As a college student at UNC Chapel Hill, I had friends who lived in a sunny, safe, and spacious 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment for a monthly rent that would have gotten them one bathroom stall overnight at New York City’s now-defunct Tunnel.

 

Though it has been over 10 years since I left North Carolina, my shock at the relatively high cost of living up here in the New York-New Jersey metro area lingers a bit. When I first moved up here for graduate school, I heard myself drawl, “But in the South…” every time I was confronted with what seemed like an unreasonable price to pay for everything from a pound of peaches to car insurance (my heart nearly stopped when I saw that estimate).

 

After some time, I became used to living up North; my Southern accent diminished, I stopped going into sticker shock, and I became accustomed to store-studded highways. Just as I began to view my way of life as the norm, my former college roommate, a small-town North Carolina native, came to visit for New Year’s Eve in New York.

 

Watching me battle holiday traffic on our drive to the Willowbrook Mall in Passaic County, New Jersey, she announced that, in my place, she would “be cryin’” at the frustration of merely getting from point A to point B. I shrugged and explained that I had simply gotten used to it, and our shopping trip was peppered with Southern-twanged reminders of how expensive, crowded, and downright stressful living up here is.

 

Apparently living here is also dirtier, as she naively demonstrated in the Port Authority bus station one morning. Exiting a bathroom stall, complaining of a wet toilet seat, she announced that she had unwittingly sat in strange urine. I could not conceal my shock that she had actually sat on the seat, sans layers of toilet paper or a protective cover. Her shrug and wide-eyed expression led me to re-toilet train a grown woman. You just can’t, I slowly explained, do that in New York, and especially not at the Port Authority.

 

“I could never live here,” she declared. “I don’t know how you do it.”

 

Okay, so New York, aside from being a stressful, expensive, and filthy-dirty place to live, is the greatest city in the world. I love it. I love its diversity, its character, and its big heart.

 

Having said that, I know at least 3 Gen X /Gen Y couples who are moving down South. They feel exhausted and ancient, slaving away at interminable hours for wages that ought to provide for a comfortable standard of living, but don’t. Embittered, these couples are leaving, citing New York’s outrageous housing costs, high taxes, and pricey daily expenses.

 

With homes in the New York metro area costing twice the national average (according to 2005 figures from the National Association of Realtors) but with very little square footage, the South’s sprawling acreage and beautiful mansions release a siren’s call dripping with the seductive charm Blanche DuBois poured all over that paper boy.

 

But it won’t just be young couples making the great out-migration, as these pairs are having children, and with babies come grandparents. Determined, aging grandparents, people who live solely to spoil tiny tots rotten. Or sadly, some older folks may be battling health issues, provoking them to be closer to loved ones. Whatever the motivation, retired and mobile, Boomers and Matures are ready to move.

 

Those cohorts want to be close to their kids and grandkids, and they can be. Their savings, combined with the lower cost of living, make for fantasies of the good life which include images of wraparound porches and, further down South, driveways that don’t ice over in the winter.

 

While Florida and North Carolina, as well as the rest of the region, may see a multi-generational deluge of new citizens including Matures, Boomers, Gen Xers, Gen Yers, and their babies, the Southwest is also a draw. According to a 2006 U.S. Census Bureau report, Arizona and Nevada have welcomed large numbers of relocated New Yorkers as well.

 

With eager New Yorkers comes plentiful New York cash; retailers may enjoy the effects of reverse sticker shock—joyous spending in the face of the lowest prices many metropolitan dwellers have seen in years.