But of course regions do go through cycles of growth and shrinkage, so it makes sense to question the assumption that mobility is the solution to every problem. In our Rust Belt scenario of regional population stagnation, a romanticized devotion to mobility has often caused more problems than it has solved. Desegregation was made possible by greater mobility. And suburban flight to escape school busing was also made possible by mobility.
All of that said, sometimes flight is the smart response. Sometimes moving to another place is the best way to “reset” a student’s approach to school. Sometimes a simple change of scenery opens up one’s mind to new possibilities and helps to shed old negative expectations. An August 24, 2015, New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell described a study by the University of Oxford’s David Kirk that compared the recidivism rates for prisoners who were in a Louisiana penitentiary during Hurricane Katrina. Many of their home neighborhoods were destroyed by the storm, so when they were eventually released from prison, some had to relocate to other places while others went back to their old neighborhoods. The ones who went back to the old neighborhoods had a 60 percent recidivism rate, while for those who went to other places it was 45 percent. Human behavior is shaped not just by the inclinations of the individual, but by social settings that reinforce or discourage particular actions.
Of course that’s also the thinking behind the breakup of concentrated poverty that was embodied in high-rise housing projects by tearing down the housing and dispersing former residents throughout a region. Statistics show that such measures have decreased crime and increased opportunity for many of the people who had lived in the projects. But that doesn’t mean all neighbors are eager for Section 8 housing on their own street (all those old fears at play). The people who have most exploited mobility have not been those whom it would most benefit (people stuck in toxic poor neighborhoods) but the wealthier half of society using their money to distance themselves from poverty, and all too often that pattern of flight has had negative effects on the regional economy, not to mention the social fabric.
The view from the airplane makes it clear that in trying to spread too far too quickly, we weaken our very fabric—not only is it frayed at the edges, it’s also unraveling in the middle. Flying into a Rust Belt city, you’ll often see the blue sparkles of swimming pools giving way to cast-off neighborhoods left to rot as if they were fast-food trash tossed out the car window. We may be able to drive around that on the ground, but from the air it is plain to see that we are not only allowing weak places to compromise the structural integrity of the whole, but we are also missing an enormous opportunity to revive the existing fabric with new designs and stronger material. In our age of easy mobility, it’s always an option to set out for what we imagine is that Better Place. But we might be smarter to invest where we are to make our place better.
Leaving and Staying
SALLY ERRICO
Losing Lakewood
I MOVED TO LAKEWOOD, OHIO, a few weeks after breaking up with my boyfriend and, not coincidentally, a few weeks after I started sleeping with Adam. My boyfriend and I had lived together on Cleveland’s east side—his native stomping ground—and as soon as the first winter had hit, I had become desperate to leave.
“You realize the snowbelt that goes all the way to Buffalo starts here, right? Like, specifically here. If we lived twenty minutes west, we’d have an entirely different climate.”
“I like the east side,” he’d said. “Now hand me the ice scraper.”
There were other reasons for moving to Lakewood. It seemed to me a city in the best possible ways: progressive in both its politics and its society, a place where a proud Cleveland met a youthful liberalism. It was full of shops and restaurants and bars, and their interconnectedness—the sheer number of them and their proximity to one another, and to residential streets, and to Cleveland itself—was to me a characteristic of what urban life should be.
On a more practical level, Lakewood was also where Adam lived.
I met him at a party in December, and when he mentioned that he and his girlfriend would be moving in together in May, I thought, I have six months to make you fall in love with me. I had known him for an hour.
The intensity of my attraction was unlike anything I’d ever felt: he was tall, slim, and impeccably dressed, with curly brown hair and eyes so dark they were almost black. As we got to know each other better over the next few months, I also discovered he was sometimes vain. He could be jealous and resentful. But his flaws made him more appealing, which is why I maintain that my attraction wasn’t just physical. I was in love.
The situation was complicated by 1) my boyfriend and 2) Adam’s girlfriend. For a while, I imagined that Adam and I could just … hang out together forever, complacent in our respective relationships, no rocking of boats. We had mutual friends, so there was always an excuse to see each other; we enjoyed the same things, so if we happened to find ourselves at, say, the same concert, hey, what a coincidence! But then one night, after we attended a wine-fueled fund-raiser for the Cleveland Public Theatre, he kissed me. I was living in Lakewood by the end of the month.
I found my apartment by driving around and looking for FOR RENT signs in the windows of buildings (it was a kinder, simpler, realty app–free time: 2004). I checked out houses, duplexes, and apartment complexes, some near the
