Movement At Warp Speed - Young Americans move frequently

American Demographics, August, 2000

America's twenty- and thirty-somethings, traditionally the most mobile age group, now change residences far more than older adults, and they cover greater distances in their moves. About a third of all people in their 20s changed residences in 1997, more than double the rate for those 35 to 44 years old, according to the Census Bureau's 1998 Current Population Survey. This fact is part and parcel of new demographic trends that are producing some broad regional shifts across the country. It is also a by-product of the new global information economy, and is evidence of a youth culture that has made mobility and change a crowning virtue. - "A whole generation of young people see the world as their job market and their playground, and they have a one-way ticket," says Elissa Moses, who last year completed a massive survey of teen attitudes as vice-president of global marketing for Philips Electronics. This trend that will only grow more important as the generation of children born to baby boomers comes of age. Among young Americans, ages 15 to 19, the survey found barely half expected to live in the country of their birth, and only slightly more than a quarter expected to live in their hometowns.

Throughout the 1990's Census Bureau surveys portrayed a nation that seemed to be losing its taste for migration. As the economy strengthened, the nation's mobility rate - the share of the population moving from one home to another each year - drifted down to 16 percent, the lowest point since the close of World War II, and a far cry from the 20 percent figure common during the 1950's and 1960's. And, most of the roughly 43 million who moved each year did not go very far, just taking up another residence in the same metropolitan area. The toplines, however, are deceiving. From affluent young people gentrifying urban cores to recent immigrants filling suburban apartment complexes, the people who are moving are some of the nation's most desirable consumer and worker groups.

But knowing where they will end up is not as easy as it used to be. The key issues in this question center on the relationship between human flows and America's increasingly global and digital economy. "The Internet has changed the rules," says Mitchell Berger, CEO of Stephen-Bradford Search, a New York City-based placement firm. For one, a new breed of technocratic nobles - the young, highly-skilled, well-paid creators of the information economy - are hopping from place to place in search of ever better financial and lifestyle opportunities.

The movement of New Economy workers, and the development of technology work centers is crucial in shaping the economic landscape. In the past two decades, metropolitan areas with technology-intensive employment have experienced explosive rates of economic growth, vastly outpacing the U.S. at large. Taking into account employment growth and earnings per job, NPA Data Services estimates that San Jose produced an average annual economic growth rate of 5.0 percent from 1969 to 1998, compared with 2.6 percent for the U.S. as a whole. Technology centers Raleigh-Durham, Austin, and Fairfax County boasted annual growth rates of 5.5 percent, 7.2 percent, and 8.0 percent, respectively, during the same period. Each of these technology hotbeds helped expand their states' economies significantly faster than the national average as well. Wooing these workers who are the engines of economic growth in the information age will be increasingly vital to the cities and states which want to reap the rewards of growth.

The wanderings of the techno-aristocracy are in turn replicated by another tribe - the similarly young, but low-skilled, low-wage immigrants who provide all manner of services to the gentry of the ex-urbs. Growth masks movement, especially in the most glittering new towns well-endowed by high-tech businesses. Unlike suburbanites of generations past, many of the new residents in fast-growing communitiesare sojourners rather than stakeholders. "In the high-tech market, people stay in a job no more than two to three years at a time," says Erik Jones, a staffing consultant at Knowledge Workers, a Fairfax, Virginia-based placement firm. "Those people move constantly to where they find work."

That said, familiar patterns - frost belt to sunbelt, city to suburbs, immigrants to Los Angeles and New York - are still apparent in the numbers. But, a cumulative look at year-to-year census surveys over the past decade, as well as recent findings by some top demographers, marketers and sociologists suggest that other trends are developing. Little by little, city by city, the landscape is changing in ways that may not make the headlines until the full results of the 2000 Census are available in a couple of years. In the meantime, the movers are reshaping markets, creating new kinds of communities and setting the stage for a new understanding of what it means to be mobile in America.

No consensus has taken hold around these trends. Instead, the big thinkers offer contrasting but not necessarily contradictory interpretations. William H. Frey of the University of Michigan, sees the rise of new "regional geographic divisions being just as important as city versus suburb or rural versus urban." The country will divide sharply between "Melting Pot regions" and "Heartland regions," he argues in a study for the Milken Institute, written with Ross C. DeVol. Immigrants concentrated in a few major cities will produce areas that are "increasingly younger, multi-ethnic and culturally vibrant." Meanwhile, boomers will retreat to parts of the New West and the New South, as well as parts of the farm belt and the rust belt to create areas that are "older, more staid, and less ethnically diverse."