Will climate change tank my dreams of a multigenerational family?

Or, how I'm trying to adopt a multigenerational mindset part 3

Me visiting the Great Salt Lake a few years ago.

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Here’s my thesis for today, so you know where I’m going right off the bat: If you want to live in a place with lots of friends (so, less loneliness) and where your kids, grandkids, etc. can always be a part of your life, you have to live in a place where people have lots of economic opportunities. And more and more, climate change is going to determine where those opportunities exist.

Here’s the longer version:

Imagine starting a family in Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, the American car industry was still ascendent, and the city’s population was inching toward 2 million. In fact, between the 1920s and the 1940s, Detroit was consistently the fourth largest city in the U.S. If you were a parent, it probably seemed like a safe bet to assume that not only you but also your kids and grandkids would have plenty of future opportunity right there in the booming metropolis of Detroit.

But obviously, that would have been a bad bet. Detroit’s population has been shrinking for decades and the city now has more than 1 million fewer people than it did at its peak. I know a few people in Detroit and they’re bullish on the city’s prospects¹, but there’s no question that the amount of opportunity and prosperity in Detroit pales in comparison to what the city once offered, and what many other cities currently offer.

I thought about Detroit a lot when I chose to move to Salt Lake City. As I’ve previously written, I moved (back) to Utah in order to be closer to my extended family².

But I also thought long and hard about whether it was a place where my kids and grandkids would find opportunity 30, 60, or 90 years down the road.

My thinking was that things like jobs, relationships, friendships etc. are born out of real-life social networks, or the proverbial “village” most of us need to thrive. And I wanted to live in a place where the village had the potential to outlast me. Put another way, I wanted to choose a city that over the long term wasn’t going to experience the kind of reduction in opportunity that Detroit did. After all, it’s going to be really hard to have a village of friends and family when everyone is leaving for greener pastures³.

To that end, I combed through a bunch of economic and demographic data and concluded that as best I could tell Salt Lake’s prospects were fairly promising. It probably won’t be the most prosperous city in the near future, but its trajectory at the moment is definitely upward.

But more and more, I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t look at enough data on one topic in particular: climate change.

Here’s the situation in Salt Lake: Like many places, this summer has broken a number of heat records and this June was the hottest in 147 years of record keeping; wildfire smoke from across the West has on a number of occasions blanketed the city in a miserable, suffocating haze; and the Great Salt Lake is shrinking to its lowest level in 170 years, exposing a lakebed that has become infused with toxic chemicals.

I don’t think any of these things are suddenly going to destroy Salt Lake City. And aside from questions about weather and climate, there are tons of great things about Salt Lake.

But if the climate situation worsens, it could create pressure on people and jobs to go elsewhere. For example, one reason Utah has “the greatest snow on earth,” as our license plates claim, is because of the Great Salt Lake. But if the lake goes away, the snow suffers and Utah loses one of its biggest selling points. A dry lakebed also means more chemical-infused dust floating around.

Utah has created a sort of mini Silicon Valley — “the Silicon Slopes” — but it’s hard to imagine more companies choosing Utah if the state’s brand eventually goes from “outdoor wonderland” to “kind of like Phoenix, but with more poisonous air.”

In any case, the point is not to get too bogged down in the specifics of Utah, where I happen to live.

Rather, it’s to highlight how if you want friends and family members to be a regular presence in your life, you have to live in a place where all those people have some means of supporting themselves. The same is true across generations; if you want to live near your kids over the long term, which is my dream, both you and they have to have access to economic opportunities (as well as a decently sized pool of potential friends).

And increasingly, climate change is clearly going to be a factor in how economic opportunity gets distributed across different places.

Everywhere will be impacted of course, but those impacts aren’t going to be felt equally everywhere, and some regions will probably adapt with greater agility than others. It’s also probably worth remembering that the world is littered with cities — in addition to Detroit, Venice⁴ immediately comes to mind — that thrived in a particular era but couldn’t adapt and gradually saw their influence, population, economies, artistic communities and other things wane.

Overall I’m still optimistic about Salt Lake, and I hope it copes with the pressures of climate change more effectively than, say, Detroit coped with things like globalization and automation. I hope climate change doesn’t tank my dream of having a multigenerational family right here in Salt Lake.

But I’m also not sure, and as I consider ways to attempt to set my kids and (potential future) grandkids up for the best possible life, I’m increasingly considering how and where they can thrive in a world that is hotter, dryer, and probably just generally tougher.

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Headlines to read this week:

American Parents Are Way Too Focused on Their Kids’ Self-Esteem

“American parents today are also quick to protect their kids from disappointment and failure. We give participation trophies when kids don’t win first place; we fly into the school to deliver kids’ forgotten homework. But these well-meaning interventions backfire because a child with healthy self-esteem is a child who has learned, through experience, that he can overcome obstacles and disappointment. He’s had the opportunity to fail and has discovered that failing doesn’t preclude him from being loved.”

1. Check out the movie Only Lovers Left Alive, which starts Loki’s Tom Hiddleston and Dr. Strange’s Tilda Swinton as a pair of artsy vampires living in a dilapidated Detroit mansion. In the movie, Hiddleston’s character makes the point that Detroit will one day rise again because it has water, which the now-booming cities of the American Sunbelt lack.

2. Obviously the ability to think and plan like this is a tremendous privilege. Hopefully more and more people have the same opportunities.

3. I like to write about financial benefits such as jobs because that’s easy to quantify. But a parent’s network of friends can obviously have an array of other benefits for the next generation. When I was growing up, for example, my parents were friends with a couple who were very into art. I’d say my own interest in art (which I have, despite the fact that it’s beyond the scope of and never featured in this newsletter) stems at least in part from exposure to that friendship.

4. Venice was one of the most powerful cities in the Western world during parts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It controlled trade throughout the Mediterranean, enjoyed some autonomy from the Catholic Church, and ruled over millions. But by the 17th century its power had withered and it has spent the last several centuries as a tourist attraction (albeit a very charming one).