Mobility And Community

Does being "rootless" grow community?

Feb 25, 2025

There’s this interesting article by journalist and housing writer Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic, and the social-media chatter around it, that caught my attention and which touches on a lot of inter-related urbanist-ish issues.

Here’s the social media comment that first made me aware of the piece, and it makes a really fascinating sociological point: “I’ve puzzled over the loss of geographic mobility for years, and these electoral results still shock me. No wonder people think things are worse than they are—they are watching their childhoods change and disappear around them.”

No wonder people think things are worse than they are—they are watching their childhoods change and disappear around them.

The point being, declining geographic mobility has not necessarily functioned the way localists and communitarians hope it might: i.e., making people more invested in, involved with, and committed to their communities, their places, their network of small businesses, etc. Instead, maybe people perceive the normal changes in places as a kind of attack on their own history and identity. They don’t become benefactors of their places; they become possessive of them. Sticking around while your own place transforms around you can make you paranoid and foster a zero-sum attitude.

This obviously brings to mind NIMBYism. Now, there’s a cheap NIMBYism that goes something like “I want to be the last person to move into this new community.” I don’t really give that much credit, although I do believe the way we build our places causes it to make a certain amount of sense. And so that I’m not cryptically referencing myself, what I mean by that is this, from the linked piece:

The nature of these large developments is that they have this effect of making you feel almost stranded. They make you feel small. That sense of frustration, disorientation, being thwarted and dwarfed by this big faceless thing, when you’re waiting for a gas pump or stuck in a grocery store line at a huge store or circling a vast parking lot. I can feel that it activates something in my brain, some feeling almost of danger, despite my knowing how silly that is. So I guess I’m saying these places feel crowded.

In other words, modern, car-oriented suburbia is really quite sparse and empty, but it’s designed in a way that makes it feel overcrowded.

But anyway, that’s the kind of NIMBYism I’m less sympathetic to. I’m more sympathetic to people who grew up in a place and have watched it transform into something they don’t recognize. Watching the old families and business owners retire, the old landmarks fall apart or get redeveloped, all the trendy stuff you might not like replace the comforting things you know. I’m not sure it’s possible to experience that without a sense of loss or mourning.

The argument here, which seems kind of cold-hearted, is basically, move. You’re not doing your community or yourself any good by just standing around and slowly losing your actual connection to your place. Maybe it’s a kind of difficult but worthwhile thing to find a new place that feels like your own. Maybe being too invested in a specific place, reducing a little postage stamp snippet of the world to your entire world, isn’t a virtue, or at least not always a virtue.

Here’s how the article opens:

The idea that people should be able to choose their own communities—instead of being stuck where they are born—is a distinctly American innovation. It is the foundation for the country’s prosperity and democracy, and it just may be America’s most profound contribution to the world.
No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility, roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year.

Now that’s interesting. Vance Packard—a curious popular journalist who wrote from a center-left perspective in his time which now reads often as conservative or even a bit curmudgeonly—wrote A Nation of Strangers in 1972, about the increasing rootlessness of American culture and the decay of community. (This would fit into something of a line with Bowling Alone, about a quarter-century later.) I’m not sure people appreciate that America has always had this restless quality, and that deeply settled localism is in some ways a European or rose-colored-glasses overlay on actual American life in any era.

Appelbaum quotes a 19th-century newspaper article:

“We are a migratory people and we flourish best when we make an occasional change of base,” one 19th-century newspaper explained. “We have cut loose from the old styles of human vegetation, the former method, of sticking like an oyster to one spot through numberless succeeding generations,” wrote another.

Anyone who demeans people with an attachment to their place as “sticking like an oyster” today would be pilloried as a clueless, striving left-wing elitist. It’s quite a thing to realize that sort of sentiment was common in a time long before anyone now is alive to remember.

This is very interesting, and it definitely challenges the assumption I’ve sort of picked up that sticking it out in “your place” is in and of itself a good thing:

These ceaseless migrations shaped a new way of thinking. “When the mobility of population was always so great,” the historian Carl Becker observed, “the strange face, the odd speech, the curious custom of dress, and the unaccustomed religious faith ceased to be a matter of comment or concern.” And as diverse peoples learned to live alongside one another, the possibilities of pluralism opened. The term stranger, in other lands synonymous with enemy, instead, Becker wrote, became “a common form of friendly salutation.” In a nation where people are forever arriving and departing, a newcomer can seem less like a threat than a welcome addition: Howdy, stranger.
Entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, social equality—the most appealing features of the young republic all traced back to this single, foundational fact: Americans were always looking ahead to their next beginning, always seeking to move up by moving on.

What he’s building up to is this hypothesis that staying in the same place and the same situation actually leads to all sorts of stagnation and deterioration, personal and social:

The sharp decline in geographic mobility is the single most important social change of the past half century, although other shifts have attracted far more attention. In that same span, fewer Americans have started new businesses, and fewer Americans have switched jobs—from 1985 to 2014, the share of people who became entrepreneurs fell by half. More Americans are ending up worse off than their parents—in 1970, about eight out of every 10 young adults could expect to earn more than their parents; by the turn of the century, that was true of only half of young adults. Church membership is down by about a third since 1970, as is the share of Americans who socialize several times a week. Membership in any kind of group is down by half. The birth rate keeps falling. And although half of Americans used to think most people could be trusted, today only a third think the same.

And he notes that the housing crisis we often speak of means two things: one is that housing in highly desirable metro areas and communities is very expensive. The other is that economic opportunities are often lacking in places where housing is cheap:

Many Americans are stranded in communities with flat or declining prospects, and lack the practical ability to move across the tracks, the state, or the country—to choose where they want to live. Those who do move are typically heading not to the places where opportunities are abundant, but to those where housing is cheap. Only the affluent and well educated are exempt from this situation; the freedom to choose one’s city or community has become a privilege of class.

This is one of those points that needs explaining now that it is something we have to think about. I don’t think anybody ever thought much about how housing prices made it possible show up in a new city and get a job, or move your family to a new state, or whatever. It was just a thing that was possible and widely done. But it’s tricky to reverse-engineer without sounding like you’re saying “I have a right to live in any community I want.”

Of course, that mobility did not necessarily apply at such a granular level. There were always “mansion rows” and fancy parts of town. But we never had a situation where entire cities or even entire regions were short on housing that regular working people or middle-class people could afford.

And it was pro-development, light-touch regulations and constant construction which made this possible: “Old buildings continually yielded to newer ones, as neighborhoods climbed higher to meet demand; the first townhouse on a block of freestanding homes might, a couple of decades later, be the last remaining townhouse sandwiched between apartment buildings.”

The fact that people moved a lot more, and that homes at different price and quality levels were available in pretty much any general town, city, or metro area (at least for white people, before the civil rights era) seem to be pretty well attested to. There’s a bit about “Moving Day,” a sort of unofficial holiday in the 19th century observed on the day(s) when large numbers of leases ended. And there’s a bit about how Americans used to view homes as consumer goods.

It may come down to this: in the absence of housing scarcity, moralizing about deservingness and neighborhood character and all the other stuff that passes for housing discourse just didn’t take up so much space.

It’s really like reading about a different country.

Funny enough, Vance Packard also wrote against advertising and consumerism in the postwar era. I liked his work a lot in high school and college. I even have a magazine from the 1970s, a Life issue, I think, in which he wrote an article about postwar Japan. Now I can see how there’s a certain romanticism of an imagined past at work there. His article included a bit about how Japanese people didn’t see the need for a refrigerator, because the wives always picked up the day’s food at a market.

Frankly, a lot of localism and “simple living” and homesteading and communitarian stuff often fits into a kind of “creative nonfiction” genre. It’s ironically a bit like the “move to Europe and your life will suddenly get easier” genre of essays. It’s almost an attempt to manifest a reality, to pretend that ideas are all-powerful. Ideas are powerful. But lots of other things matter, too. And just just as moving is no guarantee of changing you, neither is staying put.

I’m really curious how folks think about the “sense of decline is due to staying in place too long” hypothesis, whether this is backed up by other research, and how urbanists and housing advocates should think about building great, highly livable communities, but also not becoming too attached to a place as it exists at any specific moment.

The Deleted Scenes

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