides. Unfortunately, I also find myself very misunderstood and I have a lot of trouble with relationships of all kinds. It's heartbreaking to leave people behind, and it's exhausting to spend the years fitting in with new groups of people. Most cultures are protective and cautious of outsiders, and friendships rarely stick. The Curse of the Traveler means that my favorite people and things are never where I am right now, but I'm none the poorer for having known them.
As I've grown older, I've come to appreciate the benefits more and more. I have favorite places to shop, eat, entertain myself all over the world. I'm confident that I see and use much more of cities than most people. Where you live, work, socialize, entertain yourself, seek education, and so on can all be totally different places. My worldview cherry-picks from anything anywhere. I browse the internet of many countries, and read news from all over.
I'm always thinking "wherever you go, there you are" with people around me. My mom visited me while I was living in Tokyo, and she just wanted to go to Disneyland and see fireworks, and mostly wanted to eat American food she found familiar. She found the unfamiliar things intriguing, but didn't know how to ask good questions and put the unfamiliar things to use in her life. People are largely blind to details of new people and places and it takes some real effort to penetrate layers of language and social access.
I wish individuals would reflect on their cultures more. Americans should be outraged over their broken healthcare system and work cultures (even though the pay can be good). Some places might benefit from forgetting a lot of their religious and political history in exchange for some happiness and freedom. Many cultures have surprisingly high tolerances for pollution, poverty, and civil rights restrictions.
It's sometimes hard when you see others with their consistent lives, and roots laid down, but at the same time they'll often say how they envy you.
It's similar to the choice of having or not having kids. The trade off in life experiences is neither better or worse, just different.
i'm not so sure about that
having said that, as i got older and started having kids, i did move back to that hometown. i honestly did enjoy moving every 1-3 years as a kid, but my wife had a similar experience and did not enjoy it. now my kids have a home town and can see both sets of their grandparents every week or so. its also pretty cool taking my kids to the same restaurants and places that i went to when i was younger. based on how much trouble my 5 year old had with this move its not something i want to subject them to any more times(shes happy about it now and we wanted to get it over with before kindergarden etc starts). people like us who had a positive outcome from moving constantly are the outliers i think, its better to give the kids a sense of continuity.
I think I'd want to raise the kid with a sense of continuity, but also travel a lot. maybe even move to another country for a bit before returning back to the place i'd picked to raise them. who knows?
You also don't hold awful stereotypes that most people have - even most of those in a place like here. The south isn't all racist, the coast isn't all snobby, the southwest isn't full of dangerous cartels murdering everyone, middle America isn't a bunch of uneducated hicks, etc.
I've changed my understanding of other countries the same way. Mostly from meeting people online, but sometimes in person. Just something as simple as someone asking "what is ketchup?" in line at an elevator at a convention can expand the mind. How do you describe ketchup? Everyone knows ketchup! It made me wonder what else was normal and obvious to me that isn't to someone who's never experienced it.
But you have a couple of different groups broadly speaking. People who never moved out of a small town and people who gravitated back towards some major metro for any number of reasons.
And remember there are a lot of basically "small towns" that are counted with urban areas in the US.
That might be worth it for someone who wants to forge a career or explore. But for the average person who pushes paper at a generic office? You can do that anywhere. So why not do it where everyone you know lives?
There is a trade off to never putting down roots.
I was travelling through PA once as well and was at a local dive bar chatting up some folks - and they'd never even left their county either - not even for casual travel.
My moms side (7 kids, German Methodist) is scattered about, CA,OH,NC,NY,CO,GA and one uncle that stayed near my grandma in PA.
Hands down, far and away I’d take the first situation over the second. The family bonds and stories are incredible. They get together all the time, work together, some go to church together. It’s an incredibly tight knit family and at last look three of the women that divorced out of the family still come to gatherings and still carry that family name for decades.
1. Cities are awful dangerous places with no value 2. Strip malls and chain restaurants are the pinnacle of civilization
When I moved from Bucks County to Chester County I was "moving away" and many people just wrote me off. Despite being an hour or two drive away.
You can't hardly move at all in Texas without ending up in another county, but you can go 1000+ miles and still be in the same state.
Whereas there are counties in California that are larger than the nine smallest states.
There are many Californians that have been to another country (Mexico) but have never been to another state; they're far away.
It's easily verified by data you can find in many studies, and presumably the census itself. Of course it doesn't technically prove causality - it could be that the type of people who are successful just happen to be the same type of people who get married. Or maybe they get married precisely because they are successful - or unsuccessful people have a harder time finding spouses.
I am the only person in my direct family that lives outside of the county (very rural) or neighboring county that I grew up in. I really absolutely cannot fathom living my (probably) only life worrying about social cohesion or economic value of society. I live like 2500 miles from my family, and it used to be a lot further (I lived in east Asia for a while). Despite the distance, technology has allowed for me to keep in close contact with my family.
Taking the chance to explore new cultures and really immerse myself in them, and also live through the crazy Bay Area tech bubble before deciding it wasn't for me, really has provided a lot of excellent life experiences and perspectives. I wouldn't trade these opportunities for anything and strongly encourage younger people to try and leave the nest, at least for a bit, while it's still easy to do so and before they have to decide on things like staying near their parents once they become elderly.
IMO the main factors would be your economic situation and your relationship with your family. People with little money and tight family ties probably wouldn't be keen to move very far, whereas someone with a bad or indifferent relationship to family and the means to head elsewhere would probably do so.
Human communities have always needed a majority of members who are focused on family, community, and stability, but they've needed a minority of members who are more interested in the horizon - these people are the traders, explorers, settlers, etc and I wouldn't be surprised if there is some reproductive advantage (maybe your offspring are more likely to have a diverse genetic composition or something) I wonder whether there might be a genetic contributor toward wanderlust.
The few years my siblings spent half the world away from us prior to the proliferation of smartphones (and thus the ability for video calls to just happen whenever instead of being specifically organized) did seem to strongly weaken their relationship with the rest of the family though. They seemed to feel abandoned due to essentially having to grow up on their own (ie finish up college and start working) due to not being able to as easily share their issues.
I was born in a flyover state. There's ~no coding jobs here, and the ones that are here, pay pittances compared to anywhere not adjacent to a (feed)corn field.
I moved 250 miles away (to the other side of my state... dang is the US huge) to take a tech job that payed closer to what coastal companies will pay.
The next step was probably to move to Seattle or SF and take a "real" tech job there. But two things happened at the same time:
1. remote work really grew up. now I can work from anywhere and (mostly. geo-adjusting etc. luckily that seems to be on the decline.) get paid well.
2. We had our first child. Now suddenly close access to our support network (parents etc) is both logistically important ("hey mom can you watch the kids for a weekend so we can sleep") and emotionally important (grandparents getting to see the kids every weekend or two instead of significantly less often).
So now instead of looking to move an additional 2k miles away, I moved back to be ~2 miles from one set of parents and ~20 miles from the other set.
I'm not really thrilled about the local jobs or local politics etc. But family is incredibly important to have physically close, and so here I am. Thank heavens for remote coding jobs.
I feel like I would lose a little bit of my soul moving back to my hometown, but like you said the support network is extremely important.
Not sure what we're going to do.
We want to. But between housing prices and student loans, we can't afford to.
I enjoy exploring the world. However eventually I want to come back home.
Make a move before it's too late. Or convince them to move close to you.
If you love being with your parents, your window of doing so is fast shrinking.
I wish I had understood this sooner.
I did the same thing though and moved away from my family. I moved back during the pandemic and while I know everyone has a different family dynamic, I can't believe what I was missing. The physical, financial, and emotional support system of having family 15 min down the road is hard to quantify.
In talking to people who got out vs. some who didn't, there seem to be three main, interrelated things that hold people local: money, class and fear.
- Obviously money makes moving to the Big City much easier, and more of it is always better. But below some point, it becomes incredibly hard to make work - if your parents are in the bottom half of the income gradient, first, last + deposit on a San Francisco apartment and a couple $k on moving and move-in is a huge expense.
- Class matters a lot, in that it colors how distant, urban places are perceived. Some members of my family have an almost cartoonishly apocalyptic fantasy vision about what cities are like, and the fact that nobody's sucked the marrow from my bones in 30 years of urban living will never change that.
It also effects the likelihood of knowing people who did move away. If nobody you personally know has done it, it really does become much harder to do for multiple reasons, both psychological and concrete.
- Finally, fear of "not making it", of something Bad happening, and of making a costly choice that you regret, of having to "slink back home" for whatever reason really weigh on people. Of course if you don't know anyone who's ever lived in a major metro, and if the cost of trying is big enough, that fear can massively amplify.
I moved to SF almost 30 years ago. It was a leap of faith - I landed with enough money for food for about two weeks and slept on a friend's floor for a few months while I worked shit jobs to get established. That path is harder now - I wouldn't now be able to get an apartment here now washing dishes and serving drinks. So if anything, I suspect the above is more salient now than it was a generation ago.
What seems unimaginable to one of us is not just normal but desirable to the other.
The same is true for deciding where to live.
Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with the strong family bonds that so many in this thread have. We lived 2.5 hours away from my Dad's family and saw them about 6 times a year. We lived 1500 miles from my Mom's family and I probably visited my Mom's parents a dozen times in my entire life. Now, my wife and I live 2500 miles from our parents. Half the year it's further than that since one set winters in Florida and the other in Asia. At times I feel like I've totally missed out on something but at the same time I wouldn't move back "home" probably ever. I've lived in my current house for 18 years. It's the longest I've ever lived anywhere. This is "home" now.
> Maybe this is because I am gay and I needed out of the south
...well ok, that makes a lot of sense.
You let it be known you need some help with X and suddenly a cousin appears who specializes in X.
My example: Shortly after college, I moved to the city half way across the country because my high school friend lived there. And then several other of our high school friends (all from a small town) moved there with their spouses as well, and we'd all hang out and even started a company together for a while. We eventually all went our separate ways, at least as far as what states we live in. (There is still some amount of moving to be closer again going on as well. For example my ex's family and a friend from the state we moved to moved closer to her.)
The above isn't just about parents. My siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts.
This is the reason people are willing to commute so damn far; you're forced to commute but if you're not near your friends, you'll never see them again.
Having lived in urban, suburban, and rural areas, I would say that rural areas can sustain themselves because they have significantly less infrastructure.
People have wells for water, septic for sewage, poorer (or satellite only) internet, and less reliable/resilient electricity. The roads are narrower, sometimes without lane markers, sometimes unpaved. Fewer cars on the roads means less maintenance.
This lowers costs.
Suburbs typically have none of these options due to density. They have city-like amenities but have to run them greater distances.
There are ways to improve suburbs. One is consolidate housing but keep the same overall density with greenspace (less wire and pipe to rowhouses). Also, mixed use development with small businesses can reduce roads needed and generate tax revenue.
Rural areas are also heavily subsidized by urban areas. This is necessary because we need rural areas to make food. Suburbs are also subsidized, but without the benefits.
> The tax never stops. And then, in addition to that, I've got to listen telling me that my area is too spread out "because roads and sewers" and I should pack my stuff and go live in a city?
It seems like you are agreeing with the parent poster but are also mad at them because they are right? Unsustainable suburban development leads to crushing taxes is exactly what most folks are saying in this thread. That's how infrastructure like "roads and sewers" are funded.
You can move to the city. You could also move to a more rural area, if you like. If you want suburbs with urban amenties, it's going to be expensive.
Your France taxes though are not far off US taxes either (30% capital gains)... The USA has property tax with multiple levies on them and they are a function of real estate wealth in most places. And you don't have the crazy healthcare premiums.
California is essentially gentrifying at the state level with wealthy transplants, pushing working and middle class people who grew up here out of the state.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-income-t...
No individual, be it in a state or a city or neighborhood, is to blame for gentrification. By definition gentrification is a collective movement — one billionaire with a ski chalet on a private mountain in extremely rural Montana does not gentrify the entire region, nor does it really raise the property values of any home near it.
Gentrification is systemic, and approaching California’s population loss and gain through this framework explains pretty much everything that is wrong with California at a policy and macro level.
The reason for this “gentrification” at the state level would confirm everyone’s priors: the cost of living is simply too high for most people. That would be greatly alleviated by building more housing to increase the supply for the bottom 90% of people who struggle with their mortgage payments, rent, or scraping enough money for a down payment together and realizing they can buy a home outright twice the size in Texas for what is just the down payment in California.
Sometimes I think about buying a place back near where I grew up, but my parents don't live there anymore and it's really not that much cheaper than my current house for losing out on a lot of things, so...I don't know why I actually would. It's just more lawn-mowing.
Rural Texans who left home to seek their fortune are said to favor Dallas/Fort Worth more than here, and that feels fairly true, but again: no data. I know more people from out of state (or other countries) than I do from elsewhere in Texas.
[0] The Master and Margarita is my favourite take on deicide.
[1] with the benefit of hindsight, this is perhaps the victors' history. After all, NATO (although it no longer does) had openly fascist members within my lifetime. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grândola,_Vila_Morena
(also: I'm not so sure about the cow's milk going all the way to the Med. Consider: "All Gaul is divided into three parts: the part that cooks with lard and goose fat, the part that cooks with olive oil, and the part that cooks with butter.")
Edit: Wow, Mullins met Pound post-WW2. ... and I guess if the goldbuggery I'd noticed earlier in Pound was coded antisemitism whose whistle I'd missed, it explains much more about how an educated, culturally open, intellectual (cf Pound's juvenilia) could embrace fascism.
And of course, if you have an even better solution than autarky, I'm all ears.
(more background: I'm partial to Jane Jacobs' theory that market agriculture has throughout history been subject to the vagaries of fortunes in nearby trade centres. If you have evidence that this theory is mistaken, I'm also willing to revisit that belief)
The gist is that we've funded the construction of our infrastructure nationwide without accounting for the cost of maintenance. Now after decades of neglect, the cost of fixing all of our infrastructure is astronomical, far worse than if we had been doing it correctly from the beginning.
That doesn't seem workable.
I’d assume one needs a bit broader set of data than that that comes from a clearly anti-suburb position.
It’s like only looking at NRA sources on the need for gun control.
Just need a willing city mayor to be re-investing into infrastructure.
Some of it had to do with the murder of brick and mortar retail in tightly packed downtowns in favor of the big box stores on the edge of town. That creates an enormous waste in municipal resources, doubly so if the store got property/sales tax subsidies.
This is less of an issue in the denser near suburbs where populations and revenues have been consistently rising the last few years.
Walmart is particularly good at this. Search for Walmart property tax lawsuit and you'll find hundreds of examples of Walmart filing lawsuits to get their property taxes lowered. The latest ploy for these big retailers is to push to have their property taxes valued as if the store was empty and shut down and had no inventory.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/to-cut-ta...
This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburbia is not the utopian dream it was sold as.
Pipes break. Schools wear out. Roads wear out. Houses and fencing wear out, etc.
Many cities don't budget in perpetuity and (further) can't maintain existing infrastructure as a population bulge dissipates or as young people move away.
Or you can move out if the mayor does not bother to reinvest into its community.
All hell breaks loose when the population sinks. Its hard to justify higher taxes now to pay for things 10 years away.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI [3] https://www.urbanthree.com/
I am by no means an expert on this topic and just poorly summarized the contents of this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
It turns out that core infrastructure should be built to be inexpensive to maintain, and density helps greatly with that goal.
San Francisco is a great example. The once bustling downtown is losing business at a rapid click not only because residents have left, but also office workers aren't coming in anywhere near as often.
I predict it'll be a positive feedback loop. As more businesses close, QOL issues become worse, it'll accelerate the exodus. It's like a repeat of the 60's.
Cities are the lifeblood of any culture and economy, after all.
Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability.
I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.
Affordability for a lot of suburbs is when you allow for degrading infrastructure and moving more and more towards bankruptcy of cities. Budget analysis for a lot of suburbs show very troubling trends. In essence, living in a properly maintained suburbia is not affordable. Too much street, pipe and wire per capita.
Cleanliness - it's only in appearance. The dirtiness is externalized to the environment by means of CO2 and other emissions due to personal transport. A lot of concrete and asphalt being poured require massive excavations and destruction of nature elsewhere. More than cities.
Quiet is also externalized - cars are extremely noisy and suburbia basically requires a lot of 4000 lbs metal hunks with mostly a single person inside.
Privacy is there, but it costs quite a lot in total societal costs.
We can have moderately dense, highly walkable, transit-connected, safe, clean, private, quiet, socially vibrant, affordable towns and suburbs all over the country.
We just choose not to in large part because many Americans, brainwashed by The Automobile, can't even imagine such a state of affairs.
I hate beating this drum because it's borderline stereotypical at this point, but Tokyo really should be studied because for an incredibly dense city of nearly 14 million people they manage to achieve quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy, and affordability
>I want quiet
Visit the residential neighborhoods of the largest city in the world, Tokyo, and discover that you can get quiet with density. These are not mutually exclusive items, we as American society have somehow decided that noise pollution was an acceptable feature of urban landscapes. Japan decided, as a society, that anti-social noise activities in residential areas were bad and makes sure it stays that way.
>safety
A controversial topic pre-loaded with mountains of baggage, but IMO this is a result of policy and philosophical decisions. Japanese cities are incredibly safe at all times of the day -- you can leave a phone out in the open and no one will steal it. A lot of theories as to why that is, but the end result is clear: Japan, a city of 14million residents, is safe.
>cleanliness
Interestingly enough, 1960s and 70s Tokyo was a bit infamous for its litter/trash problem. I am a little fuzzy on how they turned that around, but they did and today it's one of the cleanest cities in the world. Again, a societal decision that has enforcement with teeth. And mind you, there aren't a lot of trash cans on the street. You have to carry around your trash with you if you generate any until you find a suitable trashcan or take it home with you. Yet the streets stay really clean.
>privacy
I will hand it to you, a big city can be a lot less private. But there are ways to create that sense of privacy within a more dense urban residential area without sacrificing density. Also, as density rises, you can get a weird counter-intuitive effect where the crowd affords you even greater privacy.
>affordability
The average house in Japan costs around $400,000 to build from scratch. Yes. You heard me right. When you buy a house in Japan you buy the lot it sits on, demolish the previous house, and build a house customized to your liking (designed and built by one of many competing housing companies). All for around $400,000.
Now, is it smaller than the current average American 2-story house? Yes. Is such a house size necessary? As it turns out, that's also a philosophical question and society over there has decided that in a trade off between smaller house + more urban density vs bigger house + less density, the density was worth the trade. You can definitely spend a million dollars and get yourself a proper sized mansion. But at least you get a proper sized mansion.
---
This isn't direct at you specifically, but one thing that frustrates me in the debates between urbanization vs non-urbanization in the USA is the lack of imagination everyone possess. So much possibility, so much possibility that IS ALREADY PROVEN and yet we circle back around the same things. American cities aren't the only way cities are. Our cities can be so much better, they HAVE been better, and we can make them better again if we collectively as a society choose to.
Most of these are pretty cliche. New York City is one of the safest cities in the country per capita. But as with “cleanliness” is usually trotted out in a dog whistly kind of way that really is about something else. And affordability: yep. You’ve got that for a couple reasons: 1. People LIKE living in cities. Good old supply/demand. 2. As this thread is discussing, suburbs are massively subsidized to the detriment of the cities they neighbor.
I am reminded of some cities having "weak mayor" government structure. And it is painfully self-evident by looking at the unmaintained roads and sidewalks.
Also I noticed unchecked huge retirement benefits used as an award for "good" governance toward token administrators, and disproportionate sapping of local taxation by its state government (one such tax example, Robin Hood school funding).
Once they become “hot” they tend to lose a lot of what makes them unique.
Until suddenly it’s trendy to live their again.
The suburbs take a huge amount of land. If everyone lived in NYC-level of density, we could all fit in New Jersey. If we all lived in middle-missing housing level density, that amount of land is still far less than the total area of all the suburbs.
Upzoning does not mean you automatically get a building at maximum allowed density, it means you increase what is allowed and let the market decide what makes sense where. It would play out exactly as you describe.
Music. Street racing. 24/7 dog barking. Density is hell.
Sure it’s not like living next to Times Square but it’s far noisier than a neighborhood of single family homes.
Having lived in other big cities that manage to collect garbage in containers, NYC's continued practice of dumping uncontained garbage on the sidewalk for collection gives it a very real non-dog-whistly feeling(/sight/odor) of dirtyness.
Calling someone's preferences cliches and dog whistles is a really lazy way to have a discussion and degrades this forum.
Do you have real examples of this? The past few suburbs I've lived in have been very prosperous, as a counter-example anecdote. I don't doubt some towns/suburbs are having financial troubles... but so are mega-cities too. Recall all the city bailout money that got spread around during the pandemic? How much of it went to small suburbs vs. mega-cities?
> The dirtiness is externalized to the environment by means of CO2 and other emissions due to personal transport.
I disagree here. A lot of hand-waving has been done about commuter cars - but somehow we ignore the miles of idling cars stuck in traffic every day for hours in these mega-cities. Fewer individuals may own vehicles in a mega-city, but the pollution is still there.
> Quiet is also externalized - cars are extremely noisy
On a freeway maybe. Inside a neighborhood? You can't hear any traffic noises.
There's been this movement to villainize suburbs and push everyone into mega-cities. It's rather misguided at best.
A US problem, created by the very suburbia that forces people to buy cars. All those suburbans are going to go downtown to work. Naturally you get congestion.
The argument for cities is that you can build no-car-required infrastructure that is both cheaper and easier for humans. Like in Europe etc.
Kind of weird to talk about "living on a bunch of credit cards" when it's the cities who seem to burn cash with little to show for it.
Cities generate the tax base and subsidize the rest. This is shown in every case. It's not good or bad, just a reality of how density works.
It's one big cycle, people moved to cities during WW2, then out to the suburbs during the 60's. Then back into cities in the 90's, now back out in the 2020's.
This means things can be, and are, very spread out. It is not unusual for a person in the US to live 20-60+ miles from their work - by choice.
It is simply not possible for everyone in the US to live in or near these mega-cities. Nor do most people (by the numbers) want to live in or near these mega-cities.
When I visit mega-cities, I see overt drug usage on the streets, trash everywhere, homeless camps everywhere, parts of the city a visitor is unsafe being in... and worse. That doesn't mean these things don't exist in a suburb - but clearly they are more readily evident in a mega-city.
We can go on about externalized things like carbon emissions from the commuter cars... but every time I visit a mega-city, there's miles of idling cars just spewing emissions while in traffic.
If you like living in a mega-city - good for you. Enjoy it, as is your right. That, however, also means I get to enjoy my suburbs. We don't get to tell each other how to live.
It simply does not track that because our country is huge, we must either live in uncomfortable mega-cities or in car-dependent and socially/economically/environmentally unworkable SFH sprawl. Americans overwhelmingly live in one of these two. They both have significant downsides that we truly don’t have to accept!
Americans have multiple health disasters on our hands - physical, emotional, and social - due at least in large part to the way we’ve built our living situation. It’s frankly sad that you think we have to accept it because… errr… mega cities are a bit dirty? You really think we ought to condemn generation after generation after generation of American to deteriorating quality of life because we couldn’t pull our heads out of our asses enough to build moderately sized cities with the physical infrastructure necessary to support strong communities? Good grief, what a low opinion of our country!
> tiny town in rural Arizona
I don't think most of us would say a tiny rural town is anything like a suburban area surrounding a moderate/mega city.
My suburb is near one of these moderately sized cities (less than 1 million population). None of these fantasies are working well for this moderately sized city. All of the same problems exist... drugs, crime, safety, privacy, homeless, trash, exceedingly expensive... plus public transit isn't sufficient to rely on either. It's literally the worst qualities of both combined into one special dump.
And... if you truly believe suburbs are a deterioration of quality of life in America, you really need to try living in one. I can just as easily wave my hand and exclaim mega-cities are the root of all problems in this nation. In fact, I'd have a lot more evidence to support condemnation of mega-cities, including how they doom people into permanently impoverished lives.
Every time Americans use that argument to defend anything that is wrong with the US policy, it looks crazy to people who are looking at the situation from another place around the world.
Neither size nor population are arguments for anything. There are gigantic countries on the planet that do not have America's suburb/car problem. They not only have well-run cities, but they also build fast trains and whatnot. The main trick is in not setting up entire urbanization and infrastructure to maximize profit for real estate, automotive and oil industries by spreading out people to immense areas like in the US. So, in that regard, the people who say that the 'suburban American dream' was a scam, they are right: It can be sustained in a few very rich regions. It is unsustainable for anywhere else. Even in those rich regions it causes many problems ranging from inefficiency to traffic congestion in the cities where the suburbanites have to go to work.
> When I visit mega-cities, I see overt drug usage on the streets, trash everywhere, homeless camps everywhere
Those have nothing to do with the concept of cities but everything to do with the US policies that prevent social services with public spending in order to maximize the tax breaks for the corporations and the rich.
> We don't get to tell each other how to live.
Actually, they do - you are spending their tax money for your inefficient suburb in a much higher rate than your tax money that they are spending for their city. An inefficient system is inefficient, even if those who run that system can afford to run it - like your local prosperous suburb. For the regional infrastructure in your own locale to be affordable by your suburb, a lot of taxpayer money will have to be spent for the society-wide infrastructure. So that the costs of being integrated to the larger infrastructure can even be affordable in your region regardless of its prosperity. From the larger power network to the transportation and communication networks, from production & supply chains to judiciary, police, even defense & military.
There is no small region that can afford the modern local amenities that they have without having a much larger society making those possible through society's aggregated spending regardless of how rich the region is.
You are also making the mistake of using gpd as a measure of productivity. It's not, it's just a measure of nickel and diming.
It's not really debated that the carbon emissions of suburban life is an order of magnitude more than urban life. They just aren't comparable.
Probably less common, but it is not that unusual to meet someone in Europe who commutes long distance by train. Probably it will become even more common as WFH or partial WFH becomes the norm in many industries.
Assuming such a future comes to pass (And that’s obviously a big question mark), desirability and property values in suburban-like neighborhoods would go up, since suburbs are no longer at a disadvantage for all those things you are arguing, like walkability, socially vibrancy, etc. A quick tap on your phone and 15 minutes later you can be at the bar or the shops or whatever else. Combine that with the remote work revolution and the future is looking great for suburbs and terrible for cities.
If anything, I’d argue Americans are ahead of the curve. In a society where self driving cars are cheap, environmentally sustainable, and always available people would naturally fan out into suburban living, with mixed-use development falling out of favor.
SF will be fine.
But with plunging tax revenue the city is going to be faced with some tough choices.
That and the crushing car dependency.
But a lot of people like it, so hey, good for them too!
To each his/her own.
When we all have windows open in summer we can hear one of our neighbors' TVs a bit though, and there can be noise between floors of multifamilies.
Yes, the fact that your nearby city is the worst of both worlds is my point. This is a condemnation of the way we build cities. Note that you are still near a city due to the amenities and opportunities that only cities can provide. This effect appears only to get stronger, not weaker, with time. So how can we not condemn later generations to abysmal living conditions?
It doesn’t look like either of the options on the menu in the US today.
Half of the names of cities you have lived in are definitely mega-cities, or very close to being a mega-city. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Seattle, Palo Alto - none of these are even remotely similar to typical modern-day suburbs.
What exactly do you consider a "city" as opposed to a mega city?
I’m clearly having difficulty speaking a language you understand, so have a good rest of your evening!
I'm curious what you mean by this, given the unusually high incarceration rate in the US.
Seems pretty evident GP lacks both historical and geographical context.
If it were legal to build low-rise, medium-density housing throughout the cities, more people would choose to live there, rather than the suburbs, because commuting sucks and city amenities are great.
Instead, restrictive zoning codes set aside large swaths of the city for single-family homes; the large plots of land they occupy mean that only rich people can afford them, which forces everyone else to compete for a limited number of apartments. Land for apartments being artificially limited means that construction cannot keep up with demand, so apartment prices rise too. The working class get forced out to the suburbs; eventually the middle-class have to go, too, whether they like it or not.
We should repeal these zoning codes and let people build dense housing wherever it's economically justified. Then, the choice really could be "to each his/her own": people who genuinely prefer to live in the suburbs could still go there, while people who would rather live in the city could do that instead.
We have suburbs because people want them.
The best example is when I lived in Singapore. Great public transit and high density housing. No need for a car.
When I talked to Singaporeans, most dreamed of owning a single family home (a landed home) with its own yard and a car. And we’re talking 90% preference.