So, I'm listening to NPR this morning, which I do consistently on weekends (versus the weekday, when I listen to prog talk). There was a report on proposed new rules for homeownership, featuring representatives of the American Enterprise Institute and the Center for Responsible Lending.
While that topic--cementing the burden of responsibility for the mortgage crisis on the home buying borrower, as if they were to blame instead of corporate-conservative deregulation--is a diary in itself, what caught my ear was the follow-up report by NPR's Business Editor Marilyn Geewax. In this report, she discussed the advantages of renting in today's economy, and in particular, the advantage of mobility.
I don't own a home, & at my present pace of income in my late 30s, won't for a long time (perhaps never, who knows). I have also recently benefited from not owning a home, moving back to Denver from Phoenix with all of 4 days off work for travel & the legal-document shuffle, via transferring within my company. So I'm all in favor of the option of mobility.
What I don't like to hear is the implied expectation that people should move solely for economic reasons. This to me smacks of the same flawgic behind free trade: that labor must try to keep up with capital, that states should be in fierce competition to lure business and thus the best of the workforce, that mobility = nobility when the motive is economic. And that, by implication, there is no particular usefulness, goodness, morality in other motivations or reason for living in a place. That there is no sense of place outside of economic meaning.
I hafta say, while there is some economic benefit to Denver over Phoenix, it's not why I moved. I moved for Love: of friends, of weather, of Place. And I don't dislike my hometown of Phoenix at all (Kookocracy aside), but rather prefer Denver for listed reasons as my chosen home.
And I get that when places go downhill, people want out. Life is too short for those with the option to move in search of a better quality of life, and more power to them. But what is terrible is that we seem willing to consign our own places to the sociocultural-economic trash heap, a mindset in my mind equivalent to that behind vampiric, Sucked-Dry-And-Cast-Aside globalism.
We shouldn't be OK with vast portions of interior cities as ghettos. We shouldn't be OK with the consumption of limited land resources when we believe we've ruined our existing parcels. Start a new life; Go West! we still groupthink, only now, Careerward has replaced Westward in our Economic Manifest Destiny. The Gold Rush is the Job Competition. There wasn't enough gold for everyone, and there aren't enough good jobs for everyone, but that doesn't matter to those who benefit financially by leveraging the power of the ensuing stampede of the workforce.
If we oppose the way globalism conducts international competition--putting the cost burden on the working class instead of the investor class--we should oppose with equal vigor whatever it is we call interstate competition that does the same thing in our own country. I despise the way corporations hold state and local governments hostage to threats of moving in order to secure tax privileges, and the idea that We the Workforce should pull up stakes in our cultivated communities and move ourselves (and our families, or sometimes not) Careerward to accommodate them is part and parcel of enabling them to continue getting away with pitting State against State in the ongoing war against worker pay & benefits. With each compromise, the "winning" State trades tax revenue for jobs, and while the lost tax revenue has proven politically hard to recover, have the gained jobs proven as durable?
And getting back to the original premise: is it good for people to have to move for economic reasons? We built a mobile society, but we have paid prices: the sociopolitical cost of weakened community seems pretty high to me. While I myself have left home, I can't imagine the sense of desperation of those who feel they must leave their immediate family to find work hundreds of miles away in order to support them.
To support strong community and family integrity, as well as a higher quality of life, we must deliberately value the economic integrity of ALL cities and states, so that interstate moving can be a choice separate from economic necessity. I don't mean to celebrate unsustainable economic growth, but rather a high level of Localism resistant to corporate tax-cut blackmail. There must be a connection between the concept of buying/shopping locally with the realization that the job one saves or creates might be one's own, and that the perceived necessity of moving away from loved ones, friends, or chosen Place can be reduced by successful economic Localism.
This has become kind of a ramble, & may seem obvious, but it's more the response to the portrayal of conventional thinking on mobility by a business journalist. It's not the first time NPR business reporting has touched a nerve, and really it's probably a notch up on business reporting from corporate entities (which I don't ingest).