Danielle Anderson landed a promotion in June that required her to move from southern California to Houston, where she bought a $280,000 townhouse near downtown. Since then, the 24-year-old sales and marketing manager has spent $8,000 on furnishings, hooked up cable television and hired a gardener.
The number of Americans moving has started to increase from a record low, promising a lift to the labor-market recovery as well as housing and consumer spending. An estimated 12 percent of U.S. residents moved in the year ended March 2012, up from a 63-year low of 11.6 percent the prior year, according to an analysis of unpublished Census Bureau data by the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington-based research organization. About 1.7 percent moved from one state to another, the most in five years, the data show.
Mobility adds flexibility to the labor market, allowing employers to fill positions more easily when skills may be in short supply. A lack of migration the past few years helps to explain why 3.6 million jobs were unfilled in August — 719,000 more than in January 2009 when unemployment last matched Septembers 7.8 percent, Labor Department data show.
Increased mobility will facilitate a quicker improvement in the job market, as the unemployed and underemployed can more easily move to where the jobs are, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I would expect mobility to steadily improve going forward as job opportunities and house prices increase.
Encouraging Trend
