An interesting question, one I’ve been living for about a decade, in fact.
In the summer of 2011, when I was hired by The American Conservative, I was living in Philadelphia. The idea was that after a year or two, I would move with my family down to the Washington area. Then that autumn, my sister Ruthie died, and my wife and I felt that we should be living in the small town of St. Francisville, La., my hometown, to look after my aging parents and to help with my sister’s kids. Wick Allison, who ran the magazine (and who died last year, RIP), generously agreed to let me do this, trusting that geographical distance would be no problem for me, given the kind of work I do.
And that was the birth of what I used to call the St. Francisville bureau of TAC, which became the Baton Rouge bureau in 2016, after my father died and our mission parish had to close; we moved 30 miles down the road to be nearer the closest Orthodox church. So, I live in a smallish city — about 400,000 — in the Deep South, and write this blog, do podcast interviews, and write books — three New York Times bestsellers since I relocated here. The cost of living is low compared to East Coast cities, and the airport is very easy to use (and the New Orleans airport, which is much bigger, is only about an hour to the South). Louisiana is not for everybody. It’s hot most of the year, and very humid. There are snakes. But you can’t beat the people. It works for us.
Covid forced the whole country to realize how much of the work that we do can be done remotely. It ought to be compelling young people and especially young marrieds to think about the possibilities of relocating to smaller cities where you can still find the good life, but on a friendlier budget. It seems especially true that conservative Christians of the Benedict Option persuasion who are going to be working remotely even after Covid passes should reconsider the feasibility of relocating in larger numbers to more friendly redoubts.
There’s no doubt that you give up a lot when you leave a big city. I would say the happiest time of my life was living in New York City from 1998 to 2003. But my wife and I always knew that if we were going to have the big family we wanted, we were going to have to leave one day. It’s just too expensive for the kind of life we wanted for our family, and it’s too intense. Having kids takes a lot out of you, and trying to navigate with children around New York City is a real challenge. People do it, but it’s hard. When we moved to Dallas in 2003, man, I have rarely seen my wife more joyful than being able to put groceries in the back of a minivan instead of having to push a stroller home through the snow, with plastic sacks of groceries hanging off of it.
