You and I are reminded daily of a recurring theme: Big isn’t beautiful, especially when it comes to cities that lock it all down. In case after case, we’ve seen the success of smaller cities that are less strict, and remain open for business—they survive and thrive.
Unfortunately, in big cities, the farther the “experts” get from the boots on the ground, the more oblivious they are to the suffering until it’s too late. Small restaurants surviving on a month-to-month basis just don’t have the running room. And why even consider going out to dinner in a big city when a protest could break out at any moment?
Workers aren’t dumb. They go to where opportunities are plentiful, which happens to be smaller, safer, beautiful cities—more relaxed on the lockdowns. Most of them happen to be in red states like Greenville, South Carolina, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Des Moines, Iowa, notes the WSJ. The pandemic simply accelerated the trend.
Areas that used to be world-class food destinations are now pocked with NO GO ZONES. You know about Paris. I’ll add areas of downtown Boston and Portland, Maine, to the list. On the ground intelligence emails me that NO GO ZONES litter beautiful Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. Why risk an altercation while walking back to your hotel after dinner? That leaves the Beaufort Habersham area and the other local islands—end of discussion.
Action Line: You want to know where you can live in a better America? Start by following the money. You may never have as much control over your future as you do right now.
Justin Baer writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Kelly Mackay, an advertising-sales executive, is among the converted. The 30-year-old Des Moines native left her one-bedroom apartment in Chicago, about a five-hour drive away, last spring to spend the early days of the lockdown with her boyfriend, who had relocated to Des Moines earlier that year for his job at Deere Co. , the farm-equipment giant.
During the stay she rediscovered Des Moines, this time as an adult. “A lot has changed,” she said. “There are new bars, and a new food scene. Something’s happening here.” Last fall, Ms. Mackay bought a 2,200-square-foot home for what she said would have been roughly the cost of a one-bedroom condominium in Chicago. She is still working for her Chicago-based firm, but plans to stay in Des Moines.
In Greenville, the housing market is booming. The median January home sale price was 16% higher than it was a year earlier—the national median home price rose 5.3% in that time—and the inventory of available homes for sale had fallen 17%. The growth was driven in part by the influx of newcomers, said Jacob Mann, a real-estate agent at Coldwell Banker Caine.
Michael Arcieri and his wife left the New York area last spring to ride out the pandemic in the Greenville region. The Arcieris were living in Jersey City, N.J., in a high-rise apartment with views of Manhattan.
The couple, with a baby on the way, intended to stay with family for a few weeks in Mauldin, S.C., a town a few miles outside Greenville. Their visit stretched to months, and their daughter was born in South Carolina in May 2020.
The couple bought a four-bedroom house five minutes from Greenville’s downtown last fall for $850,000, much more space than what that amount would bring in Jersey City, and with much lower property taxes.
“We were paying an arm and a leg to live in New York or New Jersey, because that’s where the jobs are,” Mr. Arcieri said. “But that’s just not the case anymore.”
P.S. Roger Daltrey, famed rocker of The Who, warns that “woke” culture is going to make a “miserable” world. The Blaze’s Chris Enloe reports:
Speaking in an interview with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music in late April, Daltrey expressed gratitude for having lived through the “golden era,” rebuking the relativity of truth and slamming those who advocate socialism and communism.
“It’s just getting harder to disseminate the truth,” Daltrey said. “It’s almost like, now we should turn the whole thing off. Go back to newsprint, go back to word of mouth, and start to read books again.”
“It’s becoming so absurd now with AI, all the tricks it can do, and the woke generation,” he continued. “It’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves. I mean, anyone who’s lived a life and you see what they’re doing, you just know that it’s a route to nowhere. Especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to.”
“We’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that,” Daltrey explained. “We came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society, completely flattened bomb sites and everything. And we’ve been through socialist governments. We’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communist. I’ve seen how ‘wonderful’ — really? — it was.”
