Criteria for selecting a new home

[next_migration]

I’ve been asked to skip ahead and dive into the lists of potentially promising destination towns in specific states, and will start doing so. That will mean skipping over a lot of explanatory text about which parts of the country are most sustainable and able to accept more people, what I think their politics will be if the Union falls apart, why secular democrats shouldn’t let themselves get crowded into blue bantustans, what internet resources are available to do your own searching for personally attractive destinations, and so forth. I’ll go back and prepare those sections piecemeal later.

For now, though, I think I do need to comment a bit on my criteria. You may find online lists of “the best places to live in Ohio” or wherever, many or most of which will have been omitted by my search strategy, and you’ll wonder why I didn’t draw from those lists. Much of the reason is because my criteria are different: those lists are aimed at the upper-middle-class who can live wherever they like, whereas my target audience includes the lower-middle-class and downwardly mobile, who first and foremost need a community where they can keep a roof over their heads in a worsening future. For my purposes, a cheap town with several active factories is better than a picturesque and marvelously crime-free town. But if cost isn’t a consideration for you (you lucky person), you may wish to look elsewhere for guidance.

 

 

Criteria that I consider to be significant for the average potential migrant, which were the basis for my basic search strategy, include:

o  Population size. I recommend avoiding huge megalopolises unless you really must live there for some reason, whereas really small towns (under 5000 or even 10,000 people) are to be avoided or considered with caution because you will be perceived as an outsider; at best, the few remaining jobs will be earmarked for locals, not for you. That leaves a vast range, from modest towns to cities of 200,000 or so, within which I suggest that migrants distribute themselves. For those whose demographics, work skills, and cultural tastes are suitable to a smaller town, that’s likely a better choice, more sustainable for the long term and leaving more room in more urban areas for migrants who wouldn’t fit well in small towns.

o  Cost of living, or median cost of rent or housing. Searchable figures are not up to date but at least give you an idea of relative costs. I usually exclude expensive towns from consideration or recommend them with caveats. Even if you can afford to live there now, will you be able to pay your mortgage after the next economic crunch? And rich neighbors, after spending years prohibiting you from hanging clotheslines and such, aren’t likely to cope well with crises.

o  Unemployment rate. It’s risky to move to an extremely depressed area with high unemployment—though the long-term post-pandemic situation is, at this time, very hard to predict. I tend to suspect that small towns with reported severe drug problems are not able to meet their current residents’ economic needs, much less those of newcomers, whatever the official unemployment rate might say. Even if you managed to make a living in such a town, an outsider who was doing noticeably better than locals could be resented.

o  Reasonable distance from any badly overgrown metropolitan area.

o  For urban areas, farmland in the broader region sufficient to meet minimal needs for food, if at all possible. This doesn’t seem to matter now, but it might someday.

o  The opinions of residents: if online reviews raise serious red flags, the town is not recommended or recommended with caveats.

o  Secondary, but still much to be preferred: a connection to long-distance public transportation via a nearby Amtrak station or intercity bus service, and in large towns a local transit system, in states where those are common.

 

“Why are you so obsessed with buses anyway?”

Public transportation is a valuable service. Of course, you can’t guarantee that a bus line that exists now will exist ten years from now. Still, if you choose to live in a smaller community without the full range of services (e.g., bookstore, department store, medical specialists), it would be nice to be able to get to a bigger city without having to rely on a private car. Someday you may have trouble keeping and maintaining a car, or there may (very well) be a gas crisis or delays in getting parts needed to keep it running, or you could develop a health problem or have an injury that keeps you from driving. Today, connectivity says good things about a town. A place where everyone can afford an SUV and drives everywhere won’t handle decline well, and a place where residents who can’t drive have very little contact with the outside world might not be a great place for strangers. Therefore, I consider small towns with intercity transportation service to be more appealing than those without, although in some states it’s not possible to be too picky about this without greatly limiting one’s options.

A city where you would not be able to live within walking distance of every place you will regularly need to go (home, job, grocery, etc.) should preferably have at least some local bus service. If not, you are shackled to maintaining a car, or to paying much more for exploitative ride services. In the Northeast, some kind of transit service in medium-sized or larger cities is almost ubiquitous; in the Southeast, it is not.

I also point out current Amtrak stations. More cities, even quite small ones, have airports of some kind than train service, and Americans traveling long distances usually fly if they don’t drive, so you may not see a reason to value train stations. Flying is less efficient in terms of fuel and carbon per passenger-mile, so it is likely to become less available in future; it will certainly become more expensive, and indeed is already becoming both pricey and miserable. If you will need or want to travel cross-country, it would be nice if you could easily do that by train. One may hope that as decline progresses, Amtrak will add more passenger lines that can run on existing railroad tracks.

 

Additional criteria that some individuals should carefully investigate include:

o  Race. You do not want to be the only non-white person in your new town, so in searching for possible homes you might specify a minimum population of your ethnic group, or a maximum percent white. However, majority-minority communities are often neglected or outright targeted by rural-dominated state governments, and can be at risk of vote suppression.

o  Religion. If you belong to a minority religion or unusual denomination, you may want to prioritize the presence of a temple, masjid, etc. If you are LGBTQ+, you may want to confirm that there isn’t a very aggressive local fundamentalist movement, or that some other people in your demographic are known to exist in the area.

o  Schools. If you want your children to get a specific religious education (e.g., Catholic school, or weekend religious training), restrict your searching to communities where it’s available. If you want your children to get a good secular education, check that the public schools’ biology and history curricula aren’t dictated by fundamentalists, or be prepared to compensate at home.

o  Crime. Some depressed small towns, especially but not exclusively in the South, have crime rates that would embarrass New York. If you’re from a tough neighborhood, this may not bother you at all. If you have kids and are inclined to be highly anxious, it will. But there is crime everywhere, and drugs are a problem all over the Rust Belt and Appalachia, so don’t demand Utopia. In some small towns, the majority of what I would call “crime” consists of the local police finding excuses to rob townsfolk or travelers; the number of fines and arrest warrants issued locally each year can exceed the number of citizens. This should be a huge red flag for potential migrants, especially people who would likely be prime targets of such regimes.

o  Presence of a community college. If you are young or have not had the opportunity yet to learn a marketable skill, so that your only employment options are likely to be low-wage jobs, place a very high priority on living in a town where you could conveniently pursue education or training for jobs that would give you a more secure economic position later in life. Commuting long-distance by car to take classes after a work shift is both physically and financially difficult.

o  Presence of a library. City-data doesn’t have this information for many communities, so online web searching will be needed in cases of doubt. Most small towns in America do have libraries or are part of a regional library system. Most can’t afford much of a library, but if there isn’t one at all, or if it’s now being shut down for political reasons, it implies that reading isn’t popular in the community. That would be a red flag for me.

o  Presence of specific desired or needed services (e.g., a natural food store or farmers’ market if you are vegan, specialist doctors or a compounding pharmacy if you have health problems that require regular care or supplies, cultural institutions that you adore or want to work for). Don’t move to a teeny town out of a misplaced sense of doomerism if you will then be very unhappy that it lacks specialty resources you need or are unwilling to do without.

 

When internet resources revealed particular quirks or unusual features of a smaller town, I mention those, even if they might be of interest to very few people, because for someone out there, that feature might make that town the perfect destination just for them. Such things as community activities and recreational opportunities aren’t selection criteria, since they aren’t essential, but I often mention them because they could help you to imagine yourself enjoying life in that town, having fun or socializing with neighbors, in a way that would let you picture it as a potential home and not just a refuge in which you can drudge at a job in exchange for shelter.

You can also study a detailed highway map of a state that appeals to you, and combine that with information from Internet research. Would you prefer to live in a town located right on an interstate with a commercial airport, or a town that’s more in the backwoods, with a national forest on your doorstep or lake fishing nearby? Investigate towns that seem to offer prime locations. Some of these places will be objectively unpleasant communities—those very much do exist—but many, many towns have great potential to offer you and your kids, if any, a happy home if you approach them with a positive attitude.

Finally, if you are able to work remotely so would not be competing for a local job, there are as of this writing several dozen less fashionable smaller towns and cities—not confined to any particular region, but scattered around the country—that might actually pay you to move there, with cash, free land to build a house, or other incentives. Check out www.makemymove.com. Don’t let one of these offers lull you into moving into, or staying in, a profoundly unsustainable region, though.

 

The political situation within states

The remainder of this post is addressed entirely to liberals and moderates. Because of the “Southernification” trend, conservatives moving even to more liberal states (which I don’t recommend, unless local ties make it necessary) could locate almost anywhere outside of the “blue islands” (the ethnically diverse cities or college towns) and find themselves among political allies. Liberals or often-discriminated-against minorities may presume that they should move to one of those blue islands, which would place much tighter limitations on their potential choices.

While I do suggest that migrating liberals move northeast and conservatives southeast, as a broad pattern, I strongly discourage liberals, especially educated urban liberals, from thinking their goal should be to find a smaller-city neighborhood full of fellow educated liberals to live in. Such choices have put America in grave danger; research by Jacob R. Brown and Ryan D. Enos (2021) reports that “[a] large proportion of voters live with virtually no exposure to voters from the other party in their residential environment.” That is even more true of Democrats, who tend to cluster themselves more tightly, though part of that is not voluntary but due to America’s persistent racial segregation. Political segregation threatens your immediate interests, as I will explain elsewhere. You may have noticed Josh Hawley, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, express gleeful hope that Blue citizens would pack together in fewer and smaller reservations that would have less and less representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

In the long run, it threatens the stability of the country. You should live, work, and socialize with people who aren’t exactly like you, because it makes it harder for those people to demonize you. Consider the corrosive historical effect of segregation on race relations: you can’t relate to someone you never interact with on an equal footing. Increasingly, we’re applying the same practice to factional affiliation, and also to social class. Misunderstanding and hostility go in both directions: educated people who don’t socialize with anyone who doesn’t have a college degree easily fall into condescending, provocative stereotyping of the working classes, and in turn they are easily scapegoated by right-wing media, whose viewers often do not recognize propaganda against educated people to be false because they don’t know any.

Moreover, keep thinking that word “bantustan” to yourself and remember how Sarajevo and other cities were besieged and shelled in the Yugoslavian civil war. If worse comes to worst, it’s a lot harder to target people who spread themselves out than people who have crowded themselves voluntarily into a tiny target. I recognize that some will have good reasons to feel that the immediate risk of such spreading out outweighs the long-term risk of being ghettoized (in the World War II, Polish Jewry sense of the term). For the rest, if half your new town is conservative, or most of the people on your block are conservative, that’s not the end of the world. Get to know them without criticizing or condescending to them or pointing out (at least initially) that you think or believe differently, and you can usually get along fine. (For practice: Don’t have a tantrum next time you meet someone who disagrees with you about COVID mandates.)

Obviously, there are limits. If you’re a Democrat or just a democrat, you don’t want to live in a town so universally and extremely right-wing that it’s likely that more than one of your neighbors belongs to a white supremacist militia. You especially wouldn’t want to be a visible minority or bicycle commuter in such a community. You can look up regional voting patterns online. Check out Niche reviews, especially of racially homogenous towns, and elected politicians from the area. Does the sheriff claim to be a “constitutional sheriff”—which means that he believes himself to be a kind of elected king of the county, with no state or federal laws capable of limiting his power over residents and visitors? You can guess how he will behave in time of crisis. If QAnon nuts or the equivalent are winning general elections, that is, at least for now, a community beyond hope. Move there, and you could someday get imprisoned or lynched for “molesting their children for adrenochrome on your secret Mars base.” Google the town. Check out local news sources, which even in small towns will often be available online, though possibly paywalled. Are the big issues in city government and local media practical ones, like trash and potholes, or are howling mobs at school board meetings common?

If your new legislative district is conservative enough that the Republican primary is effectively the general election, by all means vote in that primary so that you can vote for sane conservatives and against Qrazies. Republicans in strongly Democratic cities, where the Democratic primary is the mayoral election, often do the same thing, quite properly. However, check your new state’s laws to be sure you can’t be thrown in prison for voting in one primary while belonging to the other party. In some states, you may need to join the party whose primaries you wish to vote in.

As will be noted repeatedly, in GOP minority-ruled states, the legislative representation of existing urban residents is much smaller than their numbers would suggest. Many cities can be “cracked” into multiple mostly-rural districts so that residents’ voices aren’t represented in the legislature at all. Residents of these cities might regain some say in the political process by a simple, yet difficult means: leave the cities, and migrate to smaller communities in that state, enough different smaller communities and neighborhoods in those communities that they cannot be gerrymandered into a handful of districts, in numbers that could allow their votes to mean something at the state or federal district level.

The most extreme “pack and crack” GOP gerrymanders work in part because its victims cluster together and live in a limited number of places that are easily identified and targeted. Live in a big city in one of these states, and your vote won’t count for much. Worse, you may become a target for a state legislature whose leaders actively wish and work to strip your community of political rights or undermine your economic well-being or even your health and safety. (And, ironically, that will be true even if you vote Republican.) Move to a small city in a reddish district, or a reddish town in a swing district, and even if you don’t feel represented by your state legislator, at least the legislature won’t actively work to harm you. It will provide your district with whatever services are consistent with its leaders’ ideology, will not attempt to control your local police department or strip local politicians of power to do their jobs, and won’t try to stop you from getting to the polls to vote for statewide offices.

So the upshot is: unless a community you’re considering is truly riddled with extremism, don’t consider political affiliations in selecting your new town or neighborhood. Only consider where you can survive, make a living, and enjoy a decent quality of life.