Published January 15, 2024
The pandemic metropolitan exodus has slowed to a drip.
One of the unforeseen byproducts of the pandemic was the massive amount of folks who jumped ship from the big city where their tech or finance jobs held offices, to buy out in a suburb or even rural areas.
Cities we’d always recognized as bustling became creepily empty in a matter of months. There was speculation that the metropolitan city way of life would become a thing of the past, people would not move back to crowded cities.
We just wouldn’t live that way anymore.
Data recently released by the census bureau shows where people moved in the last year. The long and short of things is there has been a return to the big cities, but not a very big one. This would indicate that many remote workers, as a result of the pandemic shut down, have in fact stayed remote.
The data also shows that some of the repopulation of big cities has been people immigrating from other countries, rather than the original vacating populous returning.
The leaving has also not completely stopped, but it’s significantly less than it had been. People are still moving away from metropolitan cities in the last year, but way-way less people left last year, than they had the year before.
A continuing trend that became very big during Covid, is people having the desire to move somewhere warm with sunny weather. The Sunbelt was already getting popular before the pandemic but then it really blew up during the shutdowns. The wave of people wanting to move there hasn’t slowed much, it’s the type of weather people want to live in.
Census bureau is showing the top 10 fastest growing counties right now are all in the South and Southwest. Some of them are in Arizona and Florida and the rest are all in Texas.
As far as our sunny state goes, census shows in 2022 more than 817,000 people moved away from California.
Last year in 2023, about 430,000 people moved into the state.
This leaves California at about 342,000-person deficit. Silver lining for us, less crowding, I guess.
It will be very interesting to continue to watch the social and cultural trends around where people choose to live and why, shift with changing tides.
