Pick a place to live, and then find a job - or ask your company to let you take your job with you. That's the Live First - Work Second ethic in action. Penelope Trunk outed a few next-gen'ers who've made exactly that decision in her Boston Globe article, "Let Quality of Life Be Your Guide." Trunk dissected the 7 key decisions to a successful relocation.
I've picked my favorites from her list, and rif with some supporting points from our Cool Community research. (FYI, we now have over 12,000 interviews and surveys in the can with the next gen.) If you're a relocator, I recommend you read Trunk's entire article. If you're a Cool Community leader, jump-start a discussion with your peers about how to recrafting your community's marketing messages around these issues. Remember, the Rules of Citizen Attraction and Engagement are simple:
- Discover what the market needs and wants;
- (Re-)Design your community to meet those needs and wants;
- Deliver the products and services through the communication and networking channels they use.
But I digress. Back to Ms. Trunk's article....
- Pick a city with career flexibility. No one expect to work 25 years in a row for the same company. The next gen will have multiple careers and potentially dozens of jobs. But if they can have all of those experiences in a single city, then whammo: you have a stable tax base.
- Choose a city where your median income won't leave you in the poor house. There are a gob of new books hitting the shelves about happiness. The experts says that keeping up with the Joneses is a condition of chronic unhappiness. So if you pick a city - or a neighborhood - where you feel poorer than those around you, you're bound to be unhappy. If you'd like to learn more about the economics of happiness, the BBC has an excellent video series which you can view here.
- More choices do not always mean a 'cooler city.' It's true: choice can be overwhelming. Just because the "Let's Go" section of your newspaper is brimming with options doesn't mean they're all good options, or that they're the right ones for you. Consider what's happened with TV - we now have hundreds of channels and there's still nothing on. More "After Hours" activities doesn't necessarily mean a higher quality of life. You can only do one thing at a time, anyway.
- Keep your commute short. Amen. Traffic sucks. Period. Research by Dr. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, also shows that for every ten minutes people spend in traffic, they decrease their civic participation by 10 percent. Want more Girl Scout troop leaders? Build live/work communities so people can walk to the office.
Copyright 2007, Next Generation Consulting.
Originally published in the Cool Communities Newsletter, January 2007.
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