It’s no secret that loneliness is a problem for many people, and that many are aching to find real friendship and community.
It’s also common knowledge that many people are engaging in what we might call “affinity group migration.” That is, they are looking to live near people who are like them - typically like them politically and culturally. This has been called the “big sort” phenomenon.
Two articles in last Sunday’s New York Times highlight these trends at work.
The first was Ruth Graham’s front page piece called “Why a New Conservative Brain Trust Is Resettling Across America.” I am actually mentioned in it - my first ever appearance in a front page piece in the Times.
She writes:
The Claremont Institute has been located in Southern California since its founding in the late 1970s. From its perch in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, it has become a leading intellectual center of the pro-Trump right.
Without fanfare, however, some of Claremont’s key figures have been leaving California to find ideologically friendlier climes. Ryan P. Williams, the think tank’s president, moved to a suburb in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in early April.
His friend and Claremont colleague Michael Anton — a California native who played a major role in 2016 to convince conservative intellectuals to vote for Mr. Trump — moved to the Dallas area two years ago. The institute’s vice president for operations and administration has moved there, too. Others are following. Mr. Williams opened a small office in another Dallas-Fort Worth suburb in May, and said he expects to shrink Claremont’s California headquarters.
We see here the affinity migration, with conservatives moving from California and the DC area to Texas. She also mentions Josh Abbotoy’s real estate projects in Tennessee and Kentucky, which I previously interviewed him about.
Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Photo: courtesy Aaron Renn.
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