Only under duress. AKA I’ve been known to answer that question with “it depends on what you mean by home” or “it depends on what you mean by where I’m from” .
I have other answers, but I don’t feel like explaining further at the present. But I haven’t punched anyone yet for suggesting that it is “nice to be home” (I’m a boomerang child at the moment. Really hoping it will be a short moment.)
I grew up in a small town on the Jersey Shore, near Asbury Park, and that will always be home to me. I never ever ever want to live in Jersey again if I can help it, but I feel an attachment to that place that I don’t think I could feel about anywhere else. I’m a Jersey girl down to the marrow of my bones. I only wish I had more of an accent 
Of course, if anyone from my grad school asks, I say “I’m tarheel through-and-through … I’m not a tarheel born or bred, but, dangit, I’ll be a tarheel dead… can’t imagine living anywhere else… oh please don’t take my in state tuition away from me…”
I grew up in one town in northern West Virginia, then went to college just 15 miles up the road. My family is originally from there, and will probably die there. My inlaws are from there, too. It seems loical that that woudl be home for me, no matter where I live.
But it’s not quite like that. I’ve lived in Dayton for only 3 years, but I already feel so detached from “home” that I have a hard time calling it that anymore. And it’s only 4 hours away!
I don’t have a “hometown” to speak of.
My father lived in the same house in L.A. until he went off to college. When he went to medical school, he decided he wanted to experience more of the United States, so he did every stage of medical school/residency/etc. in a different place. As a result, I had lived in five different states, and about ten different cities before I started elementary school.
I did spend most of my school years in one state, so that is the state I claim as my “home” state, even though I spent only three or four years in any given city. I don’t have any contacts with any of my “friends” from those years, and I doubt many of them would remember me at all. My mother lives just a couple of blocks from the high school I graduated from, but I feel like a stranger there when I go to visit her.
After graduating from college, I spent ten years in a different state–longer than I actually lived in my “home” state. I also lived in France for a few years, which seriously distorts my idea of “home.”
I now live in the city my husband grew up in. He lived here for ALL of his public education years, and his parents moved to a different city only after he had left for college in another state. I work a block away from the house he grew up in, and I literally drive past it every day on my way home from work.
We have lived here for seven years, but it still doesn’t really feel like “home” to me.
Home is Tokyo now. I grew up in Salt Lake City, but I’ve been gone so long that it’s been downgraded to the place I’m from. Actually, I can’t see myself going back to live there. I like to visit, but it’s not home. I think I’d move to CA if I go back to the States.
Seattle is my home, and Chillicothe, Ohio (where I lived from first grade until college, and where my parents still live) is my hometown. I call both “home,” just in different ways.
I guess mostly Honolulu but really the entire state of Hawaii. Other places just feel weird, look weird. I can quite easily spend the rest of my life never even living my county. In fact I haven’t left this island (or county) since July 2001.
My case is similar: Seattle is my home, I grew up in NB, Canada. (In a no-stoplight town way outside of Toronto, if you will.)
I hope to live here in Seattle for a long time, or at least very nearby. Preferably here in Ballard, which I now call home. It feels right. I still call the place I grew up “home”, but that’s just old habit. I lived there for 25 years, after all. However, as the old cliche goes: It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
My husband is already talking about us one day retiring in Europe, or possibly New Zealand, and I don’t mind. I’m a traveller at heart, and I’m very adaptable. I do love Seattle and hope to settle here for a good long time, but if we had to get up and move somewhere new, I’d be all for it. But until/unless that happens, I will happily call Seattle my home.
Grew up in Harrisburg PA, and still have a number of relatives (cousins etc.) there. Although I haven’t lived there in nearly 30 years, it still feels like “home” in a lot of ways. In fact when I dream, and the dream involves a scene “at home”, it is virtually always set in the house I grew up in.
When I’m awake, however, “home” is wherever my spouse is.
Nomad here - and about to become an extreme nomad. In six months we move aboard our boat and set out on an adventure that we hope will cover at least 5 of the seven seas and will last as long as we last.
I grew up in Chicago and still think of that as my “home town” - probably because it still feels so familiar when I go back to visit family. My mother and brothers are still there. Would I move back if there was no family there? Only if I won the lottery and could live well on the lakefront downtown.
I love the Twin Cities. Very cosmopolitan. Beautiful.
I love San Diego. Great place to live.
If we’re still able to make a choice when we finally get off the boat, we’ll choose a coastal city.
I’m “home” wherever I feel happy.
SF Bay Area, like Anne Neville. I don’t have an attachement to any particular city ( I currently live in El Cerrito, used to live in Alameda, Oakland, and San Francisco ), but rather to the metropolitan region as a whole. We moved quite a bit when I was young, so I didn’t really start to set down roots until high school. But I love the Bay Area, despite its occasional drawbacks ( $$$ costs being number one ).
I think this sentence sums up what it feels like to have a hometown more than anything else.
I spent the first 18 years of my life here in the same town in da UP. I spent the next couple years in Minneapolis, then 11 years in Boulder, CO. About 2 years into the Boulder stint, I started getting homesick. I stuck it out, thinking it would go away - after all, who wants to live in the cold end of nowhere when I could live in Boulder?!?
It never went away. I always wanted to move back home. After ten years, I figured it was never going to go away - I had a home, it wasn’t Boulder, and I couldn’t get over it. So I moved back.
I miss living in a larger area sometimes, but overall, I’m pretty damn happy here. The overwhelming sense of belonging makes up for everything else. Much like what QtM said, it’s a bit heady, being able to look around and see things that have been with you your whole life. I work in the building across the street from my first job. I can drive down the street and dredge up memories about just about every locale. All my siblings live here, my parents live here, and my grandparents live here.
At times, it gets cloying. But I can deal with the cloying much better than I dealt with the disattachment I felt when I lived elsewhere.