Locator: 44843MOVING.
The Atlantic, March, 2025: "Stuck in Place, Yoni Appelbaum: Why Americans Stopped Moving Houses -- And Why That's A Very Big Problem," p. 32. Link here.
Fascinating.
No society has ever been as mobile as the United States once was. No society has even come close. In the 19th century, the heyday of American mobility roughly a third of all Americans changed addresses each year. European visitors were astonished, and more than slightly appalled. The American "is devoured with a passion for locomotion," the French writer Michel Chevalier observed in 835; "he cannot stay in one place." Americans moved far more often, over longer distances, and to great advantage than did people in the lands from which they had come.They understood this as the key to their national character, the thing that made their country distinctive.
But no more. And that's the "thing" Yoni Appelbaum will dissect in this article.
To some extent, those in the military still have that opportunity to move; not as much as they did during the Cold War, but at least more than non-military Americans move these days.
My wife and two daughters moved every couple of years while in the US Air Force. Near the end, we stayed put for many, many years, preparing for retirement, but for the first twenty years we moved every three or four years. In one short four-year period overseas we moved three times (at least).
By the last few moves, we literally handed the moving company the keys to our home and left to live elsewhere during the move.
During our last ten years in the USAF my wife and I planned to keep moving in retirement. We had planned to live in every big city in the US for two or three years, in a efficiency apartment, so as not to be distracted and to really learn to enjoy all America had to offer.
Then we had grandchildren and taking care of grandchildren became our primary focus. And so our dream of moving every couple of years dissipated. We still traveled a lot. We had a family home in Los Angeles, and our children / grandchildren lived in various places across the country. Our older daughter was married to a navy submarine officer and we followed them from the west coast to the south coast.
As we start to see the end of taking care of our grandchildren I'm starting to wonder if we might dream again of moving every two or three years to live in efficiency apartments to enjoy northern California, Chicago, Florida --- as I write that I realize we have lived almost everywhere in the states and I really have no desire to see any of those cities for two or three years.
I love where I am.
It will be interesting to see why Americans don't move any more -- what Yoni Appelbuam discovered.
On another note, "moving day" is absolutely fascinating. I never knew. The great holiday of America society at its most nomadic was Moving Day, observed by renters and landlords throuthout the 19th century and well into the 20th with a giant game of musical houses. Moving Day was a festival of new hopes and new beginnings, of shattered dreams and shattered crockery -- "quite as recognized a day as Christmas or the Fourth of July," as a Chicago newspaper put it in 1882. It was primarily an urban holiday, although may rural communities where leased farms predominated held their own observances. The dates differed from state to state and city to city -- April 1 in Pittsburgh, October 1 in Nashville and New Orleans -- but May was the most popular. And nothing quite so astonished visitors from abroad as the spectacle of thousands upon thousands of people picking up and swapping homes in a singe day.
At one time, if a lease did not specify a termination date, it was legally assumed to be May 1.
In the first fourteen years of my life, my dad and mom moved not less than four times.
The top two reasons why my wife and I don't move any more:
- possessions; and,
- medical care.
