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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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!