(Roughly) Daily

Anna and Kelly Pendergrast on the mechanics of a disorienting life event (that has spawned a mammoth industry)…

In 2022, about 12.6% of the US population (aged 1 year or over) lived in a different house or apartment than they did a year prior. The migration rate within the United States has been steadily declining over recent decades after sitting around 20% from the end of World War II to the 1980s. While people moving within the same county consistently make up the largest share of movers, the percentage of people moving between states has been rising, increasing from 18.8% [that the portion of the opularion that moved] in 2021 to 19.9% in 2022.

Moving house is profoundly disorienting, throwing into disarray the entirety of your material existence, your daily routines, and your relationship to the land and built environment. It’s also one of the most significant organizational challenges people willingly undertake — a moment of intersection with the global logistics infrastructures that move things  from one place to another. 

Moving house is a very specific, personal pain, but as with all stressful life events (marriage, divorce, death) there’s an entire industry around it. Professional moving companies — previously represented by the American Moving & Storage Association, now a part of the broader American Trucking Association — are dedicated to streamlining all aspects of moving house and extracting money from the weary and frazzled. Moving is a big industry: There were 17,936 companies in the moving services industry in 2024, with over 109,062 employees. 

If you’re accustomed to scrappy DIY moves, watching a moving company at work is like glimpsing a more logistically sophisticated world. If the DIY mover is a stevedore, loading lamps and houseplants one by one into a truck or station wagon, professional movers are workers at the containerized port, a model of efficiency as they stack standardized boxes into a standardized truck. The professional move is faster and more streamlined than doing it yourself, but it requires more materials, more coordination, and more infrastructure.

Part of the mover’s arsenal is the specialized box and other assorted paper products. For instance, the Dish Barrel is a double-walled cardboard container designed specifically to move dishware, enabling multiple layers of delicate kitchen items to be stacked while minimizing the risk of crushing. There are different methods for packing a Dish Barrel, both with and without cardboard dividers (which U-Haul calls cell kits). But in all cases the best practice for the Dish Barrel is to use copious sheets of newsprint before packing into a box. 

A review of moving YouTube videos like those linked above reveal a curious gender binary: While organizing YouTubers (who teach viewers how to sort, label, and display items in a house) tend to be women, moving YouTubers (who teach viewers how to wrap, pack, and box items to leave a house) are more likely to be men. While the tasks are very similar, the connotations of the work — homemaking and aesthetics on the one hand, lifting and logistics on the other — keep them squarely in gendered categories…

More redolent reportage on relocation: “Moving House,” from @annapendergrast.bsky.social and @kellypendergrast.bsky.social in Scope of Work.

(Image above: source)

* Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening“

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As we decamp, we might recall that it was in this date in 1962 that the Seattle World’s Fair (more officially known as “the Century 21 Exposition”) opened. Nearly 10 million people attended the fair during its six-month run; and as planned, the exposition left behind a fairground and numerous public buildings and public works (including the iconic Space Needle and the monorail). Unlike many Fairs of its era, Century 21 made a profit– and, relevantly to the topic above– is credited with revitalizing Seattle’s economic and cultural life and attracting an increased flow of movers to the area.