[ul]
[li]That’s where the jobs are.[/li][li]That’s where family and friends are.[/li][li]Similarly, that’s where you fit in culturally.[/li][li]People enjoy the cold/heat.[/li][li]The weather is nice for certain parts of the year (e.g. although south Florida is hot and humid in the summer, its winters are perfect)[/li][/ul]
Personally, I live near NYC because that’s where the jobs are and it’s near family and friends, but I’m not sure how you would justify, say, Wyoming.
I’m not looking for super-serious answers, just whatever opinions or anecdotes you want to share. I might consider living in Antarctica for a year just for the stories.
Also, I suspect **Iqaluit Boy **is probably the winner in any “worst climate” contest.
Sorry if this is rambling and undirected; it’s early.
Pretty much what you said, I think. I live in Boston, and I say all the time that someday I’m moving to a place where I’m not physically uncomfortable for nine months out of the year, but really… this is where my family and friends are. I’m pretty sure people in Wyoming feel the same way.
A while ago on these boards there was a thread in which we Canadians were complaining and commiserating about the lousy winter weather. One poster expressed bewilderment at how we’d live in a country with such awful weather. Said poster’s location read “Gaza”. Cracked me right the hell up.
Sometimes people who can’t find work where they live could probably find it easily if they moved somewhere else but they don’t want to move for various reasons such as friends, family, etc.
One of the main reasons we moved away from Texas was the heat- after living there most of our lives, snow has taken on a fairytale property. We’ve been back to visit once or twice, and as soon as I stepped off the plane I remembered exactly why I left.
My family told me it hit 107 the other day in Austin. It made me really enjoy the 81 degrees we had here.
Scotland wouldn’t be high on many people’s appealing climate list, but I love it. Four seasons and no extremes of hot or cold, day to day. You can get the extremely cold out in the hills, but you’ll never get to feel real heat. South Eastern Scotland is dry for the UK, so enough rain to make things interesting but not enough to make you feel deluged.
It is great to go on a holiday somewhere hot just as a reminder of what the proper sun feels like, but after about a day of it I’ve had enough. I guess you just get used to your own weather - it’s true that British people speak about the weather a lot, but we don’t really moan about it IME.
I think of weather as being miles behind considerations like job, culture, family etc, but it could be a deal breaker if it came to moving somewhere properly hot. The weather in places like Arizona, Texas, Florida etc seems relentless, hot as a ballsack day after day.
I’d turn this around to ask why people live in (or aim to live in) a place predominantly or entirely because of the climate.
As noted, frost-free (or nearly so) locations in the U.S. are deathly hot much of the year, prone to little inconveniences like floods, tropical storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, massive traffic jams and high cost of living, and/or isolated and lacking in job opportunities (i.e. Hawaii).
People live in supposedly undesirable places because they don’t have these disadvantages, or because that’s where jobs, family and friends are, plus there may be other compelling lifestyle considerations.
Calvin Trillin wrote about others asking him how he and his wife could possibly live in New York City. His response included the line “We’re big eaters” (referring to the vast array of choices the city affords diners).
Climate is only one consideration for me (the last time I was job-hunting, a stable well-paid position was tops on the list). I don’t think I’d want to live in South Dakota again, but if I had to choose between a good job there and a miserable one in Southern California, South Dakota would win easily.
We left the snow shovel behind when we moved from NJ to Charlotte. I do NOT miss getting up at 5 AM to shovel the driveway so I could get to work. Down here we see snow once or twice a year. Just enough to remember how nice it looks, but not enough to shovel.
Sometimes people don’t have the means to move, even if they’d like to try.
It depends on a person’s definition of “nice weather” though - I hate heat, especially when it’s mixed with extreme humidity (I could tolerate, for example, Las Vegas when it’s 100, but I hate St. Louis in the summer because it’s so sticky).
I could never, ever live in Florida, even though a lot of people consider the weather there to be great. I’d rather live in Wyoming, and deal with digging out of the snow - huge amounts of snow aren’t exactly nice weather, but IMO it’s the lesser of two evils compared to weather that’s too hot for long stretches.
I grew up in New England, and I miss the weather there.
My job brought me to the Colorado mountains. But I lived in Denver and had done a lot of camping so I pretty much knew what I was getting into.
I don’t think I could ever live in a city again. I’m not dissing people that do. But like people that don’t understand how I can live in deep winter for 6-7 months out of the year, I don’t understand how people live right next to each other.
I also ‘fit’ here. Blue jeans every day. And while winters are brutal. They are gorgeous. Oh, I will do my share of complaining about snow in June. But it’s mostly because we get tastes of summer and then bam, 2 feet of snow in May. People in Florida talk about the heat and thunderstorms. We talk about the snow.
After 17 years at altitude, I am still stunned by the view off my deck.
And summers, while short, are perfect. It was hot yesterday. 75 degrees
My observation has been that many of the places where one would most like to live are also the places where it’s most difficult to make a living. And hardly anywhere has “perfect” climate: too hot, too cold, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, etc. - pick your poison, so to speak.
Sure, it snows a lot around here (upstate NY). Falls are stunningly beautiful, though. But the real reason I smile and put up with the weather is that all the bugs die every year. We don’t get eight inch long anything - everything has to start from scratch every year.
My cousin who now lives in Texas came up to visit a couple years ago. It was a miserable 86 degrees out. I was about dieing from the air. It was the kind of heat that wraps it’s self anaconda style around you and makes it ever harder to breath as the sweat pours down in torrents attempting to shiveral you up like a soggy prune as your body fights to survive by dumping every ounce of water it can outside your body for cooling. And my cousin? He was cold and wanted his jacket.:eek:
Most people agree that air conditioning paved the way for the big move to the sun belt in the US. Before AC the South didn’t have many people and it did not get many transplants.
There are several things keeping me here in a place that has a (IMO) utterly miserable climate. Mainly my family, friends, job, and church. Sure, I could move to Florida, but the risks are too great. What if my job doesn’t pan out. What if I can’t afford to make ends meet? What if, what if, what if?
Best to stick with a sure thing, and live with the consequences, I guess.
I ask my mom this every time we go up to Pittsburgh to see her family - the weather sucks the goat ass, there aren’t even any jobs, the place is terribly provincial… she says she doesn’t think they know they can move. She points out that there are people in the suburbs who don’t even go into Pittsburgh, let alone any other place.
I guarandamntee you I wouldn’t be in Houston if it wasn’t for the fact this is where my industry is concentrated. The summers are brutal and this year is quickly shaping up to be one of the worst ever. The only relief we get from mosquitoes is when a hurricane bears down. For some reason people keep moving here and now it’s overcrowded to boot.
There are some businesses now that hire people who can live anywhere since they can do all their work at home via the web. I interviewed with a place like that 10 years ago although I lived near their office anyway.
Because there’s no room in the places with the good climate?
Look at housing prices in the Bay Area in California (even after recent bursting of real estate bubbles). People tend to migrate to the nice climates until the places with nice climates have a standard of living that’s equal to (or slightly lower than) the crummy places. So yeah, the Bay Area has nice weather but they have high real estate prices, traffic jams, pollution, and enough population density to make everyone miserable.
“Bad climate” is also, fortunately, subjective. And there are actually very few places that have year-round perfect climates. Yes, it’s sunny in LA all the time, but in other parts of the world, that’s known as a drought. Which is why it burns all the time.