An irresistible migration meets an unmovable population
No frontiers, no good
That’s a shot of our living room, all gussied up, along with the rest of our home in Yellow Springs OH, for its close-up shots, 3D tour, drone shots from above, etc. Our house will go up for sale in a few days because we’ve decided we’re leaving Ohio and heading to Minnesota. No illusions about escaping the tumult of climate change; just like the odds better there. More prosaically, the air quality and pollen here are too tough for me to handle, along with several family members (we are still a household of 5, despite three defections).
It is intimidating to move, but this will be my … let me see:
Born in Chilton WI (WISCONSIN), moved to Boscobel WI as an infant
Moved to another home there
Moved to the dorms at UW Madison
Moved home for one last summer
Moved back to the dorms
Sublet my brother Jim’s apartment for the summer (met future wife)
Got an apartment with others in Madison
Moved to South Madison apartment
Moved to Harvard dorm in Cambridge MA (MASSACHUSETTS)
Summer spent in St. Petersburg, Soviet Union
Move into apartment in Somerville MA
Moved to apartment in Quincy MA
Move to apartment in Brookline MA (was super to both towers)
Moved to West Baltimore MD apartment (MARYLAND)
Moved to Alexandria VA apartment (VIRGINIA)
Bought townhouse in Springfield VA
Rented home in Portsmouth RI (RHODE ISLAND)
Rented home in Middletown RI
Bought a home in Portsmouth RI
Moved into apartment in Greenwood IN (INDIANA)
Built and moved into house in Greenwood IN
Lost that house in crash (2008-2010)
Rented home in Greenwood IN
Rented home in Madison WI (WISCONSIN), then put up for sale
Rented home in Sun Prairie WI, then put up for sale
Rented home in Verona WI, then put up for sale
Rented home in Verona WI, then taken over by owners
Rented home in Madison WI (me and kids) and another home in Riverside OH (spouse taking job)
Bought home in Yellow Springs OH (OHIO)
Selling home in OH and looking to rent in Northfield MN (MINNESOTA)
Being as I am 62 years old, I have averaged a move every two years of my life.
I’ve written about this wanderlust before:
I know they’ll eventually catch me, but until then …
Has it been harder on our kids than just staying in one place for the long haul?
Have to say yes. Being the new kid in the new school … that’s the stuff tweener movies are made of. But that process has given my kids serious agency; they know what it is to star in their own film — comedy or not.
It’s also yielded kids unafraid to live abroad (Japan, Italy) or to move far away (New Mexico).
Me? I’m just excited to finally move west of the Mississippi.
I also love Central time.
And being only five hours from Lambeau — even if it is in Viking territory … very nice.
Having traveled and worked (mostly giving speeches) in all 50 states, I have really loved getting to see so much of the country, along with the opportunity to live in a total of 8 states (with upcoming Minnesota). That’s a lot of different license plates and driver’s licenses. It’s also a lot of complex, part-year-residence tax returns (the bane of my existence).
My spouse Vonne matches and exceeds my personal total, having also lived in New York and Georgia.
The fact that I spent the first 15 years of my career pretty much working exclusively for the US Military/Defense Department as a civilian did normalize the moving around stuff, because we were constantly surrounded by families doing the same every two-to-three years.
Have we wasted money and wealth living this life? Most definitely. But I grew up middle class in a very small town (my wife grew up on farm), so our expectations are modest as a rule.
We’ve also based a lot of moves on our kids and their school needs, pretty much moving the lot of them to wherever was best for the most needy of them at that time.
My Mom, parent of seven, used to reply to the question, “Who’s your favorite” with the sly answer, “The one who needs me most right now.”
The moving life also fits the blended nature of our family: three kids we had and three immigrants we adopted (one girl from China, two sisters from Ethiopia) — basically the Bradgelina package absent the wealth — and divorce.
I always feel nostalgic and excited when moving towards a move. I already drove a 26-foot Penske and loaded up a storage unit in Northfield MN over the holidays, so my blood is pumping (especially around a severely dislocated index finger — another story, along with the 3-stitches-long scar on my forehead, also still healing).
It’s also intimidating, like I said. You need to figure everything out all over again (state and county and local), schools, doctors, dentists, blah-blah-blah. A move is about a two-year adjustment leading up to, and recovering from.
But it’s also liberating: we pare down our stuff. I’ve also become arguably the greatest packer of antique furniture in the world (ah, the value of wood glue!).
Beyond those simple bits, there’s just the thrill of the new and the regular opportunity to reinvent yourself (That was Ohio Tom, this is Minnesota Tom — much nicer!).
Still, beyond our personal timing, why relate all this?
Americans used to move a lot more frequently throughout our history. It defined us first as immigrants and then as settlers and pioneers, and then as urbanites, then as suburbanites, and then as bedroom community-commuter types, and then as snow-bird retirees.
Now, the calculations include climate risk, Red-v-Blue states (the distinction grows more severe), and other intangibles like being stuck because you can’t leave your employer’s healthcare or you need to be near aging parents (which drove two of our moves) or … you get the idea.
Everything as of late seems to be pushing us NOT to move.
There is a new book on this dynamic (or lack thereof).
The interview:
VOX: The surprising theory that explains modern American life
The actual book:
Stuck: HOW THE PRIVILEGED AND THE PROPERTIED BROKE THE ENGINE OF AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY, by Yoni Applebaum
The thesis summarized:
How did America cease to be the land of opportunity?
We take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case.
Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for two hundred years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity …
Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, shows us that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in nineteenth-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village—has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum shows us that these problems have a common explanation: people can’t move as readily as they used to. They are, in a word, stuck.
Not hard to guess the political outcome: MAGA is very stuck; non-MAGA tends to move more.
From the interview:
Your research found that Donald Trump’s strongest support in 2016 came from people who stayed in and around their hometowns, while those who moved away were more likely to back Hillary Clinton. Do you see a connection between staying put and a rightward political drift?
There’s a lot of good social science research to suggest that moving doesn’t just change people’s economic destinies and the prospects of their children, it shifts their whole mindset. Researchers have found that people who relocate to new places are more open to new experiences, they tend to necessarily be more open to diversity, and conceive of the world as a place where there can be win-wins.
People who want to move, and can’t, grow more cynical, more pessimistic, more inclined to see the world as zero-sum. They may also grow more isolated, more set in their ways and habits. I think that a society that ties people down is likely to produce a politics that views change as threatening and diversity as dangerous.
Why this matters at this point in world history: this century will be defined by mass migration, mostly from the lower latitudes to the higher latitudes (and most of that being to the actual North). The growing immobility and the political conservatism it generates thus arrives at exactly the worst time.
We have an aging, birth-dearth North having to accommodate some major migratory flows from the Global South. That North grows more conservative and “stuck” and defensive just as that South grows more ambitious, demanding, and mobile. That gets you a Veep stating that the crisis of our age is uncontrolled immigration — not China or nukes or climate change or demographic aging.
No, that statement of fear cuts right to the chase: Yes, climate change is driving this. And yes, the demographics make sense (old North needs new people).
But, screw those complex situations and solutions and instead just say it’s all about keeping them out! Because, that’s simple and direct and speaks to voters’ fears.
If you can’t imagine moving, then what is scarier to you than the “hordes” headed your way?
NOTHING.
Problem is, being stuck … in the mud of modern life, it costs us as a nation. It dulls our ambitions and our innovative mindset. More and more we want technology to cocoon us — the great lesson of home delivery during COVID (Why walk down the street to a store when Amazon will bring it to me tomorrow?).
It’s even slowing us down in our own homes. My kids routinely text me from the next room over in our house. Funny, I know, but that’s a real indicator of how sedentary we can become.
You know where that takes us over the long haul …
Not pretty.
And it’s not just Latin Americans heading our way that is the scary prospect/issue. We’ll see mass migration from South to North within the US, altering that long-term flow in the opposite direction. Then, thinking longer and “higher,” there is going to be intense migratory pressure from America into Canada this century, meaning we’re getting hitched one way or the other, with Trump’s recent taunts speaking to that inevitable future. I mean, half a percent of humanity on 7 percent of the world’s non-Antarctic landmass? Ditto for Russia, Greenland, Iceland, the Nordics … all of them.
Life finds a way.
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