It's older research, but this work [0] found that when choosing a city to move, roughly 65% of moves were based on employment and housing (cost, proximity to jo

It's older research, but this work [0] found that when choosing a city to move, roughly 65% of moves were based on employment and housing (cost, proximity to job, size, etc), and only 25% came from desirability (neighborhood, crime, amenities, etc). They also assessed the difference in motivation between low-income and high-income movers; the role of desirability was reduced to about 17% for low-income moves, which seems to make intuitive sense since they are less likely to have the luxury of basing a move on less-economic factors. The authors also observed a trend that younger and more well-educated movers were more likely to choose an urbanized destination, but not by too much (single-digit percentages). In contrast, marital status and whether or not you had children were substantially more influential. I didn't do too much digging through the followup work, so I can't say anything conclusively about changes in these trends over the last 30 years. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-9906.1989.tb00193.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1467-9906...