Exodus from Big Cities?

City Safari: Is Covid Bursting The Balloons Of The Urban Paradigm?

Signs of life in small towns

Wed, May 20, 2020

By Thom Nickels

Contributing Editor

Right after Covid-19 hit a new person moved into my neighborhood. A small moving van appeared one day and the lone mover, a guy in his early twenties, began moving his stuff into a house not far from mine. The friend helping him move left at the end of the day, after which the newcomer parked his car (with New York license plates on the wrong side of the street near another neighbor’s driveway. The ex-New Yorker’s parking blunder was so in- your- face I knew that he’d soon get an earful from disgruntled neighbors. That’s exactly what happened because a week later he was parking his car on the right side of the street.

The fact that the neighborhood newcomer was from New York said it all. Here was obviously another New York City refugee who could no longer take the inhumane density of an overcrowded city in Covid-19 lockdown. Here was another New Yorker who had decided that Philadelphia was better than New York when it came to a pandemic. Here was another millennial joining up with renters his age, all of them crammed into a small house like King Oscar sardines.  Four of five people living on top of one another because rents are (artificially) inflated and exorbitant, another indication of something untoward, eating at the soul of society.

New York City, however, has plenty of company when it comes to overcrowded cities during a pandemic.

My new neighbor chose Philadelphia as a safe haven even though many Philadelphians are having second thoughts about living here. If my new neighbor was really prescient, perhaps he should have gone one step further and moved deeper into the state.

I’m thinking of towns like Elizabethtown, Plum, Whitehall, Johnstown or even West Mifflin. West Mifflin is situated on the beautiful Monongalia River, just minutes from Pittsburgh where one can rent an apartment for under $600.00 a month. A small room in a small house in Fishtown-Richmond (with kitchen privileges) will cost you well over $1,000.   

If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s made many urban types like myself realize that we don’t need the big city cultural accruements we thought we needed to live an intellectually rich life. 

We don’t need to see every new play at the Arden or the Lantern; we don’t need to see every new art exhibit in town; we can get by without seeing the latest offering from Ballet X or the Pennsylvania Ballet. We can even get along without keeping tabs on the Bearded Ladies Cabaret. These things are good but we don’t need them. Forget the noble attempt at continuing the city’s arts and cultural scene with virtual performances because in the end everything ‘virtual’ comes up short, especially that most oxymoronic virtual event of all: the virtual cocktail party.  

As I see it, one needs only good books to keep the mind fluctuating along intellectual currents. One can take books anywhere, to the mountains, to the sea, even to a log cabin in Centralia, Pennsylvania. 

Striking out for small towns far from the massive cities on the east coast can be a scary move for committed urbanites.  

The New York Timesran the following May 2020 story: America’s Biggest Cities Were Already Losing Their Allure; What next?The article describes the plight of 24-year old Nina Brajovic who moved back in with her parents in Pittsburgh to escape the Covid-infected wall-to-wall-density of New York. 

         The Timesreported:

         She is now savoring life’s slowness, eating her father’s soup and watching movies on an L-shaped couch with her mom. ‘Part of it feels like, why am I even living in New York?’ said Ms. Brajovic, 24, who pays $1,860 in rent each month for her share of an apartment with two roommates in Manhattan. ‘Why am I always paying all of this rent?’ 

         

The exodus from big cities is happening all over the world. The trend has been growing for several years but Covid-19 has pushed it over the top. Covid might be seen as Act One of possible future world "disasters” or issues, such as scarcity of food. Moving to smaller towns, of course, is expensive. Uprooting oneself for the sake of the future might not be a pleasant thing to contemplate although for many in the coming decades it could be a lifesaver. In rural areas, for instance, one can grow large food gardens but try doing that except as a balcony experiment in a Center City condo.  

          

True Activist, an online publication, ran a piece entitled 30 Cities People Are Ditching.Philadelphia was not among the list but New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit were. 

         

In 2019 The Wall Street Journalfeatured an article about millennials leaving big cities. CNN got into the act when they reported:"Coronavirus is making some people rethink where they want to live.”    

         

Business Insiderjoined the fray with this offering: "People are leaving cities for rural areas.” 

USAToday had its own spin: "Get Me Out of Here! Americans flee Crowded cities amid Covid-19, Consider Permanent Move.”

There’s a lot of snobbery associated with city living, and moving to remote towns in the country will not win you the love of urban progressives. As the National Reviewreported:           

"Meanwhile, it is not hard to find examples of urban progressives looking at rural America with a combination of contempt, disdain, pity, smug superiority . . . At some point the Coronavirus crisis will end, but one of the extraordinarily difficult lessons of this ordeal is that the catastrophic scenarios that sound like something out of science fiction can happen in real life, and that the vast majority of us are at the mercy of fate in these scenarios……Whichever way SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans — a lab accident, wet markets, exotic-animal trader, a farmer using bat guano for fertilizer — it can happen again with another virus.”  

The realization that we don’t "need” the things that big cities provide—theater, ballet,  or 101 ‘Diversity Consultants’ on every corporate board---is a comforting discovery indeed.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania

The 2010’s were the famous migration years when millennials flocked into big cities. That’s when Philadelphia’s foodie culture began to flourish, when it was difficult to pick up a regional magazine or newspaper without seeing features on the city’s burgeoning restaurant industry. Some observers then worried that the city was banking too heavily on restaurants and food as a destination selling point. That’s all changed now. Covid, for the time being anyway, has pretty much decimated the city’s foodie culture with its celebrity chefs and glamour press openings.

Prior to the millennial stampede in the 2010’s, it was the so called ‘empty nesters,’ or couples with grown children who left the suburbs to experience the excitement of living in Center City. Part of that excitement now includes being trapped in high rise condos under lockdown rules that forbid inviting in guests and hosting dinner parties 

That’s especially ironic when you consider that the whole point of urban life is mingling with people and freedom. But what happens when that is taken away; what happens when the urban dream becomes a prison?    

Perhaps it takes a pandemic to get people to open their minds. Is there life outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh despite that old mantra about Pennsylvania being Alabama outside of these two cities?

Alabama at this point doesn’t seem so bad because who knows what’s headed down the pike. Now that the unbelievable has occurred; now that science fiction has become reality, the course is set for other unbelievable occurrences. 

Meeting the ‘unbelievable’ with the ‘unbelievable’ might be the answer. 

That might mean moving to a town like Johnston, known as the third fastest shrinking city in the United States (and once 3^rdon a list to be bombed by the Russians during the Cold War because of its plentiful mills).

Johnston is a beautiful city-- in ruins. It can trace its abandonment by residents to the closing of its mills but it also has a besieged history, namely the 1889 flood when a bursting dam devastated the city. But it has a thriving arts scene, a symphony orchestra, a museum of art and a magazine called Johnston Magazine.  

It’s also a city with incredible western USA style mountain views, plenty of fresh air and acres and acres of ground for new vegetable gardens.