Unemployment and homeownership

Ever move to a new city for a new job?

Chances are if you did move, you did it in your younger years.

I'm in the process of that now, moving to New Orleans for a new job and I am finding that its a lot easier to do when you're young -- less to move, less attachments, less memories to have to weed through, before you own your own home .... you know what I mean.

It's a lot of the reason that the older we get, the less likely we are to move. And why places that have low job growth tend to have a concentration of elderly. The younger population moves on to new jobs, and with few jobs locally, there is no pressure for other young people to move in.

The elderly have little or no pressure to work and find new jobs and so they stay put. The percentage of elderly grows and grows in the low job growth area (or areas with declining job numbers).

So now comes a new study that says homeownership has a lot to do with the unemployment rate. The higher the homeownership rate the higher the unemployment rate.

To me it means that if the workforce has reasons to not be mobile (homeownership here, but there may be other things), more and more of those workers are going to get "comfortable" in places where there is not a job for them.

Homeownership makes us less mobile. It can cost thousands of dollars to move from one home we own to another in another city. Homes can be a 30-year decision. Apartments are a decision for the next 6 months or 12 months or the like.

So people on the fringes often choose unemployment -- those that are near retirement, those with health issues, those with home duties for the family etc.

Check the link at Slate.com

There are a lot of implications for economic development here. That I know of, nobody in the past ever suggested that homeownership rates and unemployment rates were linked. And if we thought about it, we always thought homeownership meant more jobs.

Stop.

Get ready for the subtle here.

Link unemployment with homeownership. But don't link jobs with unemployment -- they're not the the same thing. And they are not the opposite.

If jobs are available, unemployment means someone can't or won't go take one. And the homeownership link is showing us that it's a lot more complicated than we would like it to be.


But I can tell I lost you on that last point. Tell you what, you go check out the link above and we'll come back to that last point in another post.

-steve buser