The decision to move away from home is often difficult and charged with deep and complicated emotions, and people have a wide range of motivations for leaving. But they all stem from the same, central question:
When is home no longer enough?
The answer to this question has led over a hundred thousand people away from Toledo in the last five decades, and still looms over this post-industrial city that is searching for itself. But even after decades of departures, this community is still full of people who refuse to count Toledo out. This story begins in Toledo, but it doesn’t end here.
Communities across the Rust Belt and across the country are grappling with these same issues. So we’re after a bigger narrative, one that explores what a place represents to the people who live in it and the people who leave it behind, and one that — we hope — will transform the way we think about the future of all American cities.
I was born and raised in the Toledo (area), I graduated from the University of Toledo, and I do not live there anymore. I left 16 years ago, in Dec. ’09, a mere two weeks after graduating with an engineering degree. I’ve lived in MI, OH, Georgia, China, NYC, and now call Chicago home.
Let’s imagine we’re at the corner of Secor Rd and Central Ave in Toledo. That intersection could be Anywhere, America. It could be in Georgia, in New Jersey; in any suburb across the country it’s the exact same thing. No local feel, no character, no sense of a human story. Just stuff we’ve made; pavement, cars, parking lots, boxy buildings, but barely a person in sight. It looks lifeless. It feels lifeless.
In another podcast, the host said “So we’re staying in this place in Tuscany on a 400 acre farm that has been built up over hundreds of years. The newest thing on this farm is 300 years old. The oldest thing is probably 5,600 years old. That’s your timeframe. And I had this sense that came over me while I was there, which was, I felt so good being in a place where I knew so many people had lived and died.” -The Peter Attia Drive – #225 ‒ The Comfort Crisis. That feeling is something I want to live everyday. A sense of the long arc of time, of being one human story among many many others.
In America, we can’t do 5,600 years, but we can do over a century. I live in a house completed in 1885, that’s 140 years of being lived in. I can step out my front door and walk down to the nearby store, catch a ride into a crowded downtown, make a stop at a hardware or grocery store; I can live the same story as the past, present, and future. The Old West End has old houses, but the rest of that story has faded away. This is why I don’t live in Toledo, OH. Why I don’t live in Anywhere, America. Those places won’t be changing anytime soon, and so I won’t be living there.