Americans
are geographically more rooted today than in the past, says
UC Berkeley sociologist
13
Dec 2000
By
Patricia McBroom, Media Relations
Berkeley
- We Americans see ourselves as a nation of strangers on the
move, gazing back mistily to a time when we stayed put in
one community and knew our neighbors.
But this
image is almost exactly opposite the truth, according to Claude
Fischer, professor of sociology at the University of California,
Berkeley.
The U.S.
population is actually more settled, more rooted geographically,
than it was in the 1950s or even in the 19th century, said
Fischer in an analysis for UC Berkeley's Center for Working
Families.
The only
exception are service workers - a group including maids, guards,
waiters and janitors - who today are experiencing more residential
mobility than their counterparts 50 years ago, Fischer found.
His paper is part of a larger project that he and UC Berkeley
sociologist Michael Hout head called "USA: A Century of Difference,"
sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Both researchers
are in UC Berkeley's sociology department, part of the College
of Letters & Science.
In the
last 50 years, and particularly over the past 150 years, "Americans
have become more and more stable residentially," said Fischer.
"This rootedness is true across a broad spectrum of the American
population, including race, class, gender, age and family
type. You have to search hard to find a group that bucks the
trend."
By contrast,
the 19th century was dominated by great migrations of people,
not just across the nation, but from rural to urban areas.
Fischer said that town records from that period show rates
of movement much higher than anything in the 20th century
except, perhaps, the Dust Bowl period.
"On the
average, a 50 to 60 percent change in residents over ten year's
time was not atypical of an American town or rural county
in the 19th century. Economics was the driving force. Breadwinners
died. Jobs shut down. Farms failed. Mines played out, and
so on. People moved when their jobs changed," he said.
Because
of modern transportation systems, people no longer have to
move when their jobs change.
"We now
have a huge radius in looking for jobs," said Fischer. "That
may explain why we are more rooted. We can change jobs without
changing homes, contrary to the case in the 19th century."
But if
modern Americans are really more rooted than in the past,
why don't we have urban villages? Why don't we seem to know
our neighbors?
The answer
to that question, Fischer believes, may be found in our own
social choices - particularly our increasingly privatized
lives and use of television - as well as in working patterns
that leave neighborhoods nearly empty for most of the day.
"It's the
same home, but no one is there during the day. Women are gone.
Children are gone. Both partners are working more. The point
is that you can still have disintegration of community along
with stable residence," he said. Still, Fischer is skeptical
of claims that American communities have, in fact, disintegrated.
The broad
outlines of this story of American mobility have been known
- and ignored - for decades. Fischer pointed out that over
the past 50 years, since good records have been kept, the
U.S. Census Bureau has recorded a steady decline in residential
mobility. Yet, even social scientists continue to believe
that modern life has raised mobility, uprooting families and
creating anonymity.
"Our images
of the past come from elite families, who lived in large houses
in the same town year after year," said Fischer. "These are
the people who wrote the biographies and owned the banks.
What we don't see are the many people who came and went, who
lived in ramshackle houses that no longer stand."
Fischer's
analysis, based on annual population surveys done every March
by the census bureau, reveals that the decline in mobility
over the past 50 years can be traced strictly to a reduction
in local movement, within counties. Longer-distance moves
between counties or states has remained constant between 1947
and 1999.
Taken together,
the findings trace a picture of American mobility that is
driven by economic need among people with relatively low education
and income, who move locally to keep ahead of a housing market
that threatens to price them out.
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