How Boomers blocked the open road Americans can no longer afford to move

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, as well as the greater Lehigh Valley, during the Nineties encapsulated this. Tens of thousands of new families poured in, not only from the nearby New York City area, but also from around the country, drawn by a confluence of factors: the areas mostly successful transition from the decline of heavy industry; ample, convertible farmland for housing; numerous colleges and universities; proximity to major cities. Families could move confidently with the assurance that a good job, solid schools, and safe neighbourhoods would be waiting for them.

With the exception of recessions in the early Nineties and after the dot-com bubble burst, the economy was superficially strong in this era. It seemed like there would be a new kid on the Little League team every year whose parents had gotten a job at AirProducts — an industrial gas supplier, which replaced Bethlehem Steel as the largest local employer — or at a regional hospital, law firm, or university. Unlike today, a robust housing market, and a strong stock market directly correlated to the ability to build a stable life. 

Most of my friends lived in new suburbs around Bethlehem, which were much bigger than the house I grew up in. My family, on my dad’s teacher salary, which essentially tied us to the state where he would receive his pension, wasn’t quite able to participate in the civilisational luxury of upgrading homes or moving across the country, and I remember feeling implicitly marked by this social distinction.

Adulthood, according to the models my friends and I had around us (our parents), meant something like: you picked the place you wanted to live and then you picked a house out according to your means. Almost all the families I knew growing up, however, whether they lived in two bedroom bungalows, or five bedroom McMansions, owned their homes, and it was ownership which seemed to draw them to the area. Pleasant stasis, not contingency, was normal — a normal which my generation could only assume they stood to inherit. This was a myth, but a powerful and universal one. Why else did we go to school, study, apply for summer jobs and internships? Why else were we treading on the wheel? 

Before I graduated from high school, I began to observe the first hints of downward mobility in the early 2000s suburbs —  what is now known as “China shock” produced job losses. I saw the parents of friends lose white-collar jobs and struggle to get them back; I saw the first hints of opioid addiction. But this was never really talked about openly: the dark auguries of class descent. Whether we knew it or not, the children of buyers were growing up to be renters.

Class ascent, powered by increasing property values, however, was still the expectation. The idea that everybody should own a house was a major part of American electoral politics, and home ownership was close to attaining the status of a universal American right. “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” George W. Bush declared in 2024. “That’s what we want. This is an ownership society.”

The promise — the rhetoric of the promise — of an ownership society was a major reason, I suspect, that Bush won twice. Ironically, that dream would end abruptly in 2007 and 2008 at the end of his miserable second term. The Boomers, or enough of them, voted for a politics that underwrote their economic priorities — stocks, houses — without considering that they were depleting the well that their children would drink from.

I was a sophomore in college when the housing market collapsed, and buying a home became categorically harder in diffuse ways that I can only gesture to here (lower supply, lower real wages, rising prices, an uneven recovery, stricter lending practices). My generation entered the workforce without the confidence of our parents: that sense that we could make demands of our employers, contract builders, flip homes, and negotiate moves around the country, has never been part of our reality.

I moved to Brooklyn, and I felt lucky to live in Brooklyn, sharing a bedroom outside of gentrification territory for $425 a month. Jobs for young people, especially with humanities degrees, were scarce, and I thought that the girl who lived in the other bedroom in our apartment by herself, and had a job as editorial assistant was rich, comparatively. Lucky. 

For many of my friends who grew up in the prosperous, sheltered exburbs, the 75-mile leap to New York City, however, was a little too far, a little too risky. I was delusional enough to think I could make it as a writer, but it was vanity, not reason, that pushed me towards New York. After the Great Recession, risk aversion made more sense; risk aversion was the mode, not our parents’ expansiveness.

Now, almost 15 years later, most of my friends from high school live either in the Lehigh Valley or thereabouts. We didn’t spread with a Boomer-like indifference to our roots around the country. We hunkered down.

And have stayed that way. Today, Americans are moving less than ever, with interstate migration declining to half of what it was in the early Nineties (down from about 16% to 8% according to the Brookings Institute). According to the New York Times, more broadly, Americans in the 2020s are moving at the lowest rate since the Census Bureau began tracking mobility in the Forties. This trend is supported by other recent studies; it’s also supported by vibes.

American mobility is produced by dynamism and optimism, the amount of heat given off by its economic engines; it also drives it. The mobility boom over the second half of the 20th century reflected civilisational and generational exuberance; in turn, widespread arbitrage opportunities in the job and housing markets gave families the economic confidence to grow. Even while deindustrialisation, Reaganism, and Clinton-era free trade all produced different kinds of economic turbulence and shock, mobility and ample affordable housing were America’s great cushion and advantage. Arguably, intra-regional mobility replaced the frontier of the 19th century: the simultaneously imaginative and real place that Americans could go for greater opportunity.

This century’s decline in mobility, therefore, has not only had massive, if subtle, political and social ramifications, but reflects different modes of demoralisation that have become endemic to American life. This cyclical relationship is perhaps best exemplified by the opioid crisis in the rural and post-industrial parts of the country: decreasing property values, depressed wages, addiction all contribute to low mobility; low mobility in turn drives further despair. If you aren’t an accredited, elite cognitive worker, you don’t really have the opportunity for career arbitrage, the ability to get out. Opioid addiction both marks your condition and accelerates it.

For different reasons, younger urbanites are also increasingly, if less despairingly, trapped — by college debt, rent, inflation, stagnant wages, and the consumerist habits of their wealthier parents. They don’t move — and I speak here from personal experience — because the moderate pleasures they’ve won from the big city are too fragile, and the margin for error, for risk, are shockingly thin (one to two months savings).

Looked at more broadly, because buying a house or apartment is too risky, Americans have to delay a first home, because they delay buying a first home, they have to wait longer and longer to see its value increase, and because they have to wait longer, they have less opportunity to seek new opportunities. In the meantime, Boomers buy more homes.

It’s hard to get settled, so the prospect of re-settling is unsettling. People my age or younger, as a result, don’t feel they have enough cushion to have a child, let alone several children — who would drive them to seek out new places, new homes to raise their families in. I’m positing a cyclical relationship between mobility and fertility: having families drives people to take risks on new places, new homes, new jobs. You’re not going to give up the one bedroom in Brooklyn unless you have a compelling reason to. The suburbs are only romantic when they’re filled with young families. As a consequence, in the long run, a diminishing birth-rate also means, ironically, home values are less secure, school districts shrink, jobs shrink, big cities, where there’s still excitement, full of all the younger people.

And while the loss of what we might call the “interior frontier” clearly has an economic aetiology, there are complementary cultural factors which, I suspect, would limit American mobility even if it became significantly easier and cheaper to buy homes everywhere. Namely — while they still exist to a degree — regional differences have been reduced by the Internet and the smartphone; the local has been subsumed into globalised mass culture; Americans still have accents, but they now have DraftKings, porn, dating apps, social media, and more: they all have the same homogenising algorithms in their brains. And AI promises to make us more the same than ever. Homogeneity, in another irony, discourages heterogeneity — crossing regions, dialectics, cultural modes — because the reward, the level of difference, is so greatly diminished. The only significant American migration in the 2020s — conservatives from the coasts moving south — is premised on seeking difference; but aside from political polarisation — how different are people whose lives are largely mediated by technopoly?

Americans born after 1980 don’t just have less economic confidence, but they have a reduced sense of adventure, less of a sense that it makes a difference to go somewhere different. While Americans travel abroad more frequently than in the past, this seems more like a credit-card empowered cope rather than a compensatory benefit. Living for three months in Mexico City on savings from that one really good paying tech job that ended in 2022 is different from repeatedly building a new life in different parts of the country, as was common in the mid to late 20th century.

Mobility is a two-part equation: the confidence that you can go somewhere and the confidence that where you’re going is worth the trouble. Simply put there is no point in moving if you’ll be scrolling on your phone in a room lit by LEDs no matter where you go; or if you’ll be on a Zoom call for work no matter where you’re working. Starlink, for example, while it may have the admirable benefit of allowing people in rural places to communicate more easily, and provide access to uncensored reportage that may not be found on TV, still threatens to flatten. The final tragedy of the material commons may be that it becomes indistinguishable from the digital commons. Soul is the last resource of the community, and the last resource to be extracted.

So while it’s clearly harder, more frustrating, and riskier to buy a decent home almost anywhere in the country, and the opportunity cost of moving around is higher than it has been in maybe a century, there also has to be a point to moving. 

The decline in American mobility is partly an economic and political problem, and partly a spiritual one. And, like with all complex problems, there are no obvious solutions. And yet, so much hope comes from articulating a sense of lack, acknowledging that there is a missing predicate in contemporary American life. In a deep, historical sense, the New World represented a rejection of feudalism, of people and their labour being tied to the radius around the place they were born. Mobility is the economic expression of the underlying drive to escape towards the horizon. If there is a solution, it may just begin with looking up.

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Matthew Gasda is a writer, director, and critic. He is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research. He has three books forthcoming in 2025.

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