How We Decide Where To Build Our Lives
Same Grass But Greener
Today’s Friday Thread Prompt comes from my own deep dive into the SameGrassButGreener Subreddit, a place where people can list what they’re looking for in an ideal place to live….and others can offer suggestions. You can imagine how this usually goes: people are usually looking for places that are simultaneously walkable but rural, cute yet unique, not hostile towards LGBTQ+ people but also affordable, have great public transit but low taxes, close to an international airport but without traffic, mild weather but without climate threats, you get the picture.
The civilization people want is also not the civilization they are willing to pay for — or the civilization that their current vocation or situation allows them to afford, at least in the U.S. Suffice to say Chicago is very popular in this thread.
With that said — most people in this subreddit are not trying to optimize. They just want a place where they can work, afford to live, and figure out how to build community. Some are hunting for a “fun” area post undergrad, but a lot have already lived through their 20s and are trying to figure out a place that’s conducive to community building. I’ve come to appreciate the commenters, who are very quick to disabuse people about the livability of various “cool” places (Bozeman, hello) and celebrate the mid-size city (Spokane, we love you).
But I’m also struck by the thinking that if you can just find the “best” place to live, at least for you and your family’s personal desires, that community will follow. Because here’s what I’ve learned over the last nine months of interviewing people about what makes community work: it’s not about being in a place that checks a bunch of boxes. It’s about living very close to people you already know intimately, or living in a community — like a New York cooperative housing project, which is the story I drafted for the book today, or a highly walkable location in a small town outside Denver, which I wrote up last week — that is built to facilitate community.
Or: creating a scenario where you will have more time to allocate to community building, whatever that might look like. In other words, a place where you will work less, where you and/or partner will have less pressure to fulfill all parenting requirements, where the time and effort it takes to regularly show up (for friends, for your community) is less.
So here’s where we do our own, very Culture Study version of “Same Grass, But Greener.” We can start by acknowledging that there is no one place that will work for all, not even Chicago, although Chicago will work for many. You can pitch your location, or you can ask for thoughts — but I hope we can go beyond the descriptions I usually see in the subreddit, in both the asks and the pitches.
Just to start:
Instead of “are there young people,” we can try “how possible is it to make friends across generations?
Instead of “how good are the schools,” how invested is the community in education, just generally?
Is it possible to live without a car? If there’s public transport, is it reliable and accessible?
Are there pre-existing organizations that are easy to plug in to, or does it feel cliquey?
What new organizations or opportunities are you particularly excited about?
How long did it take you to feel like you ‘belonged’?
If you don’t have pre-existing connections, is it particularly hard to break in?
Is it a place where you have to wait months — and drive several hours — in order to access a health care specialist?
If a person of color were to move there, would they often be the only person who wasn’t white in the room?
Does the area seem to be trying to figure out climate resilience — or ignoring it?
If you moved out of the country where you hold citizenship — what did it take? What did you give up, and what have you gained?
If you moved to a situation where you made less than before, how has your life changed?
If a queer person moved there, how would they be treated? Would they need to shield parts of their identity? Could they find medical providers? (Only speak with knowledge here; just because someone’s nice to a straight-presenting person doesn’t mean they’d be nice to a person who wasn’t straight-presenting)
Are there ANY SINGLE PEOPLE, and is there a place for them to hang out?
Is there a place for you if you’re not obsessed with your job?
Is there a place for you if you’re not obsessed with your kids’ activities?
Is it possible that the thing that needs to change is something about my situation, but not my location?
I could keep going here, but I’d love for you to do it in my stead. Some of those questions were posed as if you were a person asking about potential places to live, and some of them were as if you were a person talking about where you currently live — invert them and expand them and refine them as needed. Just talk as frankly as you can about what makes a place work for you, and what might make it work for others — or what you’re looking for, if you’re still struggling to find a place that works for you.
Like Tuesday’s Thread, this is a high-risk conversation to have on the internet. It could very easily devolve into people arguing about whether Buffalo is great, or there’s actually housing anywhere within 30 minutes of Portland, or if it’s irresponsible for anyone to even think about moving to California, or just general caps lock yelling about TEXAS IS THE DEVIL.
That is not what we’re going for here, and in order to avoid that sort of thread devolution, we need to acknowledge that people are speaking from their experience. That means issuing caveats if, say, you know there’s a bus system but you’ve never used it, or if you’re a straight white married person with kids with a particular experience of a community. But it also means that people are expressing what it’s felt like for them to live in a place — which is not a blanket statement about how it would be for everyone. (A good way to emphasize this: start a comment with something like “In my experience as…..”)
This posture also means granting some grace to people who are trying to figure out where they belong. If they don’t feel at home where they are, there’s a reason. Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out what, exactly, that reason is — and how to work towards solving it. Threads like this are part of the process, not the end of it.
So with all that said: what follows is a private, subscriber-only space on the internet. I’m trusting us to be particularly thoughtful about our responses here — and continuing the work of keeping this one of the good places on the internet.