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I've spent ~19 of my 20 years alive in PA borders, and I feel the urge to post about my excitement to move out. My personal reasons for moving away include the following(they are all mostly about northern/northeast/northcentral PA):
the weather,
little economic opportunity,
not as many young people as other places,
most towns/cities feel run down and have obviously seen better days,
not many cities feel modern and everyone seems to cling to tradition as a reason not to upgrade,
3 places I've lived(in northern PA) have been very racist and homophobic,
I'm not sure how to explain it, but going to my high school if you wanted to work a white collar job you were labeled a "f a g"/college was seen as something for fancy pants,
I'm being boned by Corbett for my college education(tuition has doubled from my freshman year),
no "destination" places to end up living, except for Philly, which seems to be almost looked down on by many people from out of state.
I spent this past summer in a city in central Illinois and now I can't wait to go back there next summer and get away from this rural middle of nowhere type of place.
Or are you the exact opposite and want to stay in PA or move to it? Do you enjoy the history that surrounds the state, or is it the way of life?
What are the things that I don't take into consideration? The only pro I can see right now as a 20 year old college student is that my family lives here.
Personally, I have a job lined up in Phoenix and plan to move there upon graduation.
Like you, I grew up in a small town (Pittston Township) in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It was a suburb roughly equidistant from either Scranton or Wilkes-Barre, two larger cities. I didn't view the area as being a particularly "bad" place to live; however, I certainly did see it as being unnecessarily mediocre. Most people there were content to leave things "as-is" while I saw nothing but potential for betterment all around me. All of the "bones" were there to make Northeastern Pennsylvania a great place, but people overwhelmingly had the "if it ain't broke, then don't fix it" mentality. I viewed the area as being very racist and homophobic, and I still do to this day, despite positive changes that are finally occuring there (such as Pittston drafting an ordinance prohibiting discrimination against the LGBT community as it tries to reinvent itself as a quasi-hipster artists' colony).
I graduated from college in Wilkes-Barre and hoofed it to Northern Virginia, where I had accepted a job offer. I quickly learned "the grass ain't always greener on the other side" as I quickly grew homesick for PA and couldn't find many redeeming qualities about where I was living. Northern Virginia is a great place to live (if you're rich), but if you're poor and just starting out it's horrible. The area felt like a huge suburb with no real defined communities or "towns", if you will. Traffic congestion was immense, and it really put those supposedy bad "rush-hour back-ups" on I-81 near Scranton into perspective. I fell into a crowd of ruthless people, and being a small-town bumpkin who trusted everyone I let myself be taken advantage of emotionally and socially.
Eventually therapy taught me that sometimes an area can be toxic to your well-being. I knew I was homesick for PA, but I didn't want to move back near family, who still (to this day) doesn't embrace me for being homosexual. I tried Pittsburgh on a whim, and I've taken to it like a fish to water. It is like a larger version of Scranton, except with educated, open-minded, and tolerant people instead of uneducated, narrow-minded, intolerant ones. My partner and I don't display affection in public, but if we so chose to do so we could hold hands here without fear of persecution. I don't exactly think the same would be true if we held hands while walking to the movies in Scranton or Wilkes-Barre. Various races live harmonisouly here whereas the few blacks and Hispanics that the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area had were all dumped into small pockets of the city cores while bigoted white people moved away from them to expensive lily-white suburbs like Clarks Summit or Shavertown to offer their children a "better quality-of-life" (away from black people).
PA is a large and diverse state. Just because Northeastern and North Central Pennsylvania may suck doesn't mean Philadelphia or Pittsburgh have to.
I've spent ~19 of my 20 years alive in PA borders, and I feel the urge to post about my excitement to move out. My personal reasons for moving away include the following(they are all mostly about northern/northeast/northcentral PA):
the weather,
little economic opportunity,
not as many young people as other places,
most towns/cities feel run down and have obviously seen better days,
not many cities feel modern and everyone seems to cling to tradition as a reason not to upgrade,
3 places I've lived(in northern PA) have been very racist and homophobic,
I'm not sure how to explain it, but going to my high school if you wanted to work a white collar job you were labeled a "f a g"/college was seen as something for fancy pants,
I'm being boned by Corbett for my college education(tuition has doubled from my freshman year),
no "destination" places to end up living, except for Philly, which seems to be almost looked down on by many people from out of state.
I spent this past summer in a city in central Illinois and now I can't wait to go back there next summer and get away from this rural middle of nowhere type of place.
Or are you the exact opposite and want to stay in PA or move to it? Do you enjoy the history that surrounds the state, or is it the way of life?
What are the things that I don't take into consideration? The only pro I can see right now as a 20 year old college student is that my family lives here.
Personally, I have a job lined up in Phoenix and plan to move there upon graduation.
there are many young people just like yourself relocating to places like Philadelphia. If you look at population trends within the state they are to SEPA west to the alleghenies...recent growth in north central, and mostly decline with the exception of pittsburgh in western PA (itself a welcome but recent development). NEPA is getting older and poorer. People do look down on Philly but unnecessarily so. for a young person it has a lively scene, arguably the best beer city in the country and one of the best in the world, amazing food, bars, parks, etc. it isn't paradise but a gay man doesn't have to hide out, in fact, there was recently an article about the death of the gayborhood...a places that was a safe haven but now is no longer necessary. I'd take Philly over Phoenix in a heart beat. NEPA seems to have a lot in common with upstate NY (another struggling region).
I also have left Pennsylvania in recent years, although my situation was fundamentally job-related in my particular field. I definitely would have preferred to stay in PA -- at least for the near future -- if I could find suitable employment. I ended up moving to the DC area. It wasn't my ideal situation, but I still look at my move as positive overall.
Even though I'm not too far away, I will say there are plenty of aspects that I do miss about PA that I took for granted when I was growing up (an abundance of charming, human-scaled, historic communities; lots of locally-owned businesses [not as chain-oriented as many other states]; a nice balance of seasons; generally more affable and down-to-earth people; a pretty balanced ratio of income to cost-of-living; and generally wide availability of good schools/healthcare).
It's actually not uncommon to have a "grass is greener" mentality prior to moving and end up actually preferring the place you came from. Also, recognize that PA is a large state (as Steel City Rising mentioned). The state has large, dynamic metro areas as well as smaller, less-thriving towns. You may end up loving Illinois, but you may also equally enjoy another part of Pennsylvania.
Overall, though, I think it's a great, life-changing opportunity to live in different places. It may sound cliche, but it definitely broadens your horizons, allows you to grow personally and professionally, and forces you outside of your comfort zone.
No one can tell you what the right choice is for you, but I guess my main point is that it may take some time and living in different places to determine where you want to put down roots. That's the adventurous part, though.
It wouldn't be a bad thing, though, if more Pennsylvanians considered living in its own cities such as Philadelphia or Pittsburgh before bailing on the whole state.
I've spent ~19 of my 20 years alive in PA borders, and I feel the urge to post about my excitement to move out. My personal reasons for moving away include the following(they are all mostly about northern/northeast/northcentral PA):
no "destination" places to end up living, except for Philly, which seems to be almost looked down on by many people from out of state.
What are the things that I don't take into consideration? The only pro I can see right now as a 20 year old college student is that my family lives here.
Personally, I have a job lined up in Phoenix and plan to move there upon graduation.
Philly is certainly not looked down on by many people from out of state.
I'd advise looking into options around Philadelphia for college. Plenty of young people in Philly. You don't want to move to Phoenix... trust me. There are less young people there than Philly or Pittsburgh and it is mostly a retirement community.
I've been to many cities in the South with good reputations, and they don't have anything on Philly and Pittsburgh. In fact in a lot of ways, if you can live with the weather, Phill and Pittsburgh offer a lot of culture, character, and history that those cities will never have. A lot of them are nothing but urban sprawl at its worst..... strip mall heaven. New tract houses everywhere with crowded highways.
Grew up my whole life in Central PA..... I moved away to Seattle WA and I have no plans on moving back to PA EVER. I find most of PA to be boring, backwards thinking, and not much in terms of culture (except maybe philly). I'm not a big fan of Philadelphia though. It's a place I'd drive to for my big city fix but to me it's always seemed like a dirty run down wasteland and people are rude and just plain mean. Not to mention the taxes are annoying.
PA is a place I'd live if I were much older, married, and settled down with a family.
I'm a Pennsylvania native who left for college and didn't come back. I was a newspaper reporter and did not want to work for the owners of the Erie Times-News. I stayed in Ohio, moving around from Dayton to Cleveland back to Dayton and then to Cincinnati, and I was very content with that. I visited Erie six or seven times a year and missed it, but never considered moving back. Twenty-some years later I met a wonderful guy who just happened to live in Pennsylvania, so I came back.
My husband died in 2011 and after 2 years I'm ready to return to Ohio, or even move back to Erie now that my mom is getting up in age. Finding a suitable job there could prove troublesome, however. I spent most of my teen years plotting my escape from Erie to experience life elsewhere, but now I'd enjoy living there again. The older I get, the more I appreciate being around people I've known for a very long time.
There is nothing keeping me in the Philadelphia area other than a few friends and some cherished memories.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pman
It wouldn't be a bad thing, though, if more Pennsylvanians considered living in its own cities such as Philadelphia or Pittsburgh before bailing on the whole state.
I grew up in Lebanon, PA. Went to college in Central Virginia and lived there for a year after. Virginia is okay, but it just never felt like home. I moved back to PA, but specifically chose Philadelphia so I could have more of a city life and better opportunities than Lebanon offered, but still be near family and have that familiar PA feeling. (See, pman, I made your wish come true 20 years before you wished it).
I do find the "my PA town sucks therefore the entire state of PA sucks so I'm leaving" mentality to be common in the non-metropolitan parts of the state. Is it like this everywhere or is this more of a PA-specific thing?
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