The "Relo" Class: Money, the Middle Class, and Mobility
Class Matters - Social Class in the United States of America - The New York Times
The New York Times published an article on a new sub-class in the American social hierarchy called the "Relo" class. They're a growing segment of the upper middle class who move every few years for career reasons and have no social roots in the towns that they live in.
This article underscores many of the arguments I presented in my last blog entry about the effects that residential mobility has on the quality of community life and how the decreased quality of community life is likely affect locally owned businesses. The "Relo" class is painted as a vagabond, upper-middle class population with a disproportionate share of disposable income. Anyone want to take bets if "Joe's Hardware Store" in Downtown Anywhere USA will get much business out of these families each time they relocate? Compounding the problem even further is the tendency for people in the "Relo" class to move into subdivisions where exposure to the greater community is sacrificed for a homogenized master-planned experience that leads to faster, but more shallow community.
