Akst: America parks the moving vans

And now, from the department of silver linings, comes the news that Americans are moving less than at any time since the Census Bureau started keeping track of our comings and goings back in 1948.

This is serious. As recently as 1985 -- I still wear clothes I got that year -- more than 20 percent of Americans moved. But from 2010 to 2011, just 11.6 percent did.

The problem is that people can't sell their houses, and even if they could, they often don't have the money or the job prospects to relocate. And so I recognize that this newfound residential stasis of ours isn't great news.

People's willingness to move, after all, is what built this country. Moving is how most of us, or our ancestors, got here. They were living someplace terrible, perhaps someplace where they could barely make a living. So they left for the New World.

First there were the Pilgrims. Later the West was settled by people who moved from the East. The Okies left the dust bowl during the Depression, just as the Mormons before them moved from upstate New York and ended up settling all the way out in Utah. Even the Native Americans weren't really native, having originated in Asia. The people whose descendants we now call African-Americans were forcibly transported as slaves, and then their descendants migrated from south to north in search of a better life. In recent decades, Americans have mostly been moving to live someplace sunny, which is why the Sunbelt has boomed. And of course, immigrants have been arriving by the millions.

Now much of this frantic movement has ground to a halt, relatively speaking, even though at our current depressed rate we'd still all change houses every 8.6 years.

Given our history, it's sad when people can't seek a better life elsewhere, especially when they can't adequately support themselves where they are. One of the many reasons economists complain about the huge tax subsidies we dole out to homeowners is that they make it harder for people to move in pursuit of better opportunities.

Yet I started out by saying that this news of our non-moving comes from the department of silver linings, and the silver lining is this: Staying put, unless, of course, it involves starving, is a fine thing that more of us ought to do.

We Americans move too much. We take too lightly the precious ties of family, friendship and community, and by doing so we've created an environment that discourages emotional investment in one another. Why bother, since your new best friend might well move away in a couple of years?

Facebook friends notwithstanding, there are signs we have been getting lonelier for years. We have fewer confidantes than we used to, are less involved in civic activities, and are more prone to buy companionship by paying a therapist, or obtaining a pet. More than a quarter of us live alone. We also have a higher churn rate in our domestic relationships than any comparable nation, meaning we have more couplings and uncouplings through marriage or cohabitations. Maybe the resulting loneliness is what's driven many of us, in our furious search for ever-greener grass, to move into homogeneous enclaves of Democrats, retirees, gays and other such agreeable cohorts.

As Americans, our curse as well as our glory is our restlessness. But perhaps we've uprooted ourselves a little too cavalierly. If the real estate crash slows us down for a bit, that will be a hardship for some. Others may yet discover they're better off where they are -- something too few of us ever thought was possible.

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.