IECONOMY II COMMUNITY I

THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOMEFewer Americans are reLocating than at any time since 1962.

That's good news for families, communities ... and even the environment.BY JOEL KOTKIN

ARTWORK BY THOMAS DOYLE

ON ALMOST ANY NIGHT OF THE WEEK,

Churchill's Restaurant is hopping. ThelO-year-old hot spot in Rockville Cen­tre, Long Island, is packed with localsdrinking beer and eating burgers, withsome customers spilling over ontothe street. "We have lots of regulars­people who are recognized when theycome in," says co-owner Kevin Culhane.In fact, regulars make up more than80 percent of the restaurant's custom­ers. "People feel comfortable and safehere," Culhane says. "This is their place."

Thriving neighborhood restaurantsare one small data point in a larger trendI call the new localism. The basic prem­ise: the longer people stay in their homesand communities, the more they iden-

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tify with those places, and the greatertheir commitment to helping local busi­nesses and institutions thrive, even in adownturn. Sev~ral factors are drivingthis process, including an aging popula­tion, sUburbanization, the Internet, andan increased focus on family life. Andeven as the recession has begun to yieldto recovery, our commitment to ourlocal roots is only going to grow moreprofound. Evident before the recession,the new localism will shape how we liveand work in the coming decades, andmay even influence the course of ourfuture politics.

Perhaps nothing will be as surpris­ing about 21st-century America as itssettledness. For more than a genera-

tion Americans have believed that "spa­tial mobility" would increase, and, asit did, feed an inexorable trend towardrootlessness and anomie. This visionof social disintegration was perhapsbest epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972bestseller A Nation ofStrangers, with itsvision of America becoming "a societycoming apart at the seams." In 2000,Harvard's Robert Putnam made a simi­lar point, albeit less hyperbolically, inBowling A/one, in which he wrote aboutthe "civic malaise" he saw gripping thecountry. In Putnam's view, society wasbeing undermined, largely due to sub­urbanization and what he called "thegrowth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are

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becoming less nomadic. As recently asthe 1970S as many as one in five peoplemoved annually; by 2006, long beforethe current recession took hold, thatnumber was 14 percent, the lowest ratesince the census starting followingmovement in 1940. Since then toughertimes have accelerated these trends, inlarge part because opportunities to sell

Family and technologyare two factors

working against nomadism,in the workplaceand elsewhere.

houses and find new employment havedried up. In 2008, the total number ofpeople changing residences was lessthan those who did so in 1962, when thecountry had 120 million fewer people.The stay-at-home trend appears par­ticularly strong among aging boom­ers, who are largely eschewing Sunbeltretirement condos to stay tethered totheir suburban homes-close to family,friends, clubs, churches, and familiarsurroundings.

The trend will not bring back thecorner grocery stores and the declin­ing organizations-bowling leagues,Boy Scouts, and such-cited by Put­nam and others as the traditional glueof American communities. Nor willour car-oriented suburbs replicate theclose neighborhood feel so celebratedby romantic urbanists like the late JaneJacobs. Instead, the we're evolving inways congruent with a postindustrialsociety. It will not spell the demise ofWal-Mart or Costco, but will expressitself in scores of alternative institu­tions, such as thriving local weeklynewspapers, a niche that has withstoodthe shift to the Internet far better thanbig-city dailies.

Our less mobile nature is alreadyreshaping the corporate world. Thekind of corporate nomadism describedin Peter Kilborn's recent book, NextStop, Reloville: Life Inside America's Root­less Professional Class, in which familiesrelocate every couple of years so thebreadwinner can reach the next rung

on the managerial ladder, will becomeless common in years ahead. A smallercadre of corporate executives may stillmove from place to place, but surveysreveal many executives are now unwill­ing to move even for a good promotion.Why? Family and technology are twokey factors working against nomadism,in the workplace and elsewhere.

Family, as one Pew researcher notes,"trumps money when people makedecisions about where to live." Interde­pendence is replacing independence.More parents are helping their childrenfinancially well into their 30S and 40S;the numbers of "boomerang kids" mov­ing back home with their parents, hasalso been growing as job options and theability to buy houses has decreased forthe young. Recent surveys of the emerg­ing millennial generation suggest thisfamily-centric focus will last well intothe coming decades.

Nothing allows for geographic choicemore than the ability to work at home.By 2015, suggests demographer WendellCox, there will be more people work­ing electronically at home flrll time thantaking mass transit, making it the larg­est potential source of energy savingson transportation. In the San FranciscoBay Area and Los Angeles, almost onein 10 workers is a part-time telecom­muter. Some studies indicate that morethan one quarter of the U.S. workforcecould eventually participate in this newwork pattern. Even IBM, whose ini­tials were once jokingly said to standfor "I've Been Moved," has changed itsapproach. Roughly 40 percent of thecompany's workers novy labor at homeor remotely from a client's location.

These home-based ~orkers becomecritical to the 10caifSt e'conomy. Theywill eat in local restaurants, attendfairs and festivals, take their kids tosoccer practices, ballet lessons, or reli­gious youth-group meetings. This isnot merely a suburban phenomenon;localism also means a stronger senseof identity for urban neighborhoods aswell as smaller towns.

Could the new localism also affect ourfuture politics? Ever greater concentra­tion of power in Washington may nowbe all the rage as the federal government

intervenes, albeit often ineffectively, torevive the economy. But throughout ourhistory, we have always preferred ourpolitics more onthe home-cooked NEXT ~

side. On his visitto America in theearly 1830s, Alexisde Tocqueville was BY JENEEN INTERLANDI

struck by the de-centralized nature of the country. "Theintelligence and the power are dis­persed abroad," he wrote, "and insteadof radiating from a point, they crosseach other in every direction."

This is much the same today. Themajority of Americans still live in apatchwork of smaller towns and cities,including many suburban towns withinlarge metropolitan regions. There arewell over 65,000 general-purpose gov­ernments, and with so many "smalltowns," the average local jurisdictionpopulation in the United States is 6,200,small enougRto allow nonprofessionalpoliticians to have a serious impact.

After decades of frantic mobility andhomogenization, we are seeing a returnto placeness, along with more choicesfor individuals, families, and commu­nities. For entrepreneurs like KevinCulhane and his workers at Churchill's,

By 2015, there will bemore people

working electronicallyat home full time

than taking mass transit.

it's a phenomenon that may also offera lease on years of new profits. "We'reholding our own in these times becausewe appeal to the people around here,"Culhane says. And as places like LongIsland become less bedroom commu­nity and more round-the-clock localefor work and play, he's likely to haveplenty of hungry customers.

KOTKIN is a presidentialfellow in urbanfutures at Chapman University. He isauthor ofThe Next Hundred Million:America in 2050, to bepublished byPenguin Publishing in 2010.

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