Vox and Corus: The Great Relocation

Click here to read the full piece via Vox Media.

Here's an excerpt from the piece:

From February 2020 to December 2021, about 56 million Americans, or about 17% of the population, moved to a new home. That sounds like a lot, but when placed in historical context, it’s a number that has been steadily trending downward for more than 50 years.

Even taking into account these low expectations, the number of people who moved in 2021 was still 9% smaller than in 2020. You would have to go back to 2007, the year of another global crisis (that would ultimately lead to the Great Recession in the U.S.), to find an annual drop that significant. Perhaps Covid has actually acted as a deterrent to moving— the opposite of what we’ve been thinking.

To find out how much unrealized demand there is for moving, we asked 6,478 Americans who didn’t move during the pandemic whether they wanted to. The results were striking: nearly four in ten said that they would have moved, but for other challenges.

Clearly, “The Great Relocation” isn’t so much about numbers as it is about Americans moving under extraordinary circumstances and with more unknown factors than before.

Why did moving drop so sharply in 2021, and not in 2020 when the pandemic began?

In 2020, almost six in ten Americans who moved said that Covid factored into their decision. Many of these moves were temporary, especially among college students whose campuses were shut down, and young workers who were laid off or furloughed.

‍

Vox leveraged the vast reach and nuance of the Corus platform in order to gather these findings, and tell a different story than what other media outlets were simply repurposing. To see how Corus may help you tell a better story with data, reach out to us today.