(Roughly) Daily

As Dylan Matthews explains, 80 percent of young Americans still live within 100 miles of where they spent their teenage years…

A new paper by Harvard’s Ben Sprung-Keyser and Nathaniel Hendren, and the Census Bureau’s Sonya Porter, takes an in-depth look at young adults leaving home. The big takeaway is … they do not.

At age 26, the authors find, 30 percent of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16. Fifty-eight percent live less than 10 miles away;80 percent live less than 100 miles away; 90 percent live less than 500 miles away. Census tracts are tiny, hyper-local designations, with populations between 1,200 and 8,000 each; mine is only 0.2 square miles in area. The small town where I grew up has three tracts within it. Staying within your tract is an extreme level of residential stasis, but 30 percent of young adults do just that…

As the demographers and sociologists reading this are likely to point out, the finding that people mostly stay put is not new. Indeed, residential mobility inside the US has been cratering for years, and kept falling even during the pandemic, despite narratives about city residents fleeing…

How race and class play into this trend, how distant job opportunities don’t, and what might be done to change the pattern: “The great millennial migration that wasn’t,” from @dylanmatt at @voxdotcom.

* Albert Einstein

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As we get moving, we might recall that it was on this date in 1610 that explorer and navigator, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into (what we now know as) Hudson Bay in (what we now know as) Canada. While Hudson is rightly remembered for this and his other explorations and chartings of the northern reaches of North America, it was at the time a disappointment: Hudson initially believed that he had finally found the Northwest Passage through the continent. Months of further exploration and mapping, of course, proven him wrong.

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