Limited Mobility
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Americans are staying put in many places...An excerpt from FT...
You would be forgiven for assuming that the US was in the middle of a mass migration. As cities became Covid-19 hotspots and remote work skyrocketed, there was a lot of noise about shifts towards suburban and rural areas and the decline of coastal cities.In fact, the overall American mobility rate barely budged during the pandemic — which came during a multi-decade decline in population movement, reaching a record low in 2021. Exact figures vary by survey, but Americans are moving at roughly half the rate they were in the middle of the 20th century.
“There was definitely a big spike in mobility at the onset of the pandemic,” says Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Center for Joint Housing Studies. But after that initial rise, “mobility trends continued their long-term decline, and went back to these pre-pandemic trends”.
Change of address data from the US Postal Service shows an increase in “temporary” address changes in the first months of the pandemic. Shifts in permanent address, however, track fairly closely with the months before the pandemic.
And while there was an outflow from urban cores to suburban areas, this continues a decades-long trend, partially balanced by higher natural population growth and higher rates of international migration to cities. To the extent that it accelerated during the pandemic, those additional losses seem to have largely reversed.....
Nationally, gross housing vacancy — a combination of rental and homeowner rates — sits at about 7 per cent, roughly half of where it was during a 2010 peak and at its lowest level since the mid-1980s. The construction of new housing units has rebounded gradually since the recession that followed the 2008 financial crash, but still hasn’t returned to late-1990s levels.
