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.

When I was in Phoenix this past spring I noticed a number of people carrying their big dogs around. At first I wasn't sure what was going on. I thought maybe the dogs were injured and couldn't walk. But then it dawned on me that maybe the ground was too hot for the dogs to walk on it. Phoenix is kind of hot sometimes and so this appears to be a thing.

In response to this kind of hot problem, the city has a pilot program underway where they're testing out something that they are calling "cool pavement", which is essentially a highly reflective coating that gets layered on top of your traditional asphalt streets. Here's a video showing some of it getting applied:

The idea here is, of course, to lower the surface temperature during the day and also reduce the overall urban heat island. And after the first year of the pilot program, the results have been encouraging. Cool pavement had an average surface temperature that was 10.5 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit lower than traditional asphalt during the middle of the day.

But there have been some tradeoffs. Because of its higher reflectivity, mean radiant temperatures increased by about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, which means that these streets feel warmer to humans when they're around them. That's obviously not ideal, but it could be a necessary trade-off to reduce surface temperatures across the city.

For more information on Phoenix's cool pavement pilot program, click here.

So here's the headline: More people are moving to Manhattan than before the pandemic. This is true. But an even more accurate description might be that New York City was losing people before the pandemic and it is still losing people. But things have rebounded since the lows of the pandemic and it is now losing less people. Here are two charts from Bloomberg:

This is generally good news since the increased exodus (to places like Miami) led some to believe that one of the most important global cities in the world was now dying. I never thought that was the case. But there's no arguing against the fact that the fastest growing cities in the US are the ones with more affordable housing and fewer constraints on new development.