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With Covid-19 hitting large cities the hardest, people have started looking to the suburbs.
Headlines like “Coronavirus Escape: To the Suburbs” in the New York Times, “Coronavirus: Americans flee cities for the suburbs” in USA Today, “Will the Coronavirus Make the Suburbs Popular Again?” in Architectural Digest suggest an impending mass exodus to suburbia.
And according to some reports, more than a third of Americans are considering moving to less populated areas.
However, other data suggests that the figures are a bit lower.
A recent survey by apartment rental platform PropertyNest found that only 13.8% of people surveyed planned to move either out of state, out of the city, out of their borough, or into a new home within the city.
It’s also not only Americans who are falling in love with the suburbs. The same pattern can be seen in Canada and the UK, among other places.
Regardless of how many people are actually moving, it’s clear there’s an increased desire to seek greener, less-Covid-y, pastures.
And while suburbia may seem like a good idea given the current circumstances, long-term it’s probably worse for you.
As Amanda Mull warns in a recent Atlantic article: “fleeing a big city because of the pandemic is a bigger gamble than it might seem.”
“Those who panic-move could soon find that the future of work and cities is far different from what they expected,” she wrote, explaining that banking on permanent remote working could be risky.
For example, Facebook has already made it clear it will slash workers’ pay if they move to a less expensive place. This cost-cutting tactic is common among employers whose workers retain their jobs when they move to cheaper areas.
But pay cuts aside, moving to a suburban community is also pretty bad for your physical and mental health.
First, there’s the process of moving. Like childbirth, it’s easy to forget the pain when it comes to moving after you’ve done it but relocating can unbelievably taxing to your mental health.
In a New York Times article on the psychology of moving, Ronnie Greenberg, a Manhattan psychoanalyst explained, “Panic can really set in around your home and your apartment. It’s a matrix of safety, so moving is incredibly stressful and people don’t realize it.”
A poll conducted last year by Yopa of 2,000 UK homeowners, found that 40% of people thought the process of moving house as the most nerve-wracking life event. More nerve-wracking than getting a divorce, having a baby, or starting a new job.
Also if you have children, the transition has been shown to negatively impact their emotional well-being.
One study in published in 2017 that looked at 14,775 children in the UK over period of years found that moving may have a detrimental impact on their subsequent mental health.
Another study published in 2015 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that kids who have moved five or more times during their childhood are three times more likely to experience mental health problems compared to those who stay in their hometowns. The researchers also found that moving was significantly more damaging to older children who have to leave behind friends and change schools.
“Moving house can be a hugely stressful experience for the parents and the family as a whole as it can be associated with change in social environment and networks, and other aspects of the physical and social environment,” explained the study’s lead author Foteini Tseliou in an interview with Reuters.
But the challenges don’t stop after you’ve moved.
Human beings have an innate need to socialize with one another and even without Covid-19 the suburbs make it really hard to do that. It doesn’t matter if you just moved there or have lived there for years – their design is inherently isolating.
”A culture of impersonality has developed in the suburbs by the way they’re laid out,” Jonathan Barnett, author of “The Fractured Metropolis” and former professor of regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, told The New York Times in 1999.
Think pieces examining why we feel depressed in the suburbs point to the lack of well-defined spaces and natural order, as well as the added effort it takes to socialize when everything is so spread out.
As David Roberts writes in Vox: “The neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don’t leave except to drive somewhere.”
But as studies have shown, repeated spontaneous contact is the key to making friends, especially as you get older.
Yet, repeated spontaneous contact is virtually impossible in the suburbs. Seriously, where are you gonna run into someone? The mall?
Plus don’t forget it’s just naturally harder to keep up with friends as we age, no matter where we live.
All this compounded with the added stress of being in a new place without your usual support systems is bound to have knock-on effects.
For example, research shows that people who don’t have strong social connections are more anxious, lonely, and depressed.
And according to one study in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, social isolation or the lack of social connection can increase mortality risk by 29% and 32%, respectively.
But it’s not only mental health that is negatively effected by living in the suburbs. Several studies have shown that suburban living has negative physical health consequences.
One study published in 2004 found that people who lived in areas where there’s more urban sprawl were more likely to be overweight and obese.
Another study published in the same year, found that people who lived in more spread out suburban communities also reported more chronic health problems, like high blood pressure, arthritis, headaches, and breathing difficulties, than those who live in urban areas.
This link remained significant even after the researchers controlled for factors like age, economic status, race, and local environment that might help explain the disparity.
So before you put that down payment on a three-bedroom house in a suburban cul-de-sac ask yourself: is it really worth it?