January 22, 2012
Actually the story is that people are not moving. Adam Davidson had a piece noting the sharp decline in the percentage of the population that is moving out of state each year.
While the share of movers has fallen sharply, there are two important points about the data worth noting. First, there has been a downward trend in share of interstate movers in the population since the late 70s. There is an obvious reason for this: the aging of the population. People are most likely to pick up and move when they are in their 20s or early 30s. Interstate moves are much rarer when people have family and community roots later in life. With baby boomers now mostly in their 50s and 60s, we would expect to see a lower rate of moving than when they were in their 20s and 30s.
The other notable item in the graph is that the rate of movers appears to drop off in every downturn. It slows in the recession in the mid 70s, the early 80s and the early 90s. This suggests that there is a strong cyclical component to moving. While more people find themselves without jobs in a downturn, they need somewhere that is creating large numbers of jobs to justify a move. At the moment, there is no large geographic location that fits the bill. (North Dakota, with its labor force of 370,000 doesn’t count.)
At this point, it is not clear that the reduction in movers is any more than we should expect given the aging of the workforce and the severity of the downturn, as opposed to an underlying structural problem. It is worth noting that being underwater in a mortgage does not appear to be an important factor. It seems that families may separate or rent out homes if they need to move out of state to get a job.
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