Goldilocks Voters

Not Everything is About Politics

So, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about politics and I’m going to stick to that. I don’t have any allegiance to either political party, and it is endlessly tiresome to watch two groups of overgrown man-babies peck at each other. Instead, this piece is about the crowding-out of normal people from coastal cities: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, who have taken flight to the ‘burbs and the Southeastern US. And why.

People don’t like living where they can’t just live their damn lives.

You can’t live your life if:

• A toothbrush is $6 and/or you can barely pay the rent (affordability.)
• Your kids encounter Zombies shitting on the street en route to school (perceived safety.)
• You can’t live if the police lack a handle on crime (…crime.)
• Stores aren’t open, and schools slam their doors shut at the first sign of sniffles.

The all-too-common retort to these admittedly exaggerated issues is: “Stop being petty. There are real problems on earth and these complaints reek of privilege. We’re in a goddamned pandemic!” And then cue endless amounts of bickering about which president’s fault this is and a gross, bitter tribalism breaks out in the comments section. Yuck.

The truth that is lost in virtual yelling is that the majority of people are looking for a few key things. People commonly overlook the above issues when moving to a place, and then often stay living somewhere out of inertia, until the discomfort and inconvenience outweigh the hassle of being somewhere. You can overlook one or two problems some of the time, but when the balance of bad days outweighs good ones, well, it’s time to explore other options. So you move to a place like Texas.

Farhad Manjoo wrote a nice little analysis on why everyone is moving to Texas (we didn’t), and using some fancy GIS and data, concluded that Texas is home to what most people are looking for: affordability, opportunity, diversity, and safety. But to read the comments in the New York Times (where Farhad’s OpEd featured), you’d never know it:

I would not step foot in Texas, let alone live there. It’s is a state that is moving backwards under Republican rule. It is anti-women, anti-minority, pro fossil fuels and lacks the kind of culture and social environment that I desire. More than happy to pay my higher taxes and remain in New York City, where the people, culture, and politics is far more to my liking.

and this one:

Oh to be so privileged that abortion rights rank low on your list of priorities and it is enough to “hope” that things change.

Please don’t shoot the messenger, but it’s not that abortion rights rank low on my list of priorities, it’s that they rank lower than feeding myself and living my life, and this is true for millions of others like me. I haven’t met a single person consider where to buy property on the basis of distance to an abortion clinic over the quality of the school district — otherwise Zillow would have a map layover entitled “reproductive health providers.” But I have heard endless complaints from dear friends that they are just about fed up with the petty crime of public urination and broken car windows. The heart of the issue is quality of governance. Good governance breeds quality of life.

Coastal cities have suffered from terrible governance and extreme corruption for decades, and goldilocks voters, suddenly untethered from their habits by the pandemic, are voting with their feet and leaving, and taking their taxes and spending with them. America’s megapolises excuse their lack of effective governance on population (and problem) density, patronizingly thumbing their noses at much better governed municipalities, many of which are younger cities found in the Southeastern US. Curious, however, that they don’t compare themselves to global megapolises. I just can’t imagine a retail smash-and-grab epidemic happening in Tokyo. Or a police-free “autonomous zone” in Berlin. As if a snap of the fingers would render coastal cities’ problems gone and it were merely a matter of misapplied attention rather than a critical inability to solve problems. Newsflash, New York City, you are not the exceptional eccentric genius, but rather, the middling chronic underachiever with rich parents.

The truly out-of-touch can pine for the day they can move to a foreign utopia, achieving Scandinavian levels of happiness and prosperity. The rest of us are here, eking out a living wherever a moving van can take us. Politicians, ignore this at your peril.