Americans, Once Nomadic, Are Staying Put

Summer’s here – at long, long last – and with it will come the perennial influx of young people arriving in New York City, recent college grads chasing their dreams, renting their first apartments or, with some help from mom and dad, buying their first apartments. 

But as Curbed reports, something is changing. According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans moving over a one-year period fell to an all-time low of 11.2 percent last year (domestic migration has fallen by half since 1965). The drop is particularly prevalent among millennials. New survey data from the Pew Research Center found that 25- to 35-year-olds are relocating at much lower rates than the previous generation. Last year, 20 percent of millennials moved sometime in the last year. When older generations were the same age as millennials now, they moved at higher rates: Gen X was at 26 percent, as was the generation between 1925 and 1942.

What’s puzzling, says Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, is that, especially for millennials, it would appear the trend should be leveling out, or even getting better. The job market has improved since the recession, and unemployment is way down. Yet more and more Americans, both economically and literally, are feeling stuck.

Blame it on low interest rates – and unbeatable mortgages. “People aren’t in love with their homes,” says Redfin data scientist Taylor Marr, “they’re in love with their mortgages.” The calculus for aspiring homebuyers becomes even crueler in hot markets such as New York City, where a much smaller jump in interest rates would scare off current homeowners. This, in turn, has the potential to create a vicious cycle of stagnation, less inventory, and higher prices.

The Yale law professor David Schleicher could have been speaking about New York when he said, “People want to live in San Francisco, but the city doesn’t accommodate their demands.”