Despite the nation’s reputation as a rootless society, only about one in 10 Americans moved in the last year ”” roughly half the proportion that changed residences as recently as four decades ago, census data show.
The monthly Current Population Survey found that fewer than 12 percent of Americans moved since 2007, a decline of nearly a full percentage point compared with the year before. In the 1950s and ’60s, the number of movers hovered near 20 percent.
The number has been declining steadily, and 12 percent is the lowest rate since the Census Bureau began counting people who move in 1940.
In the early 1800s, many Americans who struggled to sustain themselves and their families moved several times in search of better prospects, mostly westward after the Louisiana Purchase, the roadway built through the Cumberland Gap, and the opening of the Erie Canal. In the late 1800s began a northward movement into the Rust Belt northeastern industrial cities for several generations. Then the swing back toward new economic opportunity in the southern states began picking up speed in the last three decades of the last century. Today, however, America’s population includes a much larger segment than ever of citizens long out of the income-producing work force and living into years of advanced frailty and reliance on caretaking by family members or other assistants. For this elderly group and those on whom they depend, pulling up stakes and relocating is unthinkable, not to mention impractical. With so many Americans living 20 or more years longer than their own parents did, naturally our society overall is less mobile than we used to be.
Henry,
I believe what you are saying is true. There is also an additional factor. There are few new geographical venues of opportunity left in the US to which people can relocate. The west, meaning even Indiana in the 1800’s, is no longer a land of open space for development. California, the oasis in the 1900’s for the dust bowl escapees, is not exactly replete with available work.
I think the new venues of opportunity will not be geographical but intellectual. And those opportunities can be reached without extensive relocations of the populace. — Stan