The Immobile Society

Is America settling down in middle age?

Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the phenomenon during his nine-month visit to America in 1831. In the U.S., he wrote, a man "settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere." In the intervening years, Americans have lived up to their reputation as the most mobile people in the world, tearing up roots and moving--across the nation or across town--at the slightest prospect of a better life. The average American family changes its residence every five or six years, much more frequently than the average European household. Now, however, there are signs that the great national game of musical houses is slowing down. Since 1970, reports the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans who move each year has dropped from 19.1% to 17.7%, the lowest rate in more than a generation. Says the bureau's Larry Long: "As incomes rise in the U.S., more people are unwilling to give up the place, climate and recreational facilities they like, simply for more money."

The growing reluctance to move has not been lost on the big corporations, which have always felt free to move their people with abandon. A Delta Airlines spokesman reports: "People are absolutely putting their foot down about being hauled out of a city." Polaroid says that applications for transfers abroad, once in the hundreds for every job, are now in the dozens. Like many companies, FMC, an international conglomerate based in Chicago, is responding to employee pressure by eliminating many executive transfers around the country. Says a spokesman: "We are trying to slow down the revolving door."

Why the change in attitude? Explains Eugene Jennings, a professor of management at Michigan State University: "People are rejecting the values of a mobile lifestyle. It was once considered stupid not to move when a company suggested it. Now the immobiles are coming out of the woodwork and saying no." There are already enough of these naysayers to form what Brandeis Psychologist Grace Baruch characterizes as "a critical mass that makes it O.K. to say, 'Maybe the job doesn't come first.' "

Some analysts attribute the trend to a housewives' revolt against executive transfer. Michael Russell, a United Van Lines agent in Los Angeles, reports a spreading phenomenon: when the van rolls up to a house to move a family, the wife abruptly announces she has changed her mind and will not go. Says Rosie Montgomery, a counselor at the Women's Center in Dallas: "Women always thought of going along as a wifely duty. Now they are saying, 'Wait a minute; it's my life too, and my children's lives.' "

Working wives have an even greater say in the decision, especially if they hold a middle-or high-level job that cannot easily be matched in another city. Rand Corp. Demographer Peter Morrison notes that 41% of all married women in America are now working, nearly double the figure of a generation ago. "As the number of two-paycheck families increases," he says, "it is reasonable to assume that migration rates will continue to decline."

Other possible explanations for the shift:

>Middleclass Americans are now more inward-looking and concerned with the quality of life, less determined to get ahead by moving to new jobs and new towns.

>The corporate shift from the older industrial cities of the Northeast to the Sunbelt has spread employment more evenly around the country. White migration from South to North has slowed to a trickle, and black migration has stopped entirely: since 1970 as many blacks have moved to the South as from the South.

>The trend to smaller families is eliminating one need for moving--a larger house.

Still, some experts think the trend away from mobility may be temporary, a product of recession and the wildly inflated housing market. John Pitkin, senior research associate at the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies, argues that if housing starts had not declined in recent years, people would be leapfrogging from house to house at record rates.

But the Census Bureau's Long believes that the trend is longterm. He cites as evidence the fact that the slowdown in mobility is occurring in the more highly educated levels of U.S. society, the very group traditionally most prone to prowl. His point: if mobility is declining at a time when a bumper crop of baby-boom college graduates is appearing on the scene, the trend is probably a powerful one. It is a message that has already got through to many corporations. People who are willing to move wherever the company sends them, says Polaroid Vice President Joseph McLaughlin, "are at this point almost a special breed."

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