The Census numbers point out a trend that won’t be trumpeted in too many economic development brochures. Thousands of professional athletes make their homes in Florida, no matter where they were born, where they grew up, where they went to school – or even what team they play for, if they’re in a team sport.
Yes, the weather in Florida is just dandy, and, oh, by the way, there is no personal income tax in Florida.
Home sweet home? For millions of Americans, scattered by the taxman or by employment with a global corporation or by something as quaint as a big back yard and a basketball hoop in the driveway, “home” is not the priority.
Of course, the “local” politicians will crank up the cheerleading to convince us that their little corner of paradise is the Garden of Eden, but life is becoming too chaotic, too nomadic, too flexible, to pay much attention to such stuff. The last time I went to a July 4 parade in the Berkshires, there were more high school bands from Connecticut than from Massachusetts.
Tens of thousands of workers commute each day among Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Connecticut and Rhode Island; their notion of “local,” of the sanctity of state borders, is often marginal at best.
The Boston Globe was clever enough to point out that the closing of the Marlborough campus of Fidelity may be jarring, but at the end of the day, many of the commuting Massachusetts workers will shrug, change direction, and still be commuting to a Fidelity facility in New Hampshire or Rhode Island. A blow to Massachusetts economic development? They really don’t care.
This House Is Not A Home
At the local-yokel level, the urban planners insist that you can’t have a strong region without a strong central city – but, of course, you can. We now scatter from downtown to suburb to ex-urban village to work, play and live, with many central cities an afterthought bordering on irrelevancy.
Harrisburg, Pa., one of those cities in embarrassing financial straits five steps from disaster, is pondering a “commuter tax” on those little devils who come into town to work – and then escape before the sun goes down. It’s a popular option in states that allow such stuff.
State and local elections are often viewed with bemused detachment by wandering workers who often have little stake in their “home” jurisdiction, because they work across a border where they are, in essence, disenfranchised.
Look at two Connecticut towns of about 15,000 people nestled on the Connecticut-Massachusetts border, Suffield and Enfield, and what you see in the Census analysis is that Springfield and Agawam and Westfield are a significant cross-commute market. About 1,000 Springfield residents commute to Enfield, while 840 from Enfield are on their way to Springfield. Which state or town should the folks root for?
Even the efforts to create and encourage “cool” cities – or, at least, cool downtowns – to attract the young and affluent and artsy-craftsy, to generate some local loyalty to the Grand Old Town, have been more hype than reality.
Joel Kotkin, a Distinguished Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., suggests that the Census figures reflect just the opposite trend. As the 20-somethings get just a tiny bit older, there is “a marked acceleration of movement not into cities, but toward suburban and exurban locations.”
The challenge in all this, of course, is one of public administration and politics and planning. If the citizenry is free to roam the region, the country, the world, without a particular loyalty to place, how can “local” or “regional” problems be made compelling?
There’s little new in this, except for the acceleration of the trend. From Luther Gulick’s “Metropolitan Problems and American Ideas,” in the 1960s, “It is clear that our big urban complexes are now so closely tied together economically, socially and structurally by daily human movements and activities that every problem is a spill-over from the next jurisdiction.”
This kind of sneaky talk is used by the politicians and “smart growth” conspiracy to cast a “regional” tax net from which no one can escape. But the challenge is real enough, in a society where work and activities of daily living simply aren’t tied to one place we call home.
