How to Pick a Place to Live

A toolkit for thinking about relocation

While migration rates within the US had long been declining, the pandemic produced a surge of people moving, whether across town or across the country. After that pandemic dislocation, there’s been a follow on shift, as some people return to their old home, or move on to yet another destination. With the tight housing market, there’s also surely pent up demand for future moves should people be able to actually buy a house someday.

Today I’m giving you a simple toolkit you can use to think through places you might want to move to. It’s a list of some of the things to think about when thinking about moving. It doesn’t tell you exactly where to go, but it does give you ways to think about the possibilities you have in mind.

After I tell you about each one, I will also discuss how the place my own family lives - Carmel, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis - measures up. So you can see the decisions we made.

Organic Connection

Organic connection is a historic or family tie to a particular area. Did you grow up there? Did you go to school there? Have you lived there in the past? Do you have family in the area?

In the early stages of our adult life, it can be good to move away to gain experiences in new places. But as we look for where to sink roots or to raise children, organic connection looms larger.

Organic connection is what makes a place seem like “home.” It helps establish a ready made network of relatives and friends that make social connection easier. It’s especially good to have family such as grandparents around when you have children.

My wife and I grew up in Southern Indiana. I lived most of my adult life in Chicago and New York. She in urban Indianapolis before moving to New York to marry me. We moved from New York to Indianapolis at the end of 2019. With a young son, it made sense to be someplace close to family. Both our extended families are in Indiana. The culture in Indianapolis is also very familiar to us, and both of us knew a lot of people here. We had organic connection.

Economic Opportunity

It’s very important to ask how you will earn a living in a place, unless, of course, you are rich. Can you get a job in your desired industry, profession, etc. in line with your talents and skill sets? Some points worth considerating:

• Economic opportunity is concentrated in large cities. That’s just reality.

• “Power couples” with two college degreed worker have increasingly moved to metro areas with two million people or more, because that seems to be the minimum efficient scale for supporting dual career households.

• Some industries are concentrated in just a handful of cities, or even just one. Energy is in Houston, government in DC, high finance in New York. If you want to be in these industries, you are at a great disadvantage if you are not where the action is.

• Elite jobs for the top 5% of talent are disproportionately located on the coasts, particularly in the big four of New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Conversely, for those not in the top 5%, these cities are very expensive and competitive to attempt to live in.

• Remote work allows you to take your job with you, but leads to atrophy in your network and likely career plateauing for most people as you fail to stay at the leading edge. Finding another job if you lose yours might be hard.

• For anyone who needs to travel, being close to a major airport is important. This usually means being near a region of one million people or more.

• For those who want to start a business, venture capital is very unequally distributed in America.

In short, bigger cities are generally better for economic opportunity, though you need to calibrate which city to live in to your realistic talent level and industry you desire to be in. Smaller and more rural areas have great advantages, but less economic opportunity.

We moved to Indianapolis, which is just above the two million population threshold. The airport is adequate to my once per month travel schedule, but would not be pleasant if I were a road warrior type. Virtually all of my income is earned out of town. It’s not clear what kind of employment I could find locally if it came to that. I would classify the city as having ok but not spectacular levels of economic opportunity.

Amenities

Amenities are another major item to consider. Amenities can be divided into a few categories, but there are three big ones:

• Natural amenities. Warm weather, beaches/waterfronts, mountains or other interesting terrain and outdoor activity zones, etc.

• Consumer amenities. Shopping, restaurants, pro sports, etc.

• Public goods and services. Parks, good schools, etc.

A lot of this is relative to what’s important to you. If you are really into hiking and skiing, maybe being in the mountains matters. Objectively, warm weather counts for a lot, as the best predictor of state level population growth since the 1960s is average January temperature.

A growing population tends to produce more consumer amenities. A stagnant to shrinking population can go the other direction.

Looking at where we moved, Indiana is very low in natural amenities. It’s flat. It has cold winters. It has a lot of gray skies in the winter. The USDA publishes a natural amenities scale, and we don’t do well on it.

I’d say Indianapolis has consumer amenities at about 75% of the biggest cities. For most people, Indy is going to have what you need. However, for me personally, there are definitely critical weaknesses here. I love opera and used to live a ten minute walk from the Metropolitan Opera House. We basically don’t have opera here, and have a very weak arts culture in general. I wear traditional dress shoes, and as far as I’ve been able to find, there isn’t a single person in the entire Indianapolis area that knows how to property resole them. I could get that done a block from my apartment in NYC. So there’s definitely some things I miss.

Indiana in general is a penny pinching state with poor public goods and services. Carmel is an exception. It has fantastic parks, infrastructure, festivals, schools, etc. I wrote a previous essay about this.

Cost

How much you have to pay to live in a particular place is very important. It doesn’t matter how livable a place is if you can’t afford to live there.

This often works against economic opportunity and amenities. Places with those two things tend to be expensive because lots of people want to live there. If a place is too cheap, there’s usually a reason, and it’s probably not a good one.

This matters both absolutely and relative to your economic opportunity. Price isn’t just a number, it’s a number relative to how much you make.

There are two big things here:

• Housing. How much does it to cost to buy a house (or rent)? Increasingly, you need to factor in the cost of insurance too, since homeowners insurance has gone through the roof in lots of places, and can even be difficult to get. I would look at the price/income ratio of housing. How much is the average (median) house in an area compared to the average income? The best place to find this for metro areas is the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. As a rule of thumb, an affordable house is no more than three times your annual income.

• Taxes. How much will you pay in state and local taxes? You have to be careful about comparing places, because you can get easily fooled. Texas doesn’t have an income tax, but it has extremely high property taxes.

We moved to Indianapolis, which is a relatively affordable housing market, but is not as cheap as it used to be. In 2014, the price/income ratio in Indianapolis was a very affordable 2.7. Today it is 4.0, an increase of almost 50% in the last decade. Chicago’s ratio is only 4.2, so Indianapolis is now basically as expensive to live in as Chicago. But it’s far from the most expensive place in the country.

Carmel is one of the priciest places to live in the Indianapolis area, but very affordable by the standards of peer cities across the country. We bought an older, smaller home that is in the bottom 10% of housing prices in the city. So we were able to move here for less than 3x our annual income. Our taxes are pretty good, with a 5% state/local flat income tax, 7% sales tax, and 1% property tax.

Politics

For a growing number of people today, politics plays an important role in where they move. Some people want to be in red states. Others in blue states. There are really three levels to consider here:

• State government: red, blue, or competitive

• Local government: which party runs the particular city where you live? Or the county if you are outside of a municipality

• District attorney (and possibly sheriff): Often elected at the county level

You can also think of it more broadly as the cultural environment. What kinds of people live near me? Liberal or conservatives?

A great tool for looking at the political demographics of the places you are thinking about moving is the New York Times 2020 national election map at the precinct level. It shows you the presidential results for 2020, as well as the red or blue shift since 2016. Since the Times never fully completed the 2020 map, you can also look at their 2016 version.

Indiana is a Republican trifecta state. The city I live in is solidly Republican, though more light red and trending Democrat over time. It might flip at some point. Our county prosecutor is a Republican.

Politics was definitely a factor in us moving to the suburbs from downtown Indianapolis. Our old NYC neighborhood on the Upper West Side was extremely liberal, but New York is huge, anonymous, and genuinely open to differences of opinion. New York also has a robust and public conservative presence, with many rich conservative donors, a conservative think tank (the Manhattan Institute), a conservative newspaper (the New York Post), and even a dissident culture and politics scene (Dimes Square).

By contrast, the urban core of Indianapolis is insufferably hard left in its public culture. Outside of a rump Republican Party with a few stray elected officials from outlying areas, there’s basically zero public dissent from the hard left line by any leader or institution in town (only private laments). The centrist Democrat mayor is the closest thing to it. For example, the conservative owned but non-political donut shop around the corner from me in my old neighborhood was run out of business by a hate mob because they failed to post a BLM sign. Not a single civic leader came to their defense.

Basically, Indianapolis is not really a socially safe place to live for anyone with public heterodox opinions such as myself. And it’s small enough that people know who you are. So it’s not really a great environment for someone like me these days.

Personal Considerations

There are always personal considerations that are specific to families or individuals that need to be evaluated when deciding where to move. Examples of these are:

• Health care or disability needs. Do you have a family member with a condition or disability that requires access to services you can’t get just anywhere?

• Religious considerations. Is there a church in the area you would want to attend? Don’t assume that just because you are in the Bible belt, there will necessarily be a church that you really like. Finding a church is a frustrating process for many people. It’s similar for other religions. Orthodox Jews probably only want to live in a city that has an Orthodox community with a synagogue, an eruv, etc.

• Ethnic considerations. There’s a reason new immigrants tend to cluster. They want to be around people who know their culture and language, where there are institutions supporting them, products from the old country available, etc. As America becomes more diverse, this is less of a concern as lots of places contain these sorts of things today.

For us, we have a son with some special needs, and that was ultimately the deciding factor in why we moved to Carmel. This is where the services are.

We loved our church in NYC, and there’s nothing like it in Indianapolis. You wouldn’t think that it would be easier to find a church in New York than Indianapolis, but for us that’s true. The cultural environment here is Middle America, and while we are definitely Hoosiers in many ways, we are not traditional Middle American people.

Genuine Affinity

Lastly, you have to ask whether you have genuine affinity for a place. Do you actually like it? Do you really feel a pull there?

A lot of people fall in love with the idea of a place, say a quaint small town in Vermont or even Austin, Texas or Miami, but then discover the reality of it is different than they thought. The cult classic film Funny Farm with Chevy Chase is a hilarious take on this expectations mismatch.

The experience of visiting a place is often very different from living there. You can visit a small town and love it. But if you moved there, you might discover that you exhaust its charms quickly. You’ll probably always be something of an outsider, even if you live there the rest of your life. You might discover that the culture is more stifling and conformist than you thought. (In a small town, simply doing something different from what everybody else does can be viewed as uppity, and be interpreted as you thinking you are too good for them). You might miss the amenities of a big city more than you think.

Similarly, you might like the idea of having a homestead farm type property, but radically underestimate how difficult it is simply to maintain your house and acreage, much less grow anything.

Cities too are like this. The experience of living in New York is completely different than the experience of visiting it.

You might also think you want to live somewhere that’s very aligned with your politics, is cheap, etc. For the conservative, a place like the Indianapolis suburbs checks a lot of the boxes. But if you are someone who’s used to being part of dense intellectual networks in DC, you might feel like you moved to a backwater. There’s a reason the majority of the conservative intellectual class lives in deep blue areas like New York or Washington.

Sometimes you don’t really know if you’ll fall in love with a place until you take the plunge and move somewhere. So you should be cautious and at least think about the possibility that you will hate it if you move to a place where you have no history, no organic connection, no network, etc. You might be falling in love with the idea of a place rather than the place itself. Or with the visitor experience of a place rather than the resident one.

For us, fortunately we love living in Carmel, though there are things we definitely miss about New York. In my ideal world, we’d have both our house here in Carmel and our old apartment back on the Upper West Side, and split time between them. This would be the perfect mix, as the cities are ideal complements for each other. But even if we had the money to do that, with a six year old, it’s not the right time to try to be enjoying New York City, so I’m very glad we are rooted here. If you follow me on X, you’ll see that I’m always posting about how great Carmel is. We don’t have any plans to leave and are acting like this is our long term home, though you never know where life takes you some time.

Additional Resources

I’ve done a couple of past podcasts about the topic of picking a place to live. My one on what to think about when you think about moving talks about some of the same things I covered here.

The one asking Where should I move? talks about the pros and cons of living in big cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas. It’s a great complement to what I wrote about here.

I also did a podcast asking whether it was possible to be a conservative in the city. I talk a lot about the realities of rural life, as well as the historic connection between conservatism and urbanism. The main content starts at 4:18 into the podcast, and the embed should be cued to that.

If you are not already a subscriber to my podcast, you should start listening today. I post episodes here on Mondays, but you can also sign up via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube.