Interesting stuff, but with DeSantis, the head medical guy and anti-vaxer, the Villages [I've been there since one of my former friends retired there], and the orange moron, it is hard to take Florida serious. Living in New Mexico makes the humidity and flatness of Florida a non-starter.
My view of FL coincides with the one that Billy Townsend has so trenchantly laid out. We flew over "The Villages" several times in our little plane when going to and from Deb's mom's area, and visiting other people in the state. It looks from above very much in keeping with its general reputation.
But what Deb has seen from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is worth noticing.
We have seen the "where to live" question play out in our own family over the last 50 years. Our parents spent their earlier adult lives on the east coast, Bob's in the Hampton Roads and later DC area (Bob's dad worked for the forerunner of NASA and then NASA) and my parents in Pennsylvania and NJ. At retirement Bob's mom moved to San Diego and my parents moved to Colorado where Bob and I moved in 1970 shortly after we married. We have been here ever since and raised our two daughters here. Both chose to move elsewhere for college and stayed in those areas, our older daughter in the Seattle area and our younger one first in Chicago and then in Madison, WI. For our parents and for Bob and me, there were no questions about affordability of the area where we wanted to live. We all had lots of choices. In the 1970's it was no problem for people to find affordable homes in either California or Colorado. My parents bought a single family home for $54,000 in 1977 in Boulder. Houses like that (1950's ranch with 1300 sq ft.) are now selling for around a million dollars. Staggering. Skip forward to the 2010's and our older daughter and her husband wanted a house that didn't break the bank and to do that had to move to a place south of Seattle (Federal Heights) with a long commute for her to her job north of downtown Seattle. Our younger daughter and her husband decided on Madison, WI which had jobs for both of them and still affordable housing. Now our family situation has become more complicated. Our younger daughter sadly died two years ago of breast cancer and our older daughter and her husband are divorcing. The house they bought in Federal Heights is now worth double what they paid for it which sounds like a windfall but of course it also means that everything else has also gone up in price. Even with a well paying job and a desire for a smaller house, there simply are no houses for sale anywhere with a reasonable commute to her job at a price that she can afford which is probably in the range of $500,000. So, now she is thinking of moving. The Boulder area where she grew up is as bad as Seattle for affordable housing. She is thinking of places like the Raleigh Durham area where housing is still affordable and there are jobs in her field. But she is concerned about living so far from us. And we don't want to move. We have a lifetime's worth of friends here and a home we built for our retirement in a still lovely rural area where we can forget about the massive influx of people to the Front Range and with a view that goes from Pikes Peak to the Never Summer Range at the north end of Rocky Mountain National Park. So far we are doing fine but I do worry about the time when things get harder and I wish our daughter could find a place closer to us or that she could find a place in an area where we wouldn't mind moving in the future. It's a problem we never anticipated.
Thank you very much for this moving and richly detailed account. (One of my lessons from decades in the reporting business: everyone's story is interesting.) And the details of the multi-generational choices in your household really highlight the effects that *real estate prices* are having on life decisions. Again thanks.
Jim In 90 years my ‘places to go’ have included Egypt, Congo, and Chile, which consumed over a decade of my life. Domestically, I have moved between Philadelphia, Washington, CT, NY, and NJ.
When I returned from my foreign residencies, I found myself in the midst of ‘Rust Belt’ woes, in which North/MidWest were discarded, and South and West were the places to be.
Of course, as a historian, I was aware of how the pattern was to go West back in the 18th/19th centuries, while textile businesses went South, though Northerners didn’t.
I recall when major corporate headquarters (before the internet) were locating out of New York and Chicago for suburban locales (or even farther).
Now with Internet and working at home, the geographic ‘living space’ has become even more flexible, when even Silicon Valley has been dispersing.
I am comfortable in my East Coast quadrant, as is most of my family. Personally, I am affected by the politicalization of America. My wife and I would shudder at the prospect of being in a big red state (like Florida, Alabama, Texas, Wyoming), where our views about the soul of America would not be welcome.
My granddaughter, who loves being at UCLA, speaks of returning East after graduation. Who knows? Staying close to family is a top priority for me and Georgia. Our children are all in the Eastern quadrant, as are all of our grand kids, except for the UCLAn.
My hunch is that retirement will be a major consideration for folks seeking better weather and/or taxes. Other than that, I foresee less major job moves and more living environment considerations, as the Internet provides considerable flexibility.
Housing is and will remain expensive. This could be a major consideration, since it is the largest annual expenditure for most individuals.
In my family, L. B. R. Wheelock did flee New York in 1833 because of ‘an affair of the heart.’ He founded Wheelock, Texas, a small town in the hinterlands. To his credit, he wasn’t buried there. Years ago I visited Wheelock. It’s river diverted about a century ago and there are only a few residents, mostly old women with their stockings rolled down. I doubt that we will retire to Wheelock.
Keith, thanks for the family chronicles, and your points — which I agree with — about the factors that will simultaneously encourage and discourage continued movement within the country.
And agree about the tie to be close to one's multi-generational family. A reason (though not the main reason) we have kept a base on the east coast is Deb's very frequent travels to see her mother, in Florida. But our kids and their kids live far away — Santa Barbara in one case, Dallas in the other. We are constantly scheme for how to be able to see them more.
On the Dallas front: You know this but it's worth emphasizing that every state is full of diversity and contradictions. The city of Dallas, a right-wing stronghold 60 years ago, is another big cosmopolitan city now. Like most cities, it votes Democratic in national elections — Obama carried it twice, then HRC and Biden. Deb has recently been impressed by the liveliness and diversity of Sarasota. Don't get us started about Greenville SC. And Laramie Wyoming is a very lively university town. It's a big varied country.
When I worked for Texas Monthly I was actually in Wheelock TX one time, as part of a project involving A&M.
Jim When I visited Wheelock, I never mentioned that I was a Wheelock. Some of the old folks spoke of seeking $$$ from Dartmouth, because of the Eleazor Wheelock connection. The postmistress's dream was to take a bus trip to Washington.
The tragedy was that Dr. Love's store was shut down and he had at least $150 of unsold goods.
You may recall that the largest town closest to little Wheelock was North Zulch (I have a photo to prove this.)
Great piece, as usual! One thing inhibiting migration, which you allude to indirectly: There are still a lot of homeowners whose homes are "under water" compared with their mortgages. So they can't move (I can suggest a fix for this). Opposite problem in some parts of CA: home values have increased so much that older folks won't move because of CA taxes that would then be due; they wait for their kids to inherit the house and get a stepped-up basis. Finally, consistent with what you've written here (and maybe the work of the authors you cite), there is good data now on impact of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. A huge disproportion of the announced project numbers, total billions of contemplated dollar investment, and scores of thousands of new jobs is/are all happening in red states or red Congressional districts within states. Various reasons for that, of course, including lower average wages and faster permitting and less NIMBYism than in more prosperous and densely populated areas. But the phenomenon seems real, and a powerful reshaper of the US economy!
And the various lock-ins of the US real-estate system have significant distorting effects, as you say. (The capital-gains issue you mention for houses is not confined to California! I will confess that we have discussed this factor, in regard to our own house here in DC.)
On your final point — I'm thinking of this more and more as a parallel to, or subset of, the much discussed phenomenon of "The economic numbers are good, so why do they 'feel' bad?" Ie, the difficulty of getting across the reality of improving economic trends.
In the general "feel bad" case, I have *some* hope that the ambient realities of rising wages, limited layoffs, strong sales, strong 401(k)s, etc will seep in. We all know that per-gallon gas prices—"prices at the pump!"—have outsized lizard-brain importance. Maybe they will continue to go down.
But on the specifics of these investments paying off, I am hoping that some media or political attention can give this news some traction. We'll see.
On migration, I think that needs statistical evidence, not just "take me, for example." So I checked my high school yearbook, class of 1959. It was a small school, and I know that about 1/3 have spent their adult lives in the same area, 1/3 clearly have not (like me). I just don't know what became of the rest of us. Have those sorts of stats been more widely gathered? How about Redlands?
Yes, of course I agree that "for instance, my family" is not sweeping proof. That's what fascinates me in the Census data. It does show (a) that Americans have long been more mobile than, say, people within France, Italy, or the UK; (b) that the *general* rate of internal mobility has been slowly decreasing, for both good and bad reasons; and (c) that nonetheless *most* people stay more or less where they started out.
Anecdotally for me, from Redlands High School: I would *guess* that the overwhelming majority of my classmates have remained in California. That's kind of an unfair comparison, since Calif includes so many different kinds of communities and holds more people than any other state. A handful of my classmates ended up living outside the US - some in Europe, some in Central America. I would guess that maybe 10% are east of the Mississippi, a subset of that on the east coast.
This is why I find the Census studies so endlessly enlightening, in matching our anecdata to larger patterns.
Like your famiily, my siblings mostly left our home state, but that was Delaware, which is pretty small. One to CA, one to HI, one to MA and one to Israel.
Thanks as always James. Special thanks for linking to Deb's post. I tell my students that it's easy to make generalizations about Florida and other Southern states sitting at home here in Connecticut on your computer –– better to be in the midst of the state and see/ read what's really happening on a day-to-day basis!
Thanks. I will confess that the opening antipathy Deb mentioned toward Florida was mostly spillover from me, in my California-guy mode.
As students of American migration well know, there's long been a few continental divides in where older Americans go, when they want to "move someplace to retire." East of the Mississippi, people have gone to Florida. And, within that group, people from the Northeast East have gone to the east coast of Florida; people from the Midwest have gone to central Florida and Florida's west coast. (Deb's parents were from Chicago and lived in Minnesota, Illinois, and Ohio. They wound up on the west coast of Florida, in the little town of Englewood, south of Venice.) This "continental divide" pattern is an over-generalization but still broadly true. And since Deb herself is a midwestern girl, Florida has somehow seemed more "natural" to her.
People from the Rockies and westward have ended up in Arizona or California. Or, if they're from Seattle (or Alaska), in Hawaii. Again overgeneralized but crudely true.
And people from California have thought: We're already here. We've got these retirement places for people who want them. But also the mountains, and the coast, and the big universities, and the nation's most innovative industries, and The Industry [in Hollywood], and the ag business, and so on. Including the big problems. I think it's still broadly true to see California as a bellwether. The power of Billy Townsend's essay is arguing the reverse about his home state (FL).
But to return to the point: Deb's been impressed, and has brought me along, about what the daily Herald-Tribune has revealed about Sarasota and its vicinity, and about those other faces of the state as a whole. (Thing are always more interesting and complicated when you look up close.)
Interesting stuff, but with DeSantis, the head medical guy and anti-vaxer, the Villages [I've been there since one of my former friends retired there], and the orange moron, it is hard to take Florida serious. Living in New Mexico makes the humidity and flatness of Florida a non-starter.
My view of FL coincides with the one that Billy Townsend has so trenchantly laid out. We flew over "The Villages" several times in our little plane when going to and from Deb's mom's area, and visiting other people in the state. It looks from above very much in keeping with its general reputation.
But what Deb has seen from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is worth noticing.
We have seen the "where to live" question play out in our own family over the last 50 years. Our parents spent their earlier adult lives on the east coast, Bob's in the Hampton Roads and later DC area (Bob's dad worked for the forerunner of NASA and then NASA) and my parents in Pennsylvania and NJ. At retirement Bob's mom moved to San Diego and my parents moved to Colorado where Bob and I moved in 1970 shortly after we married. We have been here ever since and raised our two daughters here. Both chose to move elsewhere for college and stayed in those areas, our older daughter in the Seattle area and our younger one first in Chicago and then in Madison, WI. For our parents and for Bob and me, there were no questions about affordability of the area where we wanted to live. We all had lots of choices. In the 1970's it was no problem for people to find affordable homes in either California or Colorado. My parents bought a single family home for $54,000 in 1977 in Boulder. Houses like that (1950's ranch with 1300 sq ft.) are now selling for around a million dollars. Staggering. Skip forward to the 2010's and our older daughter and her husband wanted a house that didn't break the bank and to do that had to move to a place south of Seattle (Federal Heights) with a long commute for her to her job north of downtown Seattle. Our younger daughter and her husband decided on Madison, WI which had jobs for both of them and still affordable housing. Now our family situation has become more complicated. Our younger daughter sadly died two years ago of breast cancer and our older daughter and her husband are divorcing. The house they bought in Federal Heights is now worth double what they paid for it which sounds like a windfall but of course it also means that everything else has also gone up in price. Even with a well paying job and a desire for a smaller house, there simply are no houses for sale anywhere with a reasonable commute to her job at a price that she can afford which is probably in the range of $500,000. So, now she is thinking of moving. The Boulder area where she grew up is as bad as Seattle for affordable housing. She is thinking of places like the Raleigh Durham area where housing is still affordable and there are jobs in her field. But she is concerned about living so far from us. And we don't want to move. We have a lifetime's worth of friends here and a home we built for our retirement in a still lovely rural area where we can forget about the massive influx of people to the Front Range and with a view that goes from Pikes Peak to the Never Summer Range at the north end of Rocky Mountain National Park. So far we are doing fine but I do worry about the time when things get harder and I wish our daughter could find a place closer to us or that she could find a place in an area where we wouldn't mind moving in the future. It's a problem we never anticipated.
Thank you very much for this moving and richly detailed account. (One of my lessons from decades in the reporting business: everyone's story is interesting.) And the details of the multi-generational choices in your household really highlight the effects that *real estate prices* are having on life decisions. Again thanks.
Jim In 90 years my ‘places to go’ have included Egypt, Congo, and Chile, which consumed over a decade of my life. Domestically, I have moved between Philadelphia, Washington, CT, NY, and NJ.
When I returned from my foreign residencies, I found myself in the midst of ‘Rust Belt’ woes, in which North/MidWest were discarded, and South and West were the places to be.
Of course, as a historian, I was aware of how the pattern was to go West back in the 18th/19th centuries, while textile businesses went South, though Northerners didn’t.
I recall when major corporate headquarters (before the internet) were locating out of New York and Chicago for suburban locales (or even farther).
Now with Internet and working at home, the geographic ‘living space’ has become even more flexible, when even Silicon Valley has been dispersing.
I am comfortable in my East Coast quadrant, as is most of my family. Personally, I am affected by the politicalization of America. My wife and I would shudder at the prospect of being in a big red state (like Florida, Alabama, Texas, Wyoming), where our views about the soul of America would not be welcome.
My granddaughter, who loves being at UCLA, speaks of returning East after graduation. Who knows? Staying close to family is a top priority for me and Georgia. Our children are all in the Eastern quadrant, as are all of our grand kids, except for the UCLAn.
My hunch is that retirement will be a major consideration for folks seeking better weather and/or taxes. Other than that, I foresee less major job moves and more living environment considerations, as the Internet provides considerable flexibility.
Housing is and will remain expensive. This could be a major consideration, since it is the largest annual expenditure for most individuals.
In my family, L. B. R. Wheelock did flee New York in 1833 because of ‘an affair of the heart.’ He founded Wheelock, Texas, a small town in the hinterlands. To his credit, he wasn’t buried there. Years ago I visited Wheelock. It’s river diverted about a century ago and there are only a few residents, mostly old women with their stockings rolled down. I doubt that we will retire to Wheelock.
Keith, thanks for the family chronicles, and your points — which I agree with — about the factors that will simultaneously encourage and discourage continued movement within the country.
And agree about the tie to be close to one's multi-generational family. A reason (though not the main reason) we have kept a base on the east coast is Deb's very frequent travels to see her mother, in Florida. But our kids and their kids live far away — Santa Barbara in one case, Dallas in the other. We are constantly scheme for how to be able to see them more.
On the Dallas front: You know this but it's worth emphasizing that every state is full of diversity and contradictions. The city of Dallas, a right-wing stronghold 60 years ago, is another big cosmopolitan city now. Like most cities, it votes Democratic in national elections — Obama carried it twice, then HRC and Biden. Deb has recently been impressed by the liveliness and diversity of Sarasota. Don't get us started about Greenville SC. And Laramie Wyoming is a very lively university town. It's a big varied country.
When I worked for Texas Monthly I was actually in Wheelock TX one time, as part of a project involving A&M.
Jim When I visited Wheelock, I never mentioned that I was a Wheelock. Some of the old folks spoke of seeking $$$ from Dartmouth, because of the Eleazor Wheelock connection. The postmistress's dream was to take a bus trip to Washington.
The tragedy was that Dr. Love's store was shut down and he had at least $150 of unsold goods.
You may recall that the largest town closest to little Wheelock was North Zulch (I have a photo to prove this.)
Great piece, as usual! One thing inhibiting migration, which you allude to indirectly: There are still a lot of homeowners whose homes are "under water" compared with their mortgages. So they can't move (I can suggest a fix for this). Opposite problem in some parts of CA: home values have increased so much that older folks won't move because of CA taxes that would then be due; they wait for their kids to inherit the house and get a stepped-up basis. Finally, consistent with what you've written here (and maybe the work of the authors you cite), there is good data now on impact of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. A huge disproportion of the announced project numbers, total billions of contemplated dollar investment, and scores of thousands of new jobs is/are all happening in red states or red Congressional districts within states. Various reasons for that, of course, including lower average wages and faster permitting and less NIMBYism than in more prosperous and densely populated areas. But the phenomenon seems real, and a powerful reshaper of the US economy!
Ric, yes, thanks, agree on all fronts.
And the various lock-ins of the US real-estate system have significant distorting effects, as you say. (The capital-gains issue you mention for houses is not confined to California! I will confess that we have discussed this factor, in regard to our own house here in DC.)
On your final point — I'm thinking of this more and more as a parallel to, or subset of, the much discussed phenomenon of "The economic numbers are good, so why do they 'feel' bad?" Ie, the difficulty of getting across the reality of improving economic trends.
In the general "feel bad" case, I have *some* hope that the ambient realities of rising wages, limited layoffs, strong sales, strong 401(k)s, etc will seep in. We all know that per-gallon gas prices—"prices at the pump!"—have outsized lizard-brain importance. Maybe they will continue to go down.
But on the specifics of these investments paying off, I am hoping that some media or political attention can give this news some traction. We'll see.
On migration, I think that needs statistical evidence, not just "take me, for example." So I checked my high school yearbook, class of 1959. It was a small school, and I know that about 1/3 have spent their adult lives in the same area, 1/3 clearly have not (like me). I just don't know what became of the rest of us. Have those sorts of stats been more widely gathered? How about Redlands?
Yes, of course I agree that "for instance, my family" is not sweeping proof. That's what fascinates me in the Census data. It does show (a) that Americans have long been more mobile than, say, people within France, Italy, or the UK; (b) that the *general* rate of internal mobility has been slowly decreasing, for both good and bad reasons; and (c) that nonetheless *most* people stay more or less where they started out.
Anecdotally for me, from Redlands High School: I would *guess* that the overwhelming majority of my classmates have remained in California. That's kind of an unfair comparison, since Calif includes so many different kinds of communities and holds more people than any other state. A handful of my classmates ended up living outside the US - some in Europe, some in Central America. I would guess that maybe 10% are east of the Mississippi, a subset of that on the east coast.
This is why I find the Census studies so endlessly enlightening, in matching our anecdata to larger patterns.
Like your famiily, my siblings mostly left our home state, but that was Delaware, which is pretty small. One to CA, one to HI, one to MA and one to Israel.
Thanks as always James. Special thanks for linking to Deb's post. I tell my students that it's easy to make generalizations about Florida and other Southern states sitting at home here in Connecticut on your computer –– better to be in the midst of the state and see/ read what's really happening on a day-to-day basis!
Thanks. I will confess that the opening antipathy Deb mentioned toward Florida was mostly spillover from me, in my California-guy mode.
As students of American migration well know, there's long been a few continental divides in where older Americans go, when they want to "move someplace to retire." East of the Mississippi, people have gone to Florida. And, within that group, people from the Northeast East have gone to the east coast of Florida; people from the Midwest have gone to central Florida and Florida's west coast. (Deb's parents were from Chicago and lived in Minnesota, Illinois, and Ohio. They wound up on the west coast of Florida, in the little town of Englewood, south of Venice.) This "continental divide" pattern is an over-generalization but still broadly true. And since Deb herself is a midwestern girl, Florida has somehow seemed more "natural" to her.
People from the Rockies and westward have ended up in Arizona or California. Or, if they're from Seattle (or Alaska), in Hawaii. Again overgeneralized but crudely true.
And people from California have thought: We're already here. We've got these retirement places for people who want them. But also the mountains, and the coast, and the big universities, and the nation's most innovative industries, and The Industry [in Hollywood], and the ag business, and so on. Including the big problems. I think it's still broadly true to see California as a bellwether. The power of Billy Townsend's essay is arguing the reverse about his home state (FL).
But to return to the point: Deb's been impressed, and has brought me along, about what the daily Herald-Tribune has revealed about Sarasota and its vicinity, and about those other faces of the state as a whole. (Thing are always more interesting and complicated when you look up close.)