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Americans Are Moving Less Than Ever, and It's Bad For the Economy (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The best job for someone is not always in the area where they live. Often times, the job that will pay them most, and make the best use of their skills means moving to another city, state or country. Though making the choice to move can be difficult emotionally, it is extremely good for economic growth. Productive people make productive economies. Unfortunately for the US economy, people don't move they like they used to. According to recently released data from the US Census, only 10.1% of adults moved homes from August 2017 to August 2018. This is the lowest rate of moving since the government began collected data in 1948. The census tracks moves within counties, within states, or across states, and no matter how you look at it, moving rates are way down from just 15 years ago. For example, from 2002 to 2003, 2.8% of Americans moved across state lines. From 2017 to 2018, it was just 1.5%.
I moved because I got a huge raise, but it increase my monthly housing costs by well over 50% (small town where I could afford a house to a big city where I couldn't). Now, I more than doubled my pay, so it was economical even with being stuck in an apartment. But I'm no fool, I know I'm not building any wealth, it's just that the jobs in the small town I was in were busy being outsourced and I didn't have a lot of choices.
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1. Unaffordability of housing.
2. Both partners working. It's one thing to have one partner start a new job. Moving long-distance means the other partner has to find a new job as well.
3. Most jobs don't come with a long-term contract. It's hard to justify a long-distance move when you may be out of a job after 1 year.
All of these conspire to create a situation where everybody accepts the commute from Hell rather than moving closer to where they work.
Moving might be good for the economy, but stability is good for people. Pensions are a word of a prior age, employer training and investment in their employees are less, relocation packages are stingier or often non-existent; loyalty is a nebulous word without meaning in corporate culture today...all of those destabilizing factors make moving and taking a new job a risky affair.
That doesn't address homes, values, children, schools, or anything else.
Yep absolutely. I moved to the US from Australia a few years ago and holy hell, housing is cheap here compared to much of the world.
A very typical, average suburban home is pushing $1 million in most Australian cities. Here, outside a few bubble zones (e.g. Bay Area), you can pick up similar houses for a couple of hundred thousand. I've lived in Asia (Singapore, Japan) and Europe (England, France) as well, and the US is cheaper than all of them.
Mind you, there is a downside ... and that is property taxes. I pay a pretty hefty property tax bill in the US on my place that would not be an ongoing expense back in Australia, so I supposed I have to factor that in. Still it would take many decades of property taxes to add up to the difference in initial cost.
Millenials get all the press, but there comes a time in people's lives where it actually makes sense to stay in one place for a while. For a lot of people, the lifestyle of moving across the country over and over again just to take another job isn't appealing. Either you're a permanent renter, or you end up spending insane amounts of money in real estate transaction costs. It's not just the house price...it's the mortgage origination fees, the legal fees, real estate commissions, transfer tax, the cost to move, etc.
Moving all over the country made sense back in the good old days of semi-permanent employment. A company would spend a lot of time and effort on you and it was in their best interest to keep you employed. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was still very common for a company to move an employee to wherever a new promotion opportunity was, all expenses paid. Lots of kids I knew had their parents transferred. Today, IMO that makes little sense. The cost is almost always mostly paid by the employee, and there's no guarantee you'll have a job 6 months after you uproot your family and move.
And, I know I'm going to get dinged as being old, but there's something to be said about putting down roots and becoming a part of a local community. You don't get that if you're chasing contract positions across the country and never in one place for more than a year or two. Look at military families as an example of what frequent moving around does to a kid's ability to make and maintain friendships.
There is nothing wrong with the house prices in the vast majority of the US. Housing is generally affordable and readily available. No, not in the coastal cities, but you can't generalize based on those.
The problem is most of the jobs are in the coastal cities. So cheap prices in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska aren't all that helpful.
(And before anyone says "work remotely!!" that is frequently not a stable employment situation)
I don't get why people feel trapped by family, friends, or circumstance to the extent that they are willing to live in places with shitty costs of living, essentially making no money
I lived in a dying rust-belt city with an incredibly interesting job that paid well and a fairly low cost of living. I moved.
Why? I had kids. And the thing about cheap places to live is the schools are utterly terrible in a very large portion of them. I'm not going to cripple my children's entire future so that I can gloat about a low cost of living.
Well, let's look at the data:
Here are the median home prices by State for 2018:
West Virginia $96,800
Oklahoma $121,500
Arkansas $123,600
Mississippi $124,600
Alabama $129,000
Ohio $136,700
Kansas $137,800
Indiana $139,000
Iowa $141,500
Kentucky $142,900
Louisiana $147,300
Michigan $148,100
Missouri $157,100
Nebraska $161,500
South Carolina $163,200
Tennessee $163,200
Pennsylvania $171,000
Illinois $178,000
North Carolina $179,200
Georgia $182,200
Wisconsin $183,400
South Dakota $184,400
Texas $190,400
New Mexico $191,200
Vermont $201,400
North Dakota $205,400
Wyoming $222,300
Florida $228,700
Maine $229,700
Montana $229,900
Minnesota $230,800
Delaware $232,500
Connecticut $241,700
Idaho $246,200
Arizona $246,800
Virginia $254,000
New Hampshire $271,100
Rhode Island $277,900
New York $286,200
Maryland $286,700
Nevada $287,400
Alaska $310,400
New Jersey $323,400
Utah $325,400
Oregon $339,000
Colorado $370,600
Washington $377,100
Massachusetts $402,500
California $546,100
Washington D.C. $576,100
Hawaii $620,100
Texas is roughly in the middle and homes on my street ( 3/2/2 full brick, ~2k sq ft, 1/4 acre ) are appraising at ~$150k, selling around ~$170k. So, assuming my home is paid for ( and it is ) I can choose pretty much the first dozen or so States on this list without having another mortgage.
Unfortunately, I have no desire to live in any of those States and the ones I would like to live in, fall near the bottom of the list.
Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Colorado. ( Hawaii would be nice, but that price is ludicrous ) All of which are easily double the cost of my home.
So, do I move and spend the next 15-30 years ( depending on the loan ) paying off another mortgage, or do I put that money into retirement accounts instead. . .
Decisions, decisions . . . .