Americans on the Move
For some, the decision comes with a shock of disgusted recognition, like a less heroic version of Hemingway's Lieut. Henry bidding a farewell to arms by jumping into the frigid Tagliamento River.
The moment for Walter Matsinger arrived 2 1/2 years ago, as he was stalled in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam on his way home from work as a carpenter's apprentice in Philadelphia. "This is it," Matsinger said to himself. He knew that he had to leave the city, to flee its crime, its pollution and impersonality, its high social anger. Suddenly, he recalls, "the whole area where I grew up seemed old and drab." Bachelor Matsinger went home, packed and headed for the Southwest. Today he is happily settled in Tucson, Ariz., where he works as a mason's helper.
Others are less abrupt about making such geographical leaps; their urban grievances simply accumulate like a lowering smog, until one day they call the moving van. Scott Snowden, a graduate of Berkeley's law school, could have landed a job in one of San Francisco's better law firms. But Snowden found himself growing wearier and wearier of "the constant roar in the city, the intensity and impersonality of it." With his wife, he decamped to St. Helena, a tiny town in the Napa Valley wine country. He still earns less than $15,000 a year, but he can fish for bass in the local ponds and at night hears only the calls of coyotes.
William Menzel, a dental lab-technician instructor, began making his decision back in Albany, N.Y., after he realized that "if you said hi to people on the streets, they thought you were going to mug them." He loaded up his wife and four children and headed for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where, he says gratefully, "my wife can walk the dog at 2 a.m. without fear, and the kids haven't been mugged on the way to school or had their lunches taken away from them."
All of these people are examples of a special breed that is rapidly increasing across the U.S.: the new American migrants. They are pulling themselves up by their roots in order to pursue the good life in places that are smaller, sunnier, safer, and perhaps saner than those they left. Their desire to move onward has spawned an exodus that is causing major changes in American society. Because of the migration, many once great cities are falling into ever more serious decline; scores of little-known communities are either booming or feeling the pains of all-too-sudden growth (or both); and millions of Americans have profoundly altered their way of life.
Americans have always been a restlessly mobile people, but their new migratory habits are quite different from those of the past. There are three interrelated patterns of movement:
OUT OF THE BIG CITIES. Where once Americans thronged to the big cities and their immediate suburbs in search of jobs, education and excitement, they are now moving to smaller cities and towns. Between 1970 and 1974, over 1.7 million more Americans left the big metropolitan areas than moved into them. Through migration, the New York area alone lost half a million people more than it gained; similarly, Chicago lost a quarter of a million. Of the 16 metropolitan areas that have more than 2 million people each, eight have lost population since 1970. Besides New York and Chicago, they are Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Newark. In 1973 and 1974 three others lost population: Boston, San Francisco and Long Island's Nassau-Suffolk. Significantly, the big suburbs are no longer growing as fast as they did in the 1960s. Some, like New Jersey's Bergen County and New York's Westchester County, have lost population since 1970.
TO THE COUNTRYSIDE. After declining for most of this century, the nation's rural areas since 1970 have been growing faster than its urban areas. The Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas as those counties that have cities of 50,000 people or more; counties with no communities of that size are predominantly rural. In the West, remote counties had a total growth of 9.2% between 1970 and 1974--compared to the national average of 4.8%. During that period, Mississippi and Alabama had a net migration into their states--a surprising reversal. In the Northeast, New Hampshire grew by 10.9%, Maine by 6.6% and Vermont by 5.9%. Among the fastest-growing areas: western Arizona, the western slopes of the Rockies, the Ozarks, sections of the northern Great Lakes states.
TO THE SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST. Americans are rapidly leaving the Northern and Eastern regions, the old industrial quadrant from St. Louis and Chicago to Philadelphia and Boston, and increasingly heading toward the South and West. Between 1970 and last year, 2,537,000 people migrated from the Northeastern and North Central states to the Southern and Western states. The fastest-growing states in the nation are Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Idaho and Colorado. By far the nation's fastest-developing new boom region is the Sunbelt--the lower arc of warmlands stretching from Southern California to the Carolinas.
These new migrations suggest a major change in Americans' expectations--what they want from their careers and communities and what they are willing to give up to get it. Says Pollster Louis Harris: "Most Americans don't want more quantity of anything, but more quality in what they've got."
In such impulses is a certain chastened spirit, a feeling--no doubt a residue of the manic '60s--that smaller and quieter home pleasures are more important than acquisitiveness and ambition. This is not necessarily an edifying spiritual development in America so much as a self-interested calculation that a 90-minute commute or a triple-bolted apartment door is not worth the trouble if one can escape. The ethic suggests that bigness is no longer better, that mere dollars do not mean a more satisfying life, that success is more a matter of enjoying where one is than of moving ahead. Those sentiments, of course, can carry a troubling complacency. The frankly escapist note is one theme of some of the new migrations--a kind of premature retirement, a dropping-out. That is a sweet and organically grown estimate of life, but in some cases it smacks of elitism gone to the country for the cure. Many are migrating, however, for somewhat opposite reasons. They find that in the smaller cities and towns there is more scope for their ambition, more room for competition and expansion.
"In a way it is certainly a middle-class migration," says Queens College Political Scientist Andrew Hacker. "Those who are moving out are looking for a kind of middle-class subcountry, a place where it is safer, and where there is more predictable service, and where the school system is less problematic."
Crime is the most obsessively mentioned reason for leaving the cities. Almost all of the migrants tell horror stories of muggings just up the street, of houses burglarized, of children exposed to drugs. Overcrowded schools, pollution and noise are driving many out. So are heavy taxes and high costs of living.
Beneath the migrants' vision sometimes lurks a disturbing undercurrent of racial aversion, an unspoken desire to get away from the increasingly black urban, centers. Some blacks, of course, are fleeing the cities just as fast as whites. William Hart, just retired as an official in the Job Corps program, moved a few months ago from The Bronx to the New York suburb of Greenburgh. Says he: "With the passing of time, the community changed. It wasn't safe to leave home any more, and we were broken into three times." But as Rand Corp. Demographer Peter Morrison warns, there is a danger that U.S. society "is dividing into those who can buy the new life-style and those who are left. A lot of people will simply be relegated to those empty holes, the urban cores." University of Chicago Philip Hauser says bleakly that "the country is heading toward an apartheid society."
Historically, there were ample reasons why Americans swarmed into the cities; country and small-town life could be difficult and dull and remote. In Main Street, Sinclair Lewis called the small-town existence "dullness made God . . . the contentment of the quiet dead." But rural and small-town life has been modernized and is no longer stultifyingly isolated. The interstate highway system, 88% complete, brings most of the remoter regions to within an hour or two's drive of a city. Jet planes and a growing number of airports provide similar ease of access to he outside world. Television pipes its news and entertainment into the countryside. Along with lesser fare, Live from Lincoln Center can now be seen across the country without going to New York and paying the price (up to $25) of a ticket Universities have opened branches and hundreds of two-year community colleges have sprung up in small towns, injecting a new cultural life. In short, urbanity is no longer necessarily tied to urban life. As Political Analyst Richard Scammon says "We have expanded the area in which civilized people can live "
Although the pattern of the new migrations scarcely suggests a rebirth of rural primitivism, some of those recoiling from the city have settled into rustic and often difficult lives far from urban civilization. The late '60s rural communes persist in Vermont New Hampshire, California, Colorado, New Mexico and elsewhere. Many city-bred farmers have discovered that Dwight Eisenhower (scarcely a guru) was right when he remarked that farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the cornfield."
Osteopath George Moore and his wife Nancy moved from Buffalo four years ago to the northern Maine community of Oxbow (pop. 72). With their friends Buddy and Gmme Swenson, they bought 150 acres of land and set about building two houses for themselves. They remember the fierce black flies in the summer and the rug hung in the doorway to keep out the cold in the fall. They had no electricity TV telephone or running water. The Swensons drilled a well When money ran low, both women picked potatoes even though they were pregnant. The youngest Swenson child was born in the family car by the side of the road on the way to a hospital in Presque Isle 40 miles away. Eventually, the couples moved to nearby Masardis. Dr Moore began practicing in the area, and Swenson found work teaching at the University of Maine at Presque Isle Financially pressed, the Swensons came into an inheritance' which may account for their staying on. Often an outside income is crucial-- as Robert Frost foresaw when he wrote:
Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer
With an income in cash of say a thousand
(From say a publisher in New York City).
But the hardships have been worth it, the couples testify "We're closer knit and healthier than we would be in a city," says Moore. The food at the evening meal is usually from the family garden--they eat meat only about twice a month. Says Swenson "I wanted to be economically independent of the 40-hour week. I wanted out of the pollution and overcrowding. I found the wilderness aspect of northern Maine just what I was searching for."
More typically, the migrants are looking less for a life out of Thoreau than a life out of, say, Booth Tarkington or Norman Rockwell--equidistant from the brutalities of the city and the brutalities of nature. Neil Carey, a refugee from Los Angeles, believes that he has found that golden mean in Lexington, Ky. (pop 187 200) Lexington, with a 16% growth rate since 1971, is Kentucky's boom city--yet it is also a delightful mixture of old residential neighborhoods, a renovated downtown, a state university and a low (4.5%) unemployment rate. A clinical social worker Carey 37 and his wife Karen, 35, detested the rootlessness and aimless energy of Los Angeles. Says Carey: "People were always moving moving, moving. Every promotion or raise seemed to mean a new car, new house, new friends."
The Careys, living on a much reduced income, have gladly settled for a more modest style of life--one five-year-old Dodgea $15,000 house that they have renovated, an occasional movie and dinner out, camping, and work in the Unitarian Church. Also, says Carey, "I've been to city council meetings here I'd never been to the city council in L.A. And here I feel as if I and my children can grow with the town and develop along with it."
A rising phenomenon is the return to small towns of natives who had left years ago to seek their fortunes in the cities. Don Schaaf, 38, had left his native McCook, Neb., for Chicago and a job in advertising. Five years ago, depressed by crime and what he calls 'the treadmill to oblivion," he returned to the southern Nebraska town. He took a job for a time as a $90-a-week radio announcer, but now is out of work. Despite that setback, he hopes hat he will never have to leave McCook again. "I'm here till I'm a little old man with a gray beard," says Schaaf.
Others, like Arnold Berman, 45, have spent most of their lives in big cities and are taking a calculated gamble on smalltown life. Unhappy with Los Angeles, where he worked as an executive for an aerospace company, Berman and his wife picked up three years ago and moved to Lawrence, Kans. He has earned a law degree from the university there and is now in private practice. Says he: "It's amazing how quickly you can make friends, and things seem to work better here. There is more concern for local rather than national problems, more of a feeling of isolation, like those terrible things are happening a long way away."
Dr. Suzanne Graham, a San Francisco anesthesiologist, found her haven in the lovely Victorian city of Santa Rosa, about 60 miles north of San Francisco. Santa Rosa's population has doubled to 60,000 in the past 15 years, but the city, nestled in the California wine country, has maintained a small-town flavor. Last year, caught up in the malpractice-insurance crisis and the standard aggravations of the city, Dr. Graham took a job at a Santa Rosa hospital and found a small house in what used to be an olive grove. Among other things, she has discovered that because a small town allows closer relations between doctors and patients, the risk of malpractice suits is much smaller.
"I would never go back to the city," she vows. "In San Francisco you have a sense of the deteriorating quality of life. All the civility of that city is gone. I had to be escorted to the hospital parking lot when I worked late at night." In the city she found some serenity in transcendental meditation. In Santa Rosa she hardly needs it at all.
Chester and Rhoda Bernie went to Santa Rosa recently from Los Angeles, where he sold insurance for years. In L.A., says Bernie, "there were fights on the street and parents didn't care. Our kids at school got beat up and their money taken away. But that kind of thing doesn't happen here. Kids play, but there is no violence." In Santa Rosa, the Bernies have absorbed more culture than they ever did in Los Angeles. The community turns out solidly to support the semiprofessional 75-member symphony orchestra. When Angela Davis or Jack Anderson speaks at the local college campus, it is an event; everyone comes.
"Taking the time" is a constant theme of city people moving to small towns. They are almost bewildered that the townspeople have the time, and are willing to use it, to be helpful. After Mrs. Bernie made only two visits to the local Sears, Roebuck store, a clerk remembered her name, her children's ages and clothing sizes. Other assets: fruit and vegetables bought from neighboring farms, including a wonderfully fresh local apple juice. Down in Los Angeles, says Bernie, "socially you had to have a swimming pool. Here everyone goes to the Y." In Los Angeles, "you could never get away from the freeway roar. Here, there is silence. And you see the stars when you go out at night."
Many of the migrants are following the job market as more and more companies depart the cities. Since 1970, employment in all major industries except government has grown at a faster rate in rural counties--which include towns and small cities --than in large urban areas. Again, most of the movement is to the South and West. New York's Fantus Co., which advises corporations seeking to relocate, figures that those regions will account for 55%-60% of the new manufacturing employment over the next year. One reason: more than half of all new plant construction and expansion has been going on in those areas instead of the populous North and East. Fantus Chairman Leonard Yaseen expects the industrialization of the Sunbelt to accelerate "because as the plants in the Central States and the Northeast become more and more antiquated, management will think twice before constructing facilities in those areas."
Industries have moved into the South and Southwest in part because taxes are relatively low, unions relatively weak, heating and other maintenance costs modest. Three years ago Electro Corp., a manufacturer of electronic controls for industry, moved from Niles, Ill., to Sarasota, Fla. Chairman Richard Crossley found that taxes and plant costs were considerably lower in Sarasota, that his payroll was 15% smaller because of a lower wage scale, that the productivity of his workers was higher. Electro brought 14 key people and their families from the Chicago area and started up anew. Says Crossley: "Only one person was hesitant about moving, and he has turned out to be the biggest Chamber of Commerce man in Sarasota. There's no state income tax, no estate tax, a 4% sales tax v. 5% in Illinois." Crossley now sails a 16-ft. sloop, has fewer colds and, when he consults the books, is happier still: the company has been more profitable.
The newest corporate convert to Sarasota is Snelling & Snelling Inc., the nation's largest employment agency (525 franchises, $40 million in revenues). Chairman Robert O. Snelling weighed corporate taxes, plant cost and maintenance before moving from the Philadelphia area. "Why be in Philly," he asks, "with the rotten weather, the rotten taxes and everything else? It's beautiful here." Roughly the same logic applies throughout the Sunbelt. The W.A. Krueger Co., one of the larger printing firms in the U.S., moved a year and a half ago from the chill Milwaukee area to Scottsdale, Ariz. Says one company official: "We all feel we have significantly improved our life-style."
The number of FORTUNE 500 companies that are based in the South and West jumped from 75 in 1964 to 112 in 1974. Yet the movement to smaller cities takes in all regions. The Book-of-the-Month Club has relocated its operations from New York to Camp Hill, Pa.; General Electric's corporate headquarters is now in Fairfield, Conn.; the Simmons Co. moved from New York to Norcross, near Atlanta; and Greyhound changed its headquarters from Chicago to Phoenix.
Employees who made the move are usually happy with their new lives. Others who relocate on their own often have to take pay cuts, but in most cases they find that the dollar goes further. People in the South and West spend comparatively less for taxes, housing, fuel, clothing and most services. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the cost of maintaining a high standard of living for a family of four in New York City is 33% higher than in Houston or Nashville. Air conditioning has made the long, hot summers bearable. And for some people, the way of life --a moderate climate, plenty of outdoor activity, the residual Southern graces--is an attractive alternative to the iron chill of the North.
Accountant Ed Kraujalis and his wife Mildred, both 27, left New York City a year ago for Cape Coral, Fla., a community that did not exist in 1960 and still does not show on most maps. Now it has 24,000 inhabitants. The Kraujalises paid $4,500 for a lot on a canal and have started work on a $33,000 house. Terms: 20% down and a 6.5% mortgage. "It would have cost twice that to build the same house in New York City," says Kraujalis. So many other people have discovered Cape Coral and nearby communities that the Fort Myers area, of which it is a part, is the nation's fastest-rising community. Since 1970, population has grown more than 46%, and it is now 154,000.
Temple, Texas, is another fast-growing community. Sixty plants have opened in the area, in part because the city (pop. 41,500) lies at the hub of a wheel with spokes extending to Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. Some of the residents there feel as if they are part of a migration within a migration. "My wife would slit her throat if we had to move back to Houston," says Gene Bishoff, manager of the 700,000-sq.-ft. Western Auto Supply distribution center. At first she did not want to leave Houston, where they had lived for 25 years, but now, says Bishoff, "we feel like we've died and gone to heaven. We love it here. The people, the friendliness, the ease of doing business. The class and caliber of people you get to work for you is so much better."
Some political analysts believe that the growth of population and economic power in the South and Southwest portends a dominance of Sunbelt conservatism in the nation. One proponent of the theory is Social Historian Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Power Shift, The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment. Sale argues that the Sunbelt is becoming the increasingly influential repository of "the three Rs"--rightism, racism and repression.
That is an especially simplistic--and insulting--theory of regional determinism. Deservedly, the Sunbelt is making itself heard more on the national scene. Half of the declared presidential candidates are from the Sunbelt, but they range across the political spectrum from conservative to moderate to very liberal: California's Ronald Reagan, Alabama's George Wallace, Georgia's Jimmy Carter, Arizona's Morris Udall, Oklahoma's Fred Harris and, until they dropped out, Texas' Lloyd Bentsen and North Carolina's Terry Sanford. After the 1980 census, if the current population shifts continue, the states of the South and West will increase their total congressional representation from 210 to 225 seats. The states of the Northeast and Midwest will lose 15 of their seats, declining to 210. Yet the old Southern conservatism is losing some of its force, for reasons that have to do more with actuarial necessity than with migration. The Southern barons in Congress, the men re-elected term after term so that they could use the seniority system to maintain power, are retiring or dying off. Most of the leaders of the potent Senate committees are from far outside the Sunbelt: Humphrey of Minnesota, Muskie of Maine, Kennedy of Massachusetts, Church of Idaho, Proxmire of Wisconsin.
If Americans are growing more conservative, that cannot be blamed on just one region. The political views of Americans depend far more on their occupations and on their racial and ethnic backgrounds than on where they live. Political Analyst Scammon, former director of the Census Bureau, observes: "If a plumber decides to move from East Orange, N.J., to Galveston, Texas, he is likely to continue voting the way he has been voting, assuming he continues to work as a plumber in Galveston." The newcomers tend to bring their political baggage with them.
In many ways, the migrants from the North and the East are helping to alter the character of the South, which is becoming both more sophisticated and more homogenized. On the whole, Yankees who move there find themselves welcomed, mostly because they bring new money, skills and opportunity with them. At the same time, the South is changing the carpetbaggers in a number of respects. Sometimes there is no Southerner more given to Southern style and sense of place than the Confederate from, say, Chicago--the Yankee Good Ole Boy.
Whatever economic advantages they bring, however, the newcomers sometimes threaten to perpetuate in new territory many of the offenses of urban sprawl around the big cities. Especially in many communities of the Sunbelt, oldtimers have grown bitterly aware that the massive invasions have overloaded public services, overwhelmed police and fire departments, water supplies and sewage systems.
The 29 new "developer cities" just to the west of Fort Lauderdale have encountered the dark underside of extravagant growth. The recent recession slowed the boom, leaving the skeletons of half-completed communities and a number of bankrupt builders. Now, says Fort Lauderdale Mayor E. Clay Shaw, "we have gone to enforced land-use planning at the county level. We've put population caps on certain areas. We've stopped bargaining among landowners. There have been some building moratoriums because of overworked sewerage facilities."
Scottsdale, Ariz., which has had a population growth of 25% in the past five years, is trying to slow development. To control the often haphazard designs of businesses, apartments and condominiums, the town now requires that a development review board approve all buildings except single-family homes. Mayor William Jenkins likes to speak of this deliberate slowdown as "the Scottsdale syndrome--let's let the town remain the same as it was when I came here." Similarly, Petaluma, Calif., a small agricultural community that has grown by nearly 50% in the past eight years, recently won a legal battle over its fairly new policy of slow, planned growth instead of wide-open development.
Another and in some ways more urgent problem is what the new migrations are doing to the big industrial cities, especially those of the Northeastern quadrant. They are hemorrhaging. Economist Thomas Muller of the Urban Institute in Washington lists nine "municipal danger signals." Among them: substantial long-term outmigration, loss of private employment, high debt service, high unemployment, high tax burden, increasing proportion of low-income population. The cities displaying those danger signals are Buffalo, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis. Others that are better off but still in trouble are Cincinnati, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Seattle.
It is possible to be too apocalyptic about the big cities' prospects. They still have tremendous force, and the bulk of the nation's industry and financial power. But the migratory trend is disturbing to people who have a stake in the big old cities. The automobile has in many ways rendered them obsolete. Along the highways circling them have arisen "ring cities," shopping centers, medical complexes and the rest, which provide the services that long gave the central city its raison d'etre.
For the big cities, the cycle is as depressingly vicious as it is familiar. Businesses decamp; the young, the middle class, the skilled, the well educated flee; the tax base erodes. So taxes go even higher, driving out still more productive, wage-earning families. Says George Sternlieb of Rutgers University's Center for Urban Policy Research: "We have no experience in shaping decline. No graceful way of shrinking a city. We don't know what to do with people left in a city for whom there are no job opportunities." Although the solutions are elusive, it is clear that the cities would be helped by an expanding economy and by a federal takeover of budget-busting social services, mainly welfare.
While cities struggle with their problems, the receiving areas of the Sunbelt and the countryside do need not some grand federal plan but a cooperative effort among citizens, business and local government to assure sensible and orderly growth. Without that, the shelf life of the new American life-style could wind up being roughly that of a Big Mac. Careful zoning will help, of course, along with a willingness to tax the people sufficiently to pay for necessary public services. As taxes rise, the flow of new migrants may decrease. A dilemma is that those rising taxes will place increased burdens on the many retired people, living on fixed incomes, who have deliberately selected the smaller communities for their moderate cost of living.
The U.S. is more than ever a nation of immigrants, and the new, internal migration is a pursuit, as much psychological as geographical, of the remaining pockets of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier. The migration is also the last march of a kind of expansionist privilege: the old American idea that all mistakes are canceled by the horizon, by more room, by moving out. Great population movements are hardly unique in a nation that was built by its restless energy. Never before, however, have so many Americans been able to change their lives quite so quickly, and to base their decisions about where to live on the amenities they desire. Americans undoubtedly will continue to make such choices well into the '80s. The age group that likes to move the most is between 25 and 29. Since the peak year for births in the U.S. was 1961, when 4,350,000 children were born, the biggest outward surge is yet to come.
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