Posted on 07/27/2022 2:05:51 PM PDT by FarCenter
80 percent of young adults still live within 100 miles of where they spent their teenage years.
In my family, moving long distances is the norm.
My mother was born and raised in Honolulu, where her grandmother had moved during the Great Depression from a sleepy upstate New York town on Lake Ontario. (You can read all about it in a novel my mom just published.) As adults, she and my dad left Hawaii for, of all places, New Hampshire, where my brother and I grew up.
(“Why would you leave paradise for the frozen reaches of New Hampshire?” one might ask. Don’t worry, Dan and I asked this many, many times as children.)
My parents met in Hawaii, but my dad was born in France; his dad, born in North Dakota, was a career Army officer, and so my dad and my aunts and uncles grew up everywhere from France to Belgium to San Francisco to Germany to Honolulu.
Our family is a somewhat extreme case, but if you inhabit a certain class position in the United States, this kind of mobility can seem normal. People grow up in one place, but then they go to universities a few hundred or thousand miles away, before moving on to a big city to find work.
But it’s not the norm. A new paper by Harvard’s Ben Sprung-Keyser and Nathaniel Hendren, and the Census Bureau’s Sonya Porter, takes an in-depth look at young adults leaving home. The big takeaway is … they do not.
At age 26, the authors find, 30 percent of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16. Fifty-eight percent live less than 10 miles away; 80 percent live less than 100 miles away; 90 percent live less than 500 miles away. Census tracts are tiny, hyper-local designations, with populations between 1,200 and 8,000 each; mine is only 0.2 square miles in area. The small town where I grew up has three tracts within it. Staying within your tract is an extreme level of residential stasis, but 30 percent of young adults do just that. By contrast, huge leaps, like my great-grandmother’s from New York to Honolulu or my parents’ from Honolulu to New Hampshire, are extremely uncommon.
As the demographers and sociologists reading this are likely to point out, the finding that people mostly stay put is not new. Indeed, residential mobility inside the US has been cratering for years, and kept falling even during the pandemic, despite narratives about city residents fleeing.
Mobility was high after WW II as well. GIs often moved to new states, some of which were where Uncle Sam had stationed them.
I think that the new requirement for dual incomes to support a family is an inhibitor of movement, since it is often hard to negotiate a new job for both husband and wife at the same time.
My daughter was driving on I-80 in Iowa last week and snapped a pic of an eastbound truck pulling a trailer. Written on the back: “Left California forever, Newsom sucks”
I don’t have any answers, but I’ve been teaching high school students for the past two decades, so I get to see these kids as they move into adulthood.
Getting a driver’s license is no longer the holy grail of teenage life as it was for us back in the late 1960s. Part of the appeal of that license was the instant ability to travel far from home, something that today’s teens mostly don’t care about.
I wonder about the impact created by staring into a screen all day. In order for me to see the West Coast, to use an example from my own life, I had to either get a magazine or go there myself. Today YouTube provides hundreds of poorly made travelogues.
All I know is that my kid with an engineering degree just interviewed in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida, so he’s apparently the outlier.
FYI: The writer’s name is Dylan Matthews. He speaks of a novel his mom just finished. A link shows that the book’s title is “Hawai’i Calls” by Marjorie Nelson Matthews.
$18.99
I might wait for a few weeks for the price to shrink, and get the used book on ebay.
Sad. In my twenties, I moved to New England, then NYC, then key West. Later, I settled back in Ohio, with snowbird property in Fla.
Moving away from home, for MOST, not all, builds confidence among other things.
Have an adventure before you get old, for crying out loud.
millennials, 80%, 100mi?
wut’s the percent still living in their BEDROOM?
Reno was an armpit when I lived there. Then I heard millennials were moving in. Tessla and cheaper properties. Don’t know how it turned out.
I was born in Wyoming, raised mostly in North Dakota and worked in Idaho, Minnesota, Utah, California, North Dakota, Japan and Pennsylvania.
The daughter who was born in Japan is the only one working close to where she was born. My wife, born and raised in California, couldn't wait to get out when we were married. She has never expressed a desire to go back except to visit family.
Do the census tracts include those in Mexico, Guatemala, etc.?
37yo son left FL for IN, then WI, then IL, then AZ, then Canada (NS). He is following in a 14-generation tradition of firstborn sons moving far away from home in one place in America to another.
26yo daughter still lives at home, by choice: she gets reduced expenses, I get someone who helps with the home and who’s there when I need help, like my recent hospital/rehab monthlong vacation. She’ll move when she gets her cybersecurity career up and running, which will be good for her, and if I’m still around I can decide on living arrangements then.
The country was emptier 80 years ago — even 50 years ago. Today it’s a lot more built up. Also, people weren’t concerned about paving over more of the country. Now they are.
A relative sent me a dramatic photo of the Eifel Tower that their spouse had taken.
In a few minutes I found the spot they were standing in by searching Google StreetView.
I’m sort of happy that one is nearby and the others are within an easy day’s drive.
I’d never begrudge their moving further away, but I don’t think it would improve their prospects.
Tell him to flee Minnesota.
Taxes, liberals, and an influx of Somalis and an overwhelming number of Karens anywhere near the Twin Cities.
“80 percent live less than 100 miles away.” Interesting. It has been this way for many years. Sure, some families hit the Santa Fe and Oregon trails and stock up in Kansas City. But most stay home. 80% of the forty kids in my first grade class still live 50 miles from the school. Very interesting.
Born in GA then proceeded to move to UT, CA, UT, GA, NY VA then parents moved to TN and GA again. I went from VA to college in Alabama. Been here ever since. Now my parents, sisters and now dead Grandmothers all move to the small town Alabama I live in. You can run but you cannot hide.
My youngest daughter recently left AZ for St. Paul, MN. My older daughter lives 1/2 mile away and my son lives in Globe, AZ, about a 2 hour drive from me. At one point we all lived within 3 miles of each other, which I loved.
At one point we all lived within 3 miles of each other, which I loved.
***********
That’s pretty much a thing of the past with communications,
transportation and many other things. It is vastly a change
from the past of ‘get on your pony and ride’ Clyde.
At one point, all three of my sisters were living in south Florida. I figured it was because that was as far away from our mother as they could get and still stay in the continental U.S.
“Getting a driver’s license is no longer the holy grail of teenage life as it was for us back in the late 1960s. Part of the appeal of that license was the instant ability to travel far from home, something that today’s teens mostly don’t care about.”
My wife and I are a little older than you, and we got our licenses basically the day we turned 16. Our parents were concerned but wanted us to drive not them for after and non school events.
The summer before my senior year in college, I got my mother’s 52 chevy if and when I was graduated. My wife drove her family cars until we were married. I had company cars until my active duty time in the Navy and afterwards until I retired.
My wife had fun cars until she got her current Lexus (now 15 years old.
I had Blazers, Broncos and a Honda Ridgeline besides the nice company cars, the Blazer/Broncos became early inheritances,which got passed on to one of our heirs. The Ridgeline was transferred to one this summer. One vehicle is all we need at this stage of our lives.
On a separate thread, I posted how our parents and grandparents told us to have at least one good vehicle, until the end of our driving.
Our siblings and younger relatives all have at least one good vehicle. That has helped them to get jobs requiring driving.
I worked 2 college summers for the Forestry service in Idaho and got a government driver’s license. The other two summers were with railroads and the government license and a secret clearance enabled me to bid on some good jobs.
Later while on Active duty with the Navy, a top secret clearance, government drivers license and good range time with a 45 and carbine enabled me to have some interesting drives and riders.
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