Is Green Acres the place to be?

[next_migration]

Assuming for the moment that you know which geographic region you would be wisest to move to, how should you narrow your search within that region?

 

 

For most people, let’s acknowledge upfront, the right place to live is where I can get a job, for whatever type of work you are qualified to do. If you are a professional or skilled worker for whom few potential jobs exist, you’ll likely prefer to apply for jobs in places of interest, get hired, then move to whatever community the employer is in. If you’re a logger, you’d better move someplace with a lot of trees. People who do jobs that are commonplace or in demand almost everywhere (e.g., road construction, auto mechanics, teaching, nursing) might feel more able to move to the perfect community and then look for work. Of course, these days some people are able to work remotely; just check the internet service before you move.

It would be much better not to move to a huge city that already has too many people. We discussed their environmental and logistical problems before, and we will see repeatedly that they have special political problems in GOP-dominated states. Many white-collar professional or cultural workers may think that they have to live in big cities to advance their careers, e.g., as medical specialists, scientists, artists, or musicians. This is usually not true, though. You probably could get a job, or even start a business, that uses your skills in a moderate-sized city. It would probably pay less (but your cost of living will be lower) and it would probably convey less status in your field. But how heavily do you prioritize status, vs. comfort and security?

You also don’t want to move to a very small town unless you have local ties. In little towns where everyone knows everyone, unless you are part of the gene pool, you will be an outsider for the rest of your life. There are few jobs in small towns, and a stranger from another state will not be hired over a local who has been known for decades. If you really insist on moving to a small town where you lack family, it would be wise to select one where many influential residents belong to a church you already belong to or would be happy to join. In some places, 10,000 people is too small—and where you come from also makes a difference.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many well-to-do city folks fleeing to their second homes in rural areas were shocked to find that they were barred from reaching them, barricaded into them by armed locals, or expelled from them en masse by a county order. The locals had very legitimate fears about large numbers of outsiders with money who bought up limited grocery supplies and might have imported more cases of illness than small local hospitals could handle. Still, urbanites are used to a world run by written laws, in which a person who pays the mortgage and property taxes on a house has the right to live in it. In an isolated town where genetic ties determine who is part of the community, such official paperwork might be necessary but it isn’t sufficient. If you live in such a town full time for a few years and get along well with the residents, they might let you go on living there if the rule of law declines, on sufferance.

Or they might not. Here’s an anonymous comment made on a conservative blog regarding possible breakup of the Union:

 

I could see a wild dash towards the coasts if a breakup happens, as I’m betting that the West Coast expats/migrants are being tolerated elsewhere solely because they have money to enrich the local landowners and business owners. Should the Dollar take on the ultimate value of all currencies (nothing), the people from the west coast will experience a radical collapse in various forms of status and, if not directly told to get out, would find themselves pushed away from their new ‘homes.’

 

If you were less than firmly embedded in a parochial community when the protection of U.S. law went away, whether you were allowed to go on living there—or at all—might depend upon whether your neighbors considered you to be more valuable to them than the stuff they thought you might have stored in your house. So be careful.

There are literally thousands of suitable eastern communities within the range of, say, 5000 to 200,000 people. Medium-sized cities may be questionably sustainable in the long term. (Day and Hall [2016] evaluate pretty much every metro area worthy of the name as medium-risk at best.) However, we have to remember that migration now needs to consider present circumstances, not those of the far, post-fossil-fuel future. To significantly slow and reduce the human suffering of the coming collapse of the Southwest, at least several million people should emigrate from that region in the coming decade. Where could so many people go?

Many communities have been growing by far more than 10% per decade, as are some states (unfortunately, including a couple of the most imperiled Southwestern states—some people haven’t gotten the memo). Let’s assume, to be conservative and use easy round numbers, that any town can accept an extra 10% of climate-motivated migration over 10 years, or about 1% per year, while giving its housing market and available employment and schools time to adjust without disruption. If you wanted to find new homes for a million people, hypothetically you could direct 100,000 people to each of 10 places, or 100 people each to 10,000 places. But there are not 10,000 communities that are big enough for migrants to consider. There are more than ten big cities that could take 100,000 each, but those cities are really too big already and, as I will remind you more than once, increasingly deprived of political rights.

There are just about 1000 communities in the Northeastern region that have 10,000 people or more, and you could envision each of them receiving 1000 people; however, some of those are suburbs of big metropolitan areas and/or intolerably expensive, or conversely too impoverished to supply jobs. And in fact, we would really be looking for homes in that region for several million people. Therefore, the little towns of several thousand that we might believe will be the most sustainable in the distant future will not be able to absorb all the people who should move in the near future.

Some people will need to move to regional cities of 100,000 or 200,000 people or more, which can usually absorb an extra 10,000 or 20,000 people apiece. Later, some of those people, having established regional ties and picked up regional culture, might move to nearby small towns and be more easily welcomed. Rather than trying to move from, say, Los Angeles to Rhinelander, WI, you’d be wiser to move to Green Bay or Lansing and spend several years becoming a Wisconsinite (and learning to cope with that city’s relatively bearable winter) before moving to a small, remote town. You would then not have to describe yourself as newly arrived from L.A., and would probably be both more welcome and more competent to fit in.

Alternatively, you might spend the rest of your life in Green Bay or Lansing, and your child might marry someone from a smaller town and make a smart choice to move there. The rearrangement of North American populations that climate change and American collapse will cause will take several generations to complete. Your immediate goal should be to move not to a place where you think your great-grandchildren will be best placed to make a living, but to a place where you think you will.

But it also isn’t feasible for everyone to move to those medium-sized cities. There are only about 40 cities roughly in the 100,000 to 300,000 population range in the northeastern region, where I would expect most of my readers to prefer to go. Some of those are part of much larger metropolitan areas that I strongly recommend avoiding. So directing 20,000 people to each of 50 medium-big cities wouldn’t work either.

There can in fact be room for millions of migrants to find housing and an income, but they can’t all head for the same places, nor the same types of place. Looking only at the Northeast again, several hundred thousand people can certainly find space in the medium-sized cities. There are around 150 cities with populations of 50,000 to 100,000; though some will be intolerably located, several hundred thousand people might be absorbed there, and several hundred thousand more by the similar number of small cities in the 30,000 to 50,000 range. Several hundred thousand more people could move to the several hundred towns having 10,000 to 30,000 residents. The similarly numerous towns having 5000 to 10,000 residents have limited job opportunities and many would be unwelcoming to migrants from the coast, but over time many of them could accept several hundred more people apiece; in fact, a few dozen extra residents per year might provide a valuable boost to local economies. Though larger cities are far less numerous, each one can take far more newcomers, resulting in relatively even potential distributions across size categories.

If migrants are not to find a situation where they face tight job markets and unaffordable housing, while nearby towns languish as their populations decline, everyone can’t move to the same state, nor to the same kind of community. Most readers who might consider moving soon would be moving from large urban areas, so many, if not most, of you should try to move to smaller communities than you now live in. You might have stereotypes about small towns in “flyover” states, but the worst negatives are hardly universally true. Smaller towns do have limited jobs and few urban luxuries. However, in view of the anticipated future of decline, learning to live contentedly without such luxuries might be wiser than striving to hold onto them, especially if you have or want kids.

It is easier, though, for most people to move to a city, where nobody will notice another stranger or care where you came from. Lifelong urbanites often don’t transition well to very small towns, if they don’t have a background that helps them to adapt to the local culture, and can become an object of suspicion. Housing is on average more expensive in cities, but some small towns have almost no rental housing, making them out of reach for newcomers who can’t afford to buy a house. Many (though by no means all) are almost all-white, and even when residents are generally tolerant, visible minorities can feel that they stick out like a sore thumb. These days, with the country approaching that dangerous polarization stage, anyone who appears too obviously liberal might be unwelcome or unsafe in many small towns. The more your family’s demographics, job skills, and cultural tastes resemble those of typical small-town residents, the more strongly you should consider moving to a small town. That both puts you in a maximally sustainable place, and leaves more space in larger towns for your compatriots who really wouldn’t be welcomed in most small towns.

Californians should consider themselves extra likely to fall into the latter group. California is despised by right-wingers for various reasons, including its high racial diversity, social tolerance, and suffocating regulations. In addition, there is a noted trend of richer Californians moving out of the state and settling in numbers in a few particularly attractive small towns, where their wealth allows them to bid up the price of the limited available housing. Locals resent them not only out of prejudice, but because their arrival increases lifelong residents’ cost of living. Residents of small towns (like the fellow whose thinly veiled violent fantasies I quoted earlier) may groan when they hear about Californians moving in next door in a way that they wouldn’t if it were an Arizonan family, even if the family has the same income and pays the same price for the house. Being able to avoid this hostility by a staged move or a strategic choice about how you describe your origins could be beneficial.

It is also important, to limit this hostility and to avoid economic difficulties, that not too many people move to the same places in a short period of time. This is a point I emphasize repeatedly for good reason. Nice towns can be spoiled by too much population increase happening too fast. While I mention in later chapters some examples of small towns that appear promising, they are far from being the only small towns in those states where one might be able to make a living or find trustworthy neighbors. If you want to live in a small town, the best choice would be to go someplace where you can claim personal or family ties, or else do some investigation and pick a place that not too many other people are likely to pick. You do not want to be seen as part of an invading wave, but as one person or family who just happens to have moved in.

 

In this internet era, there are excellent free tools that everyone thinking of leaving a high-risk zone can use to help them identify more promising destinations. City-Data is a free website that amasses huge amounts of data on America’s cities, towns, and villages, from population and demographic figures to average house costs, income, commuting time, local natural disasters, water system violations, nearby schools and colleges, local businesses, radio and TV stations, and so on. It is invaluable for anyone searching for a new place to live who doesn’t already have an obvious destination, though it contains enough errors and omissions that critical information should be verified elsewhere. The Advanced City Search tool, though often several years out of date, allows you to filter using huge numbers of criteria to see what places fit your desires.

Niche provides less detailed data, but has the useful feature of hosting anonymous reviews of tens of thousands of communities. No individual reviews can give you a better idea of a big city’s economy, government or culture than hard data or news stories, since any one person’s experience of a city is so limited. Such reviews are most useful for small towns, and even there should be taken with a grain of salt. There will always be residents or ex-residents with an axe to grind, so look at the overall number of good vs. bad reviews before taking criticisms too seriously, except for criticisms that could only be made by members of minority groups. If there are 10 reviews claiming that a small town is fantastic and one claiming that it’s a crime-ridden drug den, that one person is probably a bit paranoid; if the numbers are evenly balanced, that’s a red flag. Further, if your dream is to live in a place where you can walk in the woods by day and see the stars by night, bad reviews that amount to “the bars don’t stay open late enough” might read as positive to you.

Let’s go through an example. I mentioned the appalling housing costs in New York City, which are likely to persist until local conditions deteriorate far enough that the wealthy people who run up those costs can’t insulate themselves from the problems anymore and lots of people start moving out. But America’s market failures, like its climate risks, are not at all evenly distributed, and there’s plenty of land in the states of the eastern seaboard that isn’t part of the megalopolis. Let’s suppose that you’re an NYC resident who wants to stay in the state to be near family; you insist on living in a city big enough to have cultural resources; and you don’t want to have to work three jobs to pay the rent.

We consult City-Data.com’s advanced city search tool with three criteria: cities in New York with populations over 50,000 and median gross rent under $900. We’ll find eight cities, ranging from Utica to Albany. Those of largest size are Syracuse (according to the returned table, about 145,000 people), Buffalo (259,000), and Rochester (210,000). We can follow links to the City-Data pages to find out more, as well as consulting Google, Wikipedia, etc. Here we learn that City-Data’s data for the search function is not kept up to date, so any criterion of great importance to you needs to be verified elsewhere. On the individual city pages, all three of these cities are reported to have median rent in 2019 that was about $100 higher (and of course, the populations have increased). Those figures are doubtless higher yet post-COVID, as recent skyrocketing rents in many cities have not yet been incorporated into major databases. Still, their relative affordability probably hasn’t been changed much by the pandemic, and the overall cost of living index is reported as 101.4 to 102.3 for these cities, where 100 is the nationwide average, compared to 162.3 for New York, NY.

Each of these three cities has a large, diverse economy, over a hundred parks and natural or landscaped public areas, a public transit system, and numerous cultural resources (symphony orchestras, theaters and museums, public festivals, diverse ethnic restaurants). Buffalo also has major-league football and hockey teams. Schenectady and Albany are smaller and more costly, but a shorter Amtrak ride to get to NYC if you wanted to be able to do that regularly. Buffalo is more expensive, and as Robin Wall Kimmerer observes, Syracuse is home to an entire landscape made of industrial waste, so let’s consider Rochester as our first choice.

Rochester is an ethnically diverse port city on the south shore of Lake Ontario. Its metropolitan area includes Irondequoit, a much smaller and less diverse municipality also on the list of eight hits, which has a harbor used for fishing. Both cities, however, are mostly located well above sea level. In a less globalized, resource-limited future, the economic advantages of this location are likely to be more conspicuous. Unemployment in Rochester was above the state average in late 2020, probably worsened by the pandemic, but cultural and employment opportunities are usually numerous. There are several hospitals, several universities and colleges (which have many jobs for both academics and non-academics), and importantly, one of the largest surviving centers of manufacturing in the U.S., including some major corporate factories and hundreds of smaller employers, mostly in high-tech industries. Rochester also has an active music industry. The professions that could not be employed in this city would be few indeed. Public schools are well-rated; crime, like in most large cities, is above-average but has been declining; racial inequality is a noted problem but one that may be found, sadly, in most American cities.

You may think life in the Big Apple is better than in Rochester, or any of those other smaller cities. Maybe it is, but is it more than three times better (the ratio of pre-pandemic median rents)? Or even 60% better (the ratio of overall costs of living, ignoring the question of how much more of one’s income must be spent on a smaller, less comfortable shelter)? If not, then unless you genuinely must live in NYC for career or family reasons, why should you pay so much more just for the privilege of living there? Maybe Rochester or Buffalo could offer 97% of the things you like about city living—and with their lower costs of living, even if your paycheck was smaller, you might be able to enjoy urban amenities like restaurant meals, concerts, or sporting events more often, and use some of the money you save to go to NYC on vacation once in a while.

As a bonus, you’d be less vulnerable to climate catastrophes and associated supply chain disruptions. A few thousand more Manhattanites moving to each of these smaller metros each year would hardly throw the local economy or housing market into chaos. It could make the future much brighter for those individuals—and just a little brighter, too, for those remaining in NYC who would face a bit less less crowding and competition for housing. Who wants to be an early adopter?