It didn’t make headlines in the rest of the country, but it sure
did here. On Monday of this past week, the local newspapers and TV
stations all featured the results of a survey of Massachusetts baby
boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964. MassINC (The
Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth) commissioned the
survey, and found, alongside the expected — too much debt, anxiety
over retirement — that 35 percent of boomers planned to leave
Massachusetts when they retired. The complete survey may be found
on MassINC’s website at www.massinc.org.
A little calculation set the headline writers writing and the
talk show hosts talking. Massachusetts is a boomer-heavy state,
with 30 percent of the population and 45 percent of the workforce
made up of the post-World War II generation. If 35 percent actually
followed through and left the commonwealth on retirement, let’s
see, that’d be about 650,000 people, or 10 percent of the
population. This in the only state in the union actually to lose
population already as of the last census.
As MassINC put it, “The sheer size of the generation makes this
mass exodus problematic.”
That evening, drive time talk show host Howie Carr devoted two
hours of his program to the subject. His callers’ near-universal
declaration: “I’m outa here.” Carr himself, a Boston icon, said,
not for the first time, that he’s leaving the state as soon as
possible. The on-air complaints included bad weather, high housing
costs, high insurance costs, regulation, and the overbearing
climate of liberalism, including the gay marriage pronunciamento by
the Supreme Judicial Court. The typical retirement destinations for
Carr listeners? About 10 percent said New Hampshire or Maine,
mainly for those who wanted to stay near their children. For the
rest, the Carolinas, Florida, and a few votes for Utah. The next
morning, host John Depetro took up the same question and got two
hours of similar responses. Anecdotal stuff, certainly, but lots of
it.
Political concern also overhangs the boomers’ planned escape.
Carr expressed a near-universal worry that the only thing holding
back the legislature from total collapse into Democrat-dominated
corruption was Mitt Romney. We’ve had reasonably responsible
Republican governors for a couple of decades now, but there is no
likely candidate on the horizon to beat Attorney General Tom Reilly
next time around. And he’s a big D.
“What’s that they say in French?” as Carr put it. “Apres moi, le
deluge.”
THE WHOLE GRIPE TENDS TO FOCUS on housing and housing costs,
unsurprisingly. On November 14, the Boston Business
Journal reported the results of third quarter housing sales.
Total volume was down a bit, but the prices were still going
up.
“The median price for a single-family house in the quarter was
$370,000, a 5.7 percent jump over last year,” the Journal
reported. “Condominium sales went up 14
percent to 7,124 condominiums sold from July through September. The
median price for a condominium was up 5.3 percent to $282,000.”
Add to that high property taxes, the cost of heating a home in
the Northeast’s bitter winters, car insurance, the wear and tear on
home and vehicle from bad weather, lots of clothes and dry
cleaning, and a generationally typical mountain of debt (which the
survey also reports), and it’s no wonder a big slice of the
population wants out. It’s urgent, too. It takes very little
calculation to realize that, just as boomers drove the housing
price boom, a bunch of boomers trying to sell all at once could
very well drive, if not a housing bust, at least a substantial
turndown in home values.
Aside from talk radio, trade-specific blogs have all featured
the MassINC survey: in human resources, in executive recruiting,
and in real estate, too, of course. One executive recruiter
speculated gloomily that, given rising business costs, there might
be nothing to do to retain the boomers’ skills but first to offer
them incentivized retirement, and then to hire them back. The real
estate bloggers speak darkly of “developing neighborhood
turnover.”
And they all wonder what they can do to counter the trend.
THE ANSWER IS: NOTHING. It’s not just economics, you see. It’s an
affair of the heart.
I did not download the big .pdf file with the whole MassINC
survey and pore through it line by line, but I’ve got a serious
hunch about that impending booming diaspora segment: It is
disproportionately married. In the seventies and eighties, we
boomers, single or at least childless, would leave Eastern big city
buildings in the late afternoon. It would be dark, and the urban
canyons sparkled with pleasure and promise. We felt a feeling
unlike any other, of life unfolding, of satisfaction in work
accomplished and due to be accomplished at even higher levels, with
no limit in sight.
But now we’ve grown up, even those of us most reluctant to do
it, most devoted to Viagra and aerobics and antioxidants. Marriage,
especially lasting marriage, and children change almost everything.
Age does the rest. Instead of sparkling nighttime promise, we now
feel a winter chill that goes right to the bone, and we dream not
of moonlight romance, but of dewy dawns with a warm sunrise and not
very much to worry about. Maybe a paid-for house, or one with at
least a very low mortgage. Maybe a climate where the slush and salt
and ice don’t eat up your car. Maybe even living in some sort of
planned community where you don’t have to drive much at all, other
than in a golf cart.
Finally, things do go wrong, especially with the aging body,
whether your own or the one belonging to the one you love. For
that, a gentler climate — economic and climatic — carries all
sorts of benefits. There will be plenty of battles; no need to add
snowstorms. Finally, it happens to all us just the way the Roche
sisters sang it prophetically to their father in “Quitting
Time”:
Money is not the problem
you have enough of that
now you must close your office
put on your coat and hat
put on your coat and hat
Now is the hour of quitting
twilight paints the town
Old industrial skyline
how does the sun go down?
how does the sun go down
You can go south in winter
be what you are a goose
you can live near the ocean
your clothes can fit you loose
Even as you are leaning
into that glass of wine
you and beloved business
have come to the end of a line
come to the end of a line
(Margaret Roche, c. 1979, DeShufflin, Inc. Listen here here.)
Amen. See you in North Carolina. Soon.
