Why Don’t We Leave a City We Don’t Like?
On the cost of leaving a life we have built, from money and work to relationships and attachment to place.
Imagine getting home one evening after two hours in traffic.
Before you have taken off your shoes, a message arrives from your landlord: we need to talk about renewing the lease.
You call a friend and complain about Tehran again. The rent, the commute, the way even your weekends are mostly spent recovering from the week.
Your friend offers a familiar suggestion:
“Why not move to a smaller city? You could live more comfortably on the same money.”
After the call, you browse the listings. You find a bigger home with lower rent. Let us even suppose you could keep your job and work remotely.
On paper, the decision does not seem particularly difficult.
A few minutes later, though, you close the page.
What has this calculation left out?
In the previous essay, I discussed the value that proximity to opportunities adds to life in the capital. This time, I want to look at the cost of leaving behind what we have built: things we can easily overlook when comparing the rent on two homes.
First: living more cheaply can require having more money to begin with
Let us try a hypothetical calculation.
Suppose moving to another city would reduce your expenses by five million tomans a month. But moving, finding a home, settling in and covering a possible gap between incomes would cost sixty million tomans.
You would need a year of savings to recover the initial cost.
If you have that money, you can weigh the decision's gains and losses. If you do not, you may never reach the point of making the comparison.
This simple difference helps explain why “move somewhere cheaper” means different things to two people with the same income. One has savings to cover a few difficult months; the other still needs to find this month's rent.
There is a study called Underinvestment in a Profitable Technology, by Gharad Bryan, Shyamal Chowdhury and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, published in Econometrica in 2014.
In a region of Bangladesh where families faced shortages of work and food before the harvest, the researchers offered a financial incentive for temporary labour migration. The main payment, equivalent to US$8.50 at the time of the study, covered the round-trip travel cost. The incentive increased seasonal migration, and the migration it induced improved consumption among family members who remained at home.
This study concerns seasonal migration in Bangladesh. It cannot supply a numerical estimate for a family deciding whether to leave Tehran. It does raise an important question, however: when moving could be beneficial, what prevents someone from trying it?
Sometimes the answer lies in the cost of the attempt itself.
Someone who can return to their family's home if a decision goes wrong faces a different risk from someone for whom failure would mean overdue rent and no money for food.
Both may be dissatisfied with their present lives, while only one can afford a few uncertain months.
Second: some of the resources in our lives have an address
Imagine two families with the same income and rent.
In the first family, a grandmother looks after the child two days a week. A brother lives nearby and can come over in an emergency. They also have a friend who lets them know whenever a job opportunity comes up.
The second family lives in the same city without those connections.
An expenses spreadsheet might show little difference between them. But if both decide to move, they will not be leaving the same things behind.
The first family will need to replace some of the help it can currently rely on. Some replacements cost money; others require time and trust.
In a research report published in 2019, Gizem Koşar, Tyler Ransom and Wilbert van der Klaauw asked American respondents to state the probability of their choices in hypothetical moving scenarios. Their estimates indicated that proximity to family and friends, compatibility with the social environment and the non-financial costs of moving matter in residential choices. These findings came from responses to hypothetical situations.
To bring this closer to everyday life, imagine a repair technician.
Over ten years, they have built up a base of customers who pass their number to one another. People know they keep their promises. Sometimes a new job comes in without any advertising.
If they move to another city, their skills go with them. The customers there, however, do not yet know them.
Rebuilding that trust may take time. Meanwhile, a cheaper home does not necessarily mean less financial pressure.
When discussing life in a city, we need to account for this history of relationships and trust. Some of our resources are in our address books, beside the names of people who can actually help because they are still nearby.
Third: moving may be good for you and difficult for your shared life
Sara can work remotely. Tired of the crowds, she suggests moving to a smaller city.
Her husband, Reza, is a physiotherapist. It has taken him years to establish himself at work, get to know doctors and build relationships with patients who come back to him.
Sara might be able to move without losing her income. Reza can only talk about his future earnings in terms of possibilities and estimates.
When they discuss moving, they are facing different decisions even if they are looking at exactly the same figures.
In Family Migration Decisions, published in 1978, Jacob Mincer brought this distinction between individual and family gains into the economic analysis of migration. Within his framework, someone may move for the family's benefit despite suffering a personal loss, or stay even though moving would be better for them individually.
Now add a child's school or the care of ageing parents to the example.
The family might have a better home at the destination while one member loses their job. Total income might rise while one person takes on the burden of childcare.
Adding up the incomes alone does not reveal who loses what.
That is why “if it were just me, I would go” can be an accurate description of the situation. A person is deciding about a life intertwined with several other lives.
Being intertwined does not guarantee that every family decision is fair. We need to be able to ask whose opportunities are shrinking and whether their voice has been heard in the decision.
Fourth: we can be dissatisfied with a city and still love parts of our life there
Suppose you are unhappy with Tehran's pollution, rent and crowds.
But on Thursday afternoon, you walk a route you know well. You know which alley is quieter. A friend lives nearby whom you can see without elaborate arrangements. A few streets away stands a home where you spent important years of your life.
When you say “I do not like this city,” you are not rejecting all those experiences with equal force.
In a 2010 paper, Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford brought research on place attachment together in a framework connecting the person, psychological processes and the characteristics of a place. From this perspective, memories, social ties and environmental features can all contribute to what a place means to us.
Understanding that attachment does not require us to regard the city as beautiful or free of problems.
Someone may complain about the street where they grew up and still feel a sense of familiarity on seeing its shops. An old home may no longer be suitable to live in, yet remain difficult to leave.
The destination, too, needs to be known beyond a few days spent visiting.
On holiday, you might have breakfast in a quiet city and think you could live there for the rest of your life. But you have not yet spent an ordinary day there: a day when you need to find work, get something broken repaired or see someone after a difficult week.
Those things can be established at the destination too. The question is how much time and energy we need to build them.
Our familiarity with the city we live in has already done some of that work for us.
Fifth: wanting to leave and being able to leave are separate things
So far, we have discussed costs. These explanations should not lead us to conclude that everyone who stays is trapped.
One person may have the option to leave and prefer to live near family. Another may wish to leave every day without any way to meet the cost.
From the outside, both are still living in the same city.
In A Theory of Migration, published in 2021, Hein de Haas distinguishes aspirations to migrate from the capability to do so. Within his framework, the freedom to choose where to live includes the option to stay. Understanding people's decisions requires looking both at what they want and at the options genuinely available to them.
This distinction makes the question we ask one another more precise.
When a friend says they are tired of their city, we can ask what they would need in order to leave. Perhaps a job they can take with them. Perhaps arrangements for their mother's care. Or, after considering all of this, they may discover they still prefer to stay but want their living conditions to change.
Someone may also stay in the hope of opportunities they have not used for a long time. That possibility deserves examination too: which opportunities remain real, and which have we kept only in our imagination?
We cannot discover any of these answers by counting how often people complain.
Return to the evening when you opened the property listing.
This time, beside the lower rent, you write down a few other things: the cost of the first few months, your partner's work situation, the help you currently have and the relationships you would need to build at the destination.
After doing the calculation, you may still decide to move. You may also realise that leaving requires you to remove one of these obstacles first.
Now, though, you know why comparing two rents alone had not brought you to a decision.
In the previous essay, I wrote about the money we pay to remain close to opportunities. Here, we must set the cost of leaving our present lives alongside it. We can take part of that life with us; for the rest, we need to invest time in a new place, build trust and ask people for help again.
Perhaps someone who has not left yet is still working to make that possible.