We’re going to see many more articles like this in the next few years. While the housing market remains relatively stable in NYC, prices elsewhere are plummeting. Simultaneously, more and more of us have jobs that aren’t tethered to physical locations.

How much longer will people hold out in expensive megametropolises when affordable and fulfilling lifestyles exist elsewhere?

Says one Buffalo transplant: “I don’t miss my old life in New York. I only miss the life in New York I know I never would have had.”

This article couldn’t be any more relevant to me because I lived in Buffalo for 10 years, and when my parents moved our family they took us to another rust-belt city, Fort Wayne. And I love both of them — as much as I wanted to get out, I knew it then.

I smiled when that article referred to Buffalo as having the romantic aura of a faded empire, because for me while growing up, never having been to a major city until I was teenager, downtown was the capital of an empire. My empire. Now when I return and see the delapidated, once-glorious buildings, I see my childhood imagination turned into a possibility. These cities and their neat little piles of ashes are ready and willing to be reconstituted. I see little cracked panes and think how easily the windows could be replaced. I see cheap rents, where young chefs, DIY fashionistas and aspiring electrical engineers could afford to experiment and flourish. I see a frontier and that’s astonishing, because ever since we landed on the moon the American psyche came to accept that there was nowhere else to go — and I’ve been depressed for 20 years believing it. But I’m sitting here in NYC or SF, feeling comfortable and bored, and thinking: “There! There’s somewhere to go!”

Now if I could just get my friends to come with me…