Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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When people move long distances in the US, their primary consideration seems to be "jobs". But what does that actually operationalize to for people who aren't professionals or otherwise in some extremely niche industry? Let's say you don't hope for much more than working at Costco or maybe as an administrative assistant at some small business, or as some random entry-level lab technician. What sort of metrics are you even supposed to look at when deciding on a destination?
Something like income per capita or unemployment rate seem too crude to be useful. Perhaps Region A has higher income per capita than Region B because of a thriving industry (e.g., diesel engine manufacturing) that has no relevance to your skills.
A random snapshot of job listings on indeed.com seems too unrepresentative. Job openings come and go all the time, and it seems unwise to write off a whole area because the current job openings don't suit you.
A region's level of educational attainment seems meaningless, except perhaps for some highly skilled professions, because a less-educated region has fewer workers who might compete for the white collar job you want. And it doesn't seem obvious to me that less-education regions would have fewer white collar jobs relative to the population of qualified candidates.
A region's rate of growth seems irrelevant. What's the difference between a region that has grown 30% in the last decade from 100,000 to 130,000 to a region that has grown only 10% in the last decade from 118,000 to 130,000? If it's because there's something more desirable or economically healthy about the former, then look at that metric and skip the middleman. (And what is that metric, and why does it matter for the prospective mover?)
I can't find any clearly great data on this, but I would wager that when people move long distances in the U.S., their primary consideration is a job--like, one they have already been offered. While I have known a few people who went somewhere looking for opportunities, it seems much more common, in my experience, to have a job offer, or at least a somewhat specific lead. The main exception seems to be when people have a landing pad in the form of friends or family.
This survey is not limited to long distance moves, but the question "what brought you here" gets the answer "family" almost 1/3rd of the time--followed closely by "I grew up here" (27%) and then "job" at just 14%. Interestingly, the two biggest hypothetical reasons people imagine would get them to leave their current residence is "a new job elsewhere" followed closely by "the opportunity to move to my dream city"--which, realistically for most people, means "a new job in my dream city."
In other words, very few Americans "decid[e] on a destination" as a matter of primary consideration. Rather, people tend to make decisions based on what is familiar (geography, family) while possibly keeping an open mind should sufficiently good opportunities become available elsewhere.
The main exception to this seems to be people whose circumstances (wealth, retirement, remote work) permit them to live more or less wherever they want--in which case again, family and friends would be primary considerations, along with stuff like leisure, culture, housing prices, etc. In such cases, jobs are not generally at issue, so the relevant metrics will be highly dependent on individual preferences.
So to your question:
I would answer, "whichever metrics happen to matter to your personal case." If all you're doing is launching yourself somewhere else on a proverbial wing and a prayer, though... I don't know. If you're not independently wealthy, I feel like this would be a huge risk to take. Maybe find a place that seems likely to have some demand for the skills you personally possess?
The whole reason I ask is because I'm moving to the US from Canada later this year to be with my significant other, who is American. She currently works in Buffalo so she can drive to be with me weekly when not working. We want to move to a Red state, but neither of us have job offers or family (at least not family that we'd want to move to be near). I have no work history besides my BA degree and no idea what I want to do; she has a BA in biology and a work history as a lab tech.
It's easy enough to find a decent state (pretty much any red Midwest state, in our case). The real daunting task is finding a place within a state. Ruling out large cities because of personal preference, that still leaves dozens of cities per state. I'm having trouble figuring out how to systematically filter these hundreds of possibilities. The options that come to mind (e.g., income per capita, growth rate, and other things I've mentioned) don't seem obviously important to me, but I could be wrong. I have no experience in this area.
I'm curious what the preference here is specifically. Suburbs of large cities function quite a bit like their own small city but with lots of benefits from being attached to a major hub like access to well connected airports and niche but useful amenities. It's a very popular choice for a reason.
I'm wary of suburbs for a few reasons, not all of which I'm super confident about.
I'm concerned that most of the jobs are in the large city itself, which would be unacceptable to me. Like, let's say the suburbs have 50,000 people. I'm concerned that the number of jobs in those suburbs are vastly fewer than the jobs that would be available in another city of 50,000 that's far away from a large city and thus whose jobs can only be in the 50,000 city itself. I hope that makes sense.
I'm concerned that the large city's growth will, in years or decades, envelop the suburbs in ways I don't want (zoning, culture, traffic, demographics).
I'm concerned that the suburbs of a large city attract highly educated blue tribe people, many of whom probably commute to the large city and were priced out of it or wanted to raise a family.
Precisely because suburbs are popular, I'm concerned about the price of homes. Me and my significant other may very well end up with a household income of like mid-five-figures or something.
This may practically be the opposite for the point you followed it up with, the people commuting to the city still do much of their consumption in the suburbs. It'll depend on what kind of work you ultimately do but they're going to need all the well paid blue collar labor like plumbers and electricians as well as all the service industry jobs. White collar offices also end up in the suburbs sometimes.
Suburbs tend to be somewhat static, unless you're right on the border of the urban parts of a city you really probably don't need to worry about this. They're places built by people who don't want to live in the urban core run by people who don't want to live in the urban core. Many of the suburbs have tens of miles of not much between them and the urban core.
This seems like the kind of thing you're going to be ruling out on anyways, no need to toss suburbs out of the heap for this reason when it'll already be filtered by your price constraint. If you take a upper mid tier city like Columbus Ohio or Dallas Fort Worth you'll easily be able to find suburbs that don't trigger most of these concerns.
Uh, DFW growth rates are so high that suburbs do get enveloped into the urban core quickly and regularly, and this is true in every direction except south-southeast(which is caused by very high crime rates).
If @helmedhorror can deal with climate and a bit of culture shock, then there's three smaller, economically prosperous red tribe cities in Texas to consider- Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Tyler. All of these are cheap places to live with a generally good labour market and are deep, deep red politically- they get used by the state government to make controversial proclamations specifically because they're much farther to the right than Austin. If a hot climate, southerners, or Hispanics are an issue, I'd recommend looking in Michigan's upper peninsula- the state might be blue, but the local area is not, and the state government is shier than average about imposing progressive policies on deep red towns geographically separated from the core population.
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