Historically, the United States was a nation on the move, colonizing and migrating for nearly 400 years. Now many Americans are staying put.
Using data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, a Brookings Institution report authored by William H. Frey states that migration in America fell to a post-World War II low of 9.3 percent between March 2019 and March 2020.
In real estate terms, that means fewer Americans changed residence than in any year since 1947, when data on annual migration statistics were first collected.
“America was one of the most mobile countries in the world,” Frey said in a telephone interview. Frey is a senior fellow for the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit public policy organization.
“In the 1950s and early 1960s the population was younger, there were more renters and more single breadwinners, so people moved for one job, not two,” he added.
Factors for the continuing migration decline include an older general American population and one that isn’t growing at the vast rate it did pre-mid-20th century, when mass immigration and native birth rates were higher.
That older Americans aren’t migrating is understandable: “Migration is a young person’s game,” Frey surmised, but the data point to more younger adults remaining static, too.
“That really comes down to the Great Recession, when millennials and Gen Z were hit hard,” Frey said. “Post-recession, even when the economy came back, there was a delay in marriage and home buying.”
The report looked at data for both local moves (those within counties) and longer-distance ones, both of which have declined. Local moves dropped the most, down to 5.4 percent since 2010. “Because local moves comprise three-fifths of all moves, their consistent downward trend drove the overall pattern,” Frey wrote.
Longer-distance moves are driven mostly by economic factors (new jobs, better jobs), but local moves take in more factors: “Local moves are also based on things like good school districts and areas with a compatible lifestyle,” Frey said.
Undoubtedly, the pandemic economy has affected migration. The Census report covering March 2020 to March 2021 is due this fall, but in a more limited survey of 700 adults age 18-plus, Move.org, an Internet marketplace offering recommendations on everything from packaging to trucking, found that from January to September 2020, 20 percent of survey respondents moved this year and of those, 45 percent said their move was a result of COVID-19.
“The next census figures will be very interesting,” Frey said. “There may be a temporary uptick because of the pandemic. There will be a lot of adjustment. The effect of the pandemic won’t go away anytime soon.”
Move.org’s report stated that Florida had the biggest migratory influx into the state; Texas had the second most. California, and then New York, lost the most people. According to the census, Massachusetts’ population is holding steady at roughly 6.8 million people.
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