Philadelphia is the New Lancaster

Last Wednesday in USA Today there was an article about how hip, young urban twentysomethings are leaving the city for rural areas.

It’s a trend story, which means it has to be taken with a grain of salt. They usually make big assumptions and use a small number of people to represent the whole. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s journalism, after all, not science — but you just have to approach it knowing what you’re getting. (As a writer, I’ve always tried to avoid expanding my small interviews into taking on a larger issue, with varied success.) I came upon this story from Slate’s Jack Shafer, who wrote about it in his “Bogus Trendspotting” feature.

The weird thing was, the bogus trendspotting in this one wasn’t just the usual making-large-claims-out-of-small-data fallacy. No, those rural areas people are moving into? They’re cities like Philadelphia:

Young, single people usually love the excitement of big cities, from the vibrant nightlife to the noisiness and frenzied pace of urban existence. They love it so much they’re willing to pay a stiff price for cramped quarters and communal living.

For some, the price is getting too steep. The draw of the bright lights and big cities is dimming now that housing costs have hit exorbitant heights. Some who grew up fantasizing about life in the “big city” are settling in less glamorous cities and even suburbs. [...]

Philadelphia, sometimes the butt of jokes for its lack of cachet compared with nearby New York, is being marketed by some former residents of the Big Apple as the “next borough.” It is attracting small numbers of artsy young people from expensive neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

They also mention the movetophilly.com people, making it, essentially, a rehash of the Jessica Pressler article from over the summer. But this one’s quite fantastic: People are moving out of cities and into Philadelphia! Whoo! Start milking the cows, people, them city slickers are comin’ into town!

More of the young and hip fight urban urge [USA Today]
Driving a Stake Into Bogus Trends [Slate]