Maine

[Regarding Maine, note my previously expressed concern about the current population and limited agricultural productivity of this entire region. Not many people should move here.] Mainers have traditionally been a special breed. Many do very hard work in harsh environments on land or sea. The region is poor and insular, with a distinctive culture and accent (notwithstanding the recent “Southernification” of rural areas), and outsiders stick out. If you’re going to move to Maine from anyplace farther away than New Hampshire, show up wearing Carhartts and be ready to work hard without complaining for a long time to fit in. The biggest city is Portland, which at 68,000 people is hardly a teeming metropolis. I exclude ridiculously expensive suburbs of Portland from consideration, but housing is pricey in the state in general, and anyplace that’s farther south and has ocean views is substantially costlier than inland towns. The options that might seem most reasonable to the middle or working classes include the following, which are mostly well above sea level except as noted.

 

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Georgia

 

Six million of Georgia’s less than 11 million people live in the northwestern Atlanta metropolitan area. Augusta, on the eastern border, has a metro area population of 600,000. The third-largest metro area is Savannah in the southeast, 400,000 people, along the Atlantic Coast in the high-risk zone. That tells you which areas may be most unsustainable.

If conservative government is your main reason for choosing a Southern state, note that Georgia’s demographics are now such that, if everyone gets to vote, the state is now purple. The state government is trying to ensure that not everyone does get to vote, but as of this writing there’s a significant backlash to their efforts resulting in high turnout by newly empowered African-American voters, who are mostly Democrats. It’s difficult to imagine this state staying out of the Confederacy if the Union splits up, between its cultural ties and its geographic location. However, if that were really important to you, this might not be a safe bet.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of small cities that have good-looking economic numbers are located within the Atlanta metropolitan area. That area encompasses several whole counties, so some portions are more urban than others, but still, you shouldn’t want to add to that level of sprawl. Inland cities with more modest metro areas tend to have above-average unemployment rates, so migrants might not be easily employed. Rural areas, including large parts of the southern and eastern portions of the state, are generally quite poor and, unless you want to buy a farm, have few economic opportunities for outsiders. For these reasons I’d suggest that out-of-state migrants should not consider Georgia as a destination. Here are a few examples of smaller urban areas that might be of interest to current residents thinking of leaving Atlanta:

 

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