For much of our country’s history, Americans have shown an aptitude for uprooting themselves. Whether the underlying motive was religious freedom, better farmland or a higher rung on the social ladder, self-improvement was an ongoing quest for our ancestors — and one that often involved a change of address.
“Moving has become an uniquely American ideology,” says Steven Schnell, a geography professor at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. He points to a category of American literature known as “the road novel,” which includes such books as Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. “A common theme of this genre is that you become more truly yourself when you uproot yourself from the familiar,” Schnell says.
Music and movies have likewise romanticized freedom of movement — no real surprise, considering that the United States is, after all, a nation of immigrants.
Yet what may be surprising is that residential mobility has taken a downturn. In 1951, 21 percent of Americans were living in a different home than the preceding year, according to U.S. Census data. In 2003, that number had dropped to 14.2 percent, the lowest since the Census began tracking residential mobility in 1948.
“This is significant change,” observes Cheryl Russell, editorial director of New Strategist Publications in Ithaca, N.Y., a publisher of reference books on demographics and consumer spending. “What’s more, it reflects a fairly steady decline over the years.”
The drop in residential mobility seems counterintuitive for a number of reasons. Advances in technology and telecommunications allow people to move away from population centers and still earn a living. . Increased travel and education would also seem to pump up mobility rates, for vacations and business trips often serve as a prelude to permanent migration. And more highly educated people are more likely to move longer distances, experts say.
Granted, Americans may be racking up more mileage on their SUVs as they commute longer distances to work or chauffeur their rugrats about. But we aren’t swapping addresses as often. Key reasons include:
Greater economic security. In the past, Americans’ livelihood was tied first to agriculture and then manufacturing. When farms failed or factories closed, people had few options but to move, points out Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “With a richer, more diverse economy, there are fewer forced moves today,” Fischer says. “Granted, job security is not as great as 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s an order of magnitude greater than 80 or 90 years ago,” he adds, noting that unemployment insurance provides a temporary financial cushion that didn’t exist before 1935.
Road warriors. A century ago, people had to live closer to work. If a factory shut down and a new job turned up 3 or 4 miles away, workers moved. Today, people are willing to travel longer distances and spend more time in traffic to get to work. In fact, census figures indicate that the national average for commuting to work increased from 21.7 minutes in 1980 to 25.5 minutes in 2000.
Perhaps more significant, the percentage of people traveling less than 20 minutes to work fell during that decade while the percentage of people traveling 25 minutes or more rose, with the group of commuters who traveled 90 minutes or more to work nearly doubling from 1.6 percent to 2.8 percent.
Aging population. “Migration is primarily a young person’s game,” says William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center. Life events such as college graduation, marriage or having children prompt the greatest number of address changes, which means people in the 18 to 35 age bracket move most. As Baby Boomers, the country’s largest generational group, have entered their 40s and 50s and become more settled, they’ve helped hold down mobility rates.
Increased homeownership. Renters tend to move more frequently than homeowners, and U.S. homeownership rates have been at record highs, hitting 69.2 percent and 69.0 percent in the second and third quarters of 2004. Skyrocketing housing prices in many cities also keep American more rooted, points out Larry Ford, a geography professor at San Diego State University. “Homeowners in these areas are more likely to renovate than move,” he says.
Although today’s Americans are moving less, they still change addresses much faster than people in most countries do. For example, in 1980 the U.S. mobility rate stood at 17 percent, compared to 6 percent for Ireland, 7.3 percent for Belgium and 9.5 percent for Japan and Great Britain. Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the few countries with mobility rates as high as the U.S.
Residential mobility is a critical issue because of its pervasive economic impact and ability to shape urban development and land-use patterns. Yet forecasting is no easy feat: A convoluted topic, mobility involves both voluntary and involuntary moves as well as local and long-distance relocations.
Further complicating any comprehensive predictions is the fact that moving is not uniformly practiced. “There has always been a minority of the population — a select group of `chronic movers’ — who do most of the moving,” says Peter Morrison, a demographer at RAND Corp., a think tank in Santa Monica, Calif.
Divergent trends are also keeping crystal balls cloudy. One factor that that might increase mobility for some folks is job longevity — or more accurately phrased, job brevity.
“It’s no longer true that people have lifetime jobs with the same company, which promotes relocation,” Frey says. This applies primarily to professional, college-educated workers, which represents about one-quarter of the population. “People without college degrees typically look locally for jobs when they’re laid off,” he explains.
Yet the increase of dual-income households could also deter long-distance moves because it’s hard for trailing spouses to find jobs. On the other hand, with two earners, there’s a swifter transition from renting to owning. “There are a number of cross currents operating here,” Morrison observes.
One group that could accelerate residential moves is older Americans. Although mobility is highest among twentysomethings, experts say mobility rates also spike during retirement when people are downsizing or making lifestyle changes.
In 2000, people age 65 and older represented 12 percent of the U.S. population. Yet by 2050, that group will swell to 21 percent, according to census forecasts (a 147 percent increase during a period when the U.S. population is projected to grow 49 percent).
Of course, not all senior citizens are willing to pull up stakes. But many experts expect to see more “amenity migrants” — people who move because they’re attracted to specific environmental or cultural qualities of a region.
“For one thing, retirees are living longer, so retirement is a more significant phase of people’s lives than it used to be,” points out Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago. And, due to greater affluence, retirees have the financial wherewithal to move, Smith adds.
And real estate profits are a big part of that wherewithal. Many Californians age 50 or older are moving to Arizona, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho or Washington. These “equity refugees” realized substantial appreciation from homes they bought in the 1970s, Morrison explains: “They can buy an equally nice home in more appealing terrain and still have money in the bank.”
In other areas of the country, empty-nesters have sold their sprawling suburban homes and moved to the inner city to be closer to theaters, museums and restaurants, a boon for urban revitalization. “A lot of cities may be losing population, but they’re gaining households,” observes John McIlwain, senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
A desire to downsize isn’t the only thing moving older Americans out of their suburban castles. “We’ve designed a lot of suburbs to be car-dependent,” says Ford. “That may cause forced migration to cities or retirement communities as our population ages and becomes uncomfortable with driving.”
Some industry observers have speculated that housing prices could drop if Boomers suddenly rushed to sell their suburban McMansions and created a glut of properties on the market.
Yet McIlwain is doubtful. Instead, he expects to see “increasing density to compensate for declining housing values.” Boomers may push for zoning changes that allow them to divide large suburban homes into three or four units, similar to the fate of old townhouses in New York and Chicago, he explains: “This is a natural cycle for many urban neighborhoods, but we’ve never seen it before in the outer suburbs.”
