Moving Trends for 2025

[Irrelevant]

Here’s an article Yale published that does a better job than I can of showing the parallels between what’s happening in cities like NYC and LA and the UK. I referenced the UK as history is usually the best indicator of what’s to come.

Here’s an excerpt that summarizes the cause and effects I’d argue are one of the larger drivers. Cost of living increases is a result, not a cause. But “why” the increase is the real question.
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The Problems with a Socialist Vision for NYC

Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and co-authors suggest that some of New York City mayoral candidate Zohram Mamdani’s socialism-inspired proposals, such as city-owned grocery stores, are likely to run into inefficiencies and unanticipated downsides. They write that capitalism can be a better engine of...

insights.som.yale.edu

I'll simply agree to disagree with many of the underlying assumptions. Like people actually want socialism. I don't think that's true, for all the reasons in that article. People simply don't want, or can't stand, what we have, and socialism being so fundamentally different must therefore be better.

In an era of easy mobility, great people will always choose to live in great places. What defines a great place is up for debate and varies by each of us, with some common threads. I will go out on a limb and say that California will always have a thriving economy because it's a great place, like physical space, to live in. It's beautiful and the weather is perfect. For the same reasons, I don't think ND (or WY to a lesser degree) will ever become a huge population center (sorry to all of you who like ND, it's nothing personal).

What I think is more interesting is the observation that people move to an area to make money (some money, more money, whatever), get sick of it (the crime, the smog, and housing costs, the traffic, the taxes, etc. etc. etc), so they move to a different area with different characteristics, ones they think they want more, yet for some fairly consistent reason, they then seak to slowly change this new place to have the same things of the place they left. I don't understand that. I don't understand it for the same reason why people would move because of "politics". It just doesn't make sense to me. But as I've found, many people, and many people's actions, don't make sense.

 

[jimh406]

People move for a number of reasons and stay for equally as many. Many have continued in states they hate because their job is there while they count the days until they can move. Others, stay because their families are there and prioritize living near family.

It takes a lot of initiative to move and takes none to stay. Sometimes the initiative comes from losing that anchor job.

As far as NC vs SC goes. SC is more rural. Of course, if you are an academic, NC is better. Interesting about the comments about SC roads. It's been a while since I lived in NC, but it was a running joke about how bad their roads were both in the cities and on the interstate. We regularly traveled to SC and never experienced their bad roads, but it's been a while.

Fwiw, NC is on my list of never live there again. YMMV.