Americans Are Still Adventurous. They Just Hate Moving.
Residential mobility is falling, but not the long-distance kind that matters for economic dynamism.
Americans are moving across state lines but not across the street.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg
The percentage of Americans who move each year keeps falling, with a lowest-on-record 7.8% of US residents reporting to the Census Bureau in spring 2023 that they lived in a different place than they had a year earlier.
This decline has been lamented (by me among many others) as a sign of waning American adventurousness, an explanation for declining economic dynamism and a consequence of an overregulated housing market. Such concerns all apply mainly to longer-distance moves in which people uproot themselves for educational or work opportunities. But while those appear to be less prevalent now than in the 1950s through the 1990s, at least as measured by the share of Americans who move across state and county lines each year, these percentages stopped falling about a decade and a half ago. Since then, the decline in mobility has been driven almost entirely by the shrinking share of Americans moving within their own counties.