Small-town dreams – Despite problems of big cities, mass exodus to heartland is unlikely

A few obstacles stand in the way of Americans making a mass migration from the crowded, overpriced urban and suburban coasts to the country’s interior.

One of those was illustrated last week when US Airways announced it was going to discontinue nonstop service from Pittsburgh to 20 cities beginning in November.

By Joe Mysak

http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_82_3126199,00.html

The impact of this was spelled out in a story in The New York Times headlined, "Fears of Isolation as US Airways Cuts Flights." The newspaper noted that Ithaca, an upstate New York city, home to Cornell University and a frequent entrant on all those lists of best places to live, was one of 34 cities that are served only by US Airways. Ithaca is on the list of cities to be cut by the airline this November.

It will be tougher to get to Ithaca, and to leave Ithaca.

In his new book Life 2.0, Forbes magazine publisher Rich Karlgaard expounds on the demographic shift away from the coasts to the heartland. Right now, it’s purely anecdotal. If it becomes statistical, if the trickle of new homesteaders West becomes something you can measure, then this could be the public finance story of this decade. I’m skeptical.

It’s easy to see why people would leave the coasts, although you also could probably include Chicago and Dallas in this group because they are big cities with big-city problems. Real estate prices are insane; traffic is a nightmare; quality of life is costly. Karlgaard writes, "a growing number of Americans are seeking a larger life in smaller places."

As the US Airways story shows, though, there are some obstacles facing new homesteaders. Let’s presume that even after cashing out of the high-cost cities you still have to work for a living. Perhaps you can work from home or from a nearby office. You no longer face a horrifying hour-and-a-half commute each way to get to work.

Let’s also say that you have to visit the big cities on a regular basis, to visit clients in New York or Boston or San Francisco or Los Angeles. You have to drive 50 or 100 miles to an airport, catch a flight to one of the hubs and catch another flight to your final destination.

If everything goes perfectly, the trip takes hours. In the real world, especially the real world of Midwestern weather, replete as it is with thunderstorms, tornadoes and blizzards, that trip could take two days. The era of small-jet "taxi service" might remedy this problem, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

That relative inaccessibility of small- town America is only one reason to be skeptical about talk of any mass demographic shift from the coasts.

A far larger reason is culture, the sheer, exuberant variety and number of experiences open to those who either live in, or close to, big cities. There’s not one museum. There’s a half-dozen. There’s an orchestra, maybe two, and an almost unlimited number of venues offering music of all kinds. There’s dance. There’s theater. And there are theaters, offering first-run movies.

That’s all just for starters. There are nice things about small towns, but variety isn’t one of them.

It wasn’t too long ago that academicians and editorial writers were talking about the death of the cities. That didn’t happen. Many of those kids whose parents and even grandparents fled to the suburbs to give them a better life, came back to the cities.

Maybe cities of a certain size don’t die. Maybe people move away to raise their families, and young, ambitious strivers, who don’t mind living four to an overpriced apartment and not owning an automobile and paying too much for everything, move in, in a self-perpetuating process of renewal.

Yet there’s something afoot, to judge from the response to a column in which I reviewed Karlgaard’s book. Just the idea of leading a "larger life in a smaller place" is evidently very appealing.

Mass migration, however, seems unlikely. What we’re probably talking about is the movement of a small number of people to a smallish number of "hot" cities with lots of culture, character, amenities. These people either work for themselves, can work for themselves or work for the limited number of companies that tolerate telecommuting.

They will be accompanied in the move to the heartland by a certain number of people who are profoundly disaffected by the political liberalism of cities, and by people starting families, in search of those cheap, 3,000-square- foot houses with pools and three-car garages that are the stuff of urban legend. A fair proportion of this bunch is probably moving back home, or at least near where they still have family.

This is still a big public finance story. Where are they going, and why?

Joe Mysak is a Bloomberg News columnist.