As a displaced New Yorker, I lived for over 30 years in the Midwest, where I never really felt at home, even though my wife and I raised two children there. Now, we live in Rhode Island, having moved here 8 years ago in retirement. I felt like a local instantly. One of my favorite aspects of this place is the ease with which a stranger will stop and tell you or listen to a story. There’s an emotional openness here that I relish. There’s also a great well of irony in the humor, essential for me! I feel as if Rhode Island and I are like twins separated at birth. One of my best friends is a ninth-generation Rhode Islander, and we get along just fine. Local, for me, is the psychological fit, the comfort of finding kindred spirits.

I'm also a city person living in a rural area and one of the obligatory rituals when people meet is mapping out mutual connections. They’ll start going through family trees or friends and teachers at schools. As someone who grew up 40 miles away, I fail at those tests. But if they’re really persistent they’ll also start asking about work experiences. Working at a local school district or municipality or supermarket lets people put you in a category even if you didn't grow up locally. I’ve watched faces get visibly confused when I’ve explained I’m a remote worker for a magazine they’ve never heard of; sometimes they stop talking to me altogether because they have no way to relate to me.

After 20 years I’ve made my peace with the phenomenon but it is weird to live in a place for so long and not really fit in.

I deeply struggle with finding Home. I think it goes back to having my father pass away when I was 20 and that I have been trying to fill that gap in my life for the last 25 years.

I recently went to my regular work out class. The line was backed up to the door but the girl checking everyone in saw me and waved me past the line. Same thing happened at my local bodega later that day. Those are the moments when I feel like a local, a part of the fabric of my environment. I think we've talked about this in context of being a regular! So maybe that's what I mean about being a local.

I know I will never be a local, anywhere. I grew up a military brat, and have lived in RVs and boats for over 20 years. I've learned that some places are so provincial that I'll never be truly accepted, and that's OK. Home is internal, not a place.

Born and raised in Minnesota, moved to Texas and lived there for eight years, never really felt welcome. Texans seem very fierce about who they call Texan (meaning, you probably need to be born there). No one in our neighborhood welcomed us, and after all that time I couldn't name a single other person on our street.

We recently moved to the DC suburbs in Maryland, and not only got a lovely letter from the former homeowners, but multiple neighbors came over to welcome us, drop off letters and treats, make sure we were invited to the local Labor Day parade, etc. We've only been here two weeks and I already feel so much more welcomed here than I did in TX.

Moved to a small (pop 1,400) rural town in California over 6 years ago. After arriving, We were told we wouldn't be considered true locals until the last person who remembers us moving here passes away. :-) In reality, we feel more accepted and at home here after 6 years than we did after 30 years in Silicon Valley.
There definitely is concern from the true locals about new residents wanting to change the community, but I think it's misplaced. We wouldn't have moved here if we didn't like it the way it is.

I've lived in Atlanta for 30 years. And I love this place like home and have made deep connections to it. That said, I'm still that kid from the Shenandoah Valley, which is still home.

I was a pure Parisian for 50 years. Now I've been living in Marseille(s) France for over twenty years. I think I've become a Marseillais in the sense that it's hard for me to imagine living anywhere else anymore. I got hooked. This city is very intense, it's hot, it smells strong, it tastes spicy. Here, the true Marseillais (who have all come from the 4 corners of the globe over the years) like to say that to become a true Marseillais you first have to understand and love the city. Which takes humility and time. If you succeed, you will no longer be black or white, Christian, Jew, Muslim, rich or poor, you will first and foremost be a Marseillais. Or not. Sorry for the forever stranger !

I struggle similarly with the question “Where are you from?”. Is it where I was born? Where I grew up? The place I lived at longest, of my choosing or not? Where I live now? All these have a different answer in my case…

I have the reverse question: how do you make people feel like a local? I've lived most of my life in my town (grew up here, moved back to start a family), but a lot of my neighbors are not from around here. We have kids in school together, play board games or have movie nights, drink beers on the porch and watch the kids play in the cul-de-sac.

I'm reading these comments and pieces and thinking "Do they think they're not locals?" To me, they are locals, but I'm not sure if they feel that way. Do you even want to feel like a local? What can I do to make sure people who want to be locals are feeling like locals?

Love reading everyone’s responses to this. I grew up in Utah (yes, raised Mormon) and escaped to NYC in my twenties. Although I didn’t live there long enough for it to feel like home, I loved every second of it. I don’t like visiting Utah very much and it doesn’t feel like home. Neither does Pennsylvania, where I am stuck living until the kids I share with their dad are grown. After 12 years here I still feel like a visitor. I wonder if I’ll ever find a place that feels like “home” or if home is just a state of mind or being with a beloved life partner, which is something I sometimes feel; home isn’t so much a location, but a feeling of belonging.

One of the things I love about NYC is that anyone can become a local. It varies on how much time it takes, but there are a lot of paths to get there. Joining the PTA, for instance, or participating in local politics. But in general I think once you can navigate public transportation late at night, your local bodega workers know your breakfast order without you having to tell them and you complain about tourists walking too slow then you're a local to me.

I live in Mexico City now and it's similar, though there's gotten to be some hostility to US transplants here, so speaking local Spanish and participating in the local economy (as opposed to the foreign-oriented economy where everything costs about 4-5 times as much) are prerequisites. I still have too many ties to New York to be a local here, but if I stay another decade or so I think I could be.

I'm a transplant in a very "grew up here and still live here" suburb of Detroit and I don't feel like I fit into the culture even after nine years here, but that's not why I'm chiming in. Look how many people are responding to this post!! What does it say about us, in 2024, that migration and belonging (or not) are so central to our experience that so many of us feel compelled to share? The feeling of welcome vs othering is apparently *massive* in our daily emotional economy.

You know, I've had a lot of time to think about this subject... due to the fact that I've been living in Upstate New York for five years and have yet to make a single friend. I was born and raised in Seattle, a city that is notorious for a stand-offish social phenomenon known as "the Seattle Freeze". I hate to break it to them, it's nothing compared to a Upstate Nuclear Winter. Seattle always felt like a giant college dorm, everyone scrambled together with an interesting origin story. I was kind of an oddity, being from Seattle, usually the only one at a party, etc. I'd be interested in knowing if I'm totally wrong, but I feel like as long as you didn't complain about the weather and tell us how much nicer California is, you were good to go.

But up here, Jason is right, newcomers exude something that is unmistakable to the locals and I have yet to crack the code. I can get a neighbor to feed my cat, but our relationship ends precisely there. My latest theory is that there are invisible social lanes that everyone is carefully driving in, and I'm the oblivious nutjob weaving all over the road. My husband can code-switch, so we laugh about how he's my Upstate NY Interpreter. I'm content (or resigned?) at this point, my career is a solitary pursuit and someday we'll relocate. It helps to see it as fascinating rather than demoralizing.

Feeling home. Being a local. It seems a variety of ways that we talk about the human need for belonging. I left my rural NH hometown because I didn't feel I belonged. I moved to a sf bay area city in 1992 for graduate school and haven't left. Feeling like a local took years and effort (joining community volunteer efforts, kids going thru schools) and the size of the city made a difference. Yet when I meet gen x peers who grew up here and stayed/returned, I feel merely local-adjacent.

A couple years ago I started picking up trash on my busy street once a month on a Sunday, when traffic is light. It takes about an hour, the street looks great and I feel good about my effort, even as I try not to curse the litterers. I learned this from my dad. My younger sisters and I used to help him do the same on our country road. We'd climb in the bed of our baby blue three-on-the-tree chevy pickup and he'd slowly drive up the frost-heaved road, stopping so we could hop out, pick up the empties in the ditch and toss them into the back. He wasn't a local but I think that effort connected him to the place he wanted to call home. And I think it does the same for me.

We had a (joking?) rule in NYC for transplants that if you fled during the early pandemic and came back once things returned to normal then your are-you-a-local clock restarted a zero.

I think i have a strange reverse flip on this concept, and i'm curious if this situation exists in other cities: I live in Toronto. I was born here, and so were my parents, and so were all four of my grandparents. I am unequivocally a local. But in toronto, that's weird!

Between immigration and the fact that Toronto is often where Canadians move after university when looking for work, the most common reactions i get to my local-ness is "wow, you're the first person i've met who grew up here", or "that's so unusual, what was that like?"
I love living in a city with so much newness and change - it makes Toronto an interesting and vibrant place to live. I don't think i'd enjoy living in a place where the people and culture felt static. But of course, every single person I knew growing up is someone who also grew up here, so i never really know how to react to these reactions.

Are there any other cities where the 'culture of the local' is sort of inverted like this?

I have lived in NYC for 28 years, but I grew up in Ohio. I always say no when people ask if I am from New York, but mention that my mother's family is from here. My great-grandparents had a farm on Staten Island, and I consider myself a fourth-generation New Yorker. However, I only feel like a local to my neighborhood.