I moved from Ohio to New Hampshire, and I can confirm you’re correct. It was 97 degrees and humid here in NH yesterday. This after we spent the entire month of February (literally) below 40 degrees. If anything, the climate on the east coast is worse than the Midwest, because we get more snow. But nobody cares. That’s part of the “New England charm”, although that’s highly overrated as well.
Further evidence: you don’t hear people citing the climate as an excuse in midwestern cities that are actually growing, like Columbus or Madison or even Minneapolis. It’s only an excuse in declining cities like Detroit and Cleveland.
I’m not even sure if it’s the case in Detroit or Cleveland. My wife is from Buffalo, which is world famous for its lake effect snow. When you tell someone you’re going to Buffalo, invariably they tell you to watch out for blizzards, even in summer. (I think they’re trying to be clever.) But nobody in Buffalo cares about the snow. They just shovel it out and get on with what they’re doing. I know a lot of people through my wife who have left Buffalo for warmer climates, but in nearly all those cases, the climate itself wasn’t a factor. Most moved for jobs; some moved away for college and never moved back. But I’ve never met anyone who moved to Georgia because they were tired of shoveling snow.
One of our kids, fed up with Indiana winters, decamped for South Carolina and has made a nice life there. We went to visit last June after the birth of their first child. Holy frijoles, was the humidity unbearable. 85 degrees, but two minutes in the air and you've soaked through your shirt. In Indiana, we stay inside most of the winter. In SC, they stay inside most of the spring and summer. I feel like our son just traded one ugly season for a different one.
Maybe this is a more recent (post COVID) phenomenon, but aren’t wages, when adjusted for purchasing power, pretty similar in the Southeast and the Midwest, or really effectively higher in the Midwest? It doesn’t strike me that Atlanta, say, has better economic opportunities than Chicago, but Atlanta does now (I think) have housing that is significantly more expensive. Same with say Columbus and the Research Triangle. My understanding is that basically all of Florida has very low wages when you compare those wages to cost of housing. I could go on, but it seems to me that in absolute terms, there is a lot more economic opportunity in the Northern Mississippi and Great Lakes basins than in the Southeast, yet people keep moving from one to the other. I suspect that a large part of it is retirees moving, not working age people moving. And honestly the people I meet who move to the Southeast tend to not be super focused on their careers (with the exception of people doing manual labor going into business for themselves due to the opportunities inherent in living someplace with a rapidly growing population).
I moved from Ohio to New Hampshire, and I can confirm you’re correct. It was 97 degrees and humid here in NH yesterday. This after we spent the entire month of February (literally) below 40 degrees. If anything, the climate on the east coast is worse than the Midwest, because we get more snow. But nobody cares. That’s part of the “New England charm”, although that’s highly overrated as well.
Further evidence: you don’t hear people citing the climate as an excuse in midwestern cities that are actually growing, like Columbus or Madison or even Minneapolis. It’s only an excuse in declining cities like Detroit and Cleveland.
I’m not even sure if it’s the case in Detroit or Cleveland. My wife is from Buffalo, which is world famous for its lake effect snow. When you tell someone you’re going to Buffalo, invariably they tell you to watch out for blizzards, even in summer. (I think they’re trying to be clever.) But nobody in Buffalo cares about the snow. They just shovel it out and get on with what they’re doing. I know a lot of people through my wife who have left Buffalo for warmer climates, but in nearly all those cases, the climate itself wasn’t a factor. Most moved for jobs; some moved away for college and never moved back. But I’ve never met anyone who moved to Georgia because they were tired of shoveling snow.
Also correct.
One of our kids, fed up with Indiana winters, decamped for South Carolina and has made a nice life there. We went to visit last June after the birth of their first child. Holy frijoles, was the humidity unbearable. 85 degrees, but two minutes in the air and you've soaked through your shirt. In Indiana, we stay inside most of the winter. In SC, they stay inside most of the spring and summer. I feel like our son just traded one ugly season for a different one.
Correct.
Maybe this is a more recent (post COVID) phenomenon, but aren’t wages, when adjusted for purchasing power, pretty similar in the Southeast and the Midwest, or really effectively higher in the Midwest? It doesn’t strike me that Atlanta, say, has better economic opportunities than Chicago, but Atlanta does now (I think) have housing that is significantly more expensive. Same with say Columbus and the Research Triangle. My understanding is that basically all of Florida has very low wages when you compare those wages to cost of housing. I could go on, but it seems to me that in absolute terms, there is a lot more economic opportunity in the Northern Mississippi and Great Lakes basins than in the Southeast, yet people keep moving from one to the other. I suspect that a large part of it is retirees moving, not working age people moving. And honestly the people I meet who move to the Southeast tend to not be super focused on their careers (with the exception of people doing manual labor going into business for themselves due to the opportunities inherent in living someplace with a rapidly growing population).