Our ability to move to opportunity—our mobility—is a key factor in our own and our nation’s economic success. But the mobility of Americans has reached record lows, according the latest data from the U.S. Census.
Just slightly more than one in ten Americans (11.2 percent) moved between 2015 and 2016, almost half the 20.2 percent rate back in 1948, when the Census began tracking American mobility. Mobility was once the cornerstone of the American Dream, but today Americans move less often than Canadians, and only a bit more than Finns or Danes.
Both longer and shorter moves have declined over this period. Just 6.9 percent of Americans made shorter moves within the same county, down from 13.6 percent in 1948. The mobility rate for these types of moves plummeted between 1998 and 2008 (with the economic crisis) as the chart below shows, and has declined more slowly ever since.
[For more of this story, written by Richard Florida, go to http://www.citylab.com/housing...has-declined/514310/]
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