Why doesn't everyone just move to a family compound?
New York, I love you but you're bringing me down
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Over the last few weeks I’ve written about how I moved to a different city to be closer to family, and also about my friends’ experience living on a family compound. Obviously these are complex experiences, but the takeaway from these posts is that living closer to family has overall been a positive thing for me and my friends.
So why doesn’t everyone just do that? Why are family compounds — or, just living near family — often so hard to pull off?
There are plenty of reasons, but here’s a big one: People have to move to find jobs. And more so than in the past, they currently have to move to a shrinking handful of “superstar cities”1 to get those jobs.
This wasn’t always the case.
For most of the 20th Century, different regions of the U.S. were actually getting closer together in terms of wealth. So, poorer places were catching up to richer places. Economists call this idea regional income convergence.
This convergence had to do with labor supply and demand2, but what matters for our purposes here is that people had options; you could move to the big city for greater opportunity, but that wasn’t your only opportunity. You could also reasonably expect to support yourself and progress in a career in a city other than, say, New York or San Francisco. As Brookings Institute senior fellow Mark Muro once told the Wall Street Journal, up until about 1980 “metros were becoming more like each other. Incomes were converging, and industries were becoming more distributed across place.”
But that’s no longer the case.
In recent decades (as wages were also declining), that convergence stopped and a handful of big cities began pulling ahead3. Their wages were rising faster, they were getting more of the jobs, and their share of high-skilled workers was increasing. These are places like San Francisco and New York, and they’ve been described as “superstar” cities because they so far outpaced other places, much in the way that, say, LeBron James is a “superstar” compared to the average basketball player.
I don’t want to get too into the weeds on why this happened. (The sources in the footnotes go into detail, but the tldr is that it had a lot to do with housing costs.) Suffice it here to say that more and more if you’re highly educated and ambitious, you increasingly have to move to a superstar city like New York or Los Angeles for your career.
And on the flip side, if you don’t have a high-paying job you’re likely being squeezed out of the superstar cities by soaring housing costs4. The result is a narrower range of options and a winner-takes-all environment when it comes to jobs5.
The urbanist Richard Florida has described this effect as “cumulative and self-reinforcing,” meaning the superstar cities keep pulling further and further ahead over time. And he has pointed out that such cities are “not just the places where the most ambitious and most talented people want to be—they are where such people feel they need to be.”
What’s really wild to me is how recent this trend is. It’s basically only as old as the oldest millennials. What a time to be alive.
Plenty of experts have explored the economic complexities of regional income convergence and the rise of superstar cities.
But what stands out to me is how this trend makes it really hard to build an extended family network in any given place. Everyone in a family is being pulled more powerfully than ever before to that single region that specializes in their given field, or alternatively to that place they can actually afford.
My own experience illustrates this challenge.
At the very end of 2010, I got my first full-time job as a daily newspaper reporter in Provo Utah. My starting salary was $27,000 a year. A couple of years later, I got a job at the nearby Salt Lake Tribune, making in the mid $30,000 range.
This was a while ago, but these were abysmal salaries for a college graduate even at the time (my first gig actually meant a pay cut compared to a temp technical writing job I had been doing). And there wasn’t much room for advancement; the Tribune was constantly laying people off and many of the regional and smaller papers were dying or dead. I soon realized that if I wanted anything resembling a middle class wage, and if I wanted to have some upward career momentum, I’d have to move to a bigger place.
However, my family had over the years congregated in the Salt Lake metro area6, meaning I also had a choice: I could accept a stunted career and wages but have my family network, or I could abandon the family network. I wasn’t thinking much about families at the time, so — like many other people before and after me — I chose the career.
In 2014, my wife and I moved to Los Angeles so I could take a job at BuzzFeed News. My starting salary at BuzzFeed was more than twice the salary I had been making only 18 months earlier in Provo, and I saw regular (and occasionally decently large7) raises.
Journalism is a bit of an extreme case because it’s never been super high paying and because it has been especially beleaguered in recent years. But professionals in all sorts of industries are having to make very similar choices all the time.
This makes it really hard to get everyone in a family in the same place. I couldn’t afford to buy my family members houses so they could join me in LA, after all, and in any case they had to move to cities that specialized in their fields. For example, I have one family member who works in finance. There are finance jobs in LA, but LA is really not a hub for that industry. If you’re skilled and ambitious in the financial industry, you’ll eventually have to move to New York.
This works across generations too. Los Angeles is mainly a hub for the entertainment industry, so if I had stayed there until my kids grew up one of two things might happen: Either they’d go into entertainment and live by me, or (more likely) they’d choose another career and end up in Austin or San Francisco or New York or Seattle or wherever.
Or, maybe they’d choose a lower-paying job and have to move away thanks to the unsustainable cost of living. And then the cycle would repeat with their children, forcing each generation to start from scratch as a nuclear unit in a new place.
All of which is to say, superstar cities reinforce the supremacy of nuclear families over multigenerational ones.
I’m oversimplifying this of course and cities have always drawn people away from the hinterlands8. But today these forces are only getting stronger as prosperous places pull further ahead of poorer places. And that means more and more people are going to have to choose between their extended family networks and either A) their careers (if they’re high earners) or, B) their cost of living (if they’re lower earners).
I’m really only scratching the surface of this topic here, but I hope at least the answer to the question in the headline is clear now: When people don’t live near family it’s often because they can’t afford to, either because they were priced out of an expensive place or because they had to pursue a career in a far-flung supercity.
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Bonus: Headlines to check out this week:
The Bonds Trump Broke May Be Broken For Good
“Corin Goodwin, a 53-year-old communications consultant in Seattle, hasn’t seen her dad since October 2016, when they had a falling-out over the presidential race, in which he supported Trump and she supported Hillary Clinton. Since then, they’ve had only occasional email contact. “When he passes, I don't know if I will even be informed, which really freaks me out,” Goodwin told me.
The global increase in loneliness
“And that is when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put in place a particular form of capitalism that we call neoliberalism. A dog-eat-dog greed ... has dominated and spread across the world ever since then.
… There are a number of reasons why it engendered greater loneliness. First, it presided over an era of ever-growing wealth and income gaps. … And not that the rich can't be lonely — they can be — but we do know that if you're on a low-income [bracket] or if you're unemployed, you are more likely to be lonely.”
The Future of Remote Work is the Opposite of Lonely
“So imagine: A day or two working with your friends, a day or two in the office, a day or two at home with or without my partner, or my partners, or my garden. Time, during the day, to go to the grocery store, to mail a package, to go play with a friend’s kid for an hour, to take a nap, to read a book for research in the sun, to take a work call while walking the dog. Maybe I have a lot of concentrated work on a Thursday, and then do an interview on a Friday and go ski.”
“Superstar Cities.” Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai. National Bureau of Economic Research. July 2006.
“Why has regional income convergence in the U.S. declined?” Peter Ganong and Daniel W. Shoag. National Bureau of Economic Research. July 2017. Also, this link for a more reader-friendly write up on the findings.
“The Geography of Prosperity.” Ryan Nunn, Jana Parsons, and Jay Shambaugh. The Hamilton Project. September 2018.
Labor mobility in general has also been declining. For more on that trend, read this paper by David Perkins in Macroeconomic Policy.
“The age of winner-take-all cities.” Kim Hart. Axios. Jul 10, 2019.
I was born in Utah but raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles. However, by the time I graduated from college a majority of my family had moved to Utah, where we had deep ancestral roots.
This was in a headier, more cash-infused time at BuzzFeed. I think my first raise at the company was $10,000 a year. My recollection is that subsequent raises were smaller, but they still happened regularly, including at least one year during which I got two raises. After I left in late 2018, the company went through some more challenging times and unfortunately had layoffs, among other things.
My own family’s mythology begins with our ancestors coming to America. At it’s core, it’s a story about people choosing opportunity over family. I don’t hold that against my ancestors — it led to my existence after all — but it’s worth it for me to be aware of.