Making the Return Trip: Elderly Head Back North
The New York Times, February 26th, 2007
For the first time since the Depression, more Americans ages 75 and older have
been leaving the South than moving there, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.
The reversal appears to be driven in part by older people who retired to the
South in their 60s, but decided to return home to their children and
grandchildren in the Northeast, Midwest and West after losing spouses or
becoming less mobile.
A stream of elderly transplants leaving Florida was detected by sociologists
two decades ago, including so-called half-backs, who stopped short of returning
to their home states and settled elsewhere in the South. What is new is the
growth in the number of people leaving the region entirely and the dimension of
the migration.
“As the numbers increase of people in their early to mid-60s that move from
the North to the South, we would also expect the numbers of people 75 and older
that move from the South to the North to subsequently increase as well,” said
Grant I. Thrall, a geography professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
While the number of people ages 75 and older who move at all is relatively
small, a survey of geographic mobility released last month estimated that about
121,000 of them left the South from 2000 to 2005, and 87,000 arrived. In a
comparable survey a decade earlier, 57,000 left the South and 92,000 moved
there.
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