Good article, thanks. One angle I think we need to consider is that attachment to 'place' is not constant over time and appears to be stronger than it used to be (at least in the US). We're not as restless as once were! I saw in the NYT that the share of Americans who move each year is half what it was in the 1950s. Maybe some of it is that other attachments (to religion or school or a social club, as mentioned) have weakened, so place is what remains. But I think the "abundance" folks are correct that some of it is that it's prohibitively costly to move to the locations that have the most economic opportunity. Nostalgia is not a bad thing, but forced immobility is.
Worth noting I don’t mean “place” as in the city you live, I mean “place” as in the actual spaces you spend time in. In my experience at least, people are more attached to the spots like their favorite park or the neighborhood coffee shop than they are to the city as a whole. Case in point, my experience, I don’t care about being gone from Round Rock yet for some irrational reason it bothers me that the movie theater I hung out in so much as a kid is now gone. That’s a sentiment I’ve heard from many people.
Something I didn’t unpack in great detail in the essay, but, I think in the past it was more likely that people would feel attached to a place+institution than just a place of business. If the emotional anchor is your church, and the church is built in a big enduring building that’s been there for a hundred years, and the church is healthy and feels like it will be there for another hundred years, then you have a secure attachment point. And I think we *need* those. But obviously fewer people are attached to their churches and schools and such now, and those institutions aren’t looking as durable, and so people are left with things that weren’t meant to be durable institutions and maybe can’t serve that role for very long.
Yes. This is a bit of a reservation I have with over-emphasis place attachment. (Although I don't think that reduces the importance of placemaking or simply good overall urban planning.) I do think, though, that "Stuck" by Yoni Appelbaum, which may be the source of that factoid, makes a fascinating sort of contra-point to all of this.
The two main components are NIMBYism are the Homevoter Hypothesis and the ideology of the home. I believe the latter is fundamental and the Homevoter Hypothesis is secondary. Andrew introduces an interesting angle to this; that is, returning home, and I have not considered how this fits my scheme, which focuses on the heads-of-house.
Wish to note, if people are stuck in a place they want to leave, their presence may make the people who want to stay worse off. Wages are bid down. Hope is lost. Both sides of the conversation are correct, depending on the individual.
First: Thank you Addison. Thank you Andrew. And thanks indirectly to Chris Arnade (to whom I thought I was subscribed, but just realized I am only following - must correct that error).
This was one of the most interesting and thought provoking essays I have read in 2026. I have so many thoughts and feelings to share, but I've important things to get done before lunch that mean I need to prioritize. So ...
By pure coincidence, the last song I listened to before reading this was "The Town I Loved So Well" by Phil Coulter as performed by The Dubliners. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvSO2beh5sk). Here is a small sample of the lyric:
I remember the day that I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band
There I spent my youth and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me
For I learned about life and I'd found a wife
In the town I loved so well
So I suppose I was well primed to read a little bit about a sense of place, eh? Personally, I have an odd sense of place. My family moved every few years when I was a kid, but it was all within Wisconsin. As an adult, I have been away from this state for months at a time both within the US and outside of it, but I have always maintained my official legal address here. But perhaps because I moved so much as a child, I gave an old friend an answer which shocked him when he asked how I felt about my mother selling the house she had been in for almost five decades, where I lived during my high school years. I told him it did not bother me. I wanted her out. I wished she lived nearer to me. I felt little to nostalgia upon visits back. Yet still, I care about that place and want things to go well for it.
My son's life is very different. From the day he came home from the hospital, until he goes off to college, he has had but one home. The longest he has been away was for a couple months when he was nine years old and we lived in Scotland for a summer. We live in a very livable 110 year old bungalow in a neighborhood built mostly between 1905 and 1925. We live two blocks from a large, beautiful park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead with lagoons and woods and soccer fields and playgrounds and an art deco bandshell. Our neighborhood has organized, supervised, themed trick-or-treat and various summer events along it's central boulevard. We have an independent cinema and two coffee roasters a short walk from our door. Sense of place? It's here and my son feels it in spades. He is resigned very grudgingly to that fact that my wife and I want to downsize and try rural life when she retires. He sees little reason why anyone would want to live anywhere but here unless it were Copenhagen, where we spent a few weeks a couple years ago.
My son has a positively defined sense of place. He is well traveled for seventeen and has seen enough to know he loves home. He feels badly for his classmates who live out in the 'burbs and need to get in a car to go anywhere interesting. He loves foreign travel but after three years of German thinks it would be very hard to be fluent in another language and fully comfortable relocating to a foreign land. I have spoken with many people though, with a more negatively defined sense of place. In the small city where I was born and returned for my high school years, it is not rare to meet people who have rarely traveled more than 50 miles. People who consider Milwaukee terrifyingly huge (and maybe worse, non-white). Some may dream of going to Florida, but cannot afford it. Others who go to Florida or Arizona to visit parents but never bother exploring the landscapes or experiencing local culture. Some just find the outside world a bit too intimidating to bother with.
I just want to touch on the four non-credentialed forms of meaning that Arnade noted. This was such a great conceptual framework to understand so much of life, thanks for showing it to us. I had not seen that piece by him before. I think instinctively, my wife and I set out to make sure our boy had those things. She grew up with faith and place but with limited family connections and some issues with culture (having one immigrant parent who never became fluent in English). I grew up moving a lot and being pretty mainstream in midwest American culture with a both a tight and extended family network, but faith dissolved as my family stopped attending church by the time I was five and never really developed any replacement. I am happy my son has all four of those things in spades. With that inheritance, my wife and I can happily spend down 100% on the financial part (j/k).
Thanks for the invitation, Addison! It was fun to share a guest piece.
You're welcome, thank you!
Good article, thanks. One angle I think we need to consider is that attachment to 'place' is not constant over time and appears to be stronger than it used to be (at least in the US). We're not as restless as once were! I saw in the NYT that the share of Americans who move each year is half what it was in the 1950s. Maybe some of it is that other attachments (to religion or school or a social club, as mentioned) have weakened, so place is what remains. But I think the "abundance" folks are correct that some of it is that it's prohibitively costly to move to the locations that have the most economic opportunity. Nostalgia is not a bad thing, but forced immobility is.
Worth noting I don’t mean “place” as in the city you live, I mean “place” as in the actual spaces you spend time in. In my experience at least, people are more attached to the spots like their favorite park or the neighborhood coffee shop than they are to the city as a whole. Case in point, my experience, I don’t care about being gone from Round Rock yet for some irrational reason it bothers me that the movie theater I hung out in so much as a kid is now gone. That’s a sentiment I’ve heard from many people.
Something I didn’t unpack in great detail in the essay, but, I think in the past it was more likely that people would feel attached to a place+institution than just a place of business. If the emotional anchor is your church, and the church is built in a big enduring building that’s been there for a hundred years, and the church is healthy and feels like it will be there for another hundred years, then you have a secure attachment point. And I think we *need* those. But obviously fewer people are attached to their churches and schools and such now, and those institutions aren’t looking as durable, and so people are left with things that weren’t meant to be durable institutions and maybe can’t serve that role for very long.
Yes. This is a bit of a reservation I have with over-emphasis place attachment. (Although I don't think that reduces the importance of placemaking or simply good overall urban planning.) I do think, though, that "Stuck" by Yoni Appelbaum, which may be the source of that factoid, makes a fascinating sort of contra-point to all of this.
Andrew is such a clear thinker and great writer. Very well done.
The two main components are NIMBYism are the Homevoter Hypothesis and the ideology of the home. I believe the latter is fundamental and the Homevoter Hypothesis is secondary. Andrew introduces an interesting angle to this; that is, returning home, and I have not considered how this fits my scheme, which focuses on the heads-of-house.
Wish to note, if people are stuck in a place they want to leave, their presence may make the people who want to stay worse off. Wages are bid down. Hope is lost. Both sides of the conversation are correct, depending on the individual.
First: Thank you Addison. Thank you Andrew. And thanks indirectly to Chris Arnade (to whom I thought I was subscribed, but just realized I am only following - must correct that error).
This was one of the most interesting and thought provoking essays I have read in 2026. I have so many thoughts and feelings to share, but I've important things to get done before lunch that mean I need to prioritize. So ...
By pure coincidence, the last song I listened to before reading this was "The Town I Loved So Well" by Phil Coulter as performed by The Dubliners. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvSO2beh5sk). Here is a small sample of the lyric:
I remember the day that I earned my first pay
When I played in a small pick-up band
There I spent my youth and to tell you the truth
I was sad to leave it all behind me
For I learned about life and I'd found a wife
In the town I loved so well
So I suppose I was well primed to read a little bit about a sense of place, eh? Personally, I have an odd sense of place. My family moved every few years when I was a kid, but it was all within Wisconsin. As an adult, I have been away from this state for months at a time both within the US and outside of it, but I have always maintained my official legal address here. But perhaps because I moved so much as a child, I gave an old friend an answer which shocked him when he asked how I felt about my mother selling the house she had been in for almost five decades, where I lived during my high school years. I told him it did not bother me. I wanted her out. I wished she lived nearer to me. I felt little to nostalgia upon visits back. Yet still, I care about that place and want things to go well for it.
My son's life is very different. From the day he came home from the hospital, until he goes off to college, he has had but one home. The longest he has been away was for a couple months when he was nine years old and we lived in Scotland for a summer. We live in a very livable 110 year old bungalow in a neighborhood built mostly between 1905 and 1925. We live two blocks from a large, beautiful park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead with lagoons and woods and soccer fields and playgrounds and an art deco bandshell. Our neighborhood has organized, supervised, themed trick-or-treat and various summer events along it's central boulevard. We have an independent cinema and two coffee roasters a short walk from our door. Sense of place? It's here and my son feels it in spades. He is resigned very grudgingly to that fact that my wife and I want to downsize and try rural life when she retires. He sees little reason why anyone would want to live anywhere but here unless it were Copenhagen, where we spent a few weeks a couple years ago.
My son has a positively defined sense of place. He is well traveled for seventeen and has seen enough to know he loves home. He feels badly for his classmates who live out in the 'burbs and need to get in a car to go anywhere interesting. He loves foreign travel but after three years of German thinks it would be very hard to be fluent in another language and fully comfortable relocating to a foreign land. I have spoken with many people though, with a more negatively defined sense of place. In the small city where I was born and returned for my high school years, it is not rare to meet people who have rarely traveled more than 50 miles. People who consider Milwaukee terrifyingly huge (and maybe worse, non-white). Some may dream of going to Florida, but cannot afford it. Others who go to Florida or Arizona to visit parents but never bother exploring the landscapes or experiencing local culture. Some just find the outside world a bit too intimidating to bother with.
I just want to touch on the four non-credentialed forms of meaning that Arnade noted. This was such a great conceptual framework to understand so much of life, thanks for showing it to us. I had not seen that piece by him before. I think instinctively, my wife and I set out to make sure our boy had those things. She grew up with faith and place but with limited family connections and some issues with culture (having one immigrant parent who never became fluent in English). I grew up moving a lot and being pretty mainstream in midwest American culture with a both a tight and extended family network, but faith dissolved as my family stopped attending church by the time I was five and never really developed any replacement. I am happy my son has all four of those things in spades. With that inheritance, my wife and I can happily spend down 100% on the financial part (j/k).