Mayors across the country increasingly say the same thing in different words: cities should be places for everyone who wants to be there. New York’s former Mayor Eric Adams has warned that failing to address the housing shortage could mean, “New York will no longer be a city for working people, for families, for immigrants, or for elders.” In San Francisco, former Mayor London Breed made housing expansion a central policy priority through her Housing for All plan, which explicitly aimed to make it easier to build housing across the city so that workers, families, and long-time residents could continue to live there. In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey has explained the city’s 2040 Plan by saying, “every Minneapolis family should be able to find a place that’s safe, affordable, and feels like home.” Of course, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rise has shown just how politically resonant the language of universal housing affordability has become. Since his election, we’ve watched affordability-focused slogans propagate through the political lexicon of campaigns across the country.

In many places, this rhetoric is resulting in material changes to the dense web of local zoning and building codes that govern how and when housing gets built. Across the country, cities have moved to eliminate mandatory single family zoning, allow more height and density (upzoning), legalize Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), reduce parking requirements, and streamline approvals. Together, these reforms represent a meaningful shift away from decades of rules that constrained growth, often in the places where economic opportunity is most concentrated.

But building for “everyone who wants to be there” assumes something else: that people can actually get there. Housing supply determines whether space exists. It does not determine who is able to move into it, and in an economy where opportunity is increasingly concentrated at the the neighborhood and block level, mobility itself is becoming a binding constraint.

The Opportunity Atlas, a large-scale research project led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, has produced some of the clearest evidence to date that economic opportunity is deeply place-based.* By analyzing a vast tax data set over time, they’ve been able to show that children who grow up just a few miles apart, in families with comparable incomes, can experience starkly different life outcomes. In Los Angeles, for example, 44% of Black men who grew up in Watts were incarcerated on April 1, 2010. Compare that to central Compton, just 2.3 miles away, where only 6.2% of Black men from similarly situated families were incarcerated on the same day.

The Opportunity Atlas shows that across the country, there are neighborhoods that consistently produce better outcomes. For someone growing up in Watts, Compton is one nearby example, but it is hardly the only one. Compton is far from the highest income neighborhood in Los Angeles; it is, however, a better one along a narrow set of dimensions that matter for long-run opportunity, and it is far from unique. For someone living in Watts, there are dozens of places scattered across the country that could function as “Comptons”: communities where housing remains relatively affordable, but schools are stronger, labor markets are more accessible, and long-run outcomes are measurably better.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched an experiment to understand if moving low-income families to lower-poverty areas would improve their lives. Known as Moving to Opportunity, they selected about 4,600 low-income families living in high-poverty public housing across five cities. Families were randomly assigned to one of three groups:

At the time, policymakers wanted to understand whether place shapes life outcomes, or whether poverty is mostly about individual or family characteristics. Early evaluations found modest improvements in safety and mental health for adults, but mixed employment effects and little immediate evidence of economic gains. Ultimately, the program was not considered effective.

It wasn’t until years later, when Chetty and his team linked the Moving to Opportunity data to their own tax dataset, that they were able to examine the outcomes for children of these participating families, and the results were striking. Children in Group 1, who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods before age 13, experienced large, lasting benefits. On average, they earned about 31% higher earnings in their mid-20s than their counterparts in other groups. Not only were they more likely to attend college, but they were more likely to attend higher earning colleges, and there were lower rates of single motherhood. Those children also went on to live in better neighborhoods through adulthood. In a 2015 paper, the team published these findings and estimated that moving a child to a low-poverty neighborhood by age 8 increases lifetime earnings by roughly $300,000. Increased tax payments from these children alone are likely enough to offset the program’s costs, making the intervention fiscally efficient.

If opportunity is increasingly tied to place, Americans’ ability to move toward it has been moving in the wrong direction. A recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond found that Americans of all ages are significantly less likely to move today than they were three decades ago. This declines holds across regions, income levels, and stages of life.

Economists have offered two broad theories for why geographic mobility has decreased. The first centers on household structure. As dual-income households have become the norm, relocation has become difficult. Research has shown that couples with similar earnings are less likely to move than those with unequal incomes. This is often attributed to the cost of leaving one job behind as well as the challenge of having to replace two jobs simultaneously. Dual income households also have more challenging childcare needs with those families preferring to anchor close to extended family. A second explanation focuses on housing costs. In many economically productive regions, limited housing supply has driven prices high enough to discourage in-migration. At the same time, rising housing costs reduce out-migration. People living in high cost areas have less money for the upfront costs of moving. Hence, the important focus, and ongoing efforts, of reducing housing costs across the country. Unfortunately, research that these two factors have a causal impact on our nationwide mobility decline is mixed.

Maybe there is more at work than changing family makeup and housing policies alone. A growing body of research finds that workers are becoming less sensitive to wage and housing-cost differences in ways that our traditional economic intuition would predict. Research by Raven Molloy, Christopher Smith, and Abigail Wozniak has found that long-distance migration has declined alongside job changing, a shift not well explained by demographics, dual-career households, occupational licensing, or other commonly cited factors. For them, the reason remains opaque. The result, nonetheless, is that labor markets are no longer reallocating workers across space as efficiently as they once did.

Behavioral economics might offer a useful lens for understanding these changes. Prospect theory describes the endowment effect: the tendency for people to assign greater value to what they already have, and to experience change as a loss rather than a potential gain. Applied to place, this bias can turn neighborhoods, homes, and cities into something more than locations. They are possessions. Place has always been bound to identity, but perhaps the broader rise of nationalist inclinations are taking shape at a more local level too. This instinct is not just unique to the political right. It’s also familiar from the urbanist tradition of Jane Jacobs. When you live somewhere, you inherit it, you feel responsible for its future, and that type of stewardship, while well-intentioned, is a slippery slope to exclusion and opposition to change.

Another potential explanation is that the risks associated with moving have festered a developing cynicism for many Americans. The costs and uncertainties of moving have risen, which in turn makes staying put feel prudent. Over time, that perceived prudence becomes expectation. When fewer people move, movement itself begins to look abnormal and decisions that were once seen as ordinary begin to feel reckless. This could result in fewer people moving, not only because of the pure economic costs, but because of the perception of how others are reacting to those costs.** Economists have long observed similar dynamics in housing markets. People often buy or sell homes not because economic fundamentals demand it, but because they believe others are doing the same. They are guided by seeing their neighbors “Open House” and “Just Sold” signs more than rates and prices. This results in well understood distortions to the housing market. Migration may be following a comparable pattern, albeit on a slower and less visible timeline. What began as a rational response to risk can, over time, harden into a norm shaped as much by expectation than by childcare costs, wages, and home prices.

Declining mobility may also be a warning sign about the broader entrepreneurial spirit of the country. Moving in search of opportunity is, at its core, a form of personal entrepreneurship. If that taking that bet increasingly feels futile, it suggests that our growing wealth inequality may be self-reinforcing. When the costs of failure are high and the odds of success feel remote, the rational response is to cocoon.

The problem is not that opportunity has disappeared, it is that our ability and confidence to move toward it has. As Raj Chetty’s work makes clear, there are many places across the country with similar costs but markedly different long-run outcomes. What has become hard to explain is why fewer people are able to take advantage of those differences. Over the past three decades, geographic mobility has fallen steadily. Over the same period, economic mobility has weakened. Another finding from Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas shows that only about half of Americans today earn more than their parents did at the same age, down from roughly 92% among those born in 1940. If economic mobility is increasingly tied to place, then a society that struggles to move people toward opportunity will result in inequality by default. Expanding housing supply is necessary. But at the same time, if people are unable to relocate to places that already offer opportunity at manageable cost, then housing policy alone may not solve the problem.

Several programs have attempted to attract workers, and others have supported the relocation of displaced workers, but no national, comprehensive approach to financing mobility has gained sustained political traction. Places like Tulsa, West Virginia, and Vermont have instituted grant programs to entice workers to move there.**** These efforts are well-intentioned, but limited. They primarily support workers who already have the resources to move, failing to solve for the the hardest part of relocation: the upfront risk and liquidity constraints that keep many people from moving at all.

As part of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, economists Jens Ludwig and Steven Raphael, both of whom have worked on research related to the Moving to Opportunity experiment, outline a proposal for a federal mobility bank. The idea is to provide loans that would allow workers to relocate in search of better job opportunities, with repayment beginning only after employment is secured and capped as a share of the borrower’s income. In their framing, the goal is straightforward: lower the upfront risks of moving for households least able to absorb them. Ludwig and Raphael estimate that such a program could be launched at a federal cost of roughly $1 billion per year, while generating the equivalent of 93,000 additional person-years of employment annually which would make the program have a net cost of roughly $500-800M per year.

The core features of their mobility loan are as follows:

We subsidize mortgages, student loans, and retirement savings, but there is no comparable institution for moving, even though mobility may matter just as much. This is what makes the idea of a mobility bank particularly interesting. A lending institution has the potential to recycle capital, share risk, and, under the right conditions, even sustain itself financially. That opens the door to a different path forward. Grants can help, but they do so in a blunt way, subsidizing arrival without distinguishing between households that need temporary bridge capital and those that could move without assistance. A lending model, by contrast, is better suited to this asymmetry. It treats relocation as an investment: one that requires upfront support, but that can be repaid over time if the move succeeds. Importantly, a lending approach also aligns incentives in a way that grant programs cannot. If repayment is tied to income and begins only after employment is secured, then borrowers are protected from downside risk while the institution is rewarded for financing moves that actually improve outcomes.

Taken together, this leaves us in an awkward place. We have a potentially credible, well-designed proposal for financing geographic mobility. We have growing evidence, from cities, states, and employers, that relatively modest financial support can meaningfully influence where people choose to live and work. And yet the prospect of a permanent, federally-backed mobility institution appears remote. Mobility sits between housing policy (HUD), labor policy (DOL), and even transportation (DOT), fully owned by no single federal agency, and clearly prioritized by none. There is little indication that Congress is poised to resolve that ambiguity anytime soon. In the absence of federal action, the question becomes not whether these ideas are worth pursuing, but how they might be advanced by other means.

If the federal government is unlikely to act, a nonprofit structure offers a practical alternative. Nonrprofits can move faster than government, blend philanthropic and program-related investment capital, and iterate quickly. A nonprofit mobility bank could operate as a mission-driven lender, focused on proof of concept. Its role would be to demonstrate that financing relocation can be done responsibly: that default rates can be managed, that borrowers benefit, and that communities on both ends of a move are better off. If successful, such an institution could inform future public policy.

Ludwig and Raphael envisioned a federal program operating at national scale, financing on the order of 100,000 moves per year. A nonprofit mobility bank would not aim to replicate that immediately. Rather, it would operate at smaller scale to prove that relocation can be financed with lower default rates and sustainable operations.

Here’s how it might work.

I want reiterate the problem that I think is worth solving. The case for geographic mobility is not a new one, and neither is the evidence behind it. What is new is the confluence of several factors: increasing amounts of data and research that supports how place shapes economic mobility; evidence of a steady decline of geographic mobility; the lack of institutional support for mobility; and increasing public support, understanding, and acceptance of reforming land use and community planning to enable faster, responsible growth.

Developing a nonprofit in these conditions becomes an interesting way to pressure test whether mobility can be responsibly financed at all. It is not reasonable to expect the federal government to design a lending institution the right way on its first try, and any lending institution needs to be able to adapt over time. Nonprofits allow for that type of flexibility and donations serve as a proxy for success and usefulness. What follows is an initial attempt at some working assumptions and design considerations for a nonprofit mobility bank, focused on the practical mechanics of the loan product and how the institution would operate.

Loan amounts should be tied directly to the real costs of moving, which tend to fall into two distinct categories. The first are ‘hard’ costs: these include packing materials, shipping or freight costs, truck or van rentals, hiring movers, and short-term storage. For many long-distance moves, these costs alone run into the thousands of dollars. The second category I’ll call ‘transition’ costs, which are less visible but often just as constraining. These include travel to tour housing or interview before a move, transportation to the destination itself, and the cost of preparing a home for sale or cleaning a rental unit to recover a security deposit. Many households must also pay one or more months of overlapping rent while leases turn over. In some cases, relocation involves a gap between jobs, resulting in a temporary loss of income, precisely at a the time when expenses are highest.

Average moving costs would be re-examined on an annual basis to evaluate whether loan caps would need to be adjusted. Additional analysis should examine whether increased access to credit for moving has any impact moving costs.

Below is a estimated range for current moving costs:

The purpose of a mobility loan is not to fully absorb the cost of moving. If it did, it would shift all risk onto the lender and undermine the borrower’s incentive to plan carefully. At the same time, requiring borrowers to shoulder most of the upfront cost defeats the purpose of the institution. For that reason, we’d set a minimum loan amount of $3,000 and a maximum of $12,000 to ensure that loans are large enough to subsidize the administrative cost of originating and servicing while also preventing over-borrowing. Borrowers could also be required to complete a simple, relocation budget template as part of the application. This would anchor loan sizing to real expenses and introduces a modest but important level of effort (planning, documenting, and prioritizing costs) that signals a high intent borrower that is serious and ready to move.

The core principle of income-contingent repayment would remain intact from the original proposal. Borrowers would not be required to begin repayment until they have secured employment in their new community. Rather than capping payments at a fixed percentage of income indefinitely, however, a nonprofit model could cap loan amount at a fixed share of income over time. For example, we could limit loans to no more than 5% of a borrower’s expected gross income over ten years. For applicants who have not yet found a job, this could be based on historical income. This ensures that repayment remains affordable while also placing a clear upper bound on loan duration.

Interest rates, while not expected to fully cover losses, should still reflect differences in risk. A 30% default rate, as assumed in the original federal proposal, would likely be too high for a nonprofit lender seeking long-term sustainability. To manage that risk, the loan program could be explicitly segmented into two categories. Borrowers relocating with a signed job offer (particularly when supported by a participating employer) would face lower interest rates, reflecting reduced default risk and faster income stabilization. Borrowers moving in search of work would face somewhat higher rates, paired with smaller loan caps and more conservative underwriting.

In both cases, rates would remain well below typical unsecured personal loans, and far below the cost of carrying moving expenses on credit cards. Modest interest allows the loan fund to recycle capital over time and partially offset losses, while still relying on philanthropic first-loss capital to absorb risk that private lenders would not touch.

A signed job offer, a verified start date, or evidence of stable employment in a destination market all materially change the risk profile of a relocation loan. Some employers already provide relocation packages for higher-income workers. A mobility bank would formalize that signal for workers who don’t typically receive employer-funded moves. Partners would not control loan decisions or dictate borrower behavior. They would simply confirm employment, start dates, and basic compensation information. In exchange, they would be able to access a pool of potential nationwide talent and their employees would qualify for lower interest rates and higher loan caps. Importantly, participation in an employer network would not be a requirement for accessing a lower-risk loan. Borrowers could also qualify by providing independent evidence of employment, such as a signed offer letter, contract, or other verifiable proof of income in the destination market. Employer partnerships simply make that process faster and more standardized.

At a pilot scale of roughly 5k loans per year, a nonprofit mobility bank would originate roughly $35-40M in annual loan volume, assuming average loan sizes in the $7-$8k range. At this scale, the loan portfolio could reasonably generate $1-1.2M per year in interest income. Unlike the original federal proposal which assumed default rates around 30%, a risk-segmented product design with employment verifications mentioned above should result in material lower loss rates, presumably around 10-15%.

At the 5k loans/year scale, a lean staffing model might include:

All in, that implies 10-14 full-time staff. Fully loaded personnel costs would likely fall in the $1.7-$2.0M per year range. Technology costs (including loan servicing software, payment rails, credit and income verification APIs, cloud infrastructure, and security) would add another $400-$500k annually. Legal, audit, insurance, and overhead bring total annual operating expenses to approximately $2.5-$3.0M.

Under these assumptions, the nonprofit mobility bank would require approximately $2M per year in philanthropic support to cover the gap between operating costs, credit losses, and interest income. In exchange, that level of support would unlock approximately $40M per year in mobility financing. This is a meaningful leverage of philanthropic capital, before accounting for long-term gains such as higher lifetime earnings, increased tax revenue for destination communities, and reduced fiscal pressure in places requiring some level of out-migration.

If a nonprofit mobility bank is worth building, it should be possible to clearly and quickly say whether it is working. This requires, like any responsible company, to define operational success metrics. In order, to determine success, we should track 5 metrics across across three different dimensions or questions.

Question 1: Are we solving the right problem for the borrowers?

First and foremost, default rates are critical for performance. If a mobility bank cannot achieve materially lower default rates than those assumed in the federal proposal, then not only does the model not work at a nonprofit, but the broader concept of mobility loans is called into question. If the default rate is significantly higher, then there isn’t a substantive argument for providing loans versus grants.

Second, utilization of the loans must be monitored. Are loans actually being used to move? Are borrowers moving within a reasonable window of time? Are funds concentrated on transition costs rather than other unrelated expenses?

Question 2: Are we solving the right problem as a nonprofit?

Third, capital efficiency is a factor that may determine whether this program makes sense for a nonprofit, nationally at scale, or if it should be done by the government. If a few million dollars per year in philanthropic support can consistently unlock tens of millions in mobility financing, and if there is even a path to self-sustainability, then a strong case can be made that an organization of this mission is better operated as a nonprofit than as a government agency or enterprise.

Fourth, distinct from operating as a government agency and in an effort to truly refine the model, it’s important to measure the organization’s ability to adapt to learnings. Change velocity should be measured on an ongoing basis, including lessons learned and time to react. Are default patterns, employer partnerships, and destination markets generating insights that improve outcomes over time? Does the institution get better at underwriting, pricing, and targeting moves after each cohort? Once again, these measures define the organizations success compared to a government agency or grant program.

Question 3: Is this resulting in meaningful societal change?

Fifth and finally, we must measure changes in the labor markets in which the bank is operating. For borrowers who move with employment secured, success looks like income starting on schedule and remaining stable. For borrowers moving in search of work, it looks like shorter job-search durations and faster re-entry into employment than comparable peers who do not move. In areas where the bank is operating, we should expect lower levels of unemployment, lower levels of underemployment, and of course, long-term impacts on the children of families who move.

Mobility is not a guarantee of success, but it seems the absence of mobility is often a guarantee of constraint. Where people live has a measurable impact on their economic outcomes. Moving, especially at the right moment, can meaningfully change the trajectory of a life. Yet Americans are moving less, even as opportunity has become more geographically uneven. The costs of relocation are real, concentrated, and poorly aligned with household balance sheets.

What remains unsettled is what to do about it.

A mobility bank is not a silver bullet, and it is not guaranteed to work the way its intended, but stasis is also not a viable option. The United States has spent the better part of a century building institutions to help people stay: mortgage policy, tax incentives, zoning rules, etc. That made sense in an era when opportunity was expanding outward and stability was the goal. Today, our challenges look different. More policy makers, planners, and advocates must take a big step back and ask the simple question, “what are we trying to accomplish?” Whether a nonprofit mobility bank is the right response remains an open question, but treating mobility as an institutional problem, similar to other policies currently en vogue, feels like a good as any place to start. For much of American history, the American Dream meant the freedom to aspire and move toward opportunity. Reincorporating mobility into the American Dream restores the idea that progress sometimes requires motion, and taking that risk should not be reserved only for those who can afford it.

Footnotes:

*Chetty defines economic mobility as the relationship between an adult’s earnings and their children’s earnings, in other words, “am I more successful than my parents?” In his own (more precise) words, “the most robust way to measure intergenerational mobility is by ranking parents by parental income (at the time the child was growing up in the family) and by ranking children by their income when they are adults.”

**These dynamics are almost certainly amplified by the growing role of social media in shaping perceptions of what others are doing. Constant exposure to our peers’ choices and outcomes reinforce expectations and norms in ways that extend beyond traditional economics. The broader implications of this feedback remain to be explored, but are likely relevant across a range of economic and social behaviors.

***This phenomenon is often cited from Karl Case and Robert Shiller’s famous research on housing bubbles.

****Tulsa Remote offers $10,000 for remote workers to move to Tulsa. Ascend WV offers $12,000 grants and $8,000 worth of additional perks. Vermont’s relocation program is no longer accepting applicants.

Referenced Research: