I’m wondering what the party line on this:
In this year’s edition of our Best Cities For Jobs survey, we found that six of the 10 metropolitan areas with the fastest job growth are either mid-sized (150,000 to 450,000 total nonfarm jobs) or smaller (less than 150,000 nonfarm jobs). They also account for 18 out of the top 30. Smaller metro areas dominated job growth in a number of sectors, including manufacturing (all the top 20), information (all of the top 10) jobs and, less surprisingly, natural resources, construction and mining.
These trends are also reflected in the new U.S. Census Bureau metropolitan area population estimates for 2017, which show a significant increase in domestic migration away from the 53 major metropolitan areas with populations over a million and toward the 54 middle-sized metro areas in the 500,000 to 1 million range. In 2017, the midsize metro areas gained 271,000 more net domestic migrants than the major metro areas. (The biggest two, New York and Los Angeles, had an enormous net loss of 209,000 — 0.95% of their combined populations).
noted in Joel Kotkin’s piece at Forbes, will be? Should this pattern persist, cue pleas for policies targeted at helping “our cities”. As the 53 major metropolitan areas gentrify they’ll be decreasingly sympathetic targets for bailout but possibly better able to secure them.
Some 30 odd years ago, my and I left a top 15 metropolitan area for a small town. We did it for job reasons. It is the best move of my life of 74 years. Life in small (20,000 or less) towns is infinitely better than life in major cities. Since I lived in Boston (Dorchester) and Columbus, OH, I have some basis for that judgement.
It is psychologically impossible for me to live even in a suburb nowadays.
Please don’t tell the people moving to small cities this. I don’t want any more neighbors.