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Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?

• BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  I attribute the loss of confidence and the old "get up and go" attitude of our ancestor Americans to the complete failure of the culture and the K-12 education system in most rural counties around the country. This trait is now more commonly found in immigrants coming into the United States.
  • bluedino 8y ago
    >> 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.
  • felipemnoa 8y ago
    >>This trait is now more commonly found in immigrants coming into the United States. Just want to point out that your ancestors were once immigrants coming into the USA.
    • virmundi 8y ago
      And then it got bred out of us by 80 years of the Democratic Party saying that everyone needs to be on the government teet.
      • akhilcacharya 8y ago
        Naturalized and 2nd generation immigrants overwhelmingly vote for Democrats across all income lines and ethnic backgrounds, so that clearly doesn't hold water.
        • virmundi 8y ago
          They all get promised money. Look at those generations. Many stay on the government dole for generations.
    • mattnewton 8y ago
      Agreed, I think the population sample is biased- inmigrants are by definition people who got and and left a place in an attempt to find a better one, and most current USA ancestors were immigrants.
      • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Well, all current USA residents had immigrant ancestors, even if they came over via a land bridge more than 10kya.
  • haskellandchill 8y ago
    Wow has no one here been poor? Or ever tried empathy? Most people are fucked. Get out of your bubble and talk to people.
    • throwaway2048 8y ago
      No obviously they are just lazy and dont want it bad enough /s
• Bucephalus355 8y ago
  A lot of similar things were said about San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. 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.
• OhDagny 8y ago
  - family - friends - familiarity And coal fire plants are experiencing massive pressures from alternative energy, not just natural gas. And they should. Coal fire plants release more radiation than nuclear plants do.
• slantaclaus 8y ago
  Inertia. Fear of change. Cost of living, moving. Friends. Satisfaction. Myopia.
  • SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Home.
    • sp332 8y ago
      I think this gets overlooked a lot. "Why don't you move?" "Uh, because I live here."
      • SubiculumCode 8y ago
        Community is important. Friends, way of life, values, food, out doors living, fishing, hunting, days at the river drinking beer, a support system in place with neighbors helping out. So there are good things that can keep you in a place. But there is also that when you have little, all those things are harder to give up. Find yourself in a city where no one knows you, no one cares, and the things you found easy before, aren't easy anymore. Poverty presents so many barriers that it really hard to see the inertia it presents.
        • hinkley 8y ago
          Given the sort of value judgements on this list, one might expect that a boom town will be over-represented with a mix of people who have no fear, nothing to lose, or no strong attachments (a superset of “people who don’t give a shit about anybody else”). 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...
          • closeparen 8y ago
            Isn’t it pretty normal to have “no fear, nothing to lose, and no strong attachments” as a fresh college graduate? Those are more phases of life than character traits. Graduate, explore, slowly put down roots, then stay rooted until your own children leave the nest and start to do the same.
• Simulacra 8y ago
  I have family in this situation, of all ages, and I think it's a lack of knowledge about what exists out there. It takes a lot to break with family, tradition, history, and everything you've known, to go to a new place.
• str33t_punk 8y ago
  Cause when they pack up and move to a city everyone moans that they are ‘gentrifying’ and should move back we’re they came from.
  • jrs95 8y ago
    Can't win with this one. Either you're the modern day segregationist for wanting to live in a nice neighborhood, or you're gentrifying by not doing that. 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.
• gerdesj 8y ago
  I'm not from around there but this sounds like a sense of place or a feeling of belonging, perhaps tribalism. From the outside this phenomenon looks a bit odd and will need some explanation from the locals.
  • rjdagost 8y ago
    Some people are content with what they have in life and are not driven by a need to always strive for more. For these people, feeling like you "belong", in a place with your family and friends are nearby is more important than better career opportunities. I don't know why this is regarded as such a mystery.
    • wutbrodo 8y ago
      If you read the article, one of the primary things it focuses on is: to what we should attribute the _decline_ of geographic labor mobility. If you're going to claim that it's obviously "wanting to feel like you belong", you need a simple theory for why the desire to stay put would have increased, especially during a period when the incentives to move have grown dramatically (i.e., the "opportunity gap"). 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.
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  The elephant in the room here is politics. A better chance of employment is a lot less appealing if it's in a city where you know nobody, there is no sense of community, most people are not at all like you and think people like you are backwards hicks.
  • preordained 8y ago
    There is truth to this. As a rural Illinois boy I traveled to Chicago to intern and it just wasn't my cup of tea...plain and simple. People are different, culture is different. In my town in the "sticks" we have brown people and immigrants--plenty (will come as big shock to some who think we're all just inbred corn eaters out here). That is not the difference...to get that mandatatory political correctness dance out of the way. Rather it is simply the way people relate to each other, attitudes, community or what passes for it.
• jdhn 8y ago
  Cost of living due to rampant NIMBYism in the most economically dynamic cities, as well as the feeling of community that would disappear if they were to move.
  • humanrebar 8y ago
    But they blame other people for pulling up the economic ladder after climbing it. And they consider economic inequality in some cases but not in, say, accessibility of job opportunities in downtown SF or NYC.
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    They gave an example of the coal plant worker who found a high paying job at a somewhat isolated dam in Washington state but moved back to Ohio for a much lower paying job because he, his wife and kids missed their relatives and had trouble making new friends, so it was only the community if one can call it that and more a trouble with adapting to a new place that would happen with any move. It feels like if that family had help with adapting that move could have stuck permanently.
    • cesarb 8y ago
      > The landscape of central Washington state was more desolate than they were prepared for. The nearest Walmart and McDonald’s were almost an hour away. Flights back home were expensive. Tiffany had almost no contact with other adults when Randy was at work. To me, that sounds more like the high paying job was in the middle of nowhere.
      • souprock 8y ago
        It also seems she is used to the sort of place where it is normal for one income to support a family. There, she'd have neighbors to visit with during the day.
• autokad 8y ago
  its really hard. I imagine company hiring practices (their growing dependence on recruiting firms) also doesnt help. 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.
  • gerdesj 8y ago
    I'm really trying hard to get inside your head! There is definitely an "Americanism" here somewhere, which you take for granted but I have to tease out. I will probably get it all a bit wrong (despite having a fair few US relos) but I will do my best.
    • haskellandchill 8y ago
      Try being poor.
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        On top of being from a very different culture and trying not to say anything or have any mannerisms that may give the recruiter the impression that you're a back woods hick.
        • busterarm 8y ago
• gerdesj 8y ago
  Judging from the comments here, there is a real US ism which I find fascinating. It looks like one that is so obvious to the locals that it is err obvious.
  • toasterlovin 8y ago
    Yeah, Europe is established. The US is not. I have a German friend whose town (Liepzig) celebrated it's 1000th anniversary recently. It has a book fair that is 400 years old. The city that I live in (Portland, OR) was a forest 150 years ago. We're still figuring out where all the permanent settlements are going to be and how many people will live in each one.
    • maxerickson 8y ago
      The numbers of people living in European cities has changed quite a lot. The population about doubled since 1900. They also likely benefited (as cities) from the rebuilding that was necessary after the World Wars.
  • flukus 8y ago
    I don't think it's a USism, similar stuff is happening in rural France, Britain, Australia, Japan and probably most of the west. Rural areas areas are slowly dying and cities are thriving, perhaps thriving too much.
    • randomdata 8y ago
      It is interesting that in Canada, people are leaving the cities[1] and rural areas (not necessarily all rural areas) are starting to thrive. [1] https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/05/14/millennials-leaving-toronto-vancouver-statistics-canada-data-shows_a_23434284 https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/05/14/millennials-leaving-t...
      • skosch 8y ago
        True. Rural areas though? Try suburbs. People are moving just far enough away from the downtown core so they can afford a modest house. Let's not give anyone the impression that Canadians are abandoning the cities to reconnect with mother nature.
• HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  Really good article - didn't come across as preachy and condescending as a lot of "big media organisation interviews poor white people" stories tend to go. 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.
  • randomdata 8y ago
    I’ve spent my almost 20 year career as a developer in a rural area and found that there are plenty of places trying to hire developers, not to mention that remote work is also available. I personally have never seen it as being all that risky. The very worst case is that you move back to the city, which is exactly where you’d be if you never left.
    • HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
      What sort of places want developers in rural areas?
      • randomdata 8y ago
        There are lots of tech companies, relatively speaking. But also I've found software developers in some less obvious and surprising places. For instance, the mom and pop funeral home in town maintain their own software. My first development job was at a warehousing business on their inventory management system.
  • souprock 8y ago
    Worst case: You move again. Sure, that sucks, but you moved there in the first place. You can move again. It's not that big of a deal, and that negative is balanced off by all the nice things about being out of the urban environment. In many cases, you won't actually need to move.
  • S_Bear 8y ago
    I moved to a small town in Middle-of-Nowhere, MN last year. It's great. My wife and I bought a small house for $40k. Our house will be paid for in no time, then it doesn't matter what we do. We do miss some things about living in the city, but having nature so close and neighbors who can keep an eye on things for us is fantastic. 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.
• tw1010 8y ago
  Why Does Everyone Assume 300 Million People Agree About The Idea That Money Is A Virtue?
  • cjsawyer 8y ago
    It's probably because 99.5% of the population relies on money to live in a house and to buy food. PS: Why Do You Type Like This? It's Very Hard To Read.
    • Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
      He wrote in headline style as his comment is a "translation" of TFA headline.
• spicymaki 8y ago
  My armchair guess would be that debt is keeping people chained to particular locations. If you live in a town that no one wants to live in, who will buy your house? 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.
  • adventured 8y ago
    Despite popular myth, US households are in good condition when it comes to debt. 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/canada-household-debt-to-income-near-record-high-home-sales-fall-idUSKCN1GR1RD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-economy-debt/canad... [1a] https://i.imgur.com/XRJIDbi.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XRJIDbi.jpg [2] https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • Broken_Hippo 8y ago
      This doesn't cancel the concerns, though. 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.
    • 8y ago
• dv_dt 8y ago
  Incidentally, the recent tax cut bill removed the individual deduction for moving expenses when moving to a new job. So the financial costs of relocating have increased.
  • maxerickson 8y ago
    You have to account for the different brackets and larger standard deduction. 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.
    • closeparen 8y ago
      The point is you pay full price to move; it’s no longer discounted by your marginal tax rate.
      • maxerickson 8y ago
        And? It's hardly something to complain about if your effective taxes are lower in the new scheme even without the deduction. (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.
        • repsilat 8y ago
          They're not saying it's "something to complain about". You're arguing against something they didn't say -- the two points, - 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.
        • closeparen 8y ago
          Moving is now more expensive relative to not moving, so we should expect more people to stay put. The absolute tax burden is irrelevant.
• Karishma1234 8y ago
  These are mostly elitist concerns. The ordinary folks on the ground often turn out to be pretty happy. They have a routine life, friends and community and they simply dont care about opportunities at that point.
  • tantalor 8y ago
    Employment is elitist?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • scarmig 8y ago
    ...what? Flyover country doesn't care about their jobs and their economies? Suicide rates[0] and drug abuse statistics would suggest otherwise. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6345a10.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6345a10.htm
    • randomdata 8y ago
      Ohio, featured in the article, is only slightly above the national average. Is that significant?
      • scarmig 8y ago
        Ideally we'd have more granular data. Not all of Ohio is dead--it has several major metropolitan areas. And, likewise, the Central Valley in CA probably isn't doing that great, but it's outweighed by the California cities.
    • Karishma1234 8y ago
      They care about their routine more than jobs and economy. Suicide rates may not be correlated (or causing) with jobs and economy. Else India and China should have had big sucide rates.
  • internetman55 8y ago
• gerdesj 8y ago
  inertia
• AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  If you grew up in a town, and maybe have seen a couple of cycles of better and worse, growth and decline, it's hard to really believe that this time is different. You think, "This will be kind of bad for a while, but we've been through that before. We'll be all right" - because that's all you've known.
• tshadley 8y ago
  > According to a new Brookings Institution report, the largest metro areas—those of 1 million or more people—have experienced 16.7 percent employment growth since 2010, and areas with 250,000 to 1 million have seen growth of 11.6 percent, while areas with fewer than 250,000 residents have lagged far, far behind, with only 0.4 percent growth. 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.
  • panopticon 8y ago
    That quote doesn't say anything about the movement of people though; just the economic situation of urbanites versus rural residents.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 8y ago
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  • asdsa5325 8y ago
    Well of course employment growth increased since 2010, since the 2008 crash caused greater unemployment. That doesn't mean that people moved to find work, rather they stayed and waited for jobs to open again.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • tshadley 8y ago
      They moved, most likely: http://www.bbpmag.com/Features/1114/1114_map-population.jpg http://www.bbpmag.com/Features/1114/1114_map-population.jpg
• ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
  It's becoming more like Europe. Once everywhere's been settled it's more expensive to move around. A new frontier is needed.
• internetman55 8y ago
  For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
• greywolf 8y ago
  if they can't compete, they better stay in their old Midwest town voting for trump. the bill is gonna come anyway to their sons and daughters, in the form of an opiod crisis or whatever
• ggg9990 8y ago
  I have lived in several countries and I know I would have a terribly difficult time emigrating from the US and living elsewhere, even if things got really bad. It’s probably the local version of the same thing.
• internetman55 8y ago
  On the one hand a lot of these people are screwed from lack of education and opportunities, but it seems really weird and self-centered to think you should just be able to live in a place nobody wants you to live where you don't do anything productive and that the rest of society should subsidize your bizarre lifestyle
  • Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    So... you'll forcibly move a 20-year old that grew up in the area? It isn't like they chose to get poor education nor chose to grow up somewhere without opportunities. Generations that have passed didn't go there because of lack of opportunities or education: In fact, I'm going to guess they were there because opportunities were there at one time. It seems really weird to imagine all these people are there through a particular choice instead of simple circumstances.
    • internetman55 8y ago
      No, why would anyone be forced to move anywhere? I'm just not convinced it's morally appropriate to live somewhere with no economic activity and expect others to pay for you to live there
• echotango 8y ago
  If this article had been published in 1992 when NAFTA, free trade and immigration were actually being debated, it would have been ridiculed by the establishment as backwards and probably racist anti-globalization propaganda. Even now, questioning the govenment economic policies that directly resulted in this mess lands you on a professional blacklist at 'respected' publications.
  • wahern 8y ago
    It wouldn't have been written in 1992 because interstate net migration rates were near their historical highs. See, e.g., Figure 1, page 41 in https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130p...
    • echotango 8y ago
      That's not what the article is about. Its about whole cities becoming unemployed as a result of factories moving overseas, and unfair trade deals signed in the early 1990's. The people in that figue moved because they found work somewhere else, not because their entire community was terminated overnight.
      • wahern 8y ago
        The decline of the Rust belt began in the 1970s, and by the 1980s you already had movies like Gung Ho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film) dramatizing existential crises of factory towns in the face of manufacturing off-shoring. 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.
• Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
  I can leave cheaply, hustle remotely, and use my (technically - thanks, Solo 401K!) low AGI to go on Obamacare. Why should I get a "career" in a major city and live hand to mouth while never being able to afford real property?
  • marsrover 8y ago
    If you're in tech there is no reason to live hand to mouth in a major city. Maybe in San Francisco that's the case, but I make a very decent living in Atlanta (not suburbs) and save a huge chunk of my income. I'm sure I'm not the only one and that this isn't the only city.
    • Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
      I'm a cowboy. Hence the hustle. Even if I passed a corporate sniff test, could I put away 60% or more of my income every year? And why would I want to live in Atlanta or someplace like it? I hate commuting. That's a major reason I work from home in a small city and take whatever remote gigs I can wrangle.
      • wutbrodo 8y ago
        Fwiw, this is definitely possible. I've saved about 80% of after-tax income for the last decade or so in SF. I don't consider my life very ascetic either; in fact, it's pretty awesome. If I wanted to cut down further for some reason, the number of wonderful free/cheap things you can do in popular cities is insane. (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)
        • Andre_Wanglin 8y ago
          Yeah, I have a six bedroom four bath house because of the kids. Bought it for cash. I shudder to think what that would cost in SF.
      • marsrover 8y ago
• JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  Because: http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-household-finances/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/22/pf/emergency-expenses-househ...
• taivare 8y ago
  Noticed, recently state or fed money was given to tear down old abandoned factories in small towns in PA. post election. I believe they are trying to bring work in. However, I also believe they don't want the middle age people telling the younger generations that's where gramps worked and earned a livable wage back in the golden era ( Demand Side Economy ). I caught the tail-end as a kid. The factory towns were nice then. I have family members who won't even visit their hometowns, they get sad at the run down appearance and hopelessness 40% unemployment for working age men , tend to believe it's higher. A good job is with a gas lease, timber but not much else.
• phil248 8y ago
  As a broad response to a lot of comments here (and the HN perspective in general), there are many dozens of thriving cities in the US that are not San Francisco or New York City. Moving to a city for opportunity does not mean moving to one of the 10 most expensive cities on the planet. 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.
  • sib 8y ago
    Part of it stems from the meaning of the term, "city." While they may be incorporated as cities, three names that jumped out at me from your list are Lawrence (KS?), Santa Fe, NM, and Bend, OR, each of which has a population of < 100,000. 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"...
  • closeparen 8y ago
    Chicago. Chicago is an honest-to-goodness world city with skyscrapers and trains and everything. A luxury condo in one of them can run you less than be down payment on a rundown shack in a far-flung Bay Area suburb. Unfortunately the tech scene there is mostly in the old-school business IT tradition and in suburban office-park hellscapes.
    • DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
      The winters are also... bracing, to say the very least. If you like feet of snow, it’s great, otherwise maybe not so much. I love to visit, but I wouldn’t last a year.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• 8bitsrule 8y ago
  consternation among economists and pundits, who wonder why Americans ... lack their ancestors’ get-up-and-go....loss in self-confidence. 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!"
• jrs95 8y ago
  Maybe these people don't want to leave their families & communities and be complicit in destroying their home town just because they can make some more money by doing that, and some economists and journalists they don't know insists that they all have no future.
• jackcosgrove 8y ago
  Maybe because it actually makes economic sense to stay. Cost of living, mainly for housing, in high-paying regions means that after a certain age you won't realize the benefits of the higher wages since you won't be able to pay off your mortgage before your career ends. In fact rent or mortgage interest may capture all of the salary bump and more. 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-percent-of-upper-middle-class-households-are-saving-money https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-12/only-45-p.... Maybe we are more alike than we realize...
  • wutbrodo 8y ago
    > 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... 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-report-economic-well-being-us-households-201805.pdf 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-economic-well-being-us-households-201505.pdf 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.
• newnewpdro 8y ago
  “A big factor here is a loss in self-confidence. It takes faith to move.” 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.
  • haskellandchill 8y ago
    People don’t want to die it’s true. If you fail you die in America. Period, end of story, game over man.
    • b_t_s 8y ago
      > If you fail you die in America. 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.
• analog31 8y ago
  I looked through the comments, and a lot of interesting ideas are presented, but I have to speculate about two additional issues: 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.
  • prawn 8y ago
    In times past and in other cultures, someone might migrate solo and later bring their family over. I've read stories of European migrants doing this to Australia. Sometimes, it would be years later. 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.
• matte_black 8y ago
  I grew up poor, but I was able to move away to San Francisco and get good jobs in tech, and ultimately became successful, and by some standards here, even “rich”. 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.
  • wutbrodo 8y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that; I was in a somewhat similar position for different reasons some time ago. The bright side is: because of the large number of transplants, this is probably one of the easiest places to make friends. It's not a skill that's particularly natural, since most people are used to having a community instead of having to build one from scratch, but it's pretty vital in an increasingly socially-atomized world. I don't want to be bossy, but I really really really recommend investing actual time in it. I can tell you from experience: it's just not healthy to not have a social group around you. 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.
• EliRivers 8y ago
  “The American dream is kind of to stay close to your family, do well, and let your kids grow up around your parents,” he says. 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.
• JohnClark1337 8y ago
  Republicans never cared about unions and democrats only care about race, gender, or environmental movements now, so yeah. Nobody in government cares.
• shorttime 8y ago
  Is it even worth it to post now that this article has been up for a few days? Funny how all of these comments just sit there on a server somewhere. Produced. But what value does it add? Will anyone even look at this? 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.