Digital Gen Zoomers seeking places to call home

Affordable homes and neighbors with names are a plus. But what about culture shock?

The digital screens era is full of ironies.

Here’s one: Many young Americans are fleeing big, ultra-modern cities — even New York City and Los Angeles — and moving to smaller, somewhat remote, towns and cities in ZIP codes long considered Flyover Country.

What’s behind these moves? Well, for starters, lots of young people want to work from home — by using the computers that sit in the middle of their cozy new home offices. And how are they finding nice places to land? Often this happens via websites and digital networkers who live to create these opportunities.

Yes, there are many economic reasons for these moves. But many young people are also yearning for a sense of place and some carefully selected ties that bind. They want neighbors. They want room for bookshelves, as well as a home theater. They want chickens and gardens, just like the ones they have admired on Instagram.

With careful research, Gen Z movers can even find a church that will welcome them and flexible educational options for their children and maybe even the adults. They can find parks, hiking trails, lakes, streams and, with luck, even a mountain or two.

I get it. Yes, I am a Boomer and I have worked in big cities — even Washington, D.C., and New York (sort of). But my wife and I knew that we would head back to the hills when the timing and finances were right. So this 70-something guy is writing this post sitting at a computer in a house built in 1900 (maybe a couple of decades earlier) in the Tri-Cities of Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.

This leads me, of course, to an article in one of my favorite digital publications — The Free Press. The headline: “The Good Life, According to Gen Z.” Here is the subtitle on this fascinating Maya Sulkin feature: “Meet the Zoomers who are quitting the rat race, skipping the $8 lattes, and buying homes in towns you’ve never heard of.”

The symbolic person in this piece is Zosha Lyons, who Sulkin — currently a New Yorker — thinks may be “the voice of my generation.” Why? Here is the overture:

In college, Zosha’s goal had always been to move to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, with her high school sweetheart, Whitaker, in tow. Instead, the young couple were buying a three-acre plot in Perry County, Indiana — the place where they both grew up.

“This sounds bad,” she told me sheepishly, “but we thought we were better than this. We wanted to move away and prove ourselves.”

Zosha had worked hard to get her MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, about 50 miles outside of Los Angeles, and she spent her final year strategizing about how to move to the city and break into the film industry. But when she graduated in the summer of 2023, Hollywood was in the middle of the writers strike, and Lyons realized: No matter how hard she tried, it might be impossible to find a job that allowed her to support herself, let alone one that fulfilled her.

What were the other Big Ideas that figured into this move? This is where the cultural DNA gets interesting. For starters, marriage and four children, with Zosha adding: “I want to be done having kids by the time we’re 30.”

To cut to the chase, these youngsters decided: “What was important to us was not really our careers.”

This realization led, of course, to the Internet.

… Zosha came across an offer she couldn’t refuse.

It came via a program called MakeMyMove, which gives incentive packages to people who move to towns — in Southern Indiana, say, or Eastern Kentucky — that are looking to increase their populations. In exchange for relocating to Perry County, Lyons would get a cascade of perks — coupons to local restaurants, a free night at a local winery, a free trip to a local axe-throwing place, a free yearlong gym membership — as well as a $7,000 relocation fee, distributed over the course of two years.

“All of a sudden we were like: It would be nice to afford a house right away. And look at how cheap these houses are!”…

Will they be able, at some point, to take aim at some of their original career goals? Of course they can — by using their computers.

These Zoomers are chasing old dreams and Sulkin is convinced that, “They might be making America better too.”

What is going on here? Sulkin adds some additional background material:

Gen Z, which includes all adults under the age of 29, are increasingly turning away from big cities and everything they represent: hard work, overstuffed social lives, and living far, far away from your family. In the last few years, more and more young Americans have migrated to rural areas — a trend that MakeMyMove is capitalizing on. Three years ago, about 9 percent of applications to the program were Gen Z; that figure is now 20 percent.

This is partly because of the pandemic, which normalized working from home, something my generation famously loves to do). It’s also partly because living in big cities is becoming prohibitively expensive, and Gen Z is anxious about money and trying to save it. But it’s also cultural. On Instagram, my generation loves “cottagecore,” an aesthetic that idealizes everything about living in the countryside, from gardening to baking fresh sourdough. Casey Lewis, who runs a popular newsletter about Gen Z trends, After School, told me, “There was a trend a year ago on TikTok to ‘romanticize’ your small town,” which filled feeds with videos of quaint churches, rural gas stations, and perfectly paved streets, set to serene music. Lewis isn’t surprised Gen Z is moving to the sticks; all the signs indicate that “they want a slower, charming, more traditional life.”

Yes, Zosha bakes bread and there’s room for chickens. She gets to see her mother and grandmother early and often.

Another key term here is “community,” and we are talking about analog community that comes complete with hugs.

At this point, MakeMyMove is working with small numbers, while trusting in the big picture. One popular destination is Noblesville, Indiana (population 73,916). Digital recruiting has, so far, brought that city 28 singles and 128 married people.

Mayor Chris Jensen told Sulkin:

“This whole program is aimed at capturing a change in culture.” In his view, most young people aren’t relocating for the money. “Our incentive package has really minimal cash to it,” he admitted. (The relocation grant for Noblesville is $5,000.) Instead, he said, “A majority of our package is focused on integrating you into our community.” New residents get golf passes, memberships to the chamber of commerce, concert tickets, park passes, and memberships to local clubs. Mayor Jensen also has coffee with all of the new residents.

Is this trend Rational Sheep material?

My hunch was “Yes,” but I decided to ask an expert — my 30something daughter, who lives in an old house in the wilds of Kansas with her husband (they are both classical-school teachers) and five kids. It’s a city that locals proudly call “America’s largest small town.”

I asked for her reaction to this Free Press piece. And here it is:

I love the idea of the “make my move” grants — it’s a neat idea to help people who might want to do this, but who feel stuck or just don’t know how to make the move. It’s also news to me that Gen z is turning so rural in general. I had heard of “cottagecore” but didn’t realize it was really turning into a lifestyle for a significant portion of people.

I do think the geographic shift could have cultural implications. The house next to us is currently empty, but the new owners are from New York (not sure which part) and they seem to be trying to decide whether to move here or not. But she brought up politics within three minutes of our conversation starting, and she reflects that liberal NY position. She was friendly, but obviously did not feel comfortable discussing our differences once she realized how widely we differ on some things. Who knows if that will keep them from moving here or not, but if they do move it would be interesting to see how they deal with so much difference of opinion.

Of course, she added, their focus on classical schools and an Orthodox parish (within walking distance, no less) “implied a village of people willing to support certain goals and lifestyle choices.”

But the culture shock angle will be worth further study. As an Orthodox scribe here in my neck of the woods recently noted, a popular local bumpersticker proclaims: “Remember, you came here as a refuge, not a missionary.”

I’ll give my daughter the last word on that:

It seems pretty obvious that people are coming from high cost of living places like the West Coast and the Northeast and moving to the interior rural states seeking land and affordable housing. That just so happens to coincide with moving from mostly liberal to mostly conservative areas as well. I think it will be especially interesting as these young people settle in to see if they begin realizing why their neighbors vote the way they do, and either turning Republican or perhaps creating more middle-of-the-road versions (chapters?) of the Democratic Party. Raising kids also tends to have a “conservatizing” effect because you want to raise your children as you see fit and not as someone else tells you to."

Let us attend.