Moving Back: Spatial and Demographic Differences in Boomeranging to Parents

We develop a new method for capturing moves back to parents (boomerangs) using the large-scale American Community Survey to study spatial aspects of boomeranging among young adults (YAs) aged 24–29. Multivariate regressions of the likelihood that a move is a boomerang surface distinct intersectional differences between moves within- versus across- metropolitan areas, by race, education, marital status, and children. We also find that the boomerang share of moves is higher among disadvantaged groups in terms of race/ethnicity, education, recent marital dissolution and employment disruption. Importantly, boomerangers remain in or move toward weaker labor markets, countering convergence across places. Using a synthetic cohort to illustrate where YAs could land if they boomeranged, we find weaker local opportunities for boomeranging Black and Hispanic YAs, and those from lower socioeconomic status families. This reveals another channel through which spatial inequalities may operate, unrecognized in previous work that lacks the ACS’s spatial granularity.

There has been substantial public note of the increased number of young adults moving back to live with their parents in North America and other Western countries, yet a lack of geographically granular data on these so-called “boomerangs” limits what we know about their spatial distribution and how geographic features of the moves interact with individual characteristics and life experiences. We develop a new method for identifying boomerang moves within the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and use it to compare the detailed characteristics and circumstances of young adult movers who return to their parents’ home, with young adults making unanchored moves, an important distinction that is rarely explored in the U.S. context.

The internal migration literature on young adults has emphasized their tendency to move toward opportunity (Chen & Rosenthal, Citation2008), with migration serving as a means of advancement and a force for equilibrating labor markets across regions (Jia et al., Citation2023).Footnote1 Yet this literature does not distinguish boomerang moves, and the boomerang literature has found that this pattern of moving to better labor markets is significantly less likely when young adults return to a parental home (Chan et al., Citation2021). By providing additional insights into the spatial movement of boomerangers and the quality of their destination labor markets we shed light on the possibility that, coupled with declining mobility rates (Hyatt et al., Citation2018Citation2017), the increasing share of moves that are boomerangs could be contributing to the slowdown in regional economic convergence observed in recent decades (Austin et al., Citation2018Citation2005Citation2017Citation2011) and that spatial patterns of boomeranging can perpetuate disadvantage across places as disadvantaged groups are more likely to boomerang when they move.