The great millennial migration that wasn’t

The small town where I grew up has three tracts within it. Staying within your tract is an extreme level of residential stasis, but 30 percent of young adults do just that. By contrast, huge leaps, like my great-grandmother’s from New York to Honolulu or my parents’ from Honolulu to New Hampshire, are extremely uncommon.

- at age 26, 30% of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16

- 58% live less than 10 miles away- 80 percent live less than 100 miles away- 90 percent live less than 500 miles away

Census tracts are tiny, hyper-local designations, with populations between 1,200 and 8,000 each; mine is only 0.2 square miles in area.

80 percent of young adults still live within 100 miles of where they spent their teenage years.

A new paper by Harvard found that: