Space Command is moving jobs to Huntsville. Will workers move with it?

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Space Command is bringing more than a thousand jobs from Colorado Springs to its new home of Huntsville, Alabama. President Trump announced the move last month.

Now, Huntsville has to convince the workers to come, too.

It’s a good problem to have — and a familiar one for Huntsville. The city’s long history with space and defense research, the sprawling Redstone Arsenal Army post and former Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby’s influence on the Senate Appropriations Committee brought other military commands and more than 1,800 FBI jobs to the city in the past few decades.

Pointing to those past moves, city leaders said they’re not worried about workers relocating for Space Command. But the command’s leadership previously voiced their own concern that a majority of the civilian workers might refuse to move, undermining the command’s mission.

This is not a Huntsville-specific problem. Americans are moving at about half the rate they were 30 years ago — the lowest number on record.

“We were just struck by the fact that people were not moving,” Urvi Neelakantan, a senior policy economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said. “Such a traditional part of the life cycle is not happening anymore.”

Moving isn’t always an option

Despite all the agencies and federal jobs that have moved to Huntsville, that doesn’t mean it’s always gone smoothly.

Take the FBI’s Finance and Facilities division, for example. Back in 2018, it was based in Washington, D.C., until the division’s roughly 100 workers were called for a meeting at an FBI auditorium in Huntsville, according to Sharonda Ware, who was in that division at the time. That’s when they were told their jobs were going to Alabama.

That message was met with anger and resignation.

“You know they have these town halls, and there have been people lately who’ve been kind of like throwing rotten tomatoes?” Ware said. “That’s what that was like.”

For some workers, moving was impossible. Some had custody arrangements. Others had elderly parents needing care. Ware was personally concerned about her family’s safety, given Alabama’s long history with racism.

“Especially as a Black Woman, is this going to be a danger for my family or myself?” Ware said.

Ware estimates that only about 10% of the workers who were at that meeting moved. Some switched jobs within the FBI, while others resigned. About 10-30 percent of the agency’s workers followed their jobs to Huntsville, depending on different transition periods, according to an email from the FBI.

Other moves have gone better. The Army Materiel Command, Missile Defense Agency and U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense Command all relocated to Huntsville, and by 2011, transferred more than 4,00 jobs to the city. About 60% of those positions were filled either by workers relocating or other workers coming from outside the region.

The roughly 1,500 other jobs were filled with locals, something the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce said the city has consistently been able to do with its educated talent pool. Huntsville has the highest concentration of architecture and engineering occupations for any medium or large city in the country.

More women working, fewer moves happening

This relocation challenge is not simply about workers rejecting the South.

In fact, if you look at how many Americans relative to Alabama’s population moved to the state in 2023, it was actually above the national average. Mississippi was right around the midpoint and Louisiana was near the bottom.

Americans across the country are moving at record low numbers. Just 7.8% of Americans moved in 2023. Back in 1948, it was as high as 20%.

Part of that is explained by more women working and the shrinking pay gap between genders, according to a brief by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

The research pointed out that it is easier to move when only one partner in a marriage has a job. But with more women in the workforce today, a move likely means one spouse has to give up their job, making that decision harder.

Complicating it further, the pay gap between men and women — while still wide — has shrunk by about 10 percentage points since the ‘90s. If both partners are making near equal pay, it can be easier to stay put than choose whose career to prioritize in a move. And if they have kids, they may choose to stay close to the grandparents for childcare support.

Wages between similar jobs have also been slowly evening out between different parts of the U.S., taking away one of the main motivations for moving — better pay.

“Moving is a cost-benefit analysis,” John Bailey Jones, vice president of microeconomic analysis at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said. “The benefits of staying put are bigger than they used to be.”

Huntsville’s experience filling those jobs

Despite the country’s relocation trends, Huntsville is one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., with more than 50% of its residents being transplants, according to the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce.

A golden combination of two factors has helped draw workers in: opportunity, with the city’s huge space and defense sector, and the low cost of living.

Ware ended up moving to Huntsville and was ultimately sold on the state because of its beautiful nature and southern hospitality. She was also able to buy a bigger house for the same amount of money compared to what was available in the D.C. metro.

That low cost of living has helped shift Huntsville’s reputation within the FBI, according to Ware, with agents now wanting to move there as a cheaper alternative to D.C., with fewer crowds and just as much of an opportunity for career advancement.

Ware is no longer with the FBI — she took part in the federal deferred resignation program at the start of the year. She’s deciding with her husband what they’ll do next. One thing they’re not considering is relocating. She said Huntsville is home.

This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.