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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%.
If you bought a house in 2014, and need to move, you'll be looking at housing that is 50% more expensive than it was then. That's a hard pill to swallow when CPI-adjusted wages have been going down over the same time.
I've moved over 30 times and lived in 9 countries now, but I still remember being 22 living in the middle of nowhere in the US and most people act like moving to another state is like the end of the world.
Considering that America was founded by people who risked their entire future going to an unsettled country, it's a shame we've come to this now.
Yes, a "better opportunity" may exist, but "good enough" also has its advantages.
Unemployment is low, and good local job opportunities are aplenty, so the costs of moving just don't merit the benefits. But this is a lagging, rather than leading indicator of the economy.
First, not everything is about the economy. This seems like an actual win for quality of life in that people can stay close to their families and form communities
Second, how has telecommuting been factored into this analysis. It could be that people are now able to mee fuller economic potentials in place
That's basically what happens when any statistic is generated.
Americans aren't moving enough? We need more visa workers!
Americans won't work for low pay? We need more visa workers!
Americans change jobs too frequently? We need more visa workers!
, only 10.1% of adults moved homes from August 2017 to August 2018
Only 10% of adults moved within one year???
Is it only me to whom that sounds too high, not low?
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.
It is well known that millennials make less than their parents and education costs more.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is true ... but it's also true of the US itself. I've applied for (and been granted) professional work visas for both Canada and the US over the last decade and the process was similar in both, in that you had to prove there was no local person who had the necessary knowledge or background to do the work. You also have to prove you wouldn't be being paid substantially differently than the local for the same work.
The US is no different in this regard (at least for the L1 type visas typical for professional work). It's always a pain hiring a foreigner in any country because the company takes on the burden of sponsoring them, processing all the immigration paperwork etc.
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.
like I said in another thread, 60-80% of us live paycheck to paycheck (it's a wide margin because you can run the numbers either as "has money in the bank but not enough for anything major" or "dead broke").
Moving is a sign of upward mobility. Literally. The fact that there is less of it is an indication that upward mobility is slowing down or stopping. There are plenty of other indicators for this too (stagnant wages, an increase in low paying jobs, outsourcing of higher paying jobs, etc, etc). This is one more nail in that coffin.
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If you read TFA (which you won't do, so I did it for you), they largely put it down to millenials, who are moving significantly less (although still far more than the average over all ages) than young people of previous generations. OTW: This is yet another "Millenials are killing X" headline.
Of course we've seen pretty much every one of those are really down to that generation being far poorer and more unemployed than similar generations were at that same point in their lives. There just aren't the opportunities there used to be for young people. This ain't their fault, and the headlines really should be blaming the people with power and resources in this society, not the victims.
That is the norm, and it seems to work well for the VAST majority of the country.
No, it is tolerated by the VAST majority of the country.