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After Years Of Big-City Rootlessness, Gen Z and Millennials Can Find Happiness Moving Home

When people are rooted in their communities, they are happier — and they develop the habits of self-government.

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Shortly after the Civil War, Horace Greeley urged ambitious young men to “Go West.”

“Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable,” he is credited with writing in 1865. “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.”

A champion of Manifest Destiny, Greeley saw the frontier as an escape from urban slums and a shot at adventure and opportunity. Today the West is settled, yet the zeitgeist is calling young people away from the city again — this time not toward expansion, but restoration; not to new lands, but familiar soil.

Millennials were buying first homes and starting families in or near major cities when Covid-19 hit. Cities endured the harshest lockdowns, post-George Floyd violence, surging crime, emptied offices, spiked rents, and a collapse in meaning and mental health. For many, the city has become, as it was in Greeley’s time, inhospitable to young people.

But the answer today is not to “Go West.” The answer is to go home: to the places that raised us; to the neighborhoods, churches, and schools that shaped our values; to the people who forged our characters; to the places that now need us. That is our generation’s destiny. 

My life trajectory mirrors that of many millennials. I grew up in a working-class manufacturing town in Indiana. I left home to attend........

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