Go West, young man.
Surely, you’ve heard the phrase before. It’s been in American existence since the mid-1800s, credited to author and newspaper editor Horace Greeley, who, in an 1865 edition of the New York Daily Tribune, wrote those words as a way to encourage Americans to migrate away from the country’s founding territories in the East.
“Washington [D.C.] is not a place to live in,” he wrote. “The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man.”
The rents in D.C. remain high, by the way.