How to decide where to live

How to decide where to live Take the question of where to live seriously. Dont let inertia push you toward a big-name city, the place you grew up, or your old college haunts. Make a conscious decision to live somewhere that will improve your quality of life by really understanding what your core needs and interests areand will be. City leaders understand they are competing to attract vibrant, creative populations and are branding themselves accordingly. Young people get this, and many treat cities as a consumer product to be test-driven, like a new car. A white paper written by Next Generation Consulting stated that because of an increasing shortage in skilled workers, Generation Y is saying, I can find a job anywhere. Its more important to me to find a place where I fit in. Rebecca Ryan, CEO of Next Generation Consulting, says: Where you live is more important than where you work because a mortgage and your kids school are more long-term than the job you have. So how do you choose where to live if everywhere is a possibility? 1. Understand what really matters. Richard Florida, professor at George Mason University and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, summarized conclusions from a recent summit of the mavens of the economic development and psychology-of-happiness communities: Place is as important as having a job that challenges you, but not as important as relationships with family and friends. Jane Ciccone, designer of jewelry line Jane Elizabeth, got it. She says she and her husband, fell in love with San Francisco, but our families were in Massachusetts. We could have stayed in San Francisco if we could have gotten some of my family to move there. But no one would move because of the cost of living. Now they live in Newburyport, MA, and she is expecting to give birth any day. 2. Leave room for career flexibility. You probably wont have the same career your whole life. If you move to a city where the culture or demographics reflect your values (think recycling rates, number of churches) and meets the needs of your non-work interests (e.g. kayaking in the Pacific Northwest) then you are more likely to move among careers without having to relocate away from your interests or relationships. Realize that a high-cost of living directly affects what flexibility you have in your career. You severely limit your ability to drop in and out of the workforce and careers if you are raising kids and paying a mortgage in an expensive place. 3. Live where your income is at least as high as the median. If youre surrounded by people who have more money than you, you wont feel like you have enough. The relative amount of money is what matters, according to Daniel Khaneman, who won a Nobel Prize for applying psychology to economics. 3. Consider that more choice is not intrinsically more desirable. Do you really need to be able to choose from 20 takeout restaurants every night? Probably not. The same is true for private schools, and pet-friendly parks. More choices make us nervous about deciding and more likely to regret what weve ultimately settled on, according to Barry Schwartz, author of the Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. You dont want life dictated to you, but you also dont want to spend your whole life deliberating what-if scenarios. 4. Dont relocate away from a spouse or significant other. The single biggest factor in our happiness, according to many studies is not money, its our sex life. Daniel Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, has quantified it for us: Going from sex once a month to sex once a week creates a big jump in happiness. Caveat for the adventurous: Sex needs to be with a single, consistent partner to confer bigtime benefits. 5. Keep your commute short. Theres a huge psychic cost to joining the suburban crawl. You think you are moving out to the suburbs because its better for your kids, but in some cities, youre never going to see your kids because youre always in your car, says Wendy Waters, founder of the blog All About Cities. 6. Seek diverse populations for a richer life. Bigger cities are often among the most homogenous. Ethnic diversity and racial differences now are not as pronounced as economic and educational differences. Diverse ideas are often based in diverse experience; however housing costs are pushing out nearly everyone but the rich from the most popular cities. Richard Florida says, San Francisco is becoming an entirely homogenous place. This is true of entire regions and migration trends will make this worse. The creative revolution is creating a concentration of wealth worse than in the Industrial Revolution. 7. Make a decision to improve the world. The key to solving this problem, says Florida, is not to beat up Boston and San Francisco, but to make second-tier cities attractive. In a large part, this is a government problem. Pay attention to cities such as Columbus, Ohio, where mayor Michael Coleman has a vision for the city that intensely embraces diversity. Or Madison, Wisconsin, where theres a capable network of investors working with the government to promote local technology innovations. You can find meaning in community by helping to promote diversity and creativity in a city such as these. You can help build new models for cities that make room for communities of people with diverse ideas and diverse income levels. The decision is a little like driving a hybrid car: We cant fix everything in the world. But we can live our life in sync with our values and with intention to make a difference. How to decide where to live Three years ago, I made a decision to move from New York City to Madison, WI based purely on research. I put economic development research together with positive psychology research. Then I combed the Internet for city statistics, and I moved. (If you want to read the research I used, I linked to it all in this post.) I had never been to Madison in my life, and you know what? It was a good decision. Except for one thing: I ignored the data about schools. I didnt believe that a city known for progressive social programs and university filled with genius faculty could have poorly performing public schools. But it ended up being true, and all economic development research says do not move to a place with crap schoolsits a sign that lots of things in the city are not right. So when you decide where to live, pay attention to the research. Ignore stuff like the geography of personality because its interesting, but theres no data that says it correlates to what makes you happy. And pay attention to research that flies in the face of everything you know, like you can be a millionaire anywhere. But, then, you should probably not be looking at that research because being a millionaire wont impact your happiness so it should not impact where you choose to live. Heres some research Ive found recently that you should consider if youre considering relocating: Live by water. People who live inland are not as happy as people who live near water, according to research coming out in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. And some scientists think this is because humans evolved by following the shorelines and living off water life. So, the Journal of Preventative Medicine shows that if you live in the Appalachian Mountains you are twice as likely to have mental illness than if you live in Hawaii. Live where people have as much money as you do. Of course, the Hawaii vs. Appalachia issue is clouded by the overwhelming evidence that people have a lot more money in Hawaii. Its true that money does not buy happiness. But it is only true if you are not living in poverty. Poverty is pervasive in Appalachia, so that probably accounts for a lot of the mental health problems there. But dont go move somewhere where everyones got a lot of money, because financial security is relative. And you need to have a little more money than your friends do in order to feel financially secure. Move to where your friends are. If you move within a mile of a good friend, both of you will become significantly happier, according to Nicholas Christakis, a physician and sociologist at Harvard. If youre considering relocating away from friends and family because you believe money will buy happiness, you are sort of right. But Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London shows that youd need to have a salary increase of at least $133,000 in order to have a net positive impact on your happiness from that move. Move to an inexpensive city if you want to start a company. Seventy percent of Gen Y wants to start a company. So a lot of people are relocating to do that. You might think you need to be in Silicon Valley since the people there never shut up about their startup culture. But in fact, most startups need to keep their burn rate low more than they need that mythic startup culture, so you should move to a city with a low cost of living. Maybe you should stay where you are. When one spouse relocates for another, they generally end up earning less over their career because of it. So maybe spouses should stop relocating, period. There is a widespread feeling among Generation Y that transience is exhausting, and relocating away from family and friends for a job is a nonstarter. And anyway, it used to be that you could get a company to pay for your relocation, but Microsoft is no longer doing that, and you can bet other companies will follow. So at some point, relocation starts looking expensive, high risk, and maybe a bad idea. Unless youre starting from New York City.