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> most young people I know/work with in California who comes from the South does not want to return for these specific reasons I lived in the City of St. Louis
by dionidium 8y ago
> most young people I know/work with in California who comes from the South does not want to return for these specific reasons
I lived in the City of St. Louis† for 13 years (and in the County for 6 before that) before moving to NYC. What I find is that young folks here who say they're from, say, Cleveland or St. Louis or similar cities in the South and whose experiences since moving have led them to believe that nothing they've found here exists back home, are often from the exurbs of those places and don't actually know what it's like to live in the center of a Midwestern or Southern city.††
I suspect they wouldn't much like the exurbs of New York, either.
We like to talk about red states vs. blue states, but the reality is that blue cities give way to purple and then red counties pretty quickly, even in liberal strongholds like New York.
Now, look, that's not to say that there are no differences in culture between, say, Atlanta and San Francisco. Obviously there are big ones! But when you dig into what people actually know about living in this or that part of the country, there's often not a lot there. Or, more charitably, individual experiences vary wildly (even within a single metro area).
† Not the South, but I think the point I'm trying to make here still holds.
†† It also seems worth noting that the experience of living in a big, new city in your early 20s (with all the new freedoms that come with that) as compared to wherever you happened to be when you were 14 is -- well, let's just say there are important perception-shifting factors.
- JeremyNT 8y agoWhile this is true about the urban areas, the reality of life in a southern city is that the rural areas dominate the political environment and that hamstrings municipalities in various ways. I live in and am from North Carolina and find it barely tolerable despite now living in the most "progressive" part of the state (Durham). Every attempt a city makes to move things forward is faced with obstruction and preemption by state representatives from rural areas who resent the progressive population centers. Investment in infrastructure is especially seldom possible, so we have little public transit, few sidewalks, and lots of traffic. There are things to recommend the south, but it's sure to be a culture shock for anybody who moves from a major metro. As an aside, I think the transit situation alone makes this sort of area a non starter for somebody like Amazon and indeed I'm glad they did not select this region. This is an area which grows through sprawl and additional roads. The extra traffic combined with an unwillingness to spend money on public transit would have caused major issues.
- dionidium 8y agoYes. I agree with this. It's a significant problem.
- brownbat 8y ago> Every attempt a city makes to move things forward is faced with obstruction and preemption... Sounds similar to NIMBYism in other places. No matter your views, politics are frustrating in some way in every geographic area, I promise.