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Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

census.gov

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Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#141

Post by nonameiguess »

fullshark wrote: post #37

A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don't realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed home. If you build a society based on the assumption everyone will simply move and re-skill to the regions with economic opportunity, you get a lot of regions of bitter people who stayed behind somewhere and watched their local economy get destroyed by trade…

That honestly sounds like a lot of spurious causal assumptions. The Rust Belt and coal mining regions didn't get economically depressed because people left. People left because of the economic collapse. You seem to be saying if all those college kids just moved back to Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the people there wouldn't be mad about their economies being destroyed? Because they still would have been destroyed.

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#142

Post by granshaw »

rr888 wrote: post #38
rr888 wrote: post #29

I'm just amazed in my new job I actually have an American in my team.

Actually after being away from home for 20 years I'd love to go back but wife and kids prefer staying :(.

Same sometimes I dream of working remotely and taking my USD savings and enjoying the luxe life back in SE Asia

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#144

Post by [deleted] »

Alupis wrote: post #100
ethanbond wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least American suburbs are ultra car-dependent meaning you're not walking anywhere (literally physically degrading to both you and the environment) and you do not have chance social encounters at nearly the frequency of any walking city (socially degrading). This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburb…

Perhaps for you city dweller's, but for the rest of us, we really like our suburbs. Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability. I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.

[deleted]

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#145

Post by 88913527 »

akiselev wrote: post #103
Yhippa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading. Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don't cite a source. Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.

See the Strong Towns article "The Growth Ponzi Scheme" [1] and the ASCE Infrastructure Report Card for more concrete data [2]. The gist is that we've funded the construction of our infrastructure nationwide without accounting for the cost of maintenance. Now after decades of neglect, the cost of fixing all of our infrastructure is astronomical, far worse than if we had been doing it correctly from the beginning. [1]…

If it is indeed that much cheaper to start from scratch, we have the open land to do so. Housing prices might fall in the areas that are chosen for divestment, but if we can't afford it, it's unclear what other paths remain. I largely believe in Strong Town's thesis, but we can't make everything a 5+1 because there is too much underdeveloped land use to justify that level of density everywhere given the total population size. There certainly are plenty of areas where's it's economical to upzone, but in many areas it won't be.

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#146

Post by eropple »

emodendroket wrote: post #18
HPsquared wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the "move around a lot" people don't talk much with the "don't move around much" people, and vice-versa.

When I used to live in Massachusetts I found it boggling how many people had never lived anywhere else. Southern California, where I now live, I think actually has a narrow transplant majority.

I find Massachusetts to be pretty big, for a small place. I moved here from Maine after college and there isn't really anywhere else I want to be. I travel recreationally, but like--if I'd been born here, I don't know why I'd live somewhere else. (Spent time in California, for example. Not my thing.)

Sometimes I think about buying a place back near where I grew up, but my parents don't live there anymore and it's really not that much cheaper than my current house for losing out on a lot of things, so...I don't know why I actually would. It's just more lawn-mowing.

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#147

Post by dorchadas »

siquick wrote: post #128
Yhippa wrote: post #99

I moved from where I grew up. The biggest advantage is access to better career paths and potential with my career. If I get laid off, there are more diverse work options, unlike where I grew up. The flip side is that being able to have family help out easily when our kid is sick. Also I have friends who stayed back home (the ratio matching this article title pretty closely) and they have barbecues together, can hang…

Depends on your definition of success? I moved to the other side of the world from where I grew up in my early 30s, and I grew up at the other end of the country from where I was born and lived my early years. I have a great group of mates I met in my early twenties and still speak with daily on WhatsApp. As you say they meet up regularly, know each others families well, and they have not left their home area and hav…

I'm in pretty much this exact situation right now (we actually all left then returned in early/mid 20s after university), and, well, it's still lonely. WhatsApp (or, in our case, Discord) is no substitution for physically being able to meet up. I have friends where I live now, but it's not the same level of depth in the friendship, where we'd just go to each other's houses and shoot the shit for hours about everything and nothing (as we've done since high school) and I feel that is something I didn't realise I wanted and was missing until I moved. It's actually got me seriously reconsidering returning. Gonna be hard leaving after Christmas this year.

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#148

Post by abeyer »

the_gastropod wrote: post #123
Alupis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps for you city dweller's, but for the rest of us, we really like our suburbs. Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability. I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.

> I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability. Most of these are pretty cliche. New York City is one of the safest cities in the country per capita. But as with “cleanliness” is usually trotted out in a dog whistly kind of way that really is about something else. And affordability: yep. You’ve got that for a couple reasons: 1. People LIKE living in cities. Good old supply/demand. 2. As this thread is…

> New York City is one of the safest cities in the country per capita. But as with “cleanliness” is usually trotted out in a dog whistly kind of way

Having lived in other big cities that manage to collect garbage in containers, NYC's continued practice of dumping uncontained garbage on the sidewalk for collection gives it a very real non-dog-whistly feeling(/sight/odor) of dirtyness.

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#149

Post by ElevenLathe »

emodendroket wrote: post #20
ElevenLathe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends where you're from. IMO it is generally good and positive for families to stay in the same area for generations, since it allows for stronger ties among the community, leading to generally less fragile lives. But you're right that those same ties can hold you down in the right (wrong) circumstances. ...which I guess is just a long-winded way of saying that you should stay near home if it's good, and stay aw…

I feel like those strong ties are more likely to be fetters than supports but who am I to tell other people what they're feeling, I suppose.

I used to feel this way but have since realized that it is a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, democratic) perspective. For the majority of human history, we needed our birth community in a very direct way simply to eat, keep ourselves housed, find a mate, etc. Many of those needs can now be taken care of by the market but IMO it pays to be careful about committing completely to such a course.

Re: Nearly six in 10 US young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up

#150

Post by parker_mountain »

escalt wrote: post #115
Yhippa wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading. Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don't cite a source. Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.

It is said that the infrastructure required to sustain suburbs costs more money than these suburbs bring in. In the US a city gets federal money to build new suburbs, but when it comes to renewing them after a few decades, the city has to pay on its own and it often has not enough money to do it. I am by no means an expert on this topic and just poorly summarized the contents of this video: https://youtube.com/watch?…

It's also affecting some cities, such as Chicago. Wacker Drive is an example of this.

It turns out that core infrastructure should be built to be inexpensive to maintain, and density helps greatly with that goal.

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