Relocating is clearly a case study in odd human behavior. When the wife and I got married, we found a rural mountain area that was roughly equidistant to our jobs. I headed 30-40 miles south every day, she went 27 miles in the other direction. Over the next 25 years, our mountain area was over-run with ultra-commuters, who fled NYC to be 100 miles away from the city. Our county was heading for quadrupling it's population when the recession hit. During that entire time, the southern metro area I worked in was seeing serious inflation in housing costs, and overall unaffordability, which was the very reason that the NYC crowd was migrating. The odd part is that the number of people migrating north for a better life, 45 minutes to an hour away, seemed negligible.
At one point, a few years back, a lot of the local movers and shakers in my mountain community were all excited, since a long anticipated highway connection was going to be completed, cutting 20-25 minutes off the commune times to the south. Several told me that this was the break they were waiting for, since now the great migration from the south would finally begin. (This logic ignored that limited access, high speed, highways have connected the two areas for 50-60 years, and there has long been availability of desirable things like cheap land, good schools, recreation, and a low cost of living) I explained to a couple of these folks that "logically" their thought process was correct. Land was a small fraction of the cost, existing single family homes were dramatically more affordable, and schools were more than acceptable. What they didn't figure in was the intangible, which was something I missed for a long time. Most folks just don't want to move, unless they have no real option. The decades long boom of greater NYC folks relocating, looked huge to us, with ten thousand of them moving in, on a good year. In the big picture, given the population of the NYC region, it was statistically insignificant. When you take that same percentage and apply it to the exponentially smaller metro area south of the mountain, it means that, at best, a couple of hundred folks might, maybe relocate to the region, in a good year. A very big region, where a few hundred new people blend right in. Which means that, in the end it will all be far from a trend, and actually pretty meaningless. At this point, I called it exactly as it's played out.
Topic: Relatives who just don't get it (Read 3390250 times)
