A lot of commentary about people leaving large cities during the coronavirus pandemic has focused on the excessive costs, declining public safety, and endemic homelessness in large coastal cities, and rightly so. People were leaving large metro areas for these reasons long before Covid arrived on our shores, and the pandemic served as a kind of accelerant to the trend when more people had the freedom to work remotely. The fastest-growing large metro areas in America are the inverse of the trend, as many commentators have noted, attracting migrants because of their relative affordability, safety, and services.
Digging a bit deeper into these inter-urban reshuffles reveals something else at work that has received less attention: the appeal of human-scale living. We often talk in terms of a human scale when we talk about “a sense of place.” When we are proximate to the most functional and meaningful places in our daily lives, and we play a meaningful role in them, life has a certain coherence and harmony that is missing in more atomizing urban and suburban settings. Running into someone at the grocery store whom you know from the park down the street where your children play, or being able to walk to a café to meet a friend down the street from your house, creates a sense of place that driving from a large residential enclave to a big box store does not.
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