Here in Canada, there is often a belief that Americans tend to be more mobile than Canadians. Don't like the cold weather? Just move south. Taxes too high? Just move south. Housing too expensive? Just move south.

But just how mobile is mobile? A new study by the US Census Bureau and Harvard University found that by age 26, more than 2/3 of young adults in the US actually just live where they grew up, with 80% living within 100 miles, and 90% living within 500 miles.

Migration distances were also found to be impacted by both race and parental income (though these two things likely exhibit a relationship on their own). If you are a young white or Asian adult, the "radius of economic opportunity" tends to grow and you're more likely to live further away from where you grew up.

The most popular destinations overall are New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Denver (in this order). And while New York and Los Angeles remain at the top regardless of who you are, San Antonio and Phoenix are top destinations for Hispanics, and San Francisco is a top destination for Asians.

Regardless, home appears to be a pretty sticky place.

But what about Canadians? Are we less mobile? Looking at net domestic migration rates, Canada saw 254,143 interprovincial migrants between 2018-2019, whereas the US saw just over a million between 2020-2021. So on a per capita basis, Canada's rate is actually higher.

Statistics Canada also estimated earlier this year that as of July 1, 2016, somewhere around 4 million Canadians were living abroad -- or about 11% of citizens. This is a much higher percentage compared to Americans.

Of those living abroad, roughly half are believed to have received their citizenship through descent, meaning they were born abroad to Canadian parents. About 1/3 are Canadian citizens by birth. And about 15% are naturalized citizens.

So it turns out that Canadians are in fact pretty mobile. We also seem to like going further afield.

Today's post is perhaps a good follow-up to yesterday's post about housing supply in Ontario. Below are a few charts taken from a recent article by Wendell Cox looking at net domestic migration across the US. The takeaway here is that the shift from larger cities to smaller cities seems to be accelerating, following a trend that started before COVID.

The data in these charts is organized according to population and by Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs). At the bottom are America's two megacities: New York and Los Angeles. Both have metro areas that exceed 10 million people. As you can, these two city regions have been losing the most people, both in terms of total humans and on a percentage basis. The goldilocks sweet spot seems to be cities in the 500k to 1 million range.

But the most telling figure is probably this one here:

This chart adds up all major metropolitan areas with a population greater than 1 million, and then shows net migration over the last decade. Here you can see when this trend started (around 2016) and how it has been accelerating. In this case, it does appear that COVID added some fuel to the fire. But the question remains: Why is this longer-term trend even happening?

Is it a short-term phenomenon? Is it because once a city reaches a certain size it simply becomes more annoying to live in it and people would prefer to live elsewhere? Or is it more about overall affordability? That is, if we could figure out how to deliver more affordable housing in our cities, could we stymie the bleeding toward smaller and more affordable ones?

I don't know the answers to the questions. But they have been widely debated and I still think they're interesting ones. If all things were equal (or closer to equal), how and where would most people choose to live? Put differently, how much of this is some sort of natural market outcome and how much of it is a direct result of our actions (or inactions)?

For years, the data has been clear. Many Americans are moving from expensive cities, like Los Angeles, to less expensive metropolitan areas like Dallas-Fort Worth.

But Wendell Cox's recent article over at New Geography is a good reminder that these data sets can be limited. The US Census Bureau currently tracks domestic migration at the county level only. This can be a bit of a problem as counties vary dramatically in terms of geography and population.

The New York metropolitan area, for example, is comprised of 25 different counties averaging about 750,000 residents. The Los Angeles metropolitan area, on the other hand, is compromised of two counties averaging about 6.6 million residents.

These sorts of nuances become important when you're trying to figure out things like whether people are moving to/from urban cores or the suburbs. Case in point: The San Diego metro area is compromised of a single county. When people move there, the data says nothing about how urban or suburban they might be.

Dallas-Fort Worth is a lot easier to read. Since 2010, it has had the largest net domestic migration of any metro area in the US: +443,000 residents. But county data reveals that it is entirely suburban. The core (Dallas County) actually lost 57,000 people from 2010 to 2019. And this is not unique to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash