More Americans are staying put. The overall mobility of the U.S. population is at its lowest level and has fallen by nearly half since its most recent peak in 1985, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Americans who live in rural areas are not moving. The rate of people who moved across a county line in rural America was just 4.1 percent, down from 7.7 percent in the late 1970s, according to The Wall Street Journal's analysis. The mobility rate in rural areas has fallen faster than metro areas.
“We’re locking people out from the most productive cities,” Peter Ganong, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a force that widens the urban-rural divide.”
It can stymie economic growth, adds David Schleicher, a professor at Yale Law School. The immobility of rural residents is preventing them from getting higher paying jobs and could even be choking off the labor supply for employers in areas where jobs are plentiful.
Economists told The Wall Street Journal that the decline in rural mobility is mostly due to the escalating cost of housing. Small-town home prices have modestly recovered from the housing market crisis, while restrictive land-use regulations in metro areas have driven up prices.
Ganong finds in his research that a lawyer, for example, who leaves Alabama, Mississippi, or South Carolina for a job in New York, New Jersey, or Connecticut would spend just 21 percent of his income on housing after moving. But a janitor making such a move would have his housing costs take up 52 percent of his income.
Also, the increase of state-level job licensing requirements is another factor limiting mobility, The Wall Street Journal notes. Licensing requirements can encompass a variety of jobs, from bartenders and florists to turtle farmers and scrap-metal recyclers, WSJ reports. More than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs, according to a White House report.
As such, some occupations are less likely to move. For example, barbers and cosmetologists—which are both jobs that require people to obtain new state licenses when they move—are 22 percent less likely to move between states than workers whose blue-collar occupations don’t require a license, finds a nationwide study conducted by Janna E. Johnson and Morris M. Kleiner of the University of Minnesota.
Source: “Struggling Americans Once Sought Greener Pastures, and Now They’re Stuck,” The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 2, 2017) [Log-in required.]
