so if this holds water, wouldn't we expect these educated professionals to return to the states which appeal to families when they are ready to start one?
People are trying to find stability in a unstable system. The system is unstable because of the shifts in the North America (and World) economy. With manufacturing leaving the US, and the US focusing more on the service industry, the economics of scale of the service industry favour centralization in urban areas, so thats where the jobs end up being created. If the current system stay in place for long enough, it will become stable, with multi generation families having entire cycles in a given region.
It's the same thing that happened to coal country, just in a larger scale, and slower.
Aye. If gauranteed remote was a thing I'd be out of the city -- and fast.
But RTO is still contentious, and the ability to find a job if I moved to vaguely-near-Boise would be terrible. One misstep at work, or even just another economic shift, and I'm moving again.
But I'd love to be in a smaller city. Annapolis MD, or coastal WA or deep mountains MT, whatever.
There are a couple of probably significant factors that would counter such a tendency.
First, the states with the big cities they moved to also have smaller towns outside those cities that are fine for families. They can move to one of those and still have sufficient contact with the city to maintain their career.
Second, their spouse likely is not from the same state they are from, and may not want to move to that state. And they may not want to move to where the spouse is from.
Sometimes they do. But someone who's uprooting their life like that is probably semi-retiring - at least reducing their hours, having one partner stop working, that sort of thing. And not everyone starts a family, so the cities keep some of the most productive people forever - of course that's unsustainable, but it's not the cities' problem.
I'm sure a non-insignificant group do move to one spouse's hometown, since I can assure you, having your kids' grandparents close by can be life-changing (especially for modern, dual-income families).
I'm seeing a lot less of that among people my age who are having kids. Most stay wherever they've setup their lives but move to a larger house or something similar.
I see the same, but I think the consequences hinted at by the GP are very present. I know quite a few parents, some with their parents nearby, others without. The ones with their parents nearby universally have more of an ability to do things without their kids (either regularly, or as a special-case).
And I know several parents who tried the "go it alone" method for a while, but eventually decided to move back to one of their hometowns, specifically to be closer to their parents for reasons related to their kids. Most of it seems to be a mix of wanting nearby, reliable childcare, as well as just wanting their kids to grow up with regular contact with their grandparents. (I've also seen the phenomenon where the grandparents, after retirement, end up moving to the parents' location, but often that requires the grandparents to move to a higher cost-of-living area, so I expect that happens less often.)
I don't plan to have kids, so this is certainly a grain-of-salt-worthy opinion, but it feels to me that parent-marriages would be on average healthier if the parents had easier childcare options so they can more often do "date night" type things. Certainly nearby grandparents is not the only way to achieve that, but it is one of the simplest options, assuming grandparents who are happy to be involved to that degree.