SAN JOSE, Calif. — Increasingly middle- aged, dependent on two paychecks and worried about the economy, America is settling down like rarely before.
Just 13 percent of the U.S. population changed addresses between 2006 and 2007, the lowest share of Americans to move since the Census Bureau began keeping records on mobility after World War II.
A new survey by the Pew Research Center — conducted to analyze the trend — divides America into a nation of “movers” and “stayers.” According to the study released Wednesday, six in 10 Americans have moved to a new community at least once in their lives, but more than a third still live in their hometowns, and 57 percent of Americans have never lived outside their home state.
But for movers, the survey finds, life is far different. After decades of lighting out for the territories, millions of Americans have been left with family and friends scattered across the states — tied together by long-distance phone lines and Facebook pages. Among people who have lived in two or more places in their life, nearly four in 10 say they aren’t living in their “heart home” now, Pew found.
“The idea of mobility, of being able to put down roots wherever you want, has been enshrined in American culture,” said D’Vera Cohn, co-author of the study. “If you ask people who have moved where do they consider their true home, a fairly notable share will say it’s not the place where they are living. But they don’t necessarily want to go back.”
The Pew study said a number of long- and short-term factors are converging to crimp America’s mobility. One factor is the increase of two-career couples, who find it tougher to relocate their families to gainful new employment for both people. Another factor is the aging of the U.S. population — people under 30 are far more likely to move than older people.
Combined with the housing meltdown, those trends mean Americans are less likely to move than in earlier generations. Updated national census numbers released this week show that the share of Americans moving slid further in 2008, to just 12 percent of the population.
While nearly half of adults in the Midwest still live in their hometowns, Pew found that the West is the least-rooted part of the country, with just 30 percent of adults still kicking around their hometowns.
College graduates move longer distances, move more frequently and are more likely to move because of a job than people with just a high school diploma, Pew found.
Cohn said she couldn’t help but notice how this year’s presidential candidates, whose lives stretched from Indonesia to the Great Plains and the Panama Canal Zone to Arizona, differed from the lifelong attachment of a Jefferson of Virginia, or a Kennedy of Massachusetts.
“Both presidential candidates were guys who had put down roots someplace after living in other places,” she said. “Maybe . . . this presidential race mirrors what’s happened in the entire country.”
