The last time a shock led to this degree of mobility was the 2008 financial crisis. In a recently published paper in the Journal of Economic Geography, Michael Ohlrogge and I create a new data set that examines geographic mobility throughout the crisis among foreclosed homeowners. We compare where an individual was located originally at the time of foreclosure to where that individual moved following foreclosure. We find that people moved, on average, to census tracts and counties with better economic indicators—higher income and lower unemployment, among other factors.

That might sound counterintuitive. Clearly, a foreclosure is a bad outcome. So how could people end up moving to more competitive areas after foreclosure? Some of the answer depends on how we think about the origins of the 2000s housing bubble: whether it was driven by poor federal incentives that encouraged people into homes who weren’t able to sustain them, by restrictive zoning policies, or by other factors. But another factor is relevant: many of the movers were people who ended up renting in the new location, rather than owning in their original location.