Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion
Can you count the times you’ve moved? Remember how much fun it was? How long it took you to unpack the final boxes?

Most of us hate moving – and we understand that moving is a sunk cost that yields nothing but emotional, temporal, and economic entropy, so we try to stay in one places. Landlords know this, which is why they like to push the rents up just below the threshold where moving becomes worthwhile.
That makes the landlords rational, and us rational too. Then there are some who are irrational, at least when it comes to moving, as revealed in this oddly sympathetic New York Times article:
In the nine years since he came to
Four times a year? I’d say what Mr. Harper has is an obsession.

Make sure you label whose is whose
“Martin-Christopher Harper, right, at home with his roommate, Eli Schmidt, has a steady mover. (Image Michelle V. Agins/ The New York Times”
When he lists the neighborhoods he has lived in — in chronological order — he sounds like a bartender reciting a long list of microbrews: “Brooklyn, Chelsea Hotel for a moment, Bronx, Carroll Gardens, Crown Heights, Red Hook, Carroll Gardens, Greenpoint, Chelsea, Crown Heights, Carroll Gardens, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, East Williamsburg …”
Don’t necessarily start with this dude.
Mr. Harper, 32, a hairstylist, moved to
Mr. Harper evidently has sufficient disposable income to maintain living accommodations in several cities.

Happy to be paid each time the insecurity strikes: Mr. Harper’s mover,
He says he moves a lot because he is always looking for a better deal, a better space, a better neighborhood. He acknowledges, though, that moving is something of a compulsion, and that after tackling the issue in therapy and connecting his feverish relocating to his moving frequently as a child, he has begun to cut down. He has lasted more than a year in his current apartment in East Williamsburg, a record for him in
All right, we will stipulate that Mr. Harper is unrepresentative of anything to do with real estate, and will move on to more practical moving issues:
Whether one moves frequently or almost never, moving is an intensely emotional experience. The underlying psychological issues involved in real estate decisions are of great interest to therapists and psychologists, because housing and moving are filled with symbolism, the hope for new beginnings, crushing disappointments, loss, anxiety and fear.
As I’ve posted before, we associate change in living accommodations with change in sexual relationship: we move in with someone, live together, set up house (or set up light housekeeping, nudge nudge) or move out.

You move around a bit, eh? Move around!
And we know that more bedrooms means more babies, so it’s no wonder that Jung interpreted the house in dreams as an expression of the self.

I pray for security of tenure
“Panic can really set in around your home and your apartment,” said Ronnie Greenberg, a Manhattan psychoanalyst. “It’s a matrix of safety, so moving is incredibly stressful and people don’t realize it — they mainly talk about the packing and the external part of moving.”
Perhaps it’s understandable that people pack in a great flurry, and then unpack at leisure. (My new office, the one I’ve occupied for only a year, still has an unpacked box or two.) Perhaps it’s our way of closing a chapter of our lives and then opening it in layers, like peeling an onion, reinventing ourselves by what we choose to revive and what we choose to hide.
Mr. Harper and others who choose to move frequently are likely to be risk takers, psychologists say.
Try rootless and unable to commit?
Some therapists, borrowing a term used in Alcoholics Anonymous, call frequent moving “pulling a geographic,” seeking external changes to change internal problems.
If your environment displaces you, run away from it.
But as Elizabeth Stirling, a psychologist in

“No matter where you go … there you are.”
On the other hand, those who never or rarely move can be frozen by a fear of change, psychologists say.
Those psychologists – they miss nothing, nothing!
The prospect of leaving the place that is the center of your universe or the one constant in your life can be frightening.
Perhaps, on a more serious note, this arises from the same phobias that lead to hoarding.
Even finding a new dry cleaner, deli or coin laundry can stir up deep worries of impending isolation and loneliness.
“For the longest time, moving was a bitter consequence of making money when you were selling real estate,” said Michael Moshan, a real estate lawyer and a partner in Gold Scollar Moshan in
Loss of home = loss of place = loss of self.
Packing and sorting through a life’s worth of belongings — especially, say, if the move is the unhappy result of a divorce or other trauma — can be gut-wrenching.
We define ourselves by what we leave behind.
For Stephen Klein, 43, a renter, a single father and a librarian at the City University of New York, the process of moving is “very emotional.”

Stephen Klein would very much like to move from his rental in
Renting is a much more flexible tenure, and is therefore associated with more flexibility surrounding our personal relationships.
Mr. Klein has moved nine times in the last 14 years, often as relationships — including a marriage — began and ended.
Move = change in household configuration.
Now, he would very much like to move from his rental in
That’s the thing about children – even if your conjugal relationship sunders, your parental one survives. I wonder how Mr. Klein’s daughter feels about his peripatetic lifestyle.

I’ve just got happy moving feet!
He said he would like to stay in
Mr. Klein, all living accommodations involve choice. You can drive (or commute) until you qualify, or you can live in town in less space. Just as markets are places where people tell the truth to each other about what they value, living choices are the tangible expression of what we value, and how much. You are what you live in.
“I feel like I’m a refugee,” he said. “I really feel like I wish I could have a sense of home. I feel like I’m floating out there.”
Either buy something or accept what you have.
“If you say you are trapped,” said Linda Sapadin, a Long Island psychologist and a motivational speaker, “that’s like the trapping of an animal. It’s a pretty shocking visualization. It’s better to say, ‘I can’t move right now,’ and ask what can you do to make your environment safer, more pleasant. Adding the two words ‘right now’ is a tremendous liberator psychologically.”
Psychologically, renting is transitory, and what we will accept if “this too shall pass” can be so much less than we will accept if we have convinced ourselves it will be forever. Conversely, ease of moving influences the dynamics of market pricing. In equilibrium markets, where vacancies are plentiful, renters have the advantage; when they are scarce (thanks for nothing, rent control), property owners have the upper hand.
Will Cox’s apartment on
Mr. Cox, 38 and the owner of a television and film post-production company, has lived in a rent-controlled apartment that he took over from his parents, who now live in Connecticut.

SHAKE-UP Will Cox and his wife, Lynn Van Lith, prepare to leave his childhood home. Their daughters, Margot, left, and Matilda, help out. (Image Rob Bennett for The New York Times)
Allow me a moment to become infuriated. Even assuming that one finds rent control justifiable in the abstract – to protect some deserving group – by what reasoning does Mr. Cox qualify?
He took over the apartment from his parents, so in effect inherited wealth from a non-property right.
He is in no sense indigent, as the owner of a television and film company.
He has not needed the money for living expenses, instead saving it (see below).
He has never lived anywhere else, except for the four years he was away at college in
The inherent subsidy of Mr. Cox’s apartment has reduced labor mobility – look how long he has stayed – and not coincidentally, transferred wealth from the property owner to Mr. Cox and his family:
The place has allowed him and his wife, Lynn Van Lith, who have two daughters, ages 1 and 3, a bit of a financial cushion.
But in some ways it has also been a burden: Giving up a $1,200 two-bedroom apartment in
Such a burden, being weaned off the subsidy teat at 38.

You’re too old for this, junior
“I have all these memories of the neighborhood, these sorts of ghosts that follow you around,” he said. “And for me, it doesn’t at the moment feel entirely like my own life. I still feel like I’m under the shadow of my parents. That rite of passage of finding your own place to live in
It was always available to you, sir, had you chosen to pay market rent.
The logjam broke when Mr. Cox was offered an incentive by his landlord.
Yes, I can see where being paid would knock the sentimentality right out of your head.
He is moving today to an apartment he and Ms. Van Lith bought in
When you move, you choose. Choice = life.

I chose to drop it
Drop a pebble in the water
And the wave will reach the shore
Light a candle in the darkness
Someone somewhere finds a door
Turn your eyes away from people
And they’ll turn their eyes from you.
It’s a lesson hard to learn that
What you are is what you do.
– Shadowfax, What Goes Around
Whatever choice you make, you cannot make the same choice again.

You’re not the same reader/ and it’s not the same blog post?









































































