Contrary to popular wisdom, the most stable counties in the U.S. don’t contain tree-lined suburbs with parents who know the names of all their children’s playmates. And for a nation that’s often thought of as a place where people are perpetually coming and going, more than one-quarter of the 3,143 U.S. counties had 10 percent or more of their population move in 2020, according to a Social Explorer analysis of 2016-20 American Community Survey data.

All 109 souls in Loving County, a tiny west Texas desert outpost on the New Mexico border, lived in the same house in 2020 that they occupied during the previous year. It was the only county to achieve that particular distinction, although Kenedy County (population, 350), on the other side of the state, came close. Kenedy, which is located on the Gulf of Mexico coast barely an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, reported 99.7 percent of its residents didn’t move over the last year. Kalawao County, Hawaii, another tiny county on the island of Moloka’i, had 98.6 percent of its population stay put. The three tiny counties were followed by Piute County, Utah (1,862 people, 98.5 percent didn’t move), and Corson County, S.D. (4,022, 98.4 percent).

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Same House as 1 Year Ago, 2020. Click here to explore further.

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Author: Frank Bass