“I don’t think you’d be the same person had we stayed in L.A.,” my mom told me recently. “I wanted you to have better opportunities.”
About a year ago, I moved back to my birthplace, Los Angeles. The move came after six years on the east coast and a desire to be closer to my family.
It’s weird coming back to a place so familiar yet foreign. Despite being born in L.A., and raised just south of the city, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was 7, rendering Los Angeles a relic of my childhood, a menagerie of foggy memories.
It’s unclear what my mom meant by “better opportunities.” Still, I got the gist that it was about the socioeconomic measures think tanks, policymakers and researchers use to measure progress: education, housing and income.
I thought, “can I actually measure if moving made a difference?” Indeed, your environment impacts your future outcomes, but to what extent?
In March of 2018, Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, and a team of researchers sought to estimate upward mobility across socioeconomic lines. Using anonymized Census data and tax records of roughly 20 million Americans, he and his team predicted outcomes for children born between 1978 and 1983 to when they were in their 30s (around 2015).
Among Chetty et al.’s findings was the importance of geographical location.
Research showed that outcomes for children could vary widely even when their neighborhoods were as little as a mile apart. Furthermore, the age at which someone moves profoundly impacts their future earnings but only up until a limit.
I was born in 1989, so I was curious—what were my expected outcomes at birth? And, what would’ve happened had I been born somewhere else?
Madera, Calif.
My family migrated to Central California in the 1940s from the South. They worked as fieldhands in the region’s many fruit and nut orchards.
Madera, Calif. is where my grandparents met and where my mother was born. It’s a charming part of the state, but there weren’t many opportunities outside of farm work. I spent many summers here, helping my grandfather with crops in the backyard or learning my grandmother’s cooking recipes.
If I were born and raised here, assuming no changes in parental wealth, my expected income would be $19,000 (in 2015 dollars).
Gardena, Calif
In the 1960s, my grandparents moved to East Gardena, Calif. (a.k.a. West Rancho Dominguez or West Compton), about 15 miles south of downtown L.A. Most of my family is from here, and it’s where I was born.