Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For instance, the best way to go to a new geography would be to land a job there prior to moving there. Even in data science, supposedly hot job market, I wanted to get a job in san francisco or seattle, but I was living in philadelphia. you hear stories about people graduating from cali universities and companies jumping through windows to get to them, but even though I graduated with a masters in CIS from Upenn ... crickets. I think because most of them recruit through agencies which filter by geography. I had to reach out aggressively to the recruiters themselves, and bypass a lot of the blockers, which took 2 years. Had I not done that, my talent didn't mean as much as where I was.
Now, imagine a small towner trying to do the opposite, get a job after they make a move to say, one of the urban centers. most people dont have a lot of savings to begin with, and what would last them 6 months where they are would be depleted very quickly in one of the larger cities. even getting an apartment is harder, you dont have a job? reject.
its not impossible, its just really difficult.
It's especially bad here on HN where often the conversation devolves into people telling me that I'm wrong about my childhood where I grew up poor...or how poor people are a blight on society.
The single topic that I find in my career people insist on secrecy is about poverty. I continue to be open about it so that others are willing to talk about it to someone, because otherwise you just can't.
You're not prepared to talk about it and honestly neither am I.
Poverty is soul crushing.
I have had a very successful and influential engineering career but I can look back at single decisions I made that could have sent me the other direction. It’s easy for people to say that the decision I made was obvious but it absolutely wasn’t at the time. I took huge risk being the first in my family to go to a prestigious University and double major in physics and mathematics in the early 90s(I was no prodigy); let alone go to graduate school.
One decision different and I’d be driving trucks in West Virginia.
To clarify I'm only going to destroy them because they coast. You can't coast when you're working for that milk money. God having milk is so good.
I think you have it backwards. People are not naturally sociopathic; psychologically healthy people naturally care about other people. They may have limited resources to act, but that's a different issue.
As evidence of caring, people widely support social welfare programs. In most wealthy countries (and some others), everyone has healthcare on the taxpayer's dime, as well as other services such as housing. Even the U.S. spends vast amounts of money on these things. People also care about the rights and wellbeing of others worldwide; the trendy nationalism may try to argue against it, but Western democracies have been spending blood and treasure on others' freedom and prosperity for generations. (They spent those things on many sins too.)
We don't have a basis for talking about motives. I'd say people are scared and uncomfortable with what seems foreign to them.
> Given the opportunity to do something in person, most people crumble and go about their lives as usual. It's a very rare person that takes action.
Many people give money to those asking for it. Many will say that they are overwhelmed and feel like they can't help everyone (tip: don't let the great be enemy of the good: don't worry about helping everyone; if you can, help someone). Many have their own problems and reasons.
I can't remember speaking to someone who says they just don't care.
Most peers talk a good game but they can't relate and don't truly care. Its hard for me to at times as well...
Of course I would never even bring any of this up IRL, not worth the conversation.
As an aside, I've noticed that the American women in tech to be much more diverse in terms of background (including economic or social class) than the American men. Based on what I've learned through casual conversation I think that the various efforts to increase gender diversity have the positive side effect of catching a more diverse cross section of the population.
The problem with tech is the self centered elitist culture. The job filtering is extremely narrow and you need a specific background to get in the door of most places.
Blue collar workers are suffering everywhere (cities, rural) and it’s obvious the rest of America doesn’t care. When these workers turn to alternatives they’re dismissed because they weren’t lucky enough to be born with more opportunities.
Don't fall for the trap to think this means you can admit you were poor once too. That negative attitude will still turn towards you. You will be judged and it will be remembered. You'll get a little bit of "Other" on you and everything will get a little harder. Just consider yourself lucky that unlike most race and gender concerns you can pass very easily, so do it.
I'm impressed you are committed to being open about it, but I hope during that talk you tell them to start passing and help them learn how to if they need it.
And it's funny, because I generally find that the truly wealthy, silver-spoon/old-money type of people do not do this and they generally don't care about it if they like you...
...it's the ones in the middle.
It comes with a social cost, but I'm enough of a "personality" that who I am is going to come out regardless. There's no point in being anything but honest, but it (being too different) has cost me my job two times. If you're at a good place around good people it's not a big deal.
As for the whole "lumbersexual" thing, it's sort of like putting on blackface, as far as I'm concerned.
Mostly though, part of it is just a return to valuing the different types of skills necessary in that setting. This is great, and it is great for their perception of rural people in general, because they are bad at something that people who they look down on find easy - and it changes their mind.
It is a mixed bag, and seems like an overall good to me.
The moment I relocated to Silicon Valley, I began getting bombarded by recruiters.
At my current job, I have a co-worker who told me that his classmates would often fake a Silicon Valley address (and stomach travel expenses for interviews), and it made a huge difference in the rate of companies contacting them back.
Of course most people who live in those dead towns aren't necessarily like us, and may not have degrees or experience in demanded fields. So I'm not sure our stories are applicable to the conversation.
Their attitude might be "well, why would we pay for relocation/travel for someone in PA when we can probably find people in SF who already live here".
You could say “pay more” but housing is a positional good - that strategy doesn’t scale.
My LinkedIn page is just a straight up listing of previous jobs, no descriptions, so I've found that kinda interesting.
I worked for a small self funded startup a decade ago. We flew interview candidates in from across the country.
For a 40 something industrial worker? Forget it. You’re talking about a grind of temp jobs and shit pay.
Just ask the tens of million of immigrants in this country who have done exactly that.
In a sense, it's unfair that native-born Americans are forced to compete with people from all over the world who are highly motivated and have an extremely high tolerance for risk. But it's also what has actually made this country great.
Unless you're an immigrant yourself, it's hard to imagine how big of a deal it is to just uproot your family and go to a different country and start over, often from scratch with no real networks to build from.
That's why when a company pays for relocation, they typically pay in the ballpark of $500 to account for the expenses associated with an interstate move for one person.
...which would be a nice narrative if it wasn't an order of magnitude off.
Someone relocating has to pay for:
-transportation of themselves (that's your Greyhound)
-transportation of their goods OR re-purchases of all the basic necessities (something to sleep on, something to cook with, etc) - $1000 conservatively
-transportation or purchase of a vehicle (because you really can't live and work without a car in most of the US), so in fact, let's forget about Greyhound. Throw in vehicle registration fees, increase in insurance (going from Podunk, MN to SF Bay Area will cost you $1000 just there, not accounting for gas/mileage).
Of course, you can save by moving to an area with extensive public transportation networks, but that means you'll pay way more in...
-security deposit AND first month's rent (which, spoiler! is usually going to be much higher in the city that people are relocating to). Again, for the Bay Rea, assuming you are a 20-something single who can live with room-mates (and not someone with a family who needs an apartment), that's around $1000 + $1000 if you are lucky. Add more for NYC where 2x rent is standard for a deposit (remember how you were going to save by going car-less? Put all that money here)
-perhaps you don't have a job offer waiting for you, so a month's worth of expenses while you're looking for a job. Let's say you are frugal, so that's $500, assuming you don't want health insurance and your jalopy made it across the country without needing repairs.
So somewhere around $5K for a single person for interstate relocation, assuming one finds a job within a month.
(I moved with a job offer; typical tech relocation packages are around $5-10K)
To all those looking at Greyhound costs, I need to ask: have you ever actually moved somewhere, tallying your expenses?
For an immigrant the contrast is very clear. For some one born and used to privilege not so much.
There is reason why so many new millionaires are made, but existing heirs of all those millionaires don't become billionaires. Without any real pressure, a persons efforts will juts wax and wane over time.
Of course, you might not be able to get that far. A greyhound ticket is expensive when you don't have work and are trying to feed children. Or your parents live in the same area. Or they are dead. Or maybe greyhound doesn't serve your area well enough for you to get transportation to the bus stop. and these are just shallow things. Anyone who doesn't have a parent or friend to stay with in an area with jobs is just out of luck.
Almost every great city in existence has had at least one awful moment at some point in its history. If everyone took the "times are tough, I'm going to migrate to X place which is doing better" approach, then our urban geography would look so much different.
Ultimately, what gets a city out of tough times is its ability to retain the motivated people you mention. By losing those people, it seems that it's just reinforcing a winner-take-all approach to talent demographics.
http://www.historylink.org/File/1287 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft
Seemed like more of a thing when America was actually a land of opportunity.
How much risk is an immigrant really taking on, when there is a safety net in terms of social services available to them, that pays multiples of their yearly earnings back in "the old country"?
Meanwhile, the native-born Americans have too much assets (even if in a crappy location, it still disqualifies them) to qualify for that same assistance...
(Would this be abused for nice vacations? Almost certainly. But maybe there’s a better version of this which couldn’t.)
If unemployment/basic income adjusts for cost of living, you wind up with a positive feedback loop that ignores these messages.
NewUI = OldUI * (CostOfLiving[NewJobMarketLocation] / CostOfLiving[PrevEmploymentLocation])
But that assumes that there are factory workers in SF. There aren't—running a factory in SF is an unprofitable proposition. Whether or not you could come to the area and job-hunt, supply of your job (or any job at your pay-grade) might just not be there to meet your demand.
And that's not even accounting for the second-order effects: decreasing friction of movement between jobs markets would cause everyone else who ever wanted to live in SF to also come there to job-hunt. So, even if there were some factory-worker openings right at the beginning of this policy, they'd quickly be filled, and the markets in cities like SF would come to resemble Hollywood: a place where you have to put up with unreasonable amounts of shit to get anywhere, because there's so much more talent who has come from all over to vye for attention, than there are productions needing talent, that the productions take absolutely no care in how they treat their talent.
In other words, at equilibrium, you'd just be back to where you started as far as "number of people employed" goes, at most levels†; and you'd also not see any change in the population density, demand for gentrification, or any other such thing in these cities, because Unemployment only lasts a fixed amount of time—you can't afford to stay if you don't succeed in finding a job. The one thing that would change is that companies the nation over would be seeing far more "talent liquidity", and thus thinking of employees as even more fungible/replaceable than they do now. (But, the flip-side of that statement: an individual new hire at an SF company would now have much more even probability of having originated anywhere in the country.)
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† Maybe you'd get more startups, from several people coming to SF (or other expensive cities) and deciding to spend their UI as initial runway to form a company together. But that'd be the exception, not the rule, I think. (Might still have nice knock-on effects for employment if those companies need to grow by hiring later on, though.)
I can't believe the parent means that literally.
> people whose forefathers built the country
You don't get credit for what some ancestor did; you get credit for what you do. I'd say that trying to lean on your ancestors is 'un-American'; earn your own way.
Also, the U.S. has been 'built' continuously and it continues today. The work and progress didn't stop in 1776 or 1930 or whatever date the parent is assuming. The question is, what are you going to leave for the next generation?
> How much risk is an immigrant really taking on, when there is a safety net in terms of social services available to them, that pays multiples of their yearly earnings back in "the old country"?
This comment ignores the great burden of most immigrants: Leaving your home, moving to a foreign culture where you don't speak the language, where you have no contacts or network, and bringing few resources. I'd like to see most Americans pick up and move to a non-English speaking, completely foreign culture, with no money and no contacts.
It also assumes a decent quality of life in the U.S. 'social safety net', which is pretty awful, especially compared to other first world nations. No health care and terrible education, for one thing. Even people with jobs have a tough time, and need several of them just to get by.
I can't quite articulate it, but I have a serious problem with the attitude that seems to say "well yes, your family for 5 generations struggled to clear the land, make it productive, worked in factories, sent sons off to die in wars, but, if you aren't being 100% economically productive RIGHT THIS MINUTE, just get out of the way already and let immigrants take your place..."
That's just absurd. People who were born in the U.S. face many risks.
> get out of the way already and let immigrants take your place
Nobody is taking anybody's place. Economics is not zero sum; the better your neighbor does, the better you do. Your successful neighbors are your employers, customers, taxpayers, etc.
> if you aren't being 100% economically productive RIGHT THIS MINUTE, just get out of the way already ...
That's not a problem with immigration; it's a problem with U.S. government policy that doesn't educate, provide health care for, feed, or house its citizens, and concentrates economic opportunity in the hands of a very few. Those things are clearly doable, because almost every other wealthy country does them much better. And the political leaders who oppose such things, and continually try to 'shrink' government, try to distract attention from their responsibility (and the responsibility of their wealthy constituents who try to avoid paying taxes) by blaming immigrants.
"In order to get Medicaid and CHIP coverage, many qualified non-citizens (such as many LPRs or green card holders) have a 5-year waiting period. This means they must wait 5 years after receiving "qualified" immigration status before they can get Medicaid and CHIP coverage. There are exceptions. For example, refugees, asylees, or LPRs who used to be refugees or asylees don’t have to wait 5 years."
https://www.healthcare.gov/immigrants/lawfully-present-immig...
Unemployment benefits? You have to pay into it to get money out of it. Same as everyone else.
Emergency treatment at a hospital? I don't see a difference between citizens and immigrants.
I would really like to know where that free money is I hear so much about.
H-1B is a non-immigrant work visa.
The only relation it had to immigrant visas is that, as a dual intent non-immigrant visa, it's not illegal for you to enter on an H-1B with the intent of applying for an immigrant visa without departing in between.
> are conditional on not becoming "a burden to the state"
That's not exactly true. The condition that actually exists in law relates mostly to the future likelihood at time of admission of becoming a “public charge”.
> so you would be deported if you tried to claim unemployment etc.
No, but your I-864 sponsors (whose income and assets are considered in making the public charge decision at admission) will have to pay back any payments you get from certain federally-funded public benefit programs. You can be deported for you not paying back your debts for certain other benefit programs in a specified time period, but very few benefit programs create the kind of debts that relate to that.
Unemployment, as an earned benefit, isn't actually an issue at all.
Why is it unfair? Are Americans incapable and need protection? I thought America was built on opportunity, and free, fair competition.
Changing town/country is never easy and it has its own risks, but no pain, no gain
You're not really disproving his/her point as you're ignoring the many millions more who fail to move in the first place.
It's hard to move to a new city and leave your friends, and often family, behind. Not to mention the lifestyle change, from rural to city, which will often entail giving up hobbies and pastimes.
The pure financial impact of extended family childcare can easily eat away a step up in earnings for those with young children. Then the intangibles of not getting them to know your parents or the close friends you grew up with, those don't even have an exact market substitute. Frequent travel I guess?
It's not easy.
From the econ perspective I can't help but think that greater labor mobility would make things so much better, but as a new parent it's becoming obvious these are not trivial behaviors to shift at all.
When I first started dating and generally getting to know other American families on a more adult and intimate level, it often shocked me how low everyone's confidence and motivation levels were. There was always some looming fear of failure, of being wrong, or getting hurt, it was paralyzing.
Our culture, the media, the education system, it all cultivates fear, doubt, helplessness, and dependency. Without exceptional influences, we generally produce scared consumers.
My parents are both immigrants, and it's had a substantial impact, good and bad. Confidence, motivation, willingness to take on challenges and risks, are not problems for me. But the flip side of that is I'm often quite frustrated by my contemporaries, as I tend to expect the same. These traits seem like part of the bare minimum of being an adult from my perspective, and the average American just seems like an overgrown child in this context. It's quite frustrating.
edit:
Just wanted to add; one of the things I've most enjoyed about working at tech startups is how effectively they tend to filter out these people.
This made me chuckle. There are a lot of countries where this is true, but the US is generally not one of them. Sure you might end up loosing all your assets and living in a homeless shelter, but at least we have homeless shelters. Yea, you're probably better off indigent in much of northern/western europe, but the social safety net here in the US, while imperfect, is a heck of a lot better than much of the rest of the world. A big part of why immigrants "fearlessly" launch themselves into the unknown and immigrate is because where they're from, if you fail you actually do die. Soon. Painfully. There may be instances of that in the US, particularly in cases involving drug use and.or mental illness, but it's hardly the norm. Moving for a job you don't have yet to escape an economic backwater is certainly a huge financial risk, but it's hardly a life and death risk.
If you go bankrupt or have a foreclosure on the record, it can be hard to move to locations with better opportunities. Many jobs require credit checks, so leaving the job you don't want can be a hassle.
The US household debt to income ratio is far lower than in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Britain and Canada (see: [1] [2]).
US household debt service payments as a share of disposable income, are near a 40 year low. [3]
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-economy-debt/canad...
[1a] https://i.imgur.com/XRJIDbi.jpg
You can have bankruptcy and have little to no debt for years. A foreclosure, repo, or eviction can happen for various reasons. Maybe you simply got sick and were missing work. You can owe money on your house - a reasonable amount - and be stuck because you can't sell your house nor afford to both pay the current house mortgage and live somewhere else.
Some of the "debt" things are special to being poor. Lose your job and can't pay the final cable bill? Collections. Can't pay the $600 hospital bill? Collections and eventual judgement. It doesn't take a large amount of debt to have it affect your life negatively when a flat tire puts your electricity at risk of being turned off.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-repor... (see Dealing with Unexpected Expenses pg. 21)
I'm not familiar with the work structure in those other countries, but guessing there's a far better support structure for retirees compared to the US.
Working a menial job in a depressed area makes a lot more sense when a house there only costs $125,000.
I understand that those open to education can have a life transformation in a new city by acquiring new skills. But that's a small number of people.
Most people work to live and not the other way around. Some just want three hots and a cot, family, and friends. And that is perfectly alright.
Just for fun I searched Bloomberg for this phrase: "why do upper middle class people continue to live in overpriced cities despite having all their needs met". The second result was this one: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-12/only-45-p.... Maybe we are more alike than we realize...
The article is paywalled, but AFAICT it's not particularly true or relevant. The article you posted is from 4 years ago, and is based on the Fed's annual "Economic Well-Being" report. The most recent one was just released (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2017-repor...), and it shows that ~40 of non-retired adults think that their retirement savings are on track. This comfortably encompasses the upper-middle class.
The 2014 report is here (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2014-report-econo...) and shows worse numbers for savings (the metrics seem to have changed, so I can't make a simple apples-to-apples comparison). AFAICT, the main changes have been to economic optimism and liquidity, both of which are better indicators of the contemporary economy[1] than they are of actual financial stability or level of savings. This is hardly surprising, given that we were still not that far out from a shaky economy in '14.
It doesn't even necessarily mean moving to the trendy, increasingly expensive cities, like Portland or Denver or Austin.
It can mean moving to places like Charlotte, Nashville, Madison, Lawrence or Savannah. Or maybe Santa Fe, Columbus, Provo or Bend.
For most Americans, there is a growing city with colleges, trade schools and unemployment rates below the statewide level within a couple hours drive.
By comparison, Sunnyvale, CA, which feels distinctly like a suburb, has a population of close to 150,000.
One downside of moving to a small town for an opportunity is that, if that opportunity flops, it may be much harder to find the next one without having to move again. Whereas in the Bay Area, Seattle, NYC, etc., the next opportunity is likely in the office park next door, where they want you to start "yesterday"...
Compared to paying half your “upper middle class” salary for living conditions that most Americans would identify as poverty (roommates, paper thin walls, 1970s fixtures, no dishwasher, garbage disposal, laundry, or parking, etc) due to game-theoretically intractable politics, it’s nothing.
That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me. In fact, it’s the exact same reason I can’t live in the south. Y’all have heaters; they have AC. It all still means I’m trapped indoors and miserable much of the year. No thanks.
Year-cycle puts a nice rhythm in life. November is time to bring out tea, books, warm socks and reflect the year that is about to pass. Then first signs of spring comes, everybody is out celebrating and there's a deep-rooted feeling that rough time has passed and now you can relax for a bit.
I couldn't live somewhere without proper 4 seasons. I did stay in non-snowy areas for extended period of time more than once and it's just.. sad. On the other hand, it's probably upbringing&culture.
> That’s a big fuckin’ problem for me.
Dunno about the GP, but I live in Cleveland and I spend plenty of time outside in the winter. Even here, skiing (downhill and XC), sledding, hiking, camping, and ice fishing are all doable in the winter.
Sure enough Google and some other big dotcoms were building or moving into the area. I want to say the Morgan area?
So, clearly most Americans don't stay behind when their town has no future. The article should add the qualifier "Some" Americans to avoid a misleading impression.
In particular, the article quite obviously isn't wondering why every single resident of rural Ohio hasn't packed up and moved to Manhattan. They're wondering why (to take the county they focused on), a smaller chunk of the 64% of unemployed adults in Adams County, has left than would have in the past.
Not to mention the fact that we're not talking about striving for more: in most severe cases, the individual economic issues aggregate to municipal ones, which can affect quality of life fairly significantly. Just off the top of my head, the article mentioned increasingly understaffed gov't, plummeting school funding, and an increasingly strained law-enforcement and judicial system.
Again, if you actually bothered to read the article, it's not a question of why people aren't striking out from their cozy suburban life to take their shot in the big city. It's focusing on why the number of people willing to leave dying local economies has declined so sharply. As part of the article puts it, there's been a reversal in the correlation between poverty and geographic labor mobility, from positive to negative.
Again, I recommend reading the article posted (it's the link at the top of the comments page), and maybe you'l understand a little better what's being discussed here and what the "mystery" in question is.
And is more predictive of happiness too.
Seeing the photos of the hills, river and Gios sure made me miss the place.
But you know what? The relationships with friends and family I left behind definitely suffered. I now feel distant from everyone, and unfortunately some of my best memories are still from old times when I lived close to these people. I have very few friends here in the city, most my interactions day to day are simple and transactional. I wouldn’t blame anyone for staying behind in their town. I’ve always figured I could move back when money was no problem anymore, but I don’t think that day will come soon, and sooner or later I’ll have to decide where I want to plant roots and start a family, and I doubt any woman here will want to go back to my old town after living in SF. Don’t know what to do really, just hanging on.
I moved to San Francisco with a handful of friends, but I had a facsimile of your problem due to some unrecognized health issues that made my social life wither away, along with some bad luck with the timing of people moving away. I had to start from scratch to build a friend group here, but it turns out there are tons of people doing the same thing, and it couldn't be easier. Even if you just go to social Meetups to meet people, it can be very easy to get a good group around you just by repeatedly putting yourself out there. It does take work: there were times when i felt lazy but would force myself to go to some random outing to foster a friendship with someone who I got along with, or saw movies that I wasn't all that crazy about, but it really paid off in spades.
The closest friends from the group I've built up over the last three or four years from nothing are basically like family to me at this point, and the feeling is mutual. They're the kind of friends whose house I can drop by on a weeknight more or less randomly (assuming they're not out), and just hang out until everyone falls asleep/I go home.
Even if you decide that this is not where you want to put roots down, having a more casual group of solid friends is really valuable, at the very least so you have people you can depend on.
This, I feel, is telling. The dream is becoming the hope that your children can live as you did. It's not about each generation doing better; it's about not doing worse. It's about maintaining.
Fortunately there's also a large number of people, probably a majority, who don't give a shit about this political nonsense and just want to go on with their lives.
Nothing valuable about friends, family, community, environment, culture ... so far as these guys can see.
And, just maybe, Americans look back a couple of generations to their immigrant ancestors, and see what that was really about.
"A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
1. A lot of people are tied down by responsibilities to others, such as parents and relatives who need care.
2. If a young person from a rural town has acquired a portable skill such as programming, it's quite likely to be because they already left that town -- to attend college.
Were people then more willing to leave partners or kids behind? Or elderly parents?
I don't think I'd ever entertain the idea of moving without my partner and children like that.
Even in a very connected world, my partner is not interested in being away from her circle of friends for any serious length of time, let alone a major career/lifestyle move.
PS: Why Do You Type Like This? It's Very Hard To Read.
Some of those traits are maladaptive for long term stability of the town and its industries. Now I wonder how this feeds into the boom/bust trope...
People that would have deducted high bracket income using the moving expenses see increased costs. People that probably weren't itemizing will see decreased taxes whether they move or not.
(Which is going to be true for an awful lot of the people considering moving away from small towns)
Your comment is pretty much a different way of saying what I said in the first sentence of my second paragraph.
- The tax changes were a net benefit, and
- The tax changes make people less likely to move (because the net benefit is lower)
are perfectly compatible.
I can't speak for everyone, but that maps much more closely to my personal decision-making, which is in terms of absolute dollars, than your formulation.
Not to address the marginal costs of moving, which is where the (dis)incentive comes from.
The new standard deduction for single filers maxes out at somewhere below $43k. So if your income is anywhere above that, you'd get a tax hit for moving. But even the thought of that hit is a possible disincentive.
For me it's about the job but I'm sure everyone has their own reasons. I'm secure and don't have to struggle. I apply for jobs and don't hear back, interview and don't get the job, etc. I'd be willing to move somewhere new if I knew I had a job lined up. While savings is good, it's stressful and scary to have no income. It's like holding your breath and eventually panic sets in. Doesn't feel good. I'd love to move to a bunch of different cities but many of those places don't seem to have jobs that fit my background. I'd jump to a new career but not sure I could float the expenses while also saving for the future.
This is one of the reasons behind the rise of Los Angeles in the early 20th century. Also of note is that after they (temporarily) figured out the water problem, they were able to lure movie investment seeking to escape Edison’s patents on the east coast.
They also likely benefited (as cities) from the rebuilding that was necessary after the World Wars.
[1] https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/05/14/millennials-leaving-t...
And anecdotally, it feels like it is booming. New businesses are popping up left and right. The main street is packed full of people, something that you wouldn't have seen a decade ago. It's a complete turnaround to what I grew up with. Thriving leaves room for subjectivity, but it certainly is in my opinion. From population growth to relatively higher incomes, it all seems quite favourable by the data, and the visit leaves the same impression. I am starting to look to moving back there myself!
The people leaving Toronto are going somewhere, and everything points to this being one of those places. According to Statistics Canada, communities of 1,000 to 29,999 people were the fastest growing community type from 2011 to 2016. Communities with 100,000 people or more have started to lose share of the population.
I do not think anyone should see this as people reconnecting with nature. They are almost certainly following the money.
Understandably rural is pretty vague. Almost the entirety of the country is rural, and like not all cities are booming, not all rural areas are either. I want to be clear that I am speaking about a set of rural regions within the country.
I vacation in Toronto a few times a year, and keep in touch with residents there, so I feel I have a pretty good idea of what the people are saying. Their stories are usually on point if you consider them to be several years out of date. That is the impression I get, at least. If we were to select a rural location at random, the average person would have no idea where it is and I feel that due to that there is some inherit information lag. It is not like these places are in the news every day, so most people just don't know.
To me, that sounds more like the high paying job was in the middle of nowhere.
I myself would love to buy a house in a small town. It's a much more realistic option for me than buying in a city. And I'm sure as a programmer I could find a job. But then what happens when - or if - that employer shuts up shop? It's a massive risk.
The very worst case is that you move back to the city, which is exactly where you’d be if you never left.
In many cases, you won't actually need to move.
Even though we're making less than we were in a bigger metro (St. Louis) we're saving a lot more and our quality of life is much better.
I fantasize about doing similar, but I live in NZ, so even if I branched out to somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Australia I'd probably be looking at at least 100k USD for a decent place. Still, sure beats 300k USD minimum for a place in a city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film)
Factory towns are nothing new, and neither are factory towns disappearing overnight. What's relatively recent in modern American history is the reticence of Americans to move, thus the title of the article. But this reticence is probably a regression to the mean, much like everything else about the post-post-WWII economy.
(Though bear in mind that I'm not yet in the phase of life where I have a kid, where this stuff gets a lot more complicated)
If you're in America, sure.
This trait is now more commonly found in immigrants coming into the United States.
This is so true. The immigrant friends I have have moved around so much in the time they have been here. While people I know who aren’t doing well have lived in town their whole lives, never finding a worthwhile job. Too many excuses not to move.
Just want to point out that your ancestors were once immigrants coming into the USA.
Suicide rates[0] and drug abuse statistics would suggest otherwise.
People want to have their cake and eat it too.