Later waves that arrived just after the Great Recession, however, had a different type of migrant identity. As luxury housing continued to be built in New York City and affordable areas disappeared, some residents found the big city “inhospitable to their desired urban lifestyle and identity”: “Many of today’s newcomers to Newburgh use the term ‘priced out’…though few actually left in direct response to their rents rising or their landlord pressuring them to move out,” Ocejo writes. “But cost still played an important role in their decision to relocate…. They felt displaced from their own potential and opportunities to thrive as middle-class urbanites living a specific city lifestyle in the metropolis.”
Herein lies the tension between getting “pushed” from a city versus “pulled.” Some contemporary migrants are pushed from a particular lifestyle and pulled by a promise that it can be built elsewhere. Unlike midcentury white flight—which was highly dependent on the construction of suburban housing, racism, and statecraft—middle-class millennials (especially those facing mounting city prices and remote work) find that smaller cities and towns cater to a broader vision for life, one that provides opportunities to buy a house, build a business, or comfortably raise a family…
“When people move from one community to another…they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness,” Appelbaum writes. What this might mean for rural or metro areas is yet to be seen. But for people moving out of large cities, it’s redefining what upward mobility might look like. Building wealth through housing may be unattainable, but it’s being replaced by a search for a new American dream: self-actualization.
What I read in this description is an intertwining of financial matters and what lifestyle people see themselves having. Costs and resources matter; housing is a sizable portion of many budgets. Housing has become more expensive in many American metropolitan areas. But cultural narratives and individual aspirations also matter; what life does someone want to live? What do they see as a good life?
On this first factor, it helps to have more financial resources. The stories told in this article seem to involve people who had enough resources that they had options of where to live. They could make a major move, perhaps by selling a residence in one place to go to another. Or they had careers and job skills that enabled them to live in multiple places.
On this second factor, Americans have developed a lot of narratives over time about desirable lives. They want a single-family home in the suburbs. They want to be individuals who pursue their own path (the self-actualization suggested above). They want to engage community life. And so on.
Perhaps then it would be helpful to think about a two-pole line that demonstrates how people make decisions about where to live and what to pursue. On one side of the line is finances and what is possible in terms of money and resources. On the other side of the line is an image of the life they want to live and what that entails on a day-to-day and long-term basis. Depending on the current situation personally and in society, they might slide a marker more toward one pole than the other.
(Does this describe how young adults make these decisions or is this limited to a certain subset with particular resources and goals?)
Legally Sociable 