The Harsh Reality of Moving “Somewhere Cheaper”
For low-income workers, “cheaper” isn’t better when it comes to where you live
I live in Vancouver, BC, the second least affordable city in North America. The median price of a one-bedroom rental property is $1,900 per month. The average price of a home in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia is over a million dollars. Unaffordable housing is a constant fixture in the local news cycle. The Facebook comment section on those stories is the town square where the plebs get to sound off.
Scrolling through the comments, you see countless stories from people who struggle to make ends meet in Metro Vancouver and people who have left the region for cheaper outlying areas or for remote towns in BC’s north or interior.
Many commentors make sales pitches for the small town they moved to — “Houses are $300,000 and we have a Walmart now!” — but some speak derisively about those still eking out a living in Metro Vancouver, asking why they don’t just move “somewhere cheaper.”
“Somewhere cheaper” has seductive appeal. A place where one could work just as hard and have a better standard of living sounds like paradise, and if you don’t think about it too much, it sounds like a place with a lower cost of living would easily translate to better living.
That was what I thought in 2015. I decided to move from my hometown of Squamish, a town between Vancouver and Whistler whose real estate and cost of living have exploded in the past twenty years, to a town on northern Vancouver Island, where my mom was born and raised, a former industry town mostly sheltered from the increasing costs of living in British Columbia.
I was excited to get a bit of a break, but I quickly learned a few lessons — things Facebook commentors never mention when the topic of moving somewhere cheaper comes up.
Wages are Lower in “Cheaper” Places
I was a manager for a major fast food joint in Squamish. I had worked at that same restaurant for nine and a half years, working my way up from part-time student worker to full-time shift manager, making $14/hr. But my rent was set to increase, and what few rental properties were available in town were out of my price range. I was ready to get out of the rat race and live somewhere cheaper.
I knew the franchise owners of the same fast food restaurant in my new town, so getting a job was easy. Problem was, they only paid $12/hr for shift managers. I was then doing the same job for less pay. Some things were cheaper than the mainland, like gas and car insurance, but though my cost of living was technically less, I was also making less — putting me right back where I was before moving.
Not to mention that that I was then working for people I had just met. I no longer had the years of mutual trust that I had built up with my previous employer as a foundation. I had to prove myself, starting from the bottom. It would have been a much longer road to higher wages.
Jobs are Scarcer in “Cheaper” Places
I was lucky to even get a job. My boyfriend was unemployed for the six months we lived in this north island town. It certainly didn’t help our financial situation, but more than that, not contributing to our income and putting added pressure on me affected his mental health.
Though growing costs in booming towns hurt low-income workers, they also prove that the area is economically viable. In Squamish, there were “help wanted” signs in every window and new businesses popping up all over. The restaurant I worked for had a chronic shortage of good workers. When everyone is desperate to hire, it’s a worker’s market. You can negociate for better pay, and if you’re available and willing to work, all the hours you want can be yours.
When the economy is slow and there aren’t many jobs, it’s an employer’s market and low-income workers feel the pain. Self-employed people whose work is detached from the physical world — people who work from home in a variety of industries — can easily live in remote places, provided they have a good internet connection. Service workers, who depend on the financial risk that business owners and entrepreneurs take for their employment, need physical premises and resources provided by their employer in order to make a living.
According to Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, we live in cities so we can divide our labor and rely on one another’s specializations. In rural environments where the population is sparse, humans have to be more self-reliant — produce your own food, make your own clothes, and repair your own house — because there just aren’t enough people around to make specializing in one of those skills and trading for the others viable.
In cities, we can specialize in one form of labor and trade with others in our community to get what we need. We don’t need to know how to grow grain, mill it into flour, and bake bread — we can just go buy bread from a bakery. We don’t need to be experienced in animal husbandry — we can take our pets to veterinarians.
Low-income workers need that urbanized, specialized environment and the opportunities it affords.
When Cost of Living is Low, so is Quality of Living
I had lived in a booming town my whole life. Moving to a town that was slowing down, where people weren’t hopeful about their future prospects, was a big shock. Rates of alcoholism were higher. Teenagers got into more trouble. Teenage pregnancy happened at a far greater rate than in my hometown. One of the town’s high schools had a daycare — something I’d only ever heard of on TV.
The only people who weren’t suffering were the retirees moving to town to enjoy their savings. Working people were desperate, and I could feel it.
One of the locations my new bosses operated was inside the town’s newly built Walmart. When Walmart finally arrives in a small town, it becomes like Cheers — it’s where everybody knows your name.
Walmart is great for low prices on groceries and household necessities, but it makes a depressing town hub. No natural light, a lot of noise, and customers who would spend their entire day within that corporate box, buying lottery tickets, drinking endless coffee refills, and falling asleep in the restaurant’s booths. The store saw Christmas-like crowds on seemingly (to me) random Wednesdays… welfare day. Public intoxication was all too common. Every day, I saw the signs of real poverty. As a low-income person myself, it was even more difficult to see because it could be my reality with just a few missed paycheques.
Randoms in Facebook commenters fail to mention that cheap towns are cheap because they’re economically depressed. That town, like many coastal towns in British Columbia, used to be a mill town. My grandfather worked at that mill for most of his life. Like most mills in British Columbia, the mill closed down and the town lost a major job provider. Tourism has picked up some of that slack, but many people in mill towns who lost their jobs never worked again. Economic depression seeps into the whole community. Its effects echo for a long time.
The longer I was there, the more my mental health suffered. Almost as soon as I had settled in, I wanted to leave. I wanted to get out of the zoo of human sadness and move to the city.
Expensive as they are, economically vital cities are brimming with opportunity and, more importantly, optimism.
