[wahern]

The decline of the Rust belt began in the 1970s, and by the 1980s you already had movies like Gung Ho

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film)

dramatizing existential crises of factory towns in the face of manufacturing off-shoring.

Factory towns are nothing new, and neither are factory towns disappearing overnight. What's relatively recent in modern American history is the reticence of Americans to move, thus the title of the article. But this reticence is probably a regression to the mean, much like everything else about the post-post-WWII economy.