Why Americans have stopped moving

Nowadays, moving from one state to another has dropped 51 percent from its average in the postwar years, and that number has been decreasing for more than 30 years. Black Americans, once especially adventurous, are now especially immobile. A survey of blacks born between 1952 and 1982 found that 69 percent had remained in the same county and 82 percent stayed in the same state where they were born.

This is especially troubling in context: Studies show major benefits for the children of poor people who move to better-off neighborhoods via, for instance, a program called Moving to Opportunity. If a poor child from a bad neighborhood moved to a middle-class neighborhood at age 8, his expected lifetime income would be $302,000 higher than if he stayed put. Still, the bias toward inertia is so strong that 52 percent of impoverished black families told about Moving to Opportunity declined offers to participate.

One reason people don’t move where the jobs are is because of real-estate prices — which in turn are kept at high levels by regulatory restrictions and NIMBY-ism. In New York City in the 1950s a typical apartment rented for $60 a month, or $530 today if you adjust for inflation. Two researchers found that if you reduced regulations for building new homes in places like New York and San Francisco to the median level, the resulting expanded workforce would increase US GDP by $1.7 trillion. That won’t happen, though: More homes would diminish the property values of existing homeowners.