The downside of homeownership

In an article this week, The Economist wonders whether the decreasing labor mobility in the United States—which I've covered here before—is a result of a "more efficient market". They write,

The drop in mobility shows up almost exclusively in gross migration, the total number of interstate household moves... The trend predates the housing boom and bust; the crisis cannot explain it.

Some reckon the decline is caused by demography. Young workers, at the start of their working life, have most to gain from moving. An ageing population may therefore be less mobile. Growth in two-earner households could also play a role. When both partners work, it is harder to move if one of them loses his job or is offered a post somewhere else. New research by Greg Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania and Sam Schulhofer-Wohl of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis casts doubt on these explanations...

The authors analyse census data gathered monthly between 1991 and 2011, and find that the pattern of falling mobility persists across all parts of the workforce. Mobility is down across “all education levels, for people of all marital statuses, and for both single-earner and multiple-earner households.” Ageing is a red herring: mobility rates have dropped most for young workers. It isn’t so much the American worker that is changing, they argue, but the American economy. Reduced mobility largely reflects two shifts in the nature of economic activity...

The first is that the mix of jobs offered in different parts of America has become more uniform. The authors compute an index of occupational segregation, which compares the composition of employment in individual places with the national profile. Over time, their figures show, employment in individual markets has come to resemble more closely that in the nation as a whole. 

This homogenisation reflects the rising importance of “non-tradable” work. As the name suggests, non-tradable goods and services are not traded across long distances. Californian dentists tend not to clean Floridian teeth; every city has its own dentists. Cars, by contrast, are tradable, so not every state has its own car plant... With more of the country’s employment mix present in each state, it is less necessary to move to find work.

... The authors suggest another force is also reducing migration: the plummeting cost of information.

Young workers in particular used to have to move to gather information: to see whether they could stand a Boston winter, say, or cared enough about the Californian climate to pay Californian rents. In recent decades, however, it has become much easier to learn about places without moving house. Deregulated airlines and innovative online-travel services have slashed travel costs, allowing people to visit and assess different markets without moving. The web makes it vastly easier to study every aspect of a potential new home, from the quality of its apartment stock to the surliness of its baristas, all without leaving home. Falling mobility isn’t simply caused by labour-market homogenisation, the authors argue, but also by greater efficiency. People are able to find the right job in the ideal city in fewer hops than before.

These explanations are, in theory, quite compelling. It's certainly interesting that labor mobility is falling the most among younger workers, and this does indeed seem to beg an explanation beyond just the housing bust and underwater mortgages.

Nevertheless, I can't help but think that the housing dynamic—or, at least, the wider debt bubble that fueled it—has a significant role to play here, if only indirectly. Might it be that young workers, overly burdened with student loan debt and unable to afford places of their own (either to rent or to buy), are shacking up with their (perhaps underwater) parents so as to avoid rent costs? Clearly these two dynamics can play off of each other, given that they both stem from the same basic problem of overwhelming debt, leading workers of all ages to stay closer to home.

In thinking through these problems, I was reminded of this blog post from Tyler Cowen from last month. Citing a study in El Pais, Cowen writes:

Here are the European countries with the highest owner occupancy rates:

1. Romania, 97.5%

2. Lithuania, 93.1%

3. Croatia, 90.1% 

4. Slovakia, 90.0%

How about the lowest rates?

1. Switzerland, 44.3%

2. Germany, 53.2%

3. Austria, 57.4%

Get the picture?

Cowen's point is clear. For years—decades, even—we heard politicians and economists touting homeownership as an integral part of the American dream, and a huge key to our future economic success as a nation. Now, we're starting to see the flip side of that coin, and we're not alone. The most prosperous nations in Europe in fact have very low homeownership rates, while the nations with high rates flounder. This absolutely cannot be a coincidence, and it must have at least something to do with labor mobility.

That, or a high homeownership rate is just a great indication of a society with a lot of debt, a lack of flexibility, and therefore a general lack of entrepreneurship. I hope that we won't some day be reading statistics similar to Cowen's list there regarding levels of college education, but I certainly have to wonder. Debt is an ugly beast, and we can't very easily explain it away by spitballing theories about "lower costs of information". It's a good effort by The Economist, but I remain unconvinced.

[The Economist]
[Tyler Cowen]