portlandia
by rantywoman
Unfortunately I might have to leave my version of Portland and backyard chickens and go back to the expensive city of L.A. in order to get a job:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/18/priced_out_of_new_york/
So there you are in New York. You’re struggling and broke, but you’re happy. You’re in the center of the universe, right? And you’re so in love with the city that the sight of the Manhattan skyline as you ride the Q train over the bridge at night is enough to make you weep. Or maybe you’re crying because you’re tired from working your barely living-wage publishing job and then doing freelance work all night to cover your rent; or maybe you’re crying because New York is an absolutely brutal place to be a single woman; or maybe you’re crying because you’re in your 20s and it’s all so beautiful and big and overwhelming, the city spread out before you like that.
[…]
When my husband and I were born, it was possible to raise a family in New York without extreme struggle. It was still harder than most places, sure. New York has never been easy. But it was possible to raise a family in reasonable comfort without being a corporate lawyer or investment banker or heiress. To be a middle-class family in New York these days is to be in eternal survival mode, always scrabbling, always scraping by. What happens to a city that’s priced itself out of reach of the average family?
And so we left. We moved to Portland, Ore. We bought into that West Coast dream, backyard chickens and all.
thebitterbabe 
I am unclear as to why moving back to L.A. is likely to fix the problem of finding a job. Although being a big place would mean there are more jobs going at any point in time, that must equally mean there are more people in the vicinity who are competing for the available jobs. The only difference is that it would cost more to perch there, and therefore be an even greater drain on resources, during the job search period. It’s one thing to do it because you have an incredibly passionate desire to live there, but I fail to see how it can be viewed as a simple solution to not being employed. But then I am not privy to what is it you actually are trained for, and maybe L.A. really is the best place for your particular career, and it is simply that I don’t have enough information available to me in order to come to that conclusion.
My former organization will take employees back within a certain time frame and find them a post. So that is my safety net, although I never imagined it would come to that. Otherwise, no, I would not return there without a job.
I see now. I guess any safety net, even one that may not be ideal, is still better than none at all. Don’t give up hope yet though, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and all that.
I’m going to give it quite a bit more time, but that safety net option is now an inkling in my brain. If I have to resort to it, by then maybe I’ll have forgotten how terribly draining it is to move.
Having grown up in a small town, but having lived in NYC my entire adult life, I do understand that you may have no choice but to move back to a more urban environment to find a job. I mean, assuming for a moment that I WANTED to live in my old hometown (I don’t), there are simply No. Jobs. there. So while yes, there are more people in a big city competing for positions, at least there ARE jobs….
I know that virtually no one with whom I went to high school returned to my home town after college, because other than low-level, low-paid positions (bank teller, Walmart, etc.) there were no opportunities. Those dead-end positions were filled by local people who never went beyond high school, but if you were a professional there was simply no possibility of supporting oneself, unless one of your parents happened to be one of the local lawyers or doctors in an established practice that you could step into. Occasionally there would be an opening for a teacher at one of the local schools, but that usually would only be upon the retirement of someone who had been teaching for decades.
People move to cities for the same reason they always have: to work.
Where I’m living now is a decent-sized city, along the order of Portland, but there is a lot of competition for jobs, and a lot of it is from younger people just out of college who are willing to work for a lot less.
Thanks for the link. Timely for me and slowly working my way through the comments section. Good to know I’m not alone in (not) seeing the Emperor’s new clothes.