A Good Life Starts in a Good Hometown

Study after study finds that, far more than money or career success, the quality of our relationships makes the most impact on our likelihood to feel happy and fulfilled.

Those relationships start in our hometowns. At their best, the physical places we live—the town, the neighborhood, the block—are places where people are embedded in a thick web of ties to family and friends that helps form the core of their identity and builds community.

The world is becoming more connected, and lots of opportunity comes with having immediate access to anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere. But it can also feel overwhelming to have no limits on your existence. The flood of never-ending inputs can be dizzying and disabling. Being identified as a “global citizen”—one grain of sand in a desert of 8 billion—feels empty and meaningless to many.

Most Americans are not willing to simply give up their local identity and become citizens of the world. And not everyone sees value in chasing professional achievement across the country. Many Americans say our culture should define success as building a decent life in the place you were raised—the place your family has roots—rather than being forced to move to find career reward.

More than half of young adults live within 10 miles of where they grew up,¹ but increasingly the base of the progressive movement is higher income and more mobile. As a result, we’ve become disconnected from what most Americans want—an economy and culture built around thousands of independent healthy places, rather than a nationalized economy and culture where opportunity is concentrated in a few major cities. 

If progressives are going to reclaim our purpose to empower the masses rather than be beholden to the elites, we can start by confronting the fact that American hometowns feel less vital and relevant in our lives today. Local places like churches and union halls where we used to meet each other are atrophying, with sharp membership declines in recent decades. The local news where we learned about our neighbors and communities is disappearing—more than 3,200 newspapers have folded since 2005.² Many downtowns are shells of their former selves, as remote work and online commerce facilitate a retreat into our homes.

Compounding these trends, geographic income inequality has increased by more than 40 percent since 1980,³ concentrating economic power in a small number of high-income urban mega-economies. Many young people leave their hometowns to find work, and this lack of opportunity is seen in the growing number of places where a large share of income comes from government assistance rather than good jobs. In 53 percent of American counties—typically poorer and more rural communities—at least 25 percent of all income now comes from Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs. In 2000, this was only true for 10 percent of counties.⁴ The population is aging across America, but this level of reliance on government support is rarely seen in major metropolitan areas.

Rebuilding local communities is less about turning the dials of government spending and more about unrigging the system of concentrated economic power that holds them down. Big companies are easily able to move money, markets, and jobs overseas, giving them an advantage over workers and families who cannot move so readily. Business leaders who use accounting gimmicks to raise profits are not focusing on the innovation and investment that creates good jobs and raises living standards. Monopolies drive the small shops that help form local commercial identity out of business. Big Tech firms tilt their platforms to accumulate more power and profits at the expense of small business, in-person connection, and local journalism. Corporations fight tooth and nail to keep local workers from forming connection through labor unions. 

Where are we left when so many Americans feel they have to choose between their hometowns and economic opportunity and increasingly cannot find connection through a meaningful relationship to the place they live? Americans have fewer friends than we used to. We spend more time alone. Roughly half of American adults say they are lonely.⁵ We trust each other less than before, and we are losing faith in each other as partners in democratic governance. In 1997, Pew found that 64 percent of Americans trusted the wisdom of the American people to make political choices; only 39 percent felt the same by 2019.⁶

Creating a society where more Americans can live a good life starts by rebuilding power, vitality, connection, and unique identity at the neighborhood and community level. That means standing up to concentrated power and instead siding with the people in neighborhoods and towns across America who are working to build a better life for their families and communities.