And I find it very sad when people don’t even have the option to stay living locally to their families, or to return close by later on (eg to better facilitate caring arrangements in either direction).
Londoners (recent, lifelong and generations-back, alike) experience some real benefits which are not shared across the country, I get that. But I think there is this assumption that it’s more reasonable to expect us to have to move around and away from our roots than other people, largely because of an underlying assumption that we’re all incomers anyway. (Definitely many of my colleagues - in London! - assume that everyone’s parents are somewhere outside of London, and that everyone will also move out of London to raise families etc. This isn’t universal, but it is very widespread.)
The transport links thing is true to a point, but not always that straightforward. My sister has moved out of London to a nearby commuter town which probably sells itself as ‘30 minutes to london’. Well, it’s 30 mins to Euston, but if she wants to visit me she then has to jump on a tube and then walk 15-20 minutes from the station, so from her station to my door it’s about 70 mins - and I am comparatively near to Euston (it’s the right side of London, and one of my nearest mainline stations, so this is not a ‘contrived for arguments sake’ atypical example!). There’s nothing at all wrong with choosing to live 70 mins minimum from your closest family, there’s everything wrong with having no choice at all about it.
Ironically, the ‘ghettoising’ in my borough comes from the comparative shortage of social housing meaning it is overwhelmingly accessed only by those who have really profound levels of need. So you have massive blocks full of almost exclusively highly vulnerable people. That’s problematic, in a way that ‘people unadventurously spending their lives in the same corner of the earth as their parents did’ really isn’t.