We had dinner last night with the architect who is doing our renovation. Owner of the firm and very well-known. Apparently, a couple of years ago, when her kid was living in Brooklyn (like half of the spawn of our friends), I said that her kids would probably gravitate back to her city if there were free/cheap real estate. So she bought a triple-decker and the kid moved from Brooklyn to one of the apartments in the triple-decker.
More generally, I think the parents probably convey to the kid a set of aspirations. In some families, parents convey that they want their kids to do the best possible thing academically and career-wise. Others convey the sense that the kids are expected to live in the area. I grew up in the first kind of family. My parents’ generation were the first in their families to go to college, but both families must have conveyed that attitude. My mother was studying for a PhD about 600 miles from home and met my father who was a professor (she was in languages, he was in theoretical physics). They were happy for each of us to go off to other parts of the country, especially for grad school. Two ended up near my parents, two much farther away. We have conveyed the same to our kids. Both are now on the West Coast while we are on the East Coast. Our son will likely stay there – he is a Silicon Valley tech kid who did his grad work there and hence much of his professional network is there. Our daughter may come back and inadvertently we have the real estate for her. Long story short, we tried to downsize from the house where we raised our kids and found an extraordinary lot right on a river in the same town. Alas, the house on the lot was more than 50% larger than our previous house. The former owners were a family and the parents of the family who had a huge in-law suite. But, there is an entire wing for a family in a very nice town with very good schools. Maybe, like my architect friend, the real estate will be the lure.
The family’s expectations of the kids are only one factor. The strength of the local economy, the economy in the region where the kid went to college, the desires of significant others, opportunities that are sector specific (a relative got a PhD from Harvard in a humanities field and told me that there were only three teaching jobs in North America in the field in her year; she was fortunate to get one; some of the biggest opportunities in tech pre-pandemic were in the Bay Area, in biotech in Cambridge MA, in oil and gas, perhaps Texas).