Foreclosure Write-ins

There's an interesting footnote on the Census Bureau's 2010-11 geographic mobility tables 23 and 24--tables that detail the reasons people moved between March 2010 and March 2011.

For the first time, these tables show foreclosure/eviction as one of the reasons for moving even though the Census Bureau's survey questionnaire (surprisingly) did not offer foreclosure/eviction as an option. Here's what happened: So many survey respondents wrote in foreclosure/eviction on the survey form that the Census Bureau decided to include it in the tables, with the following footnote:

"The foreclosure/eviction reason for move category was not an option for respondents in 2011. The category was created from write-in responses that explicitly gave "foreclosure" or "eviction" as their primary reason for move."

Based on those write-ins, the Census Bureau estimates that 412,000 people moved because of foreclosure/eviction in 2010-11. This is a tiny fraction of the 35 million who moved overall, but there's no doubt the number would have been much larger if foreclosure/eviction had been an option on the survey form.