In 2013, I chose to move my family from the New York metro area to Des Moines, and commute from there every other week. Predictably, some of my friends thought I’d lost my marbles. As it turns out, I was just an early adopter.
My husband and I had lived in Manhattan for more than a decade and moved to a suburb 16 miles away when our third child was born. We had busy jobs, round-trip commutes of more than two hours, and faced property taxes, day care, health care, transportation and educational costs that always seemed to grow a step ahead of our incomes. As with COVID-19, a life that seems stressful but manageable can become suddenly insane when the black swan sails in the door. Ours arrived on a Memorial Day weekend, when my husband fell asleep on the kids’ trampoline in the backyard and woke up blind in one eye. He was hospitalized in the intensive care unit with an embolic stroke.
I needed to live in a lower-cost place where my home, office and kids’ schools were five minutes apart. My company was headquartered in Des Moines, so I asked for a transfer. I was surprised to meet dozens of professionals and creatives, especially millennials with children, who had migrated away from a growing livability crisis on the coasts. With the shock of COVID-19, that exodus may become a stampede.
‘A constant source of stress’
The immediate effect of COVID-19 has been to accelerate the flight to the suburbs that typically occurs when kids come along. Real estate brokers tell the Wall Street Journal that house-hunters are swarming towns around New York. Liz Kressel, who owns a digital strategy firm, is one of them. In June, she broke the lease on her two-bedroom, third-floor walkup on the Upper West Side, where she has lived for 16 years with her husband, a tax adviser. Their twin daughters are entering kindergarten in the fall and had won coveted spots at their preferred public school in the city lottery. Now the family has moved in with Kressel’s parents on Long Island while they shop for a home. They joined the more than 420,000 people who left the city between March 1 and May 1, according to The New York Times.
“It had been a real challenge having everyone home in a small apartment, and a constant source of stress to take the kids outside,” Kressel said. “So many people weren’t wearing masks.” The kids weren’t sleeping well, and the small irritations — no dishwasher, a single set of laundry machines for 10 units — loomed large. “I love the buzz and pulse of the city, but COVID put a vice grip on our lives and intensified everything that was not so great,” she said.
Other New Yorkers are looking well beyond the suburbs. The newly formed Facebook group “Into the Unknown” has more than 5,600 active members who debate the merits and drawbacks of places like Texas and Arizona, which have boomed in recent years. From 2012 through 2017, seven of the top 10 cities for millennial population growth were located outside major coastal areas, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data. They include Houston, Denver, Dallas, Seattle, Austin, Charlotte and Portland. Other big gainers include Phoenix, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus and Raleigh.
Millennials, 71 million strong, make up half the working population. After the Great Recession, they flocked to find jobs in “superstar cities,” such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Philadelphia. As millennials move into their child-raising years, they face a staggering surge in real estate prices, health care premiums and deductibles, child care costs, and student loan debt. At the same time, they have lower earnings, fewer assets and less wealth than earlier generations at the same age, according to a Federal Reserve study.
“Superstar cities are places with really high housing price growth but without substantial growth in housing construction, because communities don’t allow much new building,” said Joseph Gyourko, an urban economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who coined the term in a paper he co-authored. “If you look at the median home price today versus 30 years ago, the gap is much wider between the coasts and the interior, because we’ve had restrictions for a longer period of time. We see increasingly high concentrations of very high-income people displacing middle-class people, who get priced out.”
Priced-out Millennials have been flocking to secondary cities that already had great bones: clean, safe neighborhoods, affordable housing, competitive public schools, short commutes and friendly natives. But in recent years, their business, nonprofit and creative leaders have invested in walkable downtowns, recreational amenities and resources for entrepreneurs and artists. Online shopping has disrupted the need to seek out style in the brick-and-mortar stores of a superstar city, and social media provides instant transmission of cultural trends. As a result, mid-sized metros now offer the amenities — from hyper-local restaurants and craft breweries to renovated warehouse lofts and public art — that make them surprisingly cool places to raise a family. They’re also increasingly diverse. Students of color represent half of the 1,900 kids in our public high school, and more than 40 languages and dialects are spoken.
A massive shift in remote work
Prior to the coronavirus, at least one in five workers operated remotely. At the end of April, 63% did, according to a Gallup poll. Now that companies and workers have had a crash course in decentralizing the workforce, it’s likely to become a permanent part of the employment landscape. Three-quarters of U.S. businesses want at least some of their teams to continue working remotely after the pandemic, according to a Gartner survey.
“Employers are recognizing that the way to keep the workforce happy is to allow them to be more flexible in the way they work,” said Anne Helen Petersen, author and senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News who wrote a viral story on millennial burnout. Petersen drove through Montana to cover a congressional special election in 2017 and moved from Brooklyn to Missoula the following year, where she works remotely.
"Coastal city urban areas have become so unlivable and untenable for people past the age of 30,” said Petersen, who spoke with me before the pandemic hit. “My life was wake up, exercise, take the subway in, come home, make dinner, collapse. As much as the bodega guy knew me — I got hazelnut coffee from him every morning — that’s not the same as having community.”
Eighteen months after relocating, Petersen and her partner bought a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a garden and view of the mountains, which cost just $500 more than the rent on their Brooklyn one-bedroom.
“My friends are people in their 50s and 60s and also people in their 20s,” she said. “I feel like I live here, I have roots here. You can’t idealize it — it’s not like ‘Once I move to this place all my problems will be solved.’ But there’s a rich level of life under the radar.”
Other professionals are finding new jobs in prosperous cities away from the coast. Julie Heath, 40, grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and lived in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia before moving to Indianapolis with her husband and toddler.
“Both my spouse and I are very career-oriented, and now that we have a child, we are also very family-oriented,” she said. “Living in a city where we have more disposable time and income helps facilitate both those values.”
Indy’s lower cost of living gave Heath the latitude to take a more rewarding job in the nonprofit sector, running an accelerator and co-working space for start-ups. She and her husband purchased an 1,800-square-foot condominium on the Monon Trail, a 10-mile greenbelt built on a former rail line, where she can walk to work and retail stores.
Meanwhile, secondary cities offer families a less hectic pace that is part of the cultural norm. Julie Larson, a therapist and mom of four, discovered this when she and her husband, a former hedge fund partner, moved from Manhattan’s West Village to Des Moines in 2016.
“A lot of my clients in New York are mentally and emotionally burned out (because) there is a quiet expectation that you’re always working,” said Larson, who continues to see clients remotely. “Here, the highway gets busy at 5 p.m. because everyone is done and they’re going home. So not only do I feel that lifestyle balance in a different way, it is reinforced by all the people around me.”
‘They Think It’s Syria’
Small-business owners are migrating out of the coasts as well, buoyed by a supportive business community. Alexander Hall sold his five coffee shops in Brooklyn, New York, and in 2017 opened St. Kilda, an 80-seat café and bakery in downtown Des Moines. Hall, who is married with a preschooler, traded a $5,000-a-month Brooklyn rental for a mid-century lakefront house on two acres, 20 minutes from his restaurant.
“You tell New Yorkers you’re in Des Moines and they think it’s Syria,” he said. “No one has any idea of the industry that goes on here — the wealth that’s in the city. The builders in Des Moines — their reputation is very important to them, and a 10-year lease is very valuable to the landlords. They will go out of their way to make you successful.”
Since arriving in Des Moines, Hall has opened three more restaurants and a catering business. Prior to COVID-19, “I had 100 employees and was on track for a really good year,” he said. Hall consolidated menus and moved operations to one location, offering curbside take out and free delivery. He said he maintained about two-thirds of his revenue and took the opportunity to paint and make repairs at his other stores.
“It gave me a chance to look at the business from above, and I think we’ll come back bigger and better and stronger,” he said.
‘I wanted to live in New York my entire life’
For creatives, living outside a superstar city offers more opportunity to pursue their passions. Nathan Hill, author of the best-seller “The Nix,” moved to New York City after finishing graduate school in Massachusetts, and during his first month, everything he owned was stolen from his car — including his laptop with all his writing, and the backup disks.
“It was a terrible moment,” he told me. “I was really sad, especially given that I wanted to live in New York my entire life.”
Hill worked at a nonprofit poetry organization and paid $1,200 a month for a tiny studio.
“I was picking up freelance work (designing) websites for writers and bands for extra money,” he said. “For a while there, I tried to wake up before work at 5:30 a.m. just to get an hour of writing in. But that wasn’t sustainable — I’m not that kind of a morning person.”
Two years later, a teaching opportunity came up in Naples, Florida, where his girlfriend (now wife) worked.
“Florida promised a life where I wouldn’t be on a train for hours a day, and where my rent was cut in half,” he said. “It ended up being a good move, even though everyone in New York at the time told me, ‘You’re moving away from the beating heart of culture!’”
‘Pay attention to what’s not working’
When I began researching the livability crisis for my book, I questioned whether I had really spotted a trend, or was merely rationalizing the move to ease my heartbreak. (I will always love New York and may move back someday.) But the data are unequivocal: It’s become ridiculously hard to thrive in superstar metros, especially with kids, and second-tier metros are undergoing a dynamic renaissance. I’ve also realized you can’t convince someone that secondary cities offer a viable alternative unless that person is ready to go.
Larson discovered this when she traded Manhattan for Des Moines.
“People were like, ‘Iowa?! What are you going to do there? Are you going to be OK?’ And I felt this big need to convince them and sell it and share these incredible things,” she said. “Over time I stopped. Because it’s personal. It’s a process. But I do think people need to pay attention. Pay attention to what’s not working for you or where it feels really hard. And if it’s feeling that hard, you don’t need to grit your teeth. There’s something else available to you.”
Published in The Des Moines Register
