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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: A Nation of Hunkered-Down Homebodies The nation’s mobility rate fell last year to its lowest level since World War II, according to the latest census data. Growth is slowing in Sun Belt states and Northeastern states are holding on to more people. The current recession and lack of jobs are big factors, but the trend has been gaining force since the 1950s, when nearly one-fifth of all Americans moved every year. Why are Americans becoming less nomadic? Greater labor mobility helps the economy, but are there other kinds of effects — negative or positive — related to a more rooted population? Is there an upside to more Americans staying closer to their hometowns? Katherine S. Newman, sociologist, Princeton University Weathering the Storm Katherine S. Newman, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, is author of “The Missing Class.” The slowing of population movement is a common response to powerful recessions and has many negative economic consequences, particularly for job hunters who need to be able to move in search of work. But the social impacts are more mixed. One of the virtues of being stuck is that we can continue to rely on the friends and family nearby to help us get through hard times. “Social capital,” the stock of trust and support we draw on in daily life, is especially important when families are under stress. A child care emergency can be patched up if grandma is next door rather than 2,000 miles away. Borrowing $50 to get by is easier if you have someone close to turn to and much harder if you are a newcomer. Crime tends to be lower in communities where people know each other well enough to intervene when they see something amiss on the street. This may help to explain why, despite very high unemployment and a great deal of social stress, we are seeing record low crime rates. Divorce often declines as well because people just cannot afford to stretch the same income over two separate households. Staying put may mean that we retain the strength of our ties to one another. ... It’s in Our Blood William H. Frey is a demographer and a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of “The Great Migration Slowdown: Regional and Metropolitan Dimensions.” America has long been one of the most mobile countries on the planet. There is no doubt in my mind we will return to more normal migration levels, though I don’t foresee it anytime soon. The return will be especially delayed for long-distance migration, which has plummeted so low that Florida and Nevada are now attracting fewer in-migrants than those moving out. Long distance migration has sunk to historic lows because it is facing a double whammy — downturns in the job market and a near frozen housing market. In the not-too-distant past, long-distance migration was primarily related to labor market pushes and pulls like wages and job growth, rather than housing market considerations. But in recent years, migrants to different labor markets needed to also factor in housing price differences (if I move from Detroit, can I afford a house in Los Angeles?). Thus, in the mid-decade bubble years, people migrated to more affordable parts of the Sun Belt because both jobs and lower cost housing were available. Well now, both markets have dried up, depressing local mobility, but even more so, long distance migration. I’ll leave to my economist friends the task of precisely predicting when both housing and job markets will recover — though it doesn’t appear to be soon. But when they do, we need to consider that there are substantial potentially mobile segments of our population — young, highly-educated Millennials who are severely underemployed, first and second generation Americans who understand that migration is essential for advancement and a burgeoning baby boom generation poised to change residences as they retire. Then, of course, there is the DNA factor, not easily captured in economic models, that is embedded in our pioneering spirit as Americans. Aging Couples With Kids Peter Francese is the founder of American Demographics magazine, which is now part of Ad Age. He is also the demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide. Much has been written about how the drop in home prices (which has put some homeowners “underwater”) has stopped workers from moving to other states to find work. Maybe so, but the decline in interstate mobility started a long time before this recession. There are two structural reasons why fewer people move: the aging of our population and the pervasiveness of dual-career couples. The largest and most rapidly growing age groups in the U.S. are people aged 45 to 54 (largest) and 55 to 64 (fastest growing). People in those groups are in their prime working years, they have kids in local schools, and have for the most part put down roots in their communities. They are far less likely to move away than someone in their 20s or early 30s who have yet to form community bonds. Also, in roughly half of all marriages, both spouses are employed full time. This makes moving just to get a better job for one of them next to impossible. However, members of Generation Y who are now roughly 15 to 34 years old, are more numerous than Baby Boomers. When this recession winds down I predict that millions of them will move anywhere there’s a hot job market. Right now no place fits that description. So I do expect mobility to increase as more jobs become available, but as always, the vast majority of movers will be young adults. Like With Like Bill Bishop is the co-author of “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart” and the co-editor of The Daily Yonder, an online publication covering rural America. The migration that matters to most people (i.e., those who don’t live in D.C.) isn’t among states. Sure, it’s fun to measure how migration might change the composition of Congress. But when most people move, they point the Mayflower van to a community, not a state. The real effects of peoples’ movements over the last 40 years, therefore, are best seen at these smaller, local levels. The way people have settled since the mid-1970s has created an increasing geographic inequality within the country. Communities are growing more different in how people vote, earn a living, worship, form a family and, in the end, how long they live. The important thing about migration, therefore, isn’t so much the number of people who are moving, but whether the considerable movements still taking place continue to push communities further apart. Here’s what I mean: In the years just after World War II, the percentage of college graduates tended to even out from place to place. Metro areas grew more alike educationally until the 1970s, when the college-educated began to cluster in particular cities. That clustering has continued for the past three decades, creating incredible divergence between the best and worst educated communities. The economic returns to education increased during that same time, so regional economic inequality has been increasing for three decades, too. People have moved to be around others like themselves, so most American communities have also grown either increasingly Democratic or Republican since the ’70s. (This trend continued through the 2008 election, by the way.) Party affiliation is a minor part of what is becoming political inequality. We’re really sorting by way of life and that is correlated with how we vote. For example, the link between political party support and whether couples live together before marriage grew stronger at the county level in 2008. The country seems divided because that’s the way we’ve made it — because that’s the way we think and that’s the way we move. The recession has slowed migration. But unless there’s a change in the underlying patterns of how we move, all this means is that the country is growing more polarized less quickly. ... Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 1.
#1. To: Prefrontal Vortex (#0)
everything has its silver linings.
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