Recent government data shows that as the pandemic trend continues, Americans are moving to the South and Southwest in search of more space and homes, moving from cities to suburbs.
But migrants, who are starting to recover from the pandemic’s downturn, are helping to ease population declines in major cities.
A stateline analysis of U.S. Postal Service change of address data from mid-2022 to March shows Americans continue to flow into suburbs and smaller cities in the South and Southwest. The Survey Bureau’s mid-2021 to mid-2022 population projections show the same trend.
Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, which has used census estimates to analyze population growth in the county, said, “The previous trend away from large, expensive, and dense urban areas has accelerated. there are,” he said. Depopulation in the big cities would have been even worse without the influx of immigrants, Ozimek said.
He added that house prices were rising rapidly in some of the smaller cities he moved to. The shortage of housing in such locations is partly the result of zoning policies that discourage developers from building affordable housing, Ozimek said.
“A lot of the places people are going to move to, they aren’t building housing,” he said.
The only area that saw an outflow of movers from mid-2021 to mid-2022 and saw an overall decline in population was the central county within the metropolitan area. A Stateline analysis using census estimates and the National Center for Health Statistics county classification found 829,000 net emigration from these areas compared to 1.2 million net outflows last year. However, due to a surge in immigration, the total population decline in these regions will be only 49,000 from mid-2021 to mid-2022, compared to 793,000 a year earlier.
These losses may continue. From mid-2022 to early this year, zip codes in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City had the most people moving, according to the change of address form.
From mid-2021 to mid-2022, the most populous locations were small metropolitan areas with less than 1 million people and suburban areas of large cities. Subsequent address changes reflect a similar pattern. From mid-March 2022, people flocked to the cities of Port St. He Lucy and Ocala, Florida, as well as The Villages, a retirement mecca south of Ocala. Many left Houston for suburban Katy, and from Austin for Georgetown, north of the Texas capital.
The county with the highest population growth from mid-2021 to mid-2022 was Maricopa County in Arizona, home to Phoenix. However, the county’s growth was driven by people moving into suburban Surprise and Queen Creek counties (which straddle Maricopa and Pima counties), according to the change of address forms at the time.
On the other hand, the declining population is putting pressure on the finances of large cities.
In Los Angeles, for example, city controllers warned in a March review that declining home sales would make it harder to pay for ambitious plans such as Democratic Mayor Karen Bass’ strategy to reduce homelessness.
Democrat Brandon Johnson, elected mayor of Chicago, has promised to stop raising property taxes he accuses of driving people out of the city.
However, immigration has moderated population decline in the big cities. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, immigrants doubled from mid-2021 to mid-2022 to about 39,000, a year-over-year decline in population that increased by 3,400. King County, Washington, home to Seattle, experienced a similar turnaround.
A record-breaking influx of more than 300,000 Cuban immigrants in 2022, many of whom flew to Central America and then crossed the Southwestern border into places like Miami and Hudson County, New Jersey. But tougher restrictions on asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, enacted by the Biden administration earlier this year, have prompted many Cubans and Haitians to go to Florida by boat. This prompted the administration to start negotiations with Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Cuba and Florida, to call in the National Guard.
In Texas, where immigrants have helped compensate people moving from Houston and Dallas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has indicated that immigrant buses will be sent from the border to cities in the northeast, but many are in red states. You will get off at DeSantis also transferred immigrants to cities in the northeast and proposed a broader crackdown on immigrants without legal status and those who help them.
Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute, said the immigration surge was more a return to normal than an abnormal surge. She finds it difficult to determine whether the increase in illegal immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the border is due to more typical legal means such as work visas and family visas. Those legal avenues have recovered last year after in-person interviews stalled early in the pandemic.
“I’m not going to discount legal immigration as a factor,” Gerrit said. “We are subject to a number of public health restrictions and officials are holding many visa interviews as a way to ease the backlog and allow more people to enter the United States more quickly. We were taking advantage of the new flexibility to exempt.”
Stateline’s analysis of census estimates shows that from mid-2021 to mid-2022, counties of all types, from rural to metropolitan areas, more than doubled in immigration.
These immigrants may end up moving to more affordable areas, but some can stay in big cities and get higher wages, Ozimek said.
“Immigrants are willing to put up with the high cost of living in cities,” said Ozimek. “Higher cost of living leads to higher nominal wages. People who are saving some of their money to send back home will want to live somewhere with higher wages and a higher cost of living.
Stateline analysis shows that immigration more than doubled in rural and suburban areas from mid-2021 to mid-2022.
“Without[immigrants]there would be no change in rural populations,” said Tim Malema, deputy director of the Kentucky and Tennessee-based Center for Rural Strategy and editor of the organization’s publication, The Daily Yonder. was almost flat,” he said.
John Rosenow, a rural Wisconsin dairy farmer, said the supply of immigrant farm workers in the area had returned to normal, but the costs of those willing to hire those living in the country illegally were still high. not back
“The only thing that has changed with anti-immigrant rhetoric has been the coyote (smuggler) cost. Twenty years ago it was $1,500, today it’s around $12,000,” said Rosenow.
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