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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.
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.