U.S. News: Most Young Adults Live Not Too Far From Home

"Brian Kramer, age 21, said he moved to Montgomery County, Md., when he was 13 years old, after being homeless for a few months. He plans to live and work in the county in the future, in part because the place offers "a sense of stability."

Mr. Kramer's plans to remain close to home would fit the pattern identified in a research paper out Monday from the Census Bureau, in collaboration with Harvard University. The paper found 80% of young adults at age 26 had moved less than 100 miles from where they grew up, and just 10% moved more than 500 miles away.

The results varied by parental income, race and ethnicity, according to the study, which is primarily based on census and tax data for people born in the U.S. between 1984 and 1992. It focused on where they lived at age 26, compared with where they grew up.

Young adults raised in higher-income families moved farther than those who were raised in lower-income families, the paper shows. At age 26, Asians were living an average of around 220 miles away from where they grew up; whites, 190 miles; Hispanics, 140 miles; and Black young adults, 130 miles away, the study found.

The researchers' goal was to understand migration patterns between childhood and young adulthood, and how those patterns change in response to economic opportunities, said Ben Sprung-Keyser, a Ph.D. student in economics at Harvard and one of the report's authors.

When policy makers debate measures aimed at spurring labor-market growth, they often want benefits such as wage gains to flow primarily to those who grew up in a given area. The paper finds this is generally the case, even if some of the benefits also go to others who moved to the area.

"Our results suggest that the vast majority of them go exactly to who you would be targeting," said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard University economics professor and one of the authors.

Researchers estimate if wages in a given commuting zone increased by roughly $1,600 annually or about 80 cents per hour, 99% of the wage gains would reach residents who would have lived there if there wasn't a wage increase.

The findings of the study can be used to inform local investment in communities, the researchers said.

That investment could take the form of policies encouraging companies to bring factories to a given location, subsidies to support workers or targeted funding for infrastructure, Mr. Sprung-Keyser said.

Jade Walters, 22, lives in Chicago, about 800 miles away from where she was raised, in Brooklyn, N.Y. But she said she plans to move back to New York eventually.

"I was born and raised there, and there's just like so much opportunity there as well," she said. "My family is there, as well, but New York has always been home for me."" [1]

1. U.S. News: Most Young Adults Live Not Too Far From Home
Torchinsky, Rina. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 25 July 2022: A.3.