There's no place like home for the holidays ..." That certain time of year being at hand, this sentiment from Home for the Holidays will soon be crooning forth repetitiously from all the mellow music stations. More power to it. Only a sorehead would fuss about too much celebration of the idea of home during the festive winter season. For that matter, home deserves a good deal of hymning all the time. There is, as the wonderful old song Home, Sweet Home established once and for all, no place like it—and this no matter what sort of place home turns out to be. What also needs to be remembered is that home, although a special place, is never merely a place.
It is a reality that is routinely forgotten when people try to figure out the best places to live. That game goes on continually. In the 1970s the Midwest Research Institute of Kansas City put Portland, Ore., and Sacramento at the top of the heap, after a "quality of life" survey of 243 U.S. metropolitan areas, and Birmingham and Jersey City at the bottom. This year a book called Places Rated Almanac scored the "livability" of 277 U.S. urban areas; it nominated Atlanta and Washington and its environs as most livable, with two Massachusetts areas—Fitchburg-Leominster and Lawrence-Haverhill—bringing up the rear. More recently, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Social Work Richard Estes turned up with an index to the "quality of life" in 107 nations. Top marks went to Denmark and Norway and booby prizes to Ethiopia and Chad (the U.S. ranked 41st, two notches above the U.S.S.R.). Surveys of this sort usually fuel chauvinistic arguments among civic booster types. But the question is: What do such studies have to do with the way people actually wind up in whatever homes they wind up with?
The answer is: little if anything. The analysts who evaluate and rank places lean entirely on objective criteria that play a relatively small role among the influences that determine where people make their homes. For one thing, the big majority of the world's people are born into the places that remain their homes for life. In the U.S., almost 64% of the people live today in the states in which they were born. It is safe to assume that few of those made a prenatal choice of birthplace on the basis of economic, political, social and cultural factors such as those used in Places Rated Almanac. For another, when people as adults uproot from one home to make another elsewhere, they are most often impelled by an event like a new job, almost never by the sheer allure of some other place. Given such realities, the ranking of cities and countries is bound to seem an entirely academic exercise. For people at home, the exaltation of any Elsewhere, even with hard facts, never quite makes sense. Hard facts, by definition, can never include the one fact that makes a place especially dear: the fact that it is home.