I recently returned from a long weekend trip to my hometown (made longer by one voluntary bump and one involuntary missed connection), and have been turning over in my head something that has come to seem more and more important to me.
Here it is: small-town life is so obviously superior to big-city or suburban life that the suggestion that big cities or suburbs are better places to live feels like it can only be a strawman argument designed to attract ridicule.
Now, I know intellectually that this is not true. I’ve lived in big cities all over the world since I was 17, and it would be hard to imagine moving back to a small town at this point. But when I interrogate my feelings, I still come to the same conclusion: big cities and suburbs are obviously, patently inferior to small towns — preferably your hometown.
This is not, on its own, a particularly striking observation: people prefer the kind of place they grew up. But I think ignoring or dismissing it drives a lot of muddled thinking. For example, it’s often suggested with varying degrees of condescension that people living in struggling communities should move to where jobs are available. If all communities of a given type are struggling, however, this is implicitly the suggestion to leave the kind of community you want to live in and move to a kind of community you don’t want to live in.
Likewise, you can find lengthy exegeses of the problem of affordable housing in America’s most economically dynamic cities. It would no doubt be good for America’s economy if more people who wanted to were able to live in the places where their productivity is highest. But that’s not a solution for the people who don’t want to live in big cities, who don’t want to move at all, because they like the place they live.
You can find truly vile characters like Kevin Williamson of National Review arguing that it is the duty of the poor to move to where jobs are available, and government assistance should be targeted at achieving that goal. But the problem with communities struggling with the loss of manufacturing or mineral extraction jobs isn’t that the citizens don’t know there are better jobs elsewhere. The push out of small communities is strong and omnipresent (I left town to go to a “better” university even though there’s a perfectly good university in my hometown). The “problem” is that people don’t want to leave.
There’s no question you can force people out. The widespread sabotage of state universities and community colleges has been extremely effective at forcing young people with a shred of talent or ambition out of their communities. Allowing trade to devastate small town industry, and making it so hard to start businesses that it’s out of reach for most people, has made it hard enough to survive that people do, indeed, pick up stakes and move from the communities they love.
But it also comes with costs. People left behind resent the forces that push their children and neighbors out of their communities. Those who leave find themselves in unfamiliar cultural milieux and struggle to adapt to new norms.
I’ve written this from the perspective of a small-town boy, since that’s my perspective. But if you grew up in a big city, imagine being lectured your whole life that you should move to West Virginia because that’s where the coal mining jobs are. You’d say, “that’s crazy, there’s no nightlife in West Virginia” (with apologies to West Virginia, it’s a lovely place). If you grew up in a leafy suburb, imagine being told you need to move to downtown Las Angeles and that actually having a yard and a spare bedroom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You’d say, “no, actually yards are great.”
Those of my readers who are libertarian-inclined will no doubt come up with something pithy about life being full of despair and suffering and so economically devastated towns don’t deserve any special sympathy. But as long as we’re in charge of governing ourselves we have to find a better answer to suffering than that, because if we don’t, we might be stuck with the answer those who suffer come up with.
Wait until you have children, becomes an even harder balance.
There’s no condescension on my part, but moving from a place you like to where there is stable employment doesn’t seem all that weird to me. When the different branches of my family came to the U.S., they all went where they could find work. If that meant picking up stakes to go to a largely unknown situation, that was the price to pay for keeping your family fed and clothed. Would they have preferred to have more choice? You bet. Everyone wants to live in Mayberry. While I have great empathy for the poor in our country, and in fact live in Appalachia where we have our share, I think that too many people want it all, in that they want to have a decent standard of living in a familiar place that doesn’t have the jobs to offer, while expecting the situation to somehow improve without any particular reason. If they want the higher standard of living, they should be willing to leave the familiar situation behind. That’s harsh and heartrending, but there’s not a lot of other choices.
Christian,
The concern I was trying to express in this post is not that it is good or bad that people feel attached to their communities, are reluctant to leave, and are resentful if forced to. The point I’m making is that people do, in fact, feel that way. If you dismiss their feelings because you think they ought to get over them, then you are inviting a backlash from the people whose feelings have been dismissed. A lot of things that now feel “inevitable” are the result of concrete decisions made by the ruling class for their benefit and for the benefit of the kinds of places they live, and to the detriment of smaller communities. Those decisions may have made “objective” economic sense but if the effect is alienation and resentment from a portion of the population — even if it’s a small portion — they may still have been the wrong decisions to make.
—Indy
My misunderstanding. Given that context, the article makes more sense. I guess I shouldn’t peruse blogs at 3 AM.
I don’t know much about Kevin Williamson, so please explain what makes him a “truly vile character.” I read his article that you linked to in your post and I understand that he is drawing different conclusions about how to address some of the economic challenges facing our country. Is there something I don’t know about Kevin that makes him vile? Are all people who draw different conclusions about how to best resolve economic challenges vile? Was this simply a lazy, ad-hominem attack?
Jamie,
Fortunately, I do know about Kevin Williamson. Here’s another one of his gems from the National Review: I Am Cancer.
I am not that interested in Kevin Williamson’s conclusions about how to address some of the economic challenges facing our country. Kevin Williamson is vile because he belongs to the class of ideologues who always blame the poor first, and encourage the poor to blame themselves first, for their suffering in order to distract his wealthy and comfortable readers from their role in late capitalism and its failure to address the needs of the poor. This is not a “policy prescription,” it’s an ideology that disclaims the responsibility to build a society that meets the needs of everyone, not just the wealthy or the privileged few.
—Indy
I just read the “I am cancer”. Would be interested in a column in response to it.
The Georgist policies that would help alleviate the problem of massively overpriced urban real estate would also help in small towns. There are almost no places in the US that have anywhere near optimal land use.
What is simultaneously fascinating and appalling to me is the resistance of corporations to, when makes sense, set up operations in those smaller, less expensive parts of the country.
Before Northwest airlines became Delta Airlines, they set up a customer support center in the northern part of the state of Minnesota. The people who worked there were, nearly to a person, friendly and helpful. They weren’t making a lot of money, but the money they were making went further.
They were able to stay in their hometown, and make a living for themselves and their families. Why would we want to concentrate all of the population in urban centers? Why would we, who live in cities or suburbs, want to increase the gridlock in our own areas? None of it makes sense.
Mickisue,
I think you’ve hit on one important problem with the abandoning of antitrust enforcement in the last few decades. Like the free trade agenda, the argument is that increased “efficiencies” will make everyone better off, but unpaired from any attempt to actually make sure the benefits of consolidation or free trade actually go to the individuals who suffer from them! I’m sure Delta saved a lot of money closing that call center, but the money saved went to Delta shareholders — not the individuals who lost their jobs!
Similarly, the idea that closing less efficient or productive factories will push more people into more productive cities is unpaired from any attempt to create sufficient new housing units to make cities affordable to their new residents. Instead, you end up with unemployed people in the struggling communities which are the only places they can still afford to live. We need a blended response of creating jobs in the communities that need them, housing in the cities that need it, a trade policy that directs more of the benefits of trade to the specific communities that suffer from it, and a competition policy that puts workers, not shareholders, first.
—Indy
Just my thoughts are this. Sure if you want to live and die in a town you love, go for it. But if there are no jobs there and a poor economy, don’t complain to me. I know that sounds like tough love but it is.
My summary is this: Say you live in a place you love and get by with say a $10 an hour job. If I came along and offered you an equal or better job and will pay you $20, $30, $40 an hour would you move to take that job. Maybe, maybe not. Now say you’re in that same town making $40,000 a year and I offer you a job making $100,000. Now would you move? Again it really depends. Some people don’t place money ahead of place. I’ve moved a lot for jobs all over the country and small towns have great benefits over cities but they also have draw backs. As I sit here on a 10meg DSL I think of these things.
DaninMCI,
I’m glad you mentioned the issue of broadband access because that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about: businesses (like mine) that are dependent on reliable high-speed access to the internet are forced out of communities where they’d otherwise be viable forms of employment. Hillary Clinton, famously, had a plan for high-speed rural broadband for precisely this reason:
“Crucially, Clinton will focus on increasing access and adoption of high-speed broadband so that rural small businesses can better connect to the global economy, farmers and ranchers can benefit from agricultural technology, and students can benefit from distance learning.”
The kinds of jobs we treat as prestigious, lucrative 21st century work are largely dependent on access to broadband and we’ve made a choice as a country to deny rural communities access to the broadband they would need to take those jobs. Then we ALSO make housing so expensive in our cities that even if they move a large part of their increased income goes to housing, not to improving their actual quality of life.
That’s a perfect illustration of the problem I’m describing in this post, and it’s a problem created by our decisions and priorities as a nation. There’s nothing “natural” or “intrinsic” about it.
—Indy