Every year, several different organizations list the world's most expensive cities in which to live. In this country, they usually include New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Overseas, you'll pay a lot to live in Tokyo, London, Moscow, Seoul, Geneva, Milan, or Paris. When deciding on a career opportunity and where you want to live, it's good to know up front if you'd need to spend over $4,500 per month for a two-bedroom unfurnished apartment in Tokyo or need an annual salary of $65,000 to cover the basic needs of a family of four in Boston.

Recent U.S. Census data (May 2006) tracks the growing exodus from high-priced city centers and suburbs into smaller “micropolitan” towns with populations between 10,000 and 49,000 and even farther out into areas that until now were forests or farms. New York, San Francisco/Oakland, Chicago, and Los Angeles averaged net outflows of more than 60,000 people per year. Some experts see this pattern as part of the country's continuing transition from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy. While the out-migration has a lot to do with finding affordable housing, some experts fear that it could overwhelm these more sparsely populated areas that lack the infrastructure to accommodate thousands of new residents.

Americans are a highly mobile society; everybody knows that, right? Yes, but not in the way you might think. Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wagonloads of pioneers did strike out to lay claim to the wide-open spaces beyond the Appalachian Mountains. In later decades, people flooded from farm to city to suburb. This mobility left such a lasting impression that we think it continues to this day. The most recent U.S. Census data say otherwise. In 2003, only 14 percent of this country's residents moved, the lowest rate since this information has been tracked starting in 1948.

There are many reasons cited for this change. More people are willing to commute longer distances to work (see Chapter 8 for more about commuting); there are more dual-income households, which are less portable than the one-income, one-stay-at-home parent model; more people own rather than rent their living quarters; and there are more Baby Boomers and others who stay put because of elder care responsibilities.