Miller Karns loves working in emergency management. So, when a promotion opportunity came, the 24-year-old didn’t hesitate to take it– even though it meant relocating from the vast city of Fort Worth, Texas, to tiny Minneapolis (named after the much bigger city) in rural Kansas.
There are some things Karns misses about living in an urban sprawl of eight million people. But there’s plenty he likes about living in a town of fewer than 2,000, too. His previous 50-minute commute has been replaced by a short walk to work, and the noise and intensity of his overnight job at the world’s fourth-busiest airport has gone.
Not that the work is quiet. The first night Karns arrived to take up the job as emergency management director for Ottawa County (in which Minneapolis resides), the area experienced 100mph storms. “Most emergency managers have to wait years for something like that,” he told The i Paper. He felt that something was telling him he’d made the right move.
Shorts
Karns joins countless younger Americans who are relocating from places such as New York and Los Angeles to smaller towns and cities in the heartland, which is often sniffed at by the coastal elites as “flyover country”. Millions of people are making such a move. Often, they’re paid incentives of up to $10,000 to do so.
